User Guide

328 Corel Painter User Guide
Corel Painter draws shapes in an anti-aliased fashion. This anti-aliasing gives objects a
smooth edge, as opposed to the jagged edges apparent in some drawing programs.
Some clipart objects actually look like photographic elements when they are imported
into Corel Painter and displayed with anti-aliasing.
Anti-aliased shapes are typically slower to appear on the screen in Corel Painter than
are aliased objects in drawing programs, so you may want to use your drawing
program for most of your object creation. You can then import the vector artwork into
Corel Painter, tweak it with the drawing tools, and add some Natural-Media effects.
Shapes in Corel Painter can be interleaved with pixel-based layers, so you can layer
both styles of artwork in a single composition. You can convert vector objects and
groups into pixel-based layers and use any of the effects or painting tools on these
floating objects to create Natural-Media artwork.
You can also convert shapes to selections and vice versa. The tools for adjusting shapes
allow precise control over the outline path, so you may want to use shapes to create
some of your selection paths. For more information about selections, refer to
“Selections” in the Help.
Understanding Shapes as Layers
In Corel Painter, shapes are implemented as layers. When you create a shape, a new
layer is added to your document. The shapes you create are listed on the Layers palette.
Many of the options and controls for working with pixel-based layers apply equally to
shapes. For example, you can apply effects to shapes or give them a composite method
to control how the shape interacts with the underlying image.
Shapes follow the same layering rules as pixel-based layers, and you can manipulate
them in many of the same ways. Shapes differ from pixel-based layers by the type of
data they contain. Shapes are vector objects; pixel-based layers are constructed of
pixels.
If you want to work with pixel information in a shape, you can convert the shape to a
pixel-based layer. In many cases, Corel Painter will do this for you automatically. For
example, if you want to apply a fill to a shape, Corel Painter asks if you want to
commit the shape to an image layer. You can also deliberately convert a shape or group
of shapes to a pixel-based layer.
For more information about layers, refer to “Layers” on page 43.