- New! Kaleidoscope painting
Create electrifying kaleidoscope effects on canvas with this exciting new tool that only exists in Painter 12! Use your choice of media to paint transfixing patterns and colors, using three to 12 mirrored planes. No other digital painting software in the world can produce such a 'wow' reaction!
- New! Mirror Painting
Save time as you paint with perfect precision! This new tool copies every stroke you make onto the opposite side of your canvas. You choose whether it's mirrored horizontally, vertically or both. It's double the fun in half the time!
- RealBristle™ Dry Media
Reproduce the movement and feeling of traditional art on canvas! Painter's RealBristle™ brushes represent a major milestone for digital painting, providing the most realistic painting experience when paired with a graphics tablet. Designed to work with a Wacom® pen tablet, Painter's RealBristle Dry Media tools, such as Chalk, Marker, Pen and Pencil media, let you control opacity, color intensity, ink and shading simply by adjusting the pressure, angle and speed of your pen on tablet.
- New! Real Watercolor
Achieve the most authentic results! This breakthrough tool blends and dries more realistically than any other watercolor brush. Control wind direction for drying, and watch colors interact with the paper grain and change pigmentation in the most lifelike way. Also customize your paper texture settings to influence how the watercolor paint flows and pools on the canvas.
- New! Real Wet Oil
All of the fun, none of the mess or smell! With 12 new tools, the Real Wet Oil category offers the perfect solution for blending and painting flowing colors. Add solvents to the canvas for even more control. This new brush category gives artists that heightened sense of realism that only Painter 12 can deliver.
New! Clone source palette
Save time when working with photos. You can now create and manage numerous images for cloning within a single Painter file, using the new Clone Source palette. Simply create a library of objects that can easily be cloned and inserted into a painting.
- Smart photo-painting tools
Transform photos into paintings by hand or let the Auto-Painting palette paint a photo for you, using your choice of brush and media. Painter contains sophisticated SmartStroke™ brush technology that follows the lines and contours in a picture just like a real artist would.
- Customizable surface texturing
Give your art a level of texture and detail that no other digital painting software or photo-painting tools can produce. Choose paper textures for your canvas or create and customize your own texaftures to produce really unique artwork. The new Real Wet Oil and Real Watercolor palettes give you further options for controlling canvas texture.
- Smart Blur effect
The Smart Blur effect lets you quickly apply a painterly effect to an image. By smoothing out colors and sharp details, the Smart Blur effect softens the appearance of an image with a result that is similar to applying soft brushstrokes.
- New! Dynamic brush settings
Blend brushstrokes better than ever with dynamic settings. New controls let you set the merge mode and opacity for each brushstroke, resulting in much smoother blending. This feature, combined with new airbrush variants, will especially appeal to Photoshop users.
- New! Digital airbrushes
With six new Digital airbrushes, Painter 12 helps you achieve stunning airbrush effects. These new airbrushes produce effects similar to blend modes in Photoshop and work in concert with the new Computed Circular brush controls. The controls let you determine how brushstrokes interact with each layer of the canvas by adjusting opacity and hardness.
- New! Computed Circular brush controls
With the new Computed Circular brush control panel, you can specify the opacity and hardness of your brush.
- New! Gel brushes and Merge modes
The new Gel brushes let you tint an image's underlying color with the color of the brushstroke color. Customize Gel brushes by using the new Merge Mode brush controls on the General brush control panel.
- New! Multicore support for brushes
Multicore brush support maximizes brush performance when working on a multicore computer.
- New! Interface
Welcome to comfort! An interface refresh streamlines brush selection, image navigation, libraries, color controls and image set up to make the workspace more intuitive and quicker to navigate—changes that will especially appeal to people familiar with the Adobe® Photoshop® environment. This streamlined approach will significantly reduce the learning curve for new users.
- Enhanced! Brush tracking
Customize Painter to remember your touch. Brush tracking is an amazing feature that lets you instantly program Painter to remember your preferred brush speed and pressure sensitivity for each individual brush! Just as one size does not fit all, one speed does not suit all. Be particular with Painter!
- New! Workspaces
New to Painter 12, we've introduced some custom workspaces to help artists from all backgrounds quickly familiarize themselves with Painter.
- Enhanced! New Image dialog box
You can now create custom presets, such as canvases, colors and paper textures, for your artwork. The New Image dialog box lets you give your image a title and choose canvas dimensions, resolution, color and paper texture before you start painting or drawing.
- Enhanced! Speed—Painter 12 is 5x faster!
Ready, set, go! Brush performance is 3 to 5 times faster, while a range of Painter tasks, such as opening files and flattening, flipping or blurring images is up to 3 times faster than Painter 11.
- New! High-Quality Display
Get the best view! When zoomed in at more than 100 percent, the High-Quality Display option smoothes the edges of your image, allowing you to view it as it will print for a clear idea of the end result.
- New! Color Changer palette
A handy addition, the new Color Changer palette pops up on screen for a quick, easy way to change your brush color. The palette only sticks around for as long as you need it, keeping your workspace clean.

- You can easily move palettes by grabbing the bottom area of grouped panels.
- Navigator panel settings are now saved between sessions.
- You can now close the media selector bar without the need to change a selection.
- The Brush property bar now displays the correct properties for Plug-in and Hard Grainy Drip brushes.
- Brush artifacts no longer appear after you apply Watercolor and Real Watercolor brushstrokes, undo all brushstrokes, and start painting again.
- Application performance is improved when you work with large documents that have a clone source and Digital Watercolor layers.
- The Invert button reverses the effect of an Expression setting only for the active brush variant and does not affect subsequent variants.
- If you use a Wacom mouse and stylus, brush size is maintained when you switch to another application and then return to Corel Painter.
- Textures in a cloned image are maintained when you save the file.
- Random strokes no longer appear in the Mixer pad after you use shortcut keys.
- Color management menu now properly reflects assigned to the document color profile.
- The Navigator no longer appears transparent after you choose the Adobe Color Management Module.
- The Lock layer button in the Layers panel is no longer disabled after you use the Eraser tool on a layer.
- A layer mask is no longer assigned to the incorrect layer when you undo deleting a layer.
- The document returns to its original state after you undo moving a layer (Windows only).
- When you type text, the correct text layer is selected in the Layers panel.
- When the canvas is selected, pressing CMD/CTRL+SHIFT+1 now selects all layers.
- On Mac, you can now import libraries that were exported from the application on Windows.
- The shortcut combination Option + Command + Character now works correctly on Mac OS 10.6.
- Color separations now print as expected.
- After you cancel a transformation, you can now switch between open documents.
- The Reset tool button on the property bar now restores the default settings of the active tool as expected.
- You can now change the Eraser opacity by using shortcut keys.
- Various instabilities in areas such as layers, brushes, cloning, and movies were addressed on both Windows and Mac.