Painter 6.0 Photo "blur" variant

[Bill C.]

The Photo brush "blur" varaint is grayed out along with 2 others. Only two are available. They work fine in Painter 5.5. I've tried opening the palette from 5.5 from within 6.0 but they're still unavailable.

Anyone have an idea why this is? I've worked with Painter a lot since 3.0 but this one stumps me.

Thanks for your help!

Bill C.˜

[Bill C.]

The Photo brush "blur" varaint is grayed out along with 2 others. Only two are available. They work fine in Painter 5.5. I've tried opening the palette from 5.5 from within 6.0 but they're still unavailable.

Anyone have an idea why this is? I've worked with Painter a lot since 3.0 but this one stumps me.

Thanks for your help!

Bill C.˜

[Jinny Brown]

Bill,

You may need to:

In the Brushes palette, Variant menu, select Restore Default Variant. You'll have to do this with each brush that has been altered. If you've saved new brush variants, the best way to restore all of the default brushes is to replace your Painter.brs file with, if you have one, an untarnished backup copy. (It's good to save a backup copy of all of the files in the Painter main folder immediately after installing the software as they not only can become bloated from adding new variants, they can also become corrupted.)

To avoid this problem with brush variants in the future, use the Mover to create a new brush library by moving one brush icon into it and saving the new brush library with a name that makes sense to you. When you want to create and save new brush variants, first load that library and then create and save your new brush variants. This will leave your Painter.brs file pure.. just as it came with Painter.

About Painter 6 brushes that can blur, there are a couple of ways (really lots of ways) to blur in Painter 6 (and there may be more that I didn't mention):

In the Brushes palette:

1. Impasto brush type, Depth Smear
2. Liquid brush type, Coarse Smear
3. Liquid brush type, Just Add Water
4. Liquid brush type, Smear
5. Liquid brush type, Smudge
6. Photo brush type, Blur variant
7. Photo brush type, Diffuse Blur variant
8. Photo brush type, Scratch Remover variant
9. Cloners brush type, Melt Cloner
11. Water Color brush type, Flat Water Blender

These brushes will give you a wide variety of "blur" effects, and can be
further enhanced in the Brush Controls palette, General section.

Jinn

Jinny Brown
http://www.pixelalley.com
________________________

[Bill C.]

Jinn,

Thanks for your help. I will go thru all that and see what happens. I tried reinstaling Painter 6.0 once and the Photo Brush "blur" variant still wasn't there. I like that brush best set toa low opacity to blur "jaggies" that sometimes result in my Form Z 3d renderings. It won't smear one color into another and give a blur that mimmicks the soft edges of real shadows without obscurring small details in the architecture.

Happy painting,

Bill C.s

[Bill C.]

Jinn,

After reinstalling P6.0 on another CPU all the Photo variants are back. Maybe I didn't trash preferences before I reinstalled it the last time. Thanks again for your help.

Bill