Feature: Conquer Corel Painter with these how to approaches
Motivation: The learning curve is high, here are the important short cuts

The pundit community from Computer Arts to Publish (and here as well) are nearly unanimous - Corel Painter is one of the best software tools for providing true painting and natural media look and feel. But there is a price to pay - a substantial learning curve. So this tutorial proposes when and how to get the most out of Corel Painter.

First when. I have found that it is easiest to learn Corel Painter on simple tasks. I want to clone an image and give it a distinctive look and feel. The routine is fairly simple. Open the image to be "naturalized". Choose File | Quick Clone to apply Tracing paper. Now comes the challenging part - carefully choose the one or two Cloner brushes (but like in the kitchen two many Cloners spoil the broth/image) you want to use on the image. Brushes that bring out the underlying Paper are can be helpful. Voila -you are done faster than you expect, but you are by no means a master of Corel Painter.

So a more fruitful but still simple approach to Corel Painter is the rescuing of very good shots that are slightly out-of-focus. "You should have had a tripod." Yeah, and will you carry it for me on the 20KM hike? Corel Painter is perfect to rescue those near winning shots.

The above image is a very near winner except for the out of focus parts of the flower on the left due to narrow depth of field. But instead of tossing the image into the "could have been a contendah" bin we decide to use Corel Painter to give it a natural media look - and rescue an otherwise compelling exposure.

The idea is to add a surface texture that will "even out" the out-of-focus areas of the picture and then add some painted natural media borders to bring out the delicate yellow and tan tones in the image. But first we have to prepare to use Corel Painter intelligently.

The Corel Painter Learning Setup

Just as in Photoshop or PaintShop Pro there are some palettes and toolbars that absolutely have to be open whenever you use the product. Here is that list in Corel Painter:
Toolbox - all Painter's tools and controls are packed in here;
Property Bar - each time you select a tool different properties for that tool are displayed here;
Brush Control Bar - allows users to choose easily which paint brush to apply.
If these are not open, just choose the Window | Show Toolbox to make it visible. Of these three, the Brush Control may seem to the most ... uhh disposable. However, in the context of Painter where the brushes and media are everything -maybe not.

To this list I want to add the following as must-have-open palettes or tools:

          Paintbrush Trial Paper
Now why would you want to add these three as must-have controls to learn Corel Painter fast ? The short and sweet answer is color, papers and brush control are the skills to learn in Painter and having a second, blank image open - call it your Paintbrush Trial Paper(just use File | New and make sure the blank canvas is not maximized) as a place to tryout various brush settings just makes sense.

Colors, Mixer and Papers           Brush Control

With these controls open when you apply brushes to your image, users will find it a lot easier to experiment or trial-and-error to a better solution. So read on MacDuff as we describe how to spruce up a near-winner image to "contendah" category.

Creating a "Contendah"

We have already described in detail how to use Painter's Tracing paper and Cloning brushes to give an image a new natural media look. So this time , the aim will be to use some of the Effects available in Painter combined with brushes to give a good picture with some focus problems a little lift. At the same time a few handy hints on how to get around in Painter will be provided.

Painter has quite a number of effects available including surface texture, glass distortion, and a whole new set of KPT plugins Here are some of the different effects and usefulness.

Effects | Surface Control | Woodcut

The woodcut effect has quite a number of controls including:
black edge - for thickness of black edges
erosion edge - density of edges
erosion time - fineness of lines/edges
heaviness - overlap of edges/lines
color set - whether and how color is used
The resulting range of woodcut possibilities is actually quite broad. In the screenshot at the left we have used an intermediate setting for most of the controls. Let me say that there are a lot of creative opportunities with this effect.

Effects | Surface Control | Distress

This effect did not turn out to work they way I expected. First, it renders only a black and white mage no color. Second, I expected it to sort of artificially age a photo, adding spots, creasing, and/or lint. No sign of that. Rather, Distress is like the Threshold command in PaintShop Pro - it produces a two value black and white rendering of the image using varying black dot thickness, erosion, and density among other settings. I think of its as a super-Threshold command because it gives greater control over the results. This is another example of how Painter uses texture and pattern effects, and giving users control of them, to great advantage.


Effects | Surface Control | Apply Surface Texture

This is another example of Painter developing an idea that brings a new level of capability. Why not have the Pattern image or Paper or nothing at all determine the tonal imprint on a color image. Truly it is a case of surface texture being manipulated with color overlay from an original image. This is very much like Flaming Pear's Boss Emboss or Super Blade Pro plugins.

The screenshot at the left is only one of literally thousands of possibilities possible with this effect. Users will have to have used the Window | Library Palettes | Show Paper or the Window | Library Palettes | Show Patterns command to get the full benefit of this effect. With these palettes showing it is easy to switch Paper or Pattern images, change their scale or orientation and thus profoundly effect the Apply Surface Texture results.

Effects | Focus | Glass Distortion

Once again, Painter has taken a common effect, glass distortion, and supercharged it by working with their Paper, Pattern or nothing surface tone and texture control. In this case the surface texture is glass distortion and Painter supplies refraction, angle displacement, and vector displacement as its main methods of mapping glass distortions. Overlaid on this users can choose to add the tonal and texture effects possible with Paper or Patterns.

Here is how it works - set the Using options as follows:
Paper - use the current Paper settings to tone and texturize the glass distortion
3D Brush Strokes - uses the Pattern setting to texturize the glass distortion
Image Luminance - applies the glass distortion effect alone
Original Luminance - uses the Pattern setting to tonally alter the glass distortion
Where the Painter developers got their names for these options, the gods only know. While the Glass Distortion dialog is open users can change the Paper or Pattern palettes and the effect will change as well. Hence we recommend having the Paper and Pattern palettes open.

This gives a quick sampler of how Painter allows users to apply inspired texturing to their images. In this case I am using texture to cover over a slightly out of focus shot. In the next step, I decide which brush strokes to use for the natural paint stroke border I want to put on the image.

Brush Stroke Paper

Now we have recommended that users have an empty canvas available at all times to be able to tryout how brushes will work - just enter File | New. Well here is the proof of the pudding:

I started with a blue color and Chalk brush but the brush made the hue too light - see in the screenshot to the left. A change to a dark scarlet still did not help. So I changed to an Impasto brush , Smeary Flat variant. But again even with Buildup as the stroke type the colors were too flat and the rake spacing too wide and thick. So I quickly switched again to Oils, Thick Oil Flat 20. But that didn't work quite right either because the the Oils brush was interacting with the underlying colors. So with the Canvas | Canvas Size command I added a 20 pixel white border on all 4 sides and then applied the brush stoke. I used the Straight Line Strokes mode (set in the Property bar) and went around the painting 3 times with a slightly lowered Opacity setting (also set in the Property bar).

But the invisible key to this was the ability to tryout several dozen brush strokes in the empty canvas - or what I am calling my Brush Stroke Paper. I tried, erased and rejected at least a dozen brushes before trying one on all four sides around. Having a scratch canvas open is really essential to getting the most out of Painter.

So having decided on the brush stroke and color, here is the final image. I will let you, dear readers, be the judge if it is worthy of being elevated to "contendah" category.