Trying to learn how to use Painter 12 .. . The brushes are exquisitely realistic, but the memory and CPU usage are appalling. There is some sort of RAM leak such that if I work on a canvas and the RAM usage jumps up to 2.5 GB, closing all open files but leaving the program open will leave 2 GB in use (??). What is even more frustrating is that while most of the brushes work wonderfully, the “real” brushes – and ordinary erasers on special layers – can be infuriatingly slow.
In this “quick” painting, which would have taken 20 minutes tops by “analog watercolor,” took me four hours. It took 5 minutes to sketch her and scan her in, 15 minutes to make the line art, 1 hour to paint her (30 minutes of fiddling around to learn what each brush did), 1 hour to paint the background, and 2 hours to erase the background where it overlapped with the foreground. Those last three hours are absolutely ridiculous. A quick watercolor wash – which is all that background is – which takes 2 minute by hand takes the program 5 minutes to compute, with a 50% chance of crashing the program. And why was I erasing the background for two hours? Because I had attempted to do the normal thing, which is “mask off” the foreground by doing a selection, but if I take more than 30 seconds to lasso a selection, the program wigs out and starts to flash, and will automatically cut off my tracing at that point. So it’s impossible to trace a perimeter as complicated as a person. So I figured, I’d do what I do in photoshop in 2 seconds, just select afterwards and delete the stuff inside. But no, it takes 5 minutes to clear the selection (while showing “Filling”). Then, I tried the oldest method, just erase inside the lines. But the ordinary soft eraser starts to LAG – by one or two seconds – so I would always inadvertently erase extra background where I didn’t mean to. I had to restart the program each time it started getting slow. RAM usage was only 25% of max, CPU usage not max, and I turned off multicore as instructed online. No luck. Erasing the line art is a cinch, erasing anything in the “watercolor” layer takes eons, if the layer is decently full. There’s no lag in simple images which are mostly not filled (unclear whether it is how much is filled vs. how many layers, etc. is the problem – it’s very possible that re-drawing the ‘composite’ of the layers is the bottleneck).
Even though this is the weaker of my two desktops, even my more powerful computer suffers from the same excruciatingly frustrating lags, memory leaks, and crashes.
I hope I figure out how to rein in this program. I’d really like to use it to make nice watercolor landscapes while having the convenience of layers and more brushes than I have in real life.
And here’s the original pencil sketch that I worked from:
