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.