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You've purchased Painter 11 from the web, in a store, you have brought it home
or downloaded it, you've unwrapped it, opened it up, you get the CD or the file
that holds all the information, you have put it in your computer, you have
installed it, you have clicked the application to launch it... now what?
This chapter is going to tell you about your first experience with Painter,
what to expect and how some of the introductory material is going to be helpful to you.
Let's get started. Here we are, sitting at the gates of Painter.
We are ready to enter and see what's going on. It's installed.
It's ready to go. I'm going to go down to my launch application,
start it up and we get a little bit of a splash screen and here we are.
The first time you open Painter this is basically what you are going to see.
And the thing we are going to concentrate on right now is the Welcome Screen.
There is some helpful information in here that is useful and at some point
you are probably not going to want the Welcome screen to come up.
So I'm going to show you how to do that as well.
The first thing I would tell you to do is go right down here and enable Check for updates.
Now, it's not going to go out and automatically install an update without you knowing it.
When an update is ready for download, you will be presented with a screen to let
you know that it's available and you have the option of downloading and
installing it or not. So, we have taken care a little bit of housekeeping
there. The next thing let's look at is the image
here. You can see down here below it, there is the
name. Now I'm probably going to butcher this artist's
name but it looks like it's Ad van Bokhoven. Probably Dutch.
He is the artist that did this. He has a website as well.
So if you like his work, you can go and see it and there's this little Reset button
and each time you click on it, we are going to see another artist's work.
So, what this is intended to do is just be some instant inspiration for you to
kind of give you some ideas about what can be done with Painter.
One of the things I have always said, if you want to improve your art, look at good art.
The more you look at good art, the better your ideas about what you want to do get.
So, that's the first thing I wanted to show you.
Secondly, you get over here and some of this is kind of training wheel stuff.
If you haven't even gone into Painter, you have no idea how do I create a new
document, you just click on this and it instantly brings you up to the New dialog,
so you can create a new document. So, you have to do nothing more than click
OK and you have now got that. Now, if you want to get back to that Welcome
Screen, just go to the Help menu and drop down to Welcome and click on it and
it will bring it back up. So, you can bring this up anytime you want.
Now, I'm not going to click on all of these because it will dismiss it each time,
but if I click on Open an Existing Document, it's going to launch the Open
dialog and let you open an existing document. You can select Recent Documents. Like I have
been going through a lot of different files as we have been creating this
title and so all of the recent files I've had opened up appear in this list.
So, it just gives me a shortcut rather than have to go back and try to remember
where was floating world. It was recently in here.
So, it retains a list of several of the last opened documents to make it
convenient to return to them. You can also open a template and we describe
in one of the movies how to create your own templates.
This is a new feature in Painter 11. You can create an entire list of commonly
used file formats, dimensions, resolution settings that you use for documents
and rather than hand create them by the New Document dialog, you can go in and
just instantly open a document that is set to your template settings that
you've provided it. You also have Set-up. For example, you go
into Brush Tracking and again, we are going to get into this in greater detail but
you could just read the little description down here.
What it wants you to do is basically go in and just draw a stroke that is
somewhat indicative of your hand pressure and velocity, and to be honest,
that changes day-to-day, hour-to-hour. You may find sometimes it's useful to go back
into the Brush Tracking dialog and just draw another stroke.
And again, we are going to show you more about this in the forthcoming chapter.
So, I'm not going to get into in-depth here but it's just another nice thing to
have immediately available when you first launch Painter.
Another thing is Color Management. New to Painter 11 is a Color Management dialog
that is much more aligned with Photoshop style Color Management dialog.
In fact, another feature now is that if you use Adobe tools, you can actually
have the Adobe Color Management Module as your color engine, and that even makes
working back and forth between Photoshop and Painter even more easy because
you are going to have total accurate color when working in both applications.
We also have a little bit of assistance here, like you can ask what's new and
it's just going to open up a little quick file here that gives you just a quick
overview of the new features. Now, let's jump back to Painter here.
Finally, it gives you access to online training and help.
This is going to go ahead and open up a browser here.
What it's going to do is go to Corel's Painter website.
Now, we can go in here and find out things about features.
We can go down here and it tells you what's included.
It gets into all the various aspects of it. You can get into resources.
For example, there's tutorials here and these are tutorials for all of the
different applications, which you can jump in here and go to the Painter ones.
In fact, I have got a set of three tutorials right here that goes through how I
go through the workflow that I do to do my layer painting process, which again,
we are going to talk about in this title. So, you have access to a bunch of training
information as well while you are in Painter. So, the Welcome dialog is really just there
to kind of get you started and get you on your way.
It's set up for you are right here so that you can go ahead and get started.
Now, the last thing I'm going to show you, I mentioned as nice as this is when
it comes up, especially as a new user, you are eventually going to say that's
just an additional thing I have to go through and dismiss every time I launch.
You can actually stop it from coming up. If you just go right here and disable this,
now when you launch Painter, you won't be presented with this dialog.
I don't want to make it go away forever. There are times when I want to get to it.
So, once again, going to the Help menu and going down to Welcome will bring that back
up. So, that's the Welcome Screen in Painter.
That's what's going to happen the first time you open it up and it just is a way
for the people at Painter and myself to all say hello, we are here.