Continuous stroke in PSP X8?

[urkelbot666]

Hello all!
I recently upgraded from Corel Paintshop PhotoPro 3 (Which was like, a million years old) to Corel PSP X8. When using the old version, I was able to set various tools and brushes to "Continuous" by clicking a little checkbox. This would make it so that whatever brush or tool I was using would not compound and overlap itself when the tool/brush was dragged over the same area multiple times. I found this useful for a lot of kinds of shading I would do on drawings, especially if I missed a spot and wanted to touch it up instead of undoing the whole previous stroke and redoing it from scratch.

I see this option in PSP X8, the little "Continuous" checkbox, but when I click it on, I notice no difference at all with the strokes of my tool/brush. Whether "Continuous" is checked or unchecked, the tool/brush will overlap itself and compound the brush or effect, i.e. if I'm using the lighten/darken tool to shade, when I click and drag the darken-brush over an area multiple times in a single stroke, it will continue to darken instead of darkening to the same intensity until I unclick the mouse button. This also happens regardless of whether I click the new stroke button on the toolbar or not.

I was just wondering if this was some kind of error, if I was missing something, or if this is a feature that is no longer offered in the newer versions of PSP. Any info would be appreciated

[hartpaul]

The behaviour with the paint brush and lighten / darken is different from at least version 8.

For others to test:
1. New Document say 1000 x 1000 white.
2. Select paintbrush tool and with continuous unticked select a strong color in the Materials palette. Set the Opacity to 50%.
3. Make a dot on the canvas , move the cursor to a new position and hold the shift key down so that a line is drawn from your starting point to the current position. Then move it again and with shift key held down produce another line leading off from the previous line.
You should find that there are two dark spots representing the overlap points of the strokes.
Repeat 2 and 3 but with Continuous ticked. This time the darker dots do not appear. All strokes are locked in to that opacity and any overlap does not darken .

Now with a new document , floood fill with that color at 50% opacity.
1. Select the Lighten/Darken brush and set its opacity to 50 %
2. As in 3 above with Continuous unticked using the shift key and left mouse button (lighten) draw a line, change its direction a couple of times and then run it back over itself. The area of the line will be lightened where it duplicates. This also happens with the Right Mouse button (darken) and the lines are uneven in opacity.
3. Repeat with Continuous checked and there is no difference - So this might be a new bug discovered. It is also present in X9.

Again these are bugs that probably most people do not come across as they do not often use those steps.

[urkelbot666]

Thanks so much for looking into this! I really thought I was losing brain cells or going crazy or something x3 Good to know it's not just me, hope there's a fix at some point. Thanks again

[SJS]

Any help with this would be welcome, behavior/problem is same in X9

[hartpaul]

Still the same in 2018.

[SJS]

Sad!

[LeviFiction]

For me the continuous stroke is only broken on the Lighten/Darken brush. All others behave as they are supposed to. Lighten/Darken builds up constantly so Continuous may not be broken but the brush itself. I also never use that tool, so not really bothered by it. But yes it would be nice if they fixed that.

[SJS]

Not sure about X8, but in X9 several brushes I tested with opacity set down (e.g. 45) behave as if "continuous" mode is turned on, even when this is NOT checked ... however the Lighten/Darken brush does not ... it builds up regardless of setting for Continuous mode. I think the continuous mode/setting checkbox does nothing for any brush. If the intent to get rid of that setting the checkbox needs to go, and the Lighten/Darken be "fixed" to be consistent with other brushes. Since it is possible to build up intensity of any brush simply be repeating the action, having all brushes operate in continuous/no build-up mode would be OK. Current situation is certainly "broken".

[LeviFiction]

They aren't trying to remove continuous. That's a small bug where PSP thinks continuous is still turned on, not sure what causes it, it's only happened to me twice in the past six months. But all you have to do is turn continuous on and then back off and that fixes the issue for the current brush.

[SJS]

Hmm, just tried turning Continuous off/on testing with the Emboss brush, and could not get any build up: no apparent effect with multiple tries, and the same with the basic paintbrush, and no build-up.
Using PSP X9. Maybe the behavior changes with other settings on or off? Blend mode is normal, Density 100%, etc. All brush variance palette settings are "normal",

[evades1]

I have the same problem. Went through Corel and had a remote session. When he opened his
program and used the lighten/darken brush he said it worked fine. So now he wants to send me to a higher authority to sort this out. What I'm wondering is what solution did you guys come up with. There is nothing listed here that I can see.

[SJS]

No fix that I am aware of: with lighten/darken and other brushes continuous does not work in X9: the effect doubles when you overlap on the same stroke. And the Emboss brush never overlays/doubles the effect during one stroke regardless of whether Continuous is checked.

The "fix" of unchecking/rechecking the Continuous box for Lighten/Darken does NOT work for me!

Possibly there is a combination of Preferences that causes the problem, but since Corel does not allow you to export all the many preferences for easy parsing, troubleshooting that might be a nightmare.