Corel Painter Blues

Corel Painter 9 was the standard program we used for digital storyboarding. It was a great application – super easy to learn, and the tools really mimicked traditional media well. Unlike Photoshop it was designed to paint pictures, so it could do a really good job without too much customization of brushes, or writing of scripts. Unfortunately there were a few problems. Problem #1 It crashed constantly. Problem #2 The default Painter RIFF format would fragment our hard drives like crazy. Problem #3 The RIFF format would frequently get corrupted resulting in the “green screen of death” - a lime green layer that would destroy all of the art in a file. And all attempts to find a work around just made things weirder. To avoid disk fragmentation these Riffs were saved as Photoshop PSD’s. But for whatever reason, every time I’d open them, the images would get turn blue! First time – a little blueish tint. Second time - more blue. Third time – almost totally blue! And after they were uploaded – they turned brown, yellow and purple! Maybe Painter 10 is better…..