An "ah ha!" moment with Painter

I had a mental breakthrough in Painter this morning. I was just experimenting with brushes and irritated that the airbrush tilt is not working correctly when it occurred to me that the color seemed flat and uninteresting. At that moment I had an "ah ha!" and when into the brush controls and altered the color variability, as it sprays I made the brush vary the hue, saturation, and value. Above is an image sprayed from the Broad Wheel Airbrush 50 variant, note how it look like I've taken a green image and added noise. The cool thing is that I have control over how much it varies in hue, saturation, and/or color. If I just wanted to have the hue vary, I could do it subtlely or wildly. This is a great way to add a subtle texture and depth to digital painting while maintaining control in a somewhat natural way.

"Ah ha!" moments are what makes learning addictive. Especially when you've had a mental block for sometime, like I have with Painter. You can read about a technique, watch someone do it, but the thrill comes when it finally clicks while you're doing it. In fact, I'd say that is a good order of events for learning a complex tools like Painter, Flash, etc.

Painter is NOT Photoshop

I've used Photoshop since version 1.0, it is a great image editor and it is useful in image creation as well. I first tried Painter a dozen years ago, at that time Adobe had already won me over with how to edit bitmaps and vectors using Photoshop and Illustrator. Painter has some similarities to Photoshop, but the similarity between working with Photoshop ends quickly once you scratch past the surface of the tool. Just as drawing with vectors in Flash is very different from the feel and approach of drawing with vectors in Illustrator, manipulating pixels in Painter is very different from doing so in Photoshop. A good mantra when trying to get your head around Painter would be repeating "Painter is NOT Photoshop".

My desire to learn Painter never quite went away, so in September I bought Painter 9.5. I gave it another shot and felt that I was hitting the same Adobe-UI-induced mental block that I hit years earlier. Before I knew it, Painter X was released and I bought it.

After two false starts with Painter, I decided to get some instructor-led training from Painter expert John Derry. After watching John work, I feel like I finally have an idea where Painter is coming from.

Here are a few images I created at John Derry's Nashville Workshop:

• Two Amused
• Learning Moment
• Wheel Fun

FlashDevelop

I just discovered a cool, open source tool for creating Flash (without Flash) called FlashDevelop. It is for folks who prefer coding to the Flash timeline. The UI for working with a project is very good, it is similiar to Visual Studio. You can view a project in class view, where each class shows what it extends, imports, its methods, and properties. It makes it very easy to jump around in a class or even jump up the inheritance heirarchy to look at the method stubs of the parent. The code completion works for the classes you create and for other classes you import(like Tween). It uses MTASC as the compiler, which can help catch errors.

Give it a try. Here is a good introduction to the tool at flashmagazine.com. You'll appreciate it even if you only use it as an editor for ActionScript (and not for the entire development of a project).

XYplorer

I just came across a great file manager for Windows call XYplorer. It is fast and has a great user interface. One of the things I like is the preview pane. It allows you to preview quite a few different, common file types like HTML, XML, JPG, PNG, PDF, and SWF (and more). It also has very good search features. One simple thing it has that is great is the ablity to copy the full path to a file. Another nice feature is viewing the date as the age of the file (or its modification). For example, if you set the date modified to age, then it shows how long ago the file was modified (5 secs, 10 mins, 3 hrs (whatever the case may be). The price seems a little on the high-side, around $40. I'll have to see how addicted I get to it during its 21-day trial.

Select distinct in XSLT

Hard to believe, but there is no equivalent in XSLT to the SELECT DISTINCT SQL command. After doing some research, I came across a technique for getting distinct data called the "Muenchian Technique". Here is an example I made based on this method.

First the XML:


Then the XSL:


The result:


I threw the weight in to show that you are getting the first Clumber. Leaving that out would result in a list of all the distinct breeds in the dogs.xml file.

Another cool find was this site describing the key function in XSLT.

XTrans

I've been working with the program XTrans for creating XSL templates. XTrans is a free Windows program. It opens quickly and is very useful with a straightforward user-interface. The workflow is very developer-friendly. You open your XML and then create your XSL viewing them side-by-side, top-and-bottom, or one window at a time. No mouse is necessary when using the app (something I love). It has an XPath query analyzer so you can easily test your XPath queries. With the Normalize command, you can have XTrans indent your XML or XSL. By pressing the context menu key (or a right mouse click) you get a menu for inserting and XSL command/statement. I've been trying some other apps recently, but I keep coming back to this one.

Painter

I finally bit the bullet and bought Corel Painter 9.5 and an Intuos 3 tablet. Ever since working through the Photoshop part of The Photoshop and Painter Artist Tablet Book, I've been interested in giving Painter another try.

Years ago, I tried the original Fractal Painter as well as Painter X2. One of the features I found very useful for a particular project was the ablitly to record your brush strokes, and then play them back at a higher resolution. In the days of 68K Macs and 8MB of RAM, that feature was great for print projects (it was the pre-web days of the early 1990s).

Painter has improved immensely. The interface is much more intutive if you are familiar with other graphics programs. While the interface is no longer quirky, the packaging is... The CD in the package has no jewel case or even envelope, it just has a spot in the box. The manual is not much of a manual for reference. It is mostly made up of tutorials from various artists. That's a good idea, but the implentation is weak. The quality varies from tutorial to tutorial, some being more an overview as to what was done as opposed to a tutorial. The font size chosen is also too small.

It does come with a CD which has lynda.com video tutorials. These seem more useful, unfortunately they wrapped the QuickTime movies in a Director interface which doesn't provide a fast-forward button. I often use the QuickTime Player's fast-forward button to play the slower parts (or parts I know) of a video at double-speed (most of the time, the audio is still understandable). The interface of the video app also has a problem where you can't even click all of the links. Fortunately you can access the QuickTime movies directly so you can view them in the QuickTime Player by turning on "Show hidden files and folder" in the Tools>Folder Options...>View tab for that Explorer window. Then you'll see the "D:\data\movies" directory.

I need to spend some quality time with the product. At the moment, it looks like it will be worth the investment.