- 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.

Corel Painter 12.2 Service Pack 1 Update:
Optimizing memory usage (Mac 64-bit)
If you’re running Corel Painter 12 on a Mac 64-bit system, and the system has enough available memory (RAM), Corel Painter can now detect and use the additional memory to improve speed and performance. By default, Corel Painter is set to use 80% of the available memory. However, you can change the amount of memory that is allocated to Corel Painter from the Performance page of the Preferences dialog box. You can also view the amount of memory that is available to the application.

Layer Improvements
There have been many improvements to the quality of layers and selections. A broad range of defects have been addressed that include preventing common crashes (across all media types and especially real wet oil), improved stability and accuracy of the UI and the stability and quality of selections.

The following issues were addressed in this update:
- When performing a transformation, the layer that is currently selected in the Layers panel now keeps its focus in the document window.
- When dragging and dropping a layer during a transformation, the correct layer is now selected.
- Pressing Shift and then clicking on layers no longer selects all layers (Windows).
- The layer composite method no longer switches to Gel when using the Eraser tool.
- You can now easily move layers within a layer group.
- The UI now refreshes when pasting grouped layers.
- UI items are no longer cut off and it's now easier to distinguish between enabled and disabled UI controls (Windows 8).
- When using a tablet, palettes now remain docked when expanding or contracting tabs.
- When using the Rubber Stamp tool and then exiting the application, the default brush is no longer set to the Cloner brush.
- When using the Rubber Stamp tool for the first time, the source reference point no longer jumps to bottom of the page.
- You can now set more than one OS Function Key for Painter shortcuts (Mac).
- Various instabilities in areas such as layers, brushes, cloning, and movies were addressed on both Windows and Mac.