Corel intros Painter 2020 for Mac with speed & interface upgrades
Corel on Tuesday launched Painter 2020 for macOS and Windows, concentrating upgrades to the Photoshop-compatible illustration suite mostly on interface enhancements, including better brush performance.
A new "Brush Accelerator" automatically optimizes settings with GPU acceleration, which Corel claims can "significantly" boost speed and responsiveness. To go with these Corel has added two new "Fast" brush categories -- with 26 brushes in all -- plus five new Expressive brushes in Watercolor and Digital Watercolor.
The interface as a whole has been redesigned to put important controls closer at hand, and save desktop space by way of consolidated Library panels. Other changes include faster access to previous brushes, a new Temporal Color Wheel, six new Color Harmonies, and minimized lag on dodge, burn, clone, and eraser tools.
Layer workflows have been streamlined in both contextual and high-level menus, particularly in respect to actions like locking, collapsing, selecting, and pasting.
Painter 2020 costs $429 new, or $229 as an upgrade from any previous version. People can also try out the software via a free 30-day trial. Mac users must be running macOS 10.13 or later.
In the past few months Corel has regained a more prominent place in the Mac sphere, mainly by updating CorelDRAW on the Mac for the first time in years, and in December buying out Parallels -- well-known for its Mac virtualization software.
A new "Brush Accelerator" automatically optimizes settings with GPU acceleration, which Corel claims can "significantly" boost speed and responsiveness. To go with these Corel has added two new "Fast" brush categories -- with 26 brushes in all -- plus five new Expressive brushes in Watercolor and Digital Watercolor.
The interface as a whole has been redesigned to put important controls closer at hand, and save desktop space by way of consolidated Library panels. Other changes include faster access to previous brushes, a new Temporal Color Wheel, six new Color Harmonies, and minimized lag on dodge, burn, clone, and eraser tools.
Layer workflows have been streamlined in both contextual and high-level menus, particularly in respect to actions like locking, collapsing, selecting, and pasting.
Painter 2020 costs $429 new, or $229 as an upgrade from any previous version. People can also try out the software via a free 30-day trial. Mac users must be running macOS 10.13 or later.
In the past few months Corel has regained a more prominent place in the Mac sphere, mainly by updating CorelDRAW on the Mac for the first time in years, and in December buying out Parallels -- well-known for its Mac virtualization software.
Comments
Why not just call it even better - Painter 2025 or Painter 3000. /s
I personally still manage to save money for a few months at a time to buy useful tools that cost hundreds (Painter is a fantastic tool), and I’m in poverty. I will never subscribe to software, even if I somehow get out of poverty. Companies like Adobe are all too happy to abuse consumers with these market-gentrifying behaviors.
The math has been done. The software subscription model is entirely designed to squeeze more money out of saturated markets by forcing those who cannot go without to perpetually pay (and pay more) for their software. There is no savings to customers, but there is more money handed to companies, for less value returned.
As for the FOMO of “out of date” software... much of the software I use is “out of date” and works fine. Even better: it only cost me money one time per version. Paying on MY time scale matters far more to me than being “up-to-date”. If I don’t need what’s marketed in the “latest” version, I don’t want to throw money at it just to satisfy the greed of developers. Often, the value in “upgrades” is minimal and skipping versions makes an upgrade far more valuable later, for many users.
I get that many folks (particularly old-schoolers) hate the subscription model, but it works in certain areas. I used to pay thousands of dollars for a single license of Photoshop back in the early 2000's, only to have to upgrade every few years to use all the new tools.
Photoshop and Lightroom at $10 a month is a steal. You know what Photoshop used to cost? $699. The Extended version was $999.
These are professional tools for people who make a living using them. Apparently, you’re a hobbyist. You should buy Photoshop Elements at $99 or any of the cheaper competitors available that do similar things.
And the reality is that people who really need more than a single app are being steered towards paying $636 per year for annual bulk access to Adobe's apps. At $1272 every two years, that actually ends up being more expensive than the CS era, where you might pay $1200 for the CS Standard Edition and then pay a discounted upgrade price two years later for the new release...or do what a lot of people did and skip generations that didn't have compelling new features.
I would agree that the biggest problem is with use cases where maybe someone only needs 2 or 3 apps — there’s no equivalent to the various in-between CS packages that used to exist, it’s either all or one/two (PS/Lightroom). As a former Master Collection owner who actually uses 6-8 apps, it’s a bargain. Not as much so if you only need Photoshop and Illustrator, but again, if you can’t pay for the subscription in an hour or two of billable work per month, perhaps you don’t really need them and should be looking at the myriad competing apps out there that largely do similar things. These are professional tools for people who make a living using them.
Do you know what an AutoCad license costs? $1600 a year. Nuke? $1600 a quarter! Creative Cloud as a whole is a bargain for what you get.
As as far as adding features, I can say they’ve been fixing bugs and adding features MUCH more rapidly with the CC model. You used to have to wait a year to hope for a crippling bug to be fixed, ensuring that you’d have to upgrade every year in some cases. I’m super happy with it.
What I’d really like to happen is for Apple to buy up the top competitors to Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign and have them get a complete polish and unification of UI.