New Welcome Screen
Getting down to the job at hand has never been easier, thanks to the Corel Painter IX Welcome screen, which launches at startup. Divided into four sections, the Welcome screen gives quick access to recently used files, tutorials, brush and color-management settings, and artwork from renowned Corel Painter masters.

Brush Control Palettes
Brush Control palettes provide easy access to all brush settings and controls. Making on-the-fly changes to brush settings and variables is as simple as dragging a slider--without any disruption to workflow. For example, the new Boost slider, found in the General palette of the Brush Controls, instantly enhances brush speed. Just drag the slider and see brush performance accelerate.

Frames-per-Second Control
Animators can now test frame rates directly in Corel Painter. With the new Frames-per-Second Control, you can set frame rates and preview them in a range of 1 to 40 frames per second.

Rotate/Flip Canvas
Now you can easily rotate or flip entire images directly in Corel Painter. You can also verify image composition at the touch of a button.

Customizable Shortcut Keys
Corel Painter now offers you an unprecedented level of control over your workflow by enabling you to completely customize shortcut keys. Corel Painter IX also includes a handy printable template for quick reference.

Multiuser Support
Corel Painter now supports multiple users on both Mac and Windows platforms. User files are stored in the user file directory, ensuring that users in a networked environment can retain individual settings and preferences. In addition, all settings are easily reverted to the default without having to reinstall the application.

Tracker Palette Enhancements
The Tracker palette stores historical information about every brush stroke that is applied to the canvas. Acting as a virtual brush diary, the Tracker palette tells the story of an image created with Corel Painter IX brushes. Brushes used in the last session can be recalled in the next, and favorite brush variants can be locked so that they are always readily accessible.

Iterative Save
Iterative Save lets you quickly save sequentially numbered versions of an image with a simple menu command. The first time you use Iterative Save, _001 is appended to the file name. Each subsequent time the number increments by 1, and a new sequentially numbered file is created.

Session Memory
When Corel Painter IX launches, it displays settings--such as color sets, paper textures and last color used--from in the previous session. Corel Painter IX also remembers the last folders in which you opened and saved files.

Enhanced Color Handling
Enhanced color sets can be appended to each other, and any color set can be loaded in the Mixer palette.

Enhanced Zoom
Area-averaging zoom control gives you higher-quality zoomed-out views.

Other Improvements

• Choose from a range of cursor icons, including the popular Triangle Cursor
• Select your background color as you work
• Use Enhanced Selections on layer masks
• Hide or display multiple layers with a simple click and drag
• Experience more intuitive brush profile icons in the Brush Creator

Artists' Oils Painting System
The Artists' Oils Painting System is a milestone in the evolution of digital art. This new painting system enables you to apply paint blends created in the Mixer palette directly onto images in the document window. Each brush dab loads the brush variant with a finite amount of oil. As the oil runs out, the brush stroke becomes fainter. Plus, brush strokes interact with any paint already on the canvas just as they would with natural media.

Snap-to-Path Painting
When you need to create a perfect curve or shape, Snap-to-Path Painting is a great time saver. It makes it possible to constrain a brush stroke along a path or a shape by clicking a button or using a keyboard shortcut. With a simple click, you can now create a precise brush stroke that reflects the attributes typically found in a Corel Painter stroke, such as pressure, tilt and bearing.

Digital Watercolor
Digital Watercolor has been significantly enhanced in Corel Painter IX. Paint stays wet between sessions, allowing you to start one session where the last one ended. The wet fringe of digital watercolor brush strokes can now be changed dynamically, enabling experimentation after the brush stroke has been applied.

Quick Clone
Quick Clone is ideal if you're a photographer because it enables you to transform your photos into paintings. This new feature speeds up the image-cloning workflow and reduces five steps to one. You can define Quick Clone settings on the General page of the Preferences dialog box.

KPT Filters
KPT filters are renowned, powerful plug-ins that creative professionals rely on to produce stunning effects quickly and easily. Seven powerful KPT filters are included in Corel Painter IX: KPT Gel, KPT Goo, KPT LensFlare, KPT Lightning, KPT Pyramid Paint, KPT Reaction and KPT ShapeShifter. These plug-ins are valuable additions to the impressive array of effects available in Corel Painter IX.

Enhanced Adobe Photoshop Support
Moving between Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter IX is simple. Files saved to the Adobe Photoshop (PSD) file format open in Corel Painter IX, with layer masks, alpha channels and layer sets (layer groups) maintained. Layer behavior in Corel Painter IX is very similar to layer behavior in Adobe Photoshop. New layers are added above the selected layer, layers with different merge modes are collapsible, and it is now possible to hide or display multiple layers by simply clicking and dragging. In addition, Corel Painter IX supports Adobe Photoshop plug-ins for Mac OS X.

Enhanced Wacom Support
Corel Painter IX features support for Wacom's newest pen tablet model--Wacom Intuos3--and the entire Wacom tablet product line. Wacom Intuos3 has touch strips that can be configured to control brush size, zooming and many other functions, eliminating the need for a keyboard while painting. In addition, tablet keys can be used as modifier keys, such as Command, Option, Shift or Spacebar on a Mac; or Ctrl, Alt, Shift or Spacebar on a PC.

Enhanced Color Management
Corel Painter IX includes an enhanced Color Management System that ensures accurate color reproduction when images are printed. Supporting industry-standard ICC4.0 profiles, Corel Painter IX Color Management enables color matching between on-screen and printed colors. A color-management tutorial helps you configure your system for optimal color reproduction.

Mac OS X Enhancements

• Support for Mac OS X Adobe Photoshop plug-ins
• Improved function inlining and memory usage
• Enhanced for G5 (square root function calculations)
• Numerous application-specific optimizations

Improved Help
A revised User Guide and Help system provide information and fast solutions. The Corel Painter IX Handbook, which is included with Corel Painter IX Full and Upgrade versions, offers a collection of step-by-step tutorials created by well-known creative professionals.

Free Access to Selected lynda.com Training Videos
Corel Painter IX includes access to a selection of training videos created by lynda.com--one of the world's most renowned graphics training companies--to guide you through the Corel Painter workspace, tools, features and techniques.

Free Academic Courseware
Corel Painter academic courseware consists of complete lesson plans and exercises for 10 classes on a variety of subjects.

Favorite Features
If you're a long-time Corel Painter user, you can continue to enjoy the favorite features that have been the cornerstones of the application for years. Whether you're a commercial designer, artist or photographer, the following features let you leverage your natural talents and techniques to create original works of art, and they distinguish Corel Painter from other applications.

Brushes

There are more than 30 brush categories: some that mirror the look and feel of traditional brushes, others that are one-of-a-kind.

Brushes are the heart and soul of Corel Painter IX. There are more than 30 brush categories, ranging from crayons, chalk and charcoal to acrylics, watercolor, artists' oils and liquid ink. While most brush categories mirror the look and feel of traditional brushes, others offer a one-of-a-kind creative tool.

Brush Control palettes provide quick, easy access to the settings for every brush control. Brushes are organized into distinct categories, each featuring a multitude of variants.

Oil:
Oil brushes produce the effects expected from oil paints. All brush variants in this category cover underlying brush strokes, many are capable of multicolored strokes, and others interact with underlying pixels to create realistic effects.

Watercolor:
Watercolor brush variants produce natural-looking watercolor effects. Almost all brush variants in the Watercolor category interact with the canvas texture. For most of these variants, stylus pressure affects the width of the brush stroke. As with traditional-media watercolor brushes, increased pressure widens a brush stroke and reduced pressure narrows a stroke.

Cloner brush variants take their color information from a clone source, rather than the color palette.

Cloners:
Painting with a cloner brush is similar to painting with any Corel Painter brush, except that cloner brush variants take their color information from a clone source, such as a pattern or another image, instead of from the Colors palette. Some cloner brush variants reproduce a source image directly. Other cloner brush variants reproduce a source image with low opacity and soft edges, or they use paper grain and specialized dabs for particular media effects.

Brush Creator

Corel Painter IX offers a large and varied brush collection. In addition, you can customize your brushes. Brush Creator allows you to create custom brushes by providing three flexible options for designing a brush: a) randomly modify an existing brush, b) combine the characteristics of two brushes, or c) create a custom brush from scratch.

Papers
In the real world, an artist's brush or drawing tool produces different results when applied to surfaces with different textures. Corel Painter allows you to control the texture of the canvas to achieve the results you'd expect from natural media on a given surface. Brushes interact with paper grain, just as natural tools react with the texture of the surfaces beneath them.

Mixer Palette
Colors not found in the Color palette can be created from scratch in the Mixer palette. This innovative feature includes tools, such as a brush and palette knife, designed specifically for painting and color mixing. With an Artists' Oils brush, you can sample and use multiple colors in the same brush stroke.

Animation
Corel Painter has an impressive array of animation features. The Onion Skinning feature allows you to view previous and future frames while working on the current frame. The Rotoscoping feature enables you to paint and modify a single frame of an existing movie. Animated movies can be saved as animated GIFs, QuickTime movies or AVI movies.

Scripting
Scripts allow actions to be recorded and played back, saving you time when performing the same operation on a collection of images. Scripts can be played back at any resolution, allowing you to automatically re-create high-resolution output from scripts recorded at low resolution. Scripts are also a great educational resource. Viewing a script of an artist's image-creation process is like looking through the artist's eyes.

Support for Industry-standard File Formats
Corel Painter IX lets you open and save Adobe Photoshop (PSD), TIFF (CMYK and RGB), Windows Bitmap (BMP), PC Paintbrush (PCX), TARGA (TGA), GIF, JPEG, Mac PICT, QuickTime (MOV), and Video for Windows (AVI) files. In addition, you can import and export Adobe Illustrator (AI) files. You can also save files in encapsulated PostScript (EPS) format.

Image Hose
The Image Hose behaves like a brush, but it sprays images instead of applying paint. You can also load your own image or select an image from the library included in the application.