Photoshop User - USA (2019-08)

Company: Corel Corporation

Price: $429

Rating: 5

Hot: Speed optimization; no more brush lag;

compact brush selector; interface updated

to modern standards; faster workflow

Not:

Stunningly Dramatic Speed Bump

on 3.4-GHz 5K Retina i5 iMac

Painter

2020

A new summer means a new Corel Painter, and this year, it’s

Painter 2020 we’re welcoming. The new version is an improve-

ment over the previous one in many ways.

Older versions of Painter always promised faster brush

performance, but often this promise proved to be true only

for the simple brushes, not for the ones that make your com-

puter’s silicon have a sweaty workout. This time, things are

a bit different. The “Brush Accelerator” tests your system,

and automatically applies an optimized set of performance

settings. A graphic and a number show your Mac’s score,

and it sure helped on my iMac. It now feels like painting in

the real world—truly.

Okay, so for the umpteenth time, Corel has made improve-

ments to the interface with revamped property bars, flyouts,

and a compact Brush Selector. It’s a much-needed overhaul

that’s still not 100% complete, but we’re getting very close.

One area where we’re close is the dab-and-stroke preview

that no longer requires hovering. Another improvement is that

you can now select color throughout Painter within your tools.

Working faster without having to think about the interface

is also obvious at the level of selecting a brush you’ve used

before. Selecting is now much faster because you can either

click a button or use a shortcut. Other time-savers are the

contextual and high-level menu improvements for collapsing,

locking, selecting, and pasting layers.

Of course, Painter wouldn’t be Painter if Corel hadn’t added

even more tools. There are six new color harmonies that can

be saved as color sets and two new fast brush categories with

26 brushes that were specially built to put Painter’s new per-

formance optimizations to the test. Finally, you get five new

brushes in the Watercolor and Digital Watercolor categories. n

Review by Erik Vlietinck

› › REVIEWS

> KELBY ONE.COM

[ 111 ]