Color Adjustments and Corel Troubles
June 1st, 2009
The first thing I did after Friday’s draft was open up the good old Hue/Saturation panel and offset the hue about 40 points. That made the green fields yellow, the blue sea green, and the brownish mountains beet red. Kinda weird, but it made it all fresh to my eye again. Besides, it’s good to intercept one’s habits with a bit of chaos sometimes. (Click to enlarge.)
After just a little more painting, and lasso-assisted hue adjustments on specific areas, I was ready to pull the file into Corel Painter 11, where I planned to do the bulk of the work.
I’ve been meaning to learn Corel for a long time. It’s known for producing much more nuanced and convincing imitations of real-world media. I want these maps to look good printed out, potentially even at large sizes, so the fine-grain texture of the image will be important. (It mattered less in Braid, for example, because even the XBOX 360, with its awe-inspiring high definition power, has a forgiving level of pixellation. I drew all the Braid graphics at 2 times the size they would appear in the game, further ensuring through reduction that the unsightly fake-looking texture of Photoshop painting would not offend.)
Here is a detail of an area being worked over in Corel. (Click it for an actual 100% scale version). You can clearly see the difference between the big fuzzy Photoshop brush strokes on the left, and the Corel strokes on the right, which even simulate an impasto effect, with light appearing to reflect off the grooves laid by individual bristles. It’s a little bit odd looking, which might be inevitable, but keep in mind I’m just learning the ins-and-outs of the program.
Unfortunately, Corel is letting me down in some serious ways. First of all, it choked badly on this large file (12000 x 6000 pixels). Photoshop handles it just fine, but in Corel, every time I’d zoom in or out, I’d get the pinwheel thing (OS X’s way of saying “I’m doing everything I can at the moment”). I was even getting it while painting, every four minutes or so. Right in the middle of painting, suddenly my strokes would not be appearing, and then I’d notice the pinwheel spinning, and I’d just watch it spin for 20 seconds, until I was allowed to resume.
Other aspects of the interface are disappointing as well. It just seems like I have to wait a lot, for various things. I’ve recently been working with Adobe Premier and After Effects on some fairly intensive video stuff, but even when those programs were chewing on a lot, I didn’t have the responsiveness problems I’ve been having with Corel. The most baffling was the brush-selection menu, which when I clicked it, simply flickered open and closed again immediately. I tried just hovering over it, but that didn’t work. Then, sometimes I would click it and it would open and everything would be fine. It just seemed buggy.
But fundamentally, not being able to zoom in and out, or even draw continuously for five minutes with interruption, were deal-breakers. I want to learn how to use Corel effectively, but I realized that for this painting, at this stage of the process, it does not appear to be viable. Maybe later, when the map is more defined, I can break the image up into sections and work on them in Corel individually, before re-assembling them in Photoshop.
I am surprised, though, that a professional-grade tool like Corel Painter does not seem capable of handling large files. How are you supposed to create pieces to print?
Advice from Corel veterans would be very welcome!
Back in Photoshop, the work instantly went much faster. Just inventing these little spaces, deciding where the walls go, the shape of a plateau, etc., is so much fun. I realize looking at it now that it looks a little bit barren from one perspective, but I just like thinking about the spaces themselves. There’s already some kind of story happening here, in the relationships of various spaces to each other.
And here is the full image of the current draft. (Click to enlarge.)
It’s always fun for me to look back at drafts along the way to a finished product. I’ve written before about the sometimes winding processes of making Braid or A Lesson Is Learned, but I’ve never shared a work in progress like this. It’s mainly to keep me accountable, and keep me moving. Thank you for your comments and especially for the links to other maps in the same “genre.” They’ve been added to my collection. I need to know what else is out there — partly to be inspired, but more importantly, to ensure that this series eventually departs from anything that’s been done before.
June 1st, 2009 at 6:51 am
Finally my years of using painter on a PC which can barely handle a file above 2000*2000 comes in handy ;_; !
How many layers are you using for this? Painter works best when you’re using as little in terms of layers and layer styles as possible- especially for huge paintings. There are a few tricks to get painter to behave, but they tend to mean sacrificing things such as undo. Get your cache levels down to minimum, limit the number of undos, set up a good scratch disk etc. Standard stuff. Turning off brush ghosting helps a hell of a lot, as handy an option as it is, it hogs ram like a fat kid at a buffet.
It doesnt help that you’re using the impasto brushes - those buggers lag up even on a small canvas. In terms of learning to love painter, I would recommend the gouache/acrylics if you want a bit of painterly depth without lag ( the flat oils/palette knife arent that bad either ). I’ve never had lag problems with the pencil/chalk/charcoal/pastel brushes either, even when i only had 512mb of RAM to play with.
If you have your heart set on those thick brushes though, expect to have lag unless you have a beefy rig or are prepared to cut the painting into chunks and stitch them together in photoshop later on.
Painter is an awesome piece of software, but you really have to break it in before you can love it.
I’d reccommend checking out one of the marta dahligs brush tutorials at http://www.imaginefx.com/ . They helped me a heck of a lot when i was struggling to understand the mammoth amount of fine tuney-ness those painter brushes can have.
June 1st, 2009 at 10:49 am
Thank you for the great tips. Definitely going to give it another shot, with the adjustments you’ve encouraged.
As for layers, I was working with just two: the original Photoshop-painted image was on the background layer and I was painting onto another layer above that.
My hardware is a MacBook Pro from 1 year ago with a GeForce 8600M GT a 4 GB of RAM.
June 1st, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Corel Painter was great when it was the only game in town, but frankly it hasn’t kept up with the power of today’s computers. Painter 10 on a modern system feels just as slow and “this will be awesome in a few years” as Painter 1 did on a 68030 Mac.
Photoshop doesn’t quite compare in terms of fidelity when it comes to natural media, but don’t forget that you at least have the ability to use alternate brushes which can give you some of the effects you’re going for. I always loved the uncanny not-quite-real paint look you got in “A Lesson Is Learned” and I don’t see why someone should try to limit themselves to real-world media with a device capable of so much more. In a lot of ways, Painter feels like it’s stuck in this mindset of going out of its way to behave like the real-world thing, to the point that you would probably be better off just DOING the real-world thing.
June 1st, 2009 at 7:08 pm
‘My hardware is a MacBook Pro from 1 year ago with a GeForce 8600M GT a 4 GB of RAM.’
Its worrying to hear you still have problems with those brushes then with that much RAM. Who the heck they make them for if that cant handle it?
@fluffy
‘Painter feels like it’s stuck in this mindset of going out of its way to behave like the real-world thing, to the point that you would probably be better off just DOING the real-world thing.’
But surely thats the beauty of painter? It still doesnt compare to actually getting in there with a real brush but so long as you dont expect it to be a faithful mimic, it provides an alternate way of approaching digital mark making, and can do things you’d have to go out of your way to mimic in other programs - especially if you’re using tilt/rotation.
Granted, there are many options it doesnt get right, and photoshop will always be superior for a bulk workflow… painter is more of a dietary supplement than a full on meal.
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:24 am
@ALH
Have you played with the tilt/rotation in Photoshop CS4? It is WAY more responsive (and thus useful) than Corel Painter’s. It’s something which had been missing for years, yeah, but now that it’s (finally) there that is no longer a reason to consider Painter superior.
On that note, even Painter’s scrolling is laggy and unresponsive. It still feels like it’s optimized for a 68030 Mac which isn’t able to refresh the whole screen at once.
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:48 am
That’s very interesting to learn! I’m using CS3, though I actually own CS4 as part of the Production Premium box, but haven’t installed it yet. Sounds like that is in my near future.
But Painter still does the simulationy stuff that Photoshop doesn’t, right? Like, your brush will smear and pick up colors as you go, that kind of thing.
June 3rd, 2009 at 9:38 pm
Thanks guys for sharing your work and dev process!
GOOD work David!!
JET
June 5th, 2009 at 11:07 am
David,
I’m sorry to say this problem has been around since Painter 4. I gave up after version 9. If it was just the file size issue that would be one thing but add all the ‘color wheel’ issues that arise from changing many of the brush attributes and it’s enough to drive a painter even more mad than we already are.
June 5th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Yeah… Another problem I forgot to mention is that the image scaling is really bad. In photoshop, a scale like 66% tends to be a little distorted and aliased, but 50%, 25%, 12.5% and 6.25% always look fine. Those are the magnifications I work in. Painter doesn’t appear to reduce images well, which again lent to the impression that it’s for doing 100% magnification work, i.e. small canvases.
June 5th, 2009 at 11:59 am
David, that’s correct, Photoshop doesn’t do any sort of natural-media simulation. You can fake it (for example, use the smudge tool before you use the brush to do the paint-smearing thing you’d like) but it doesn’t do it directly. I think at one point Adobe started to put some natural-media stuff in but then Corel threatened to sue them because they have some rather vague and overarching patents in that area.
July 13th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Oh, and regarding scaling, yeah, Photoshop CS3 and earlier just do nearest-neighbor scaling, which causes the visible aliasing when using non-power-of-two reductions (there is still aliasing on power-of-two reductions, but it’s not as noticeable). CS4 actually does proper filtered scaling when you turn on GPU support.
July 13th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Yeah, I’ve noticed that 66% and 33% look way better than they used to!
Then there is that little “glide” it does when you move the canvas around with the hand tool. Hilarious!