Exploring the redesigned interface - Painter Tutorial

- [Instructor] Beyond Painter's new dark theme, there are several interface refinements aimed at improving your workflow. The adjustment slider, which is used throughout Painter for what I refer to as season-to-taste control, has been completely revamped. The brush cursor, another constant use UI element, has been enhanced for both readability and performance. We'll look at these and other refinements in this movie. Let's go exploring. Well first and foremost is the new UI, and you can see it in here. I've got it set to the dark option. Now in order to change this, you have to change to the one you want to use and then relaunch Painter. So rather than do that, I've created a chart here that shows the variations. And you can see at the far left, what we have is how Painter looked previously. Now we have a set of new UI elements we can work with. And it's not just changing the color of the UI, it's also focused on things like the sliders. So for example, these sliders were rather simple. They didn't have a lot of optional ways to control them. Whereas you'll see in a minute the new ones do. And they're also, if you take a look, the UI's been really, would you call this subtilized in order to not make various elements pop out any more than anything else. So it's a very uniform UI throughout the interface. The only place you won't run into it is when you go to some of the effects. And just as an example let's go to adjust colors. Now you can see these are still as they have been for many releases and I assume that at some point they'll get around to changing these as well. But just be aware that in these areas you won't see it. Another key change is that all of the icons in Painter have been redesigned and what that means is they're now much more uniform across the entire application, so that they just all fit together really nicely. It's like a suit, you know, you want to have the pants and the top, and if you have a vest, and all of those things, you want 'em to all match and compliment each other without any one element standing out. So they've done that. And you'll see whenever you have something selected, it's high-lit in an orange, and you'll see that also when we look at the sliders, that this orange is kind of the universal color to show that something is active in a particular area of the interface. Also added for the brush property bar is over here at the right. This is the new enhanced property bar. And one of the things you'll want to know about this is that whenever you see a round icon, so anywhere across here, you see it's round, round. Here's a couple more round ones. And even if we change to, say a different brush, like, oh let's try this one, you'll see even it extends to add more. Whenever you see a round icon, it is offering options for shaping a brush. For example, if I click here, I have dab options to change the character of how the stroke appears on screen. Here you can play with the dynamic speckle controls for this brush. All brushes don't have it, but if you need it, it's there and you can click for it. Here's another one to show or hide the real bristle panel, which I have embedded in the general controls drawer so it opens it up and here it is down here. And finally, if you get to a square icon, this, in this case shows you the blending options for that brush, so it opens up once again in the general brush controls drawer. It opens up the blending panel for you. So you can get to options for a brush much quicker than you used to be able to. Also, I want to point this out, I think I showed it somewhere else but it's important to show. When you now click on the size slider, you don't just get size options. It also includes other important options associated with controlling the brush. For example, the spacing, the stroke jitter. You can play with the angle as well. So these used to be something you'd have to take an extra step and go to the general brush controls to get at. Now, they're just one click away, and the same is true with opacity. So you've now got a little bit more control of that as well. Now let's take a look at sliders. This is one of the ones I really am happy they did. We'll take a look over here in the color pallette. You'll notice whenever you go to a pallette, you'll see that you get that orange indicator to realize that it's live, and as you adjust it the whole thing changes for you. So, you've got all that, and that's pretty much as it's been other than the fact that now it's a little more obvious what control is current. Another way to control this is with the arrow key. So I'm using them and you can see it's moving it in smaller increments. Now normally it's 1%, but these are very high numbers so it's not really doing a 1% in this case. But you can see, it gives you a quick way to move very subtly across the range. Also if you hold down the control or command key, it does it in 10% increments. So you've got that. And then finally the one that I really like, if I just drag this as is, you know I'm moving it fully from left to right. If I hold down the command or control key and do it, now my cursor's actually going beyond or before it. And what that means is this is like slowing the cursor down so you can very accurately get to a very precise measurement if you want to. Also another thing that that's new is if you are using the magnifier tool, and you click and drag, you can move in real time to just a continuous adjustment. And the same is true if you're say in a brush and you hold down the space bar, and command or control key, you could have that same control. So now you have a much more precise way to size an image to your liking while you're working on it. And finally we have the enhanced brush ghost, and I'm going to just quickly switch to another image here that has a blank area I can work on. Let's select a color. And when I'm not painting, we get the brush ghost that shows us the general size of the brush, but when I click and start using it, it reduces down to a simple icon, which is user-selectable and I'll show that in the preferences movie. But this just gets rid of a lot of extra overhead for Painter to compute while it's drawing and so it actually is a way making the brushes a little faster. The new UI isn't just a quick coat of slapped-on paint. Everything has been refined and tweaked for usability. These refinements don't jump up and down for your attention, rather, they quietly do their job without getting in your way. 'Nuff said.