World's Most Unstable Program
humidsign
bugs and crappy features in Painter 7 are in a totally different
category to the annoying bugs and defects in every other piece of
software that I have ever used. I am convinced that only a company
that has an unbelievable degree of contempt and disrespect for their
customers could possibly release a program onto the market in this
condition. What is wrong with these people? Do they not care at all
about their reputation? The frequency with which this program crashes
is beyond all reason. And don't think that saving your file is any
kind of precaution, when Painter crashes there is a very high
probability that it will destroy your file in the process. And any
time you open Painter there is a probability that it will crash more
than once. Not only that but it has a most spectacular method of
crashing by completely vanishing from the screen.
While of course it is possible to try to find complex and elaborate
workarounds and to use save as every 15 minutes. But I gather there
is a consensus amongst the people who use Painter that it is still
going to crash very frequently. How many times more frequently will
Painter crash than most programs? Maybe twenty or thirty times.
Painter also seems to have problems with such simple things as opening
documents. Everytime I open a document the bottom edge of the
document window is too far below the bottom of my screen to be able to
reach it with my cursor. Should I maximise the window it maximises to
leave the bottom border of the window half an inch above the bottom of
my screen.
The layers and masks in Painter 7 are so defective as to be a joke.
The watercolour brushes in Painter 7 seem to be like a feature that
has only been halfway developed. They fail to live up to even the
most minimal standard that could possibly claim to be realistically
simulating watercolour. The most characteristic feature of
watercolour is that the brush strokes merge into each other, this is
why it is possible to create even washes and gradations in
watercolour. In Painter 7 's watercolour brushes the brush strokes
will always have clearly defined edges no matter how hard one tries.
Learning to get something useful out of these brushes would be maybe
twenty times more difficult than learning how to use watercolour from
scratch. I suspect that to be willing to devote enough time to using
these brushes to get some interesting result one might have some other
motive than purely artistic such as profiting in some way from some
sort of relationship with the Corel Company.
I think it would be very appropriate one day although unlikely to
happen, but one can hope that several hundred users of Painter will
perhaps make a sufficient amount of noise and make a sufficient
nuisance of themselves as to cause Corel a significant amount of
discomfort. They deserve it. It is awful that they should be able to
get away with this kind of behaviour and that there is nothing anyone
can do.
Not everyone is a graphic designer with thousands of dollars a year to
spend on software, there are actually artists who may decide to play
around with this software who are not particularly rich.
Yours sincerely, humidesign.
Jinny Brown
You've stated your thoughts very well, and I hope you'll send this
message both to Corel/Procreate and directly to Corel Painter Program
Manager Tanya Staples at:
Just to reassure you, or to inform you, some of us try hard to make
something useful from the Painter 7 Water Color brushes, not for any
monetary reward, but because those of us who already own Painter 7, it's
extremely frustrating (as you've said) to find them so difficult and
unwieldy.. and to be unable to make them work as real watercolors do.
Many users have simply given up on the Painter 7 Water Color brushes.
Others still want to find ways to use them, even if they are not what we
hoped for and expected. It is for that reason, as I said above, that
I've done what can, to see how to make lemonade out of a big lemon.
The same holds true for other aspects of Painter 7 that don't work as
they should, including the image window when maximized, the Zoom feature
that will still jump to 10,000% even after the Painter 7 Update is
installed, Painter crashes, corrupted files, the cumbersome and annoying
file size buildup of the Pre-built Brush File that can slow down or even
halt Painter's performance, problems with the Visibility Mask when
painting into transparent areas of the corresponding Layer (paints black
on the corresponding Layer), vanishing brush variants (greyed out) after
making setting adjustments and/or saving the new brush variant,
inability to Group and Collapse Water Color Layers without an elaborate
workaround.. and so much more.
Many of us truly want to use this program! Since it's in such shabby
condition at the moment, we're stuck with what we have.
I agree that if enough of us make enough noise, there may be some hope
that Corel/Procreate will wake up and smell the roses. They certainly
won't if we don't let them know how strongly we feel and exactly what we
expect them to fix.
Again, please send your comments to both Corel/Procreate and to Tanya
Staples.
(I send her things like this frequently, just so you know, even if I do
at the same time try my best to help existing Painter 7 users get the
most out of what they currently have.)
Sincerely,
Jinny Brown
PixelAlley Section Links Page at:
http://www.pixelalley.com/pixelalley-sections-pages.html
Painter Can forum at In Depth Discussions:
http://www.critical-depth.com/cgi-bin/idd/
______________________________________
je...@tiny.net
>
> Finally, the death of Painter came about when it was passed to
> Corel. Corel is the graveyard for well intentioned software.
I'm very unhappy with Painter7 and will not buy anything further from
Corel. I currently use Painter6(.01?...the last patch from
Metacreations) on my M$ box.
> (Actually, what I'd LIKE to do is dump Painter AND
> Photoshop and turn to The Gimp under LINUX, but I am just a bit
> too locked into Windows right now...)
I also use Painter5.5 with Wine under Linux. That and the Gimp are more
than enough to keep me happy. I believe Codeweavers is working on a
Crossover for Wine to get newer Photoshop versions to run well under
Linux as well. If you need it :-)
luck.
je...@tiny.net
> je...@tiny.net wrote let it be known in
>> I also use Painter5.5 with Wine under Linux.
>
> last time I checked the database, it was still listed as pretty
> buggy.
>
> How stable is it now? Do all the features work?
Does anyone even know all the features :-)
Using the '0904' Wine source I haven't had much trouble doing the stuff
I do; photo tinting/transforming, floater(remember?) tricks, and
simple brush work. I tend to think of it as a Gimp Plugin.
It goes without saying you need a bunch of ram+cpu but that's true
under any OS.
I'm not a 'painter' in the sense of most others here (tho I know the
difference between Painter and PShop...) but over the weekend I'll lean
on the tools a bit to see what falls over. And maybe try installing P6.
thanx.