Painter brushes way too slow

[Helen Harrison]

Hi, are there any reports on when Corel will fix the SLOW watercolor
brushes? I am on Mac 0s 9.1, painter7 1 gig of ram g4 500 dual. I work at
high rez for cmyk print use. {Painter 6 watercolor brushes work fine} I
followed the customer support recc. of resetting tablet prefs as well as
reinstalling the tablet...no luck! I cannot use P7 because of this
problem...the brush stroke sometimes takes a minute to draw!

Well, that's my gripe...I'd love to hear of another fix!
H

[talos72]

I have version 7 running on windows xp. not only the watercolor, but many of
the other ones (like liquid ink) crawl when i make a stroke. almost unusable
for my purposes. i have over 700 megs of RAM and my system has well over the
min requirements, but still have slow brush issues. i have made all sorts of
adjustments (reducing hardware acceleration, maximizing memory usage,
etc.....) but no dice. not sure if there will be a patch or not, but i doubt
a patch would fix this since it seems that the problem is with the way the
program was written.....not very efficiently. too bad to, because i really
like this app.

[Jinny Brown]

Helen,

If you haven't done this already, please visit my website and follow all
of the links on the right side of the PixelAlley Section Links page.
They all have to do with Painter 7 and contain collected information on
this version, such things as tips, problem reports, workarounds and
solutions where they've been found, three PDF files from Painter
Developer John Derry, his Visual Guides for Painter 7 Keyboard
Shortcuts, Water Color Brushes, and Liquid Ink Brushes. Also a PDF file
contribution from Painter artist, writer, and teacher Karen Sperling, a
solution from Judy Miller and a related tutorial from Painter artist,
writer, and teacher Jeremy Sutton... as well as various contributions
from other Painter users and some things I've added. The URL is:

http://www.pixelalley.com/pixelalley-sections-pages.html

In the meantime, some things that seem to speed up some of the Painter 7
Water Color brushes:

Brush Controls > General (or Controls:Brushes palette): Decrease Brush
Opacity.

Brush Controls > Size: Move the Feature slider to the right (decreases
the number of bristles and can make the stroke less dense, so experiment
to get the best balance).

Brush Controls > Water: Move the Wetness slider to the left (decreases
wetness).

Brush Controls > Water: Move the Dry Rate slider to the right (speeds up
drying)

Brush Controls > Water: Move the Dry Rate slider to the right (decreases
drying time, alers brush characteristics so experimen to find the best
setting).

Decrease the brush size if possible.

When you're at my website checking the Painter 7 links, be sure to
download the brushes on the Painter 7 Custom Water Color Brushes page.
All but the top one are relatively fast compared to the default Painter
7 Water Color Brush Variants, especially Matt's Old Watercolor Brush
that's good for laying down large areas of color pretty smoothly. Still,
beware of overlapping colors resulting in the dreaded "black effect"..
similar to what would happen when overlapping certain color combinations
in traditional watercolor. (Even the top brush, named
WCDryCamel-antique-pool.XML can be made very much lot faster by making
some of the setting adjustments mentioned above. I can even get it to
paint in real time if the brush size isn't too large.)

Good luck, :o)

Jinny Brown

PixelAlley's Section Links:
http://www.pixelalley.com/pixelalley-sections-pages.html
(Painter 5 and 6 tutorials, Painter 7 info, tutorials, PDF downloads,
brushes)
Contact: jinb...@pixelalley.com or,
Painter Forum at In Depth Discussions:
http://www.critical-depth.com/cgi-bin/idd/
______________________________________

[Jinny Brown]

Gads! Karen? Are you there? What is it today? I just reread my last
message and you'd think English was not my native tongue. *LOL*

Oh well, most list and newsgroup members are used to deciphering code.
<g>

Sorry, folks. I'll try to slow down now and maybe things will be better.

Jinny Brown

PixelAlley's Section Links:
http://www.pixelalley.com/pixelalley-sections-pages.html
(Painter 5 and 6 tutorials, Painter 7 info, tutorials, PDF downloads,
brushes)
Contact: jinb...@pixelalley.com or,
Painter Forum at In Depth Discussions:
http://www.critical-depth.com/cgi-bin/idd/
______________________________________

[Karen Sperling]

Hmm, Jin, quite the opposite. As I read your message, I realized your web
site is like a Painter springs or Painter baths, a haven where frustrated
Painter 7 pilgrims journey to help ease their pain. ;-)
--
Karen Sperling
Editor/Publisher
Artistry Painter Tutorials
http://www.artistrymag.com

----------
In article <3BD75F14...@mindspring.com>, Jinny Brown

[Jinny Brown]

Karen,

Thanks! Boy that sounds nice! That's just what I need... a pilgrim
journey to Painter springs. How 'bout you? Wouldn't it be nice to
lolligag around in the sun for a few days.. no problems.. nothing to do
but be lazy?

Painter Pilgrims in Pain....

That has a certain ring, eh?

How about you do a...

Painter Springs Painting for Painter Pilgrims in Pain to Peruse at
PixelAlley?

Jin <g>
_____________________

[ghi stecyk]

there is no fix. these brushes are animations that bog down the cpu. i
remember during the beta testing john derry mentioned that the brushes are
intended for faster cpus. unfortunately apple has yet to release seriously
fast ones. hopefully the g5 will improve things. derry also recommended that
basically one could use the watercolour brushes at lower dpi, then upsample
the finalized image. but it appears to me the problem could be majorly
improved if the animation was disabled.

ghi

[Corvus]

Faster cpu? Give me a break, I'm using a 1ghz machine with 512mb of ram and
it's still as slow as a low end chip. I really don't believe that the speed
of your cpu is going to help with such a bloated process. The main question
is, do we really need the animation? It's pretty and all but if its going to
slow things to a crawl, I'd much rather just have the final product snap
into place instead of waiting, literally watching paint dry. ;0)

"ghi stecyk" <g...@smartt.com> wrote in message
news:3BD86673...@smartt.com...

[Jinny Brown]

Corvus and ghi,

Alter the General, Size, Water, and other Expression section settings to
speed up the Painter 7 WC brushes. It really does make a huge difference
and you can still get some very nice brush strokes.... even on my
system:

Pentium III
500 mHz
128 MB RAM
20 GB hard drive with about 11 GB free (or less)
NVIDIA RIVA TNT with 8 MB RAM

Jinny Brown

PixelAlley's Section Links:
http://www.pixelalley.com/pixelalley-sections-pages.html
(Painter 5 and 6 tutorials, Painter 7 info, tutorials, PDF downloads,
brushes)
Contact: jinb...@pixelalley.com or,
Painter Forum at In Depth Discussions:
http://www.critical-depth.com/cgi-bin/idd/
______________________________________