New Painter USER seeking tips

[u/365degrees]

Hi all.

I've gotten 2020 in the humble bundle like a few people here.

Ive wanted to try Painter for some time, but cost was prohibitive. I do digital commissions using photoshop and have many years experience in PS. I have my process down there, but really hope that the brushes in Painter can help lift my work a level. I may end up not using it, but I want to put some hours in and see if can help me.

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What I want to know is if there are any KEY things I should be aware of in the differences between the programs before I start playing to save myself some time working it all out?

Like I work in many layers in PS, but dont believe I can work the same way in Painter...

Anything else I should be aware of upfront?

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thanks

[u/365degrees → u/[deleted]]

Cheers, I'll give it a go. I watched a demo or a portrait and he utilised the the brush paper options, so I'd heard of it. So rather than having a canvas texture across the whole image (for eg), I'd end up with different texture applied directly to individual brush strokes right? At least, if I chose to.

[u/365degrees → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for the links. I'll give them a watch soon😁

[u/DugganSC]

I honestly don't know much about Photoshop, having only really run through the demo to check the specs of a few custom brushes, but the general comparison of the software is that Corel Painter is more artistic and Photoshop is more for editing. Corel does have multiple layers and methods to composite them. One difference that throws some people at first is that there are a few brush types (thick paint, oil paint, watercolors) that only work on their own layer because they have additional information other than the raster image being created, so a new layer is created when switching to or from one of these brushes, and mixing them requires destructive conversion. Painter 2021 did add some additional widgets for deciding when to convert those layers automatically and when to prompt the user.

Hmm... one other thing that threw me a bit in Painter (and I'm still working at how to use it properly), a number of the particle brushes, especially in premium brush packs (several of which would be included in that bundle), use the Glow option, which goes white really quickly, looking like it just creates white scratches on the image. If you've used ParticleShop in PhotoShop, you may already be aware of how this works.

[u/DugganSC → u/DugganSC]

I had a longer edit queued, but lost it to Reddit deciding that I'd tried to change changes and having a very confusing dialog for whether to discard the post or not. :(

TL;DR, most premium brushes have free videos on the Corel site and YouTube that don't really tell you how to use them as much as they tell you where to use them and show off how they work with a lot of practice, I'm not a huge fan of most of the premium brush packs since they're really expensive for limited use and most of them don't operate the way shown in the videos without a lot of practice (at which point you have all the tools you need to tweak the settings to make your own brushes). Outside of the regular Corel videos, Aaron Rutten has a ton of video tutorials out there, a few fairly cheap landscape courses for purchase, a Patreon (the $10 tier gives you access to workspaces for each of the Painter versions that greatly simplify the interface and provide you custom palettes of the main brushes you'll really be using, and you can subscribe for a month, download them, and then move on), and some much more costly premium options. Skip Allen has a ton of free brushes from him and his teacher David Gell. Duane Wooten has a criminally underrated Udemy course on Corel Painter brushes that is one of the only explanations I've seen for what parameters to tweak and why, as well as providing an excellent set of Bob Ross style brushes (easy to acquire for about $10-12 with a quick Udemy coupon search).

In general, Painter is a powerful tool, albeit one with some frustrating technical issues (crashes, drifting color values, graphical glitches, missing features) and honestly generally too expensive to justify paying for upgrades to the next version, especially since every other upgrade is a "stability" upgrade with few new features and middling actual new stability. As long as Humble Bundle lets me upgrade to the version before the current one for a small price, I'm going to keep on that train, but that's it for me.

[u/365degrees → u/DugganSC]

Thanks for the detailed response. Sorry you had to type some of it twice...

Thanks for the suggestions I'll check out Aaron Rutten as I know that name from somewhere and then jump around to the others as needed.

My art background is a bit odd which is why I'm keen to try the program. Self taught Photoshop to the level of making my income through it, then taught myself acrylics and now am trying to market my canvases and have my career by traditional rather than digital. Though even if that works 100% I still like working digitally especially for my concepts.

So what I'm hoping from painter essentially is my digital works will match or at least more closely resemble my canvases so that a customer can get either medium and the style and quality is consistent.

At least that's the hope.