Welcome to the Corel Painter forum

[chris-dickman]

I know, "Corel Painter" takes a bit of getting used to... I hope this forum proves a valuable resource for your use of this powerful, venerable graphics application.


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<font color=green>Chris Dickman</font>
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[chris-dickman]

I know, "Corel Painter" takes a bit of getting used to... I hope this forum proves a valuable resource for your use of this powerful, venerable graphics application.


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<font color=green>Chris Dickman</font>
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[mjwarren]

-Awfully nice to see an attempt at getting some Painter fans together. I love the program and have met too few folks that are interested in exploring its potentials. I'm self-taught with it so far, muddling along with 6.03 on an old Mac. Lately I haven't been doing much with Painter because it tends to crash my system. Anybody out there have any thuoghts on how to stablize the program on old Macs? How to maximize performance? What about virtual memory/RAM Doubler?

[rosebytes]

xxx

[This message was edited by rosebytes on October 12, 2000 at 04:08 PM.]

[Klaus Nordby]

I use Painter 5.5 a lot on my PIII Win98 machine, and it works fine for me - almost never crashes. Of course its masking/floater functions and gazillion obscure menus are harrrrrrrrd do deal with. Too bad Adobe didn't buy it instead of Corel, as Painter's "natural media" painting functions really should be a part of the next Photoshop!

Klaus Nordby

[gmotto]

Hi folks,
I too am happy that there still is a glimmer of interest in Painter. I had given up on this software when Metawhatever sold out. My hope now is that Corel will continue supporting and upgrading Painter software.
I am new to this Forum and am not quite sure how all this works yet. Please bare with me if you see some strange stuff from the Monastic Bat.

[athena]

Hello everybody!!

I'm also glad to see continued interest in Painter. I had always admired it from afar (back when it was owned by Fractal Design) I finally had space in the budget to buy a copy of Painter 5. Then, when MetaCreations decided to court the lawyers and stock-holders instead of the customers who brought them to the dance, I had to make an emergency purchase of Painter 6 in case it was the last version on the face of this planet. (They saw me coming didn't they [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img] ? )

I agree that sometimes painter seems counter-intuitive. But I also think that is because so many of us learn to think in terms of PhotoShop or PhotoPaint, before we ever begin to learn Painter "jargon".

Painter is a program worth learning. And as the (currently) new moderator for the Painter Forum, I would like to see us explore Painter's features together. Hopefully, we'll create an atmosphere where people feel safe enough to materialize out of Lurking and speak up. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

Athena

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[Bill C.]

Hi,

I just want to pass on a tip I received from Fractal Tech back in 4.0 days. I had a lot a of crashing on a Q630.
Not enough memory was big problem. I use 300mb now and seldom crashes unles I forget that Photoshop is open with another 300mb. then with low memory it will crash.

The Tip: Fractal told me whenever I have a crash to go into the app folder and trash the "Painter Script Data"
File. This file gets buggy with crashes. It won't erase anything like brushes or settings and is perfectly safe to trash. Painter will just make a new one when it is launched. I periodicaly trash it before starting Painter just for good housekeeping. This may help you avoid recurring crashes. I've found you really need about 6 times the file size minimum in RAM to avoid crashing.

For what it's worth I could not make a living without Painter. I love the interface more than Photoshops'. I am an Architectural 3D modeler and illustrator and rely on it's floater library extensively to keep libraries of trees, people, signs, etc. for my various clients.

happy painting,

Bill C.

[Jinny Brown]

Michael Jay,

Go to the Painter list at:

http://www.topica.com

or the Corel Painter newsgroups available through your e-mail software and ISP:

Add Server: cnews.corel.ca or cnews.corel.com (they are the same)

Subscribe to: corelfeedback.painter and corelsupport.painter

Another newsgroup also available through your ISP, or hopefully is:

alt.fractal-design.painter

Good luck,

Jinny
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Klaus, Hi....

God forbid that Painter ever becomes part of another program. With some determination and willingness to explore and experiment, you'll get used to Painter. If you need help, speak up. There's lots of help available on many lists and newsgroups (see above, my post to Michael Jay).

Jinny
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Monastic Bat,

I don't know where all of you have been up until now.. but there's a large and very active, to say nothing of enthusiastic Painter Community out there. Take a look into some of the lists and newsgroups I mentioned above in my post to Michael Jay). Corel is currently working on the Painter 6.1 patch, due to be released before the end of this year.. and the Painter 7 upgrade, due in Summer 2001.

There's more than a glimmer! .. so don't worry.. we'll all be around for a long time, we Painter lovers.

Jinny
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Bill C.

There are several things we can do to help keep Painter from crashing.. some of which have been mentioned here already.

One that I learned, or understood, only recently was that the Painter.brs file does not get smaller when we delete brush variants. It remains bloated.

This is why I'm very grateful that a kind and patient person on another list took the trouble to teach me that leaving the Painter.brs file unaltered, and making a new library for any variants I choose to create (prior to creating them) is the better mode of operation. After the new brush library is loaded, I can create my new brush variants. This keeps the Painter.brs file intact and still allows us to make as many brush variants as we want.. and even make several libraries to organize these custom brushes.

In addition to the above mentioned reason, when using Net Painter, we need to use the default brushes only to make it possible to create a collaborative painting. If the Painter.brs file has become corrupted with additional brush variants, it can make a Net Painter session pretty much a bomb. Very disappointing.. and entirely avoidable if we know in advance how to handle our brush files and libraries.

Since the Painter script file can be useful, sometimes I've renamed it and put it in another folder. Also, learning to get in the habit of recording scripts is a good way of organizing them and keeping the ones we want for use later on. (It's a kick to watch yesterday's work play out on the Canvas. Often I've forgotten that I had something neat and was able to retrieve it by playing back a previous day's script.

On the subject of scripts.. I've tried just a little script editing mainly to learn how it's done. Do you have much experience with that? I'd love to learn more about how others make use of scripts.

Jinny
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Jinny Brown
http://www.pixelalley.com
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[Jinny Brown]

Chris,

Please forgive my tardiness in responding to your message.

I was happy to find this group, yet another one where Painter users are learning together. I spend a large amount of my own time trying to help beginning Painter users get over the first hurdles and subscribe to many Painter lists and newsgroups. It always pleases me to find more People using this wonderful software.

Jinny

Jinny Brown
http://www.pixelalley.com
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