Getting started with shapes

In Corel Painter, you work mainly with bitmaps, also known as raster images. Shapes, however, are vector objects. You can work with them in Corel Painter in much the same way you work with vector objects in drawing programs like CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator. For more information, see Exporting Adobe Illustrator shapes. Vector graphics are made up of lines, curves, objects, and fills that are all calculated mathematically.

Corel Painter draws shapes in an anti-aliased fashion. This anti-aliasing gives objects a smooth edge, as opposed to the jagged edges apparent in some drawing programs. Some clipart objects actually look like photographic elements when they are imported into Corel Painter and displayed with anti-aliasing.

Anti-aliased shapes are typically slower to appear on the screen in Corel Painter than are aliased objects in drawing programs, so you may want to use your drawing program for most of your object creation. You can then import the vector artwork into Corel Painter, tweak it with the drawing tools, and add some Natural-Media effects.

When you create a shape in Corel Painter, the shape appears on a special shape layer. To maintain all of the editing properties of a shape, the shape must remain on the shape layer. However, you convert the shape to a pixel-based default image layer, so you can apply effects, transformations, or use painting tools. For more information, see Converting shapes to image layers.

You can also convert shapes to selections and vice versa. The tools for adjusting shapes allow precise control over the outline path, so you may want to use shapes to create some of your selection paths. For more information, see Converting selections to shapes.

When you save a file that contains a shape in the RIFF format, Corel Painter maintains shapes as vector objects on separate layers. In other formats, shapes merge with the canvas. In the Photoshop (PSD) format, shapes are converted to bitmaps and are assigned to appropriate layers.

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