Trouble with simple water

[Jinny Brown]

The Simple Water brush variant is not a Watercolor variant so that part of Christine's comment doesn't quite apply here. It is true that when we save a file to any other format than Painter's native RIFF, all Painter-specific information is lost.

What does happen is that wet Digital Watercolor is dried when the file is saved to a format Photoshop understands. Then when it's opened again in Painter and even the same color is painted over existing color, the brush strokes are darker.

Digital Watercolor, whether you're working on the Canvas or on a Layer is painted on the invisible Wet Layer (not listed in the Layers palette) that no longer exists when the wet Digital Watercolor is dried.

If you paint on a new Layer with Digital Watercolor using the same color that underlies that Layer, it will darken the underlying color (whether or not the underlying Digital Watercolor paint is wet) as the Digital Watercolor Layer is set to Composite Method Gel (automatically, to make the paint appear transparent and prevent the appearance of white edges around the brush strokes).

If you paint that same color on a Layer above white, it will appear as expected since there is no color to darken below it.

These are not flaws in Corel Painter. It's just the way Digital Watercolor works and it takes time and practice to learn how to use it.

You might want to read John Derry's Visual Guide for Digital Watercolor to learn more about this brush category.

Jin