The in-famous Painter's brush lag...

[Lunatique]

Nope, it's simply a situation of give and take. Either suffer the lag and have denser bristles, or have sparse bristles and gain speed. I usually set a good middle ground setting and stick to it.

[Pat Duke]

Brush performance is almost entirely CPU-based.

Assuming you're not scratch-disking from an entirely insufficient amount of RAM, memory has little to do with Painter's performance. More RAM, faster RAM, it's only going to make insignificant speed improvements.

If you want Painter to be faster, get a faster CPU.

-Pat

[E.T]

Ive got dual xeons (though "only" 1.8 ghz) and the water brushes lag like crazy. At least in higher dpi:s. (300).

So youre saying theres no way around this?

man. In Painter 6 i could at least use the watercolours and fake some of the effects. With the newer Painters, theyve made them look incredibly good, but theyre professionally useless.
:thumbsdow

[Pat Duke]

Sadly, Painter isn't dual-processor aware. It'd be cool if it was. More than likely you're only getting the benefit of one of those processors in brush activity. Right now, I think the best bet for extreme Painter users is to build a machine around the fastest single-processor CPU they can afford.

Contrary to what many people think, picking the proper resolution for an image is a highly variable issue. Most people's preconceptions towards this are actually based on output from older Photoshop documents, which tended to show resolution issues at anything lower than 300 DPI. In reality (for offset printing) the proper DPI to used only needs to be twice the LPI, or Lines Per Inch. LPI refers to the size of the ordered dots used to halftone your image. So, an image printed at 133 LPI (which is somewhat standard) technically only needs to be at 266 DPI. Newspapers print on crappy paper, so their LPI tends to be around 85 or so; larger dots means there's less chance of the ink bleeding together. But an LPI of 85 means the DPI only has to be 170!

Painter images have an exceptional ability to be up-sized. The nature of the brush engine makes the pixel data incredibly rich. Sadly, this also is one of the things that makes your brushes slow. Zoom into your Painter image and you'll see what I'm talking about. Even areas that look like solid color are actually comprised of differently colored pixels. This kind of data is the best-case-scenerio for any type of interpolation alogrithm. What this means is that working at half size is entirely acceptable in Painter.

I've done professional comic work in Painter at 160 DPI to 600 DPI. To be quite frank, the material that was done at 160 looks as good, if not better than the material done at 400 DPI. The reason is that the 160 material is upsized, so is somewhat softer. But your texture work maintains a somewhat reasonable size. The material done at 600 DPI is a lot sharper, but the textures are a lot smaller, which makes them look a little odd. This is a limitation of Painter's paper textures... they can only get so large. IMO, Painter seems geared to working best around a resolution just shy of 300 DPI.

Here's an old-school Painter trick for doing large work: Start your canvas at the whatever dimensions you want, but make the resolution 72 DPI. Apply as much water-color as you can in broad strokes, it's should be reasonably fast at this resolution. Upsize the canvas to 150 DPI. Repeat the process, for tighter details. Upsize one more time to 300 DPI and take care of your finest details.

If you've got the RAM, consider keeping two documents open at any time, one at 72 DPI and one at your final resolution. If you need to make some broad changes with a brush that is just too slow on the larger canvas, make the changes on the 72 DPI canvas, copy/paste and then resize. The weird thing about watercolor brushes is that they're just a textured brush with water properties that are set to blend with the color underneath them with Gel. So when you copy/paste and resize, just make sure to change the new layer to Gel as well. Personally, I think this works best in Painter 8 since its Layer/Layer mask ability is far more accessable than previous versions. It sounds like a pain in the ass, but your work will take on a new dimension because the size of the paper textures can have a more dynamic scale.

-Pat

[tayete]

Wow, thanks Pat! That was a good explanation of the old discussion LPI-DPI...

[halibut]

Another option might be to paint at a low resolution, recording a script of your brush strokes. Then, create a proportionate document at your high-res target size and play the script back. Then just wait for it to render. I read about this in the Painter 7 manual and tried it out...successfully. Does anyone know of problems with this method?

[Finkster]

Originally posted by E.T
In Painter 6 i could at least use the watercolours and fake some of the effects. With the newer Painters, theyve made them look incredibly good, but theyre professionally useless

Yeah I also really liked the watercolours in the older versions of painter. Is there any way to have the same "dry" watercolours in Painter7?

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