Yesterday, Corel Corporation released the latest version of Painter. I didn’t learn about it until this morning, but having heard rumors of it’s imminent arrival, I was expecting some sort of announcement either this week or next.

I’ve been anticipating (yearning, pining for, whatever) a new Painter for a while, ever since I ran up against it’s inability to use multiple processors.

This is my biggest complaint with many software upgrades these days – the developer spends too much time adding bells and whistles with new features but does little to make the software faster and better suited to today’s computers (which means they keep it at 32-bit and ignore all those mighty processors I bought). This is one of the main reasons I never upgraded from Adobe CS4 to CS5 (well, that and the highway robbery “All Or Nothing” pricing structure adopted by the Corporation That Ate Its Competition). While it’s true that Adobe upgraded the multi-processor support for Photoshop and all of the motion editing software, it left poor old Illustrator wallowing in 32-bit, Single Processor Hell. I use Illustrator for roughly 70 percent of my work, and often incorporate lots of images and complicated graphics, and I don’t think it’s too much to ask that new versions of Illustrator take advantage my hardware to speed my work along. But Adobe ignored Illustrator. So I’m ignoring Adobe. That’ll teach ‘em.

But where was I?

Oh yes. Corel answered half my prayers and included multi-processor support for brushes (I guess I’ll have to wait for 64-bit Mac support). That alone was enough for me. So I bought the new upgrade this morning.

The first thing I did was open up a large document (3000 x 4500 pixels), choose a large brush and start blocking in large shapes. This is what one does with traditional oil painting, and it’s usually done with broad, quick, spontaneous brushstrokes; and it is this precise action that was very sluggish and “non-real” and irritating in the old Painter. But with this new version, the strokes went down as fast as I could lay them. It was just like real life.

Wonderful! Wonderful!

I can see this helping me tremendously as I begin work this Summer on next year’s Bloomsday ads and poster. I can’t express how important multi-processor support is to me in my Painter workflow, so if anyone asks how the brushes work with the new Painter 12, there is only one thing I can tell them…