Has Corel Painter 12 ever crashed on you? Digital painting sucks when that happens!
July 14, 2011
Update:
I'm repurposing this post because a lot of people are crashing with Corel Painter 12. It appears that although Painter 12 has a new message when it crashes, it doesn't ever give you the option of saving anything before it closes the program on you. So all you can do is SAVE frequently and haunt the posts on forums about why it might be happening! So you can try something you are half afraid to because you are not a computer geek, that isn't recommended by Corel or is recommended by Corel!!! Aaargh! It is very frustrating!
Has Corel Painter ever crashed on you? Digital painting sucks when that happens!
Things to Do to Make it Less Traumatic:
I know I’ve said it a quite a few times…SAVE Frequently! Well, I just lost two hours of tedious work on the Blue Jay’s painting. I had worked out a way to do the branches, had two leaves done and more work on the background. I could say a bad word right here, but I won’t!
It’s my own fault really. I know my toolbox Eraser is corrupt. (Sounds ominous eh? Some painters would say it’s corrupt to use an eraser period…) Every time I click it, it turns into a Liquid Ink brush and tells me Corel has to close because of an error. It offers to save the open documents first. Click Yes, it won’t always do it for some reason, but it’s worth a try. The saved documents will go into your Recovered Folder in you’re My Documents. You will notice it’s given an alpha numeric title, which you should write down before you close the dialogue box. You’d be surprised how many are in there, and how easy it is to forget the title in a short period. It’s usually a good idea to reboot your computer, rather than just restarting Corel, or you may just have further crashes. The other annoying thing about it, is that any new brushes or palettes you made during that session will be lost. That includes Colour Palettes you know!
Another reason for crashes I’ve noticed over the years is that if you get too many Layers open and/or do too many operations that require lots of memory at the same time, it will often crash. I used to get crashes that just shut it all down instantaneously! A shocking occurrence I must say! Since I got a newer computer and am running Windows 7, I don’t get that kind much anymore (rare!)
Don’t forget you can Group Layers, and reopen them in the group and also Ungroup them. Or you can Collapse them, as described in a previous post entitled Working With Layers which goes into this subject in a little more depth.
My Brush Creator is corrupted as well. When I open it, it says I must Capture a Brush before…but it freezes Painter at that point! I’ve waited a long time for it to come back and it never does…(sob, sob) So, you have no choice but to do an ALT, CTRL, DEL click and Open Task Manager and Close Painter from in there. I think if you have to do this very many times that it starts to screw Corel Painter up and you get “corruption.” Maybe I should write a post entitled, “My Life of Corruption,” and see how many hits I get with that kind of title. J
The solution to all these problems, and to the overloaded Brush Libraries I have managed to acquire in the past few months, is to Reinstall Painter. I have been procrastinating (something I excel in!) about learning how to do the things I need to before I attempt this. I was not successful at saving the brush libraries of my custom brushes when I upgraded from Corel Painter 9.5 to Corel Painter 11. I wasn’t too concerned about it though, because I thought I could replicate my favourites fairly easily or get them off the computer I was taking out of service. (That wouldn’t have worked even if that computer didn’t get its hard drive junked when my IT guy was doing something mysterious a short time later.)
The result is that I have lost custom digital watercolour and custom watercolour brushes that I really liked and still need. Mostly the blenders I made by Transposing a diffuser with a blender (in the digital watercolour category.)
My general understanding of brush properties has improved since I made those brushes. (I got lucky in a few cases and just happened to alter the properties of a brush kind of randomly and liked what I came up with so I saved it as a Variant. I remember having a huge list of Blenders with all sorts of similar names. It reminded me of Eskimos having hundreds of words for snow. I had some nice colour combinations saved as Variants …bluey green, greeny blue (I knew the difference!)
My reluctance to reinstall Painter has been mostly because I don’t want to lose the Custom brushes I’ve made and all the frees brushes I’ve downloaded from Skip Allen, David Gell and John Derry’s Watercolour Brushes.
Solution: Learn how to make a separate Brush Library. You wouldn’t believe how technologically challenged I am when it comes to this kind of stuff. It must be just laziness and procrastination because I am certainly capable of learning much more complex things! (If you don’t think learning to paint watercolours digitally isn’t challenging…try it and see! J)
Fortunately, last month’s issue of Digital Paint Magazine February 2010 happens to have an article by Skip Allen about doing that very thing! Well, I must have dreamt that one. I can’t find a link to the Feb 2010 issue. I’ve emailed Skip, so maybe he did write such an article. Sure hope so, I need something more than Corel Painter instructions…
UPDATE:
Its' in the January Issue
Tip: Anything I bold in my posts is usually a searchable term for this blog and definitely for Corel Painter Help files. I started making a glossary of terms on my old website, but figured it’s almost just as fast to look them up in Painter.
How about a little Feedback on this? Would you find a Glossary of Terms Used helpful? I think perhaps people who don’t have the software might find it interesting.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Updated July 14th, 2011. 13 comments so far.
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Adrian Olam said:
My recently installed Painter 11 in Windows7 64 bit is crashing under the same circumstances youve described - at least a little solace infinding soemone under the same problems - have ou found any solutions; answers? Would really appreciate. Nice art, BTW!