How to fix Painter's "This installation of Painter has been damaged or illegally modified" Error For Mac and PC

Whew! That's a long title, but it's definitely worth it! Corel has a bad history of unstable programs and bad customer support. And I don't see it changing anytime soon. As a Mac user, I don't use much of their program. Except Painter. And today, out of the blue, it decided to crap out on me. Yep. I got one of those:

This installation of Painter has been damaged or illegally modified.

To the untrained eye, this might seem that I have either done something stupid and delete a file, or may have pirated (*Gasp!*) the software. Well, whoopde-fuckin-do. You know what? Corel treat people with both disorder the same way: With a cold shoulder.

After trying multiple time to install and uninstalling the damn thing, I scoured the internet. One guy/gal in a forum posted that s/he has fixed his/her copy by downloading a crack(!!) off of a hacking site. Well, that's a solution, Corel! You should distribute cracks to fix your brokkin software! But that solution is neither elegant, nor Mac-worthy.

The thing about a Mac, is we're outnumbered by the dumb people who choose to deal with viruses and all those windows crap instead of switching to a beautifully designed hardware with a revolutionary and well thought-out OS X. But enough about you PC users.

To fix the problem on a Mac, you don't need to install or uninstall or do anything, just go to your HD > Library > Preferences folder and delete the file named nTitles Product Licenses IV.

Then just load Painter! You will have to re-register so I hope you haven't thrown out your hard copy. *grin*

Now, on a PC, we have to delve a little deeper into the horrid entanglement that is the Windows Registry! *Dun-Dun-Dunnnn*

Oh, yes, this baby may look tame now, but watch out! Y'all artsy-artsy people are in for an ascii headache.

The rest of this solution is basically lifted from here. I got rid of my Windows headache so I won't have to deal with this registry shit anymore. Did I say shit? I meant crap.

you have to delete the Protexis files afterinstallation, but before trying to open the program.

So after uninstalling and then reinstalling Painter, do START>>RUN>>typeREGEDIT Search for all PROTEXIS files [two of them] and DELETE (being careful that's all you delete - remember to backup the reg first just in case). And only then open the program. 

Also, the one reply to that blog post was;

hey, the nudes were weird but I liked the other stuff you can draw

Ah, PC, how will we Macs live without you?

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Don't use Wacom Driver 6.08-2

The pen would sometimes fail to detect and stop working for a second until it refreshes and starts working again. While this doesn't seem like a big deal, it craps out your workflow especially when you're already in the zone and in the middle of painting or cross-hatching.

Another thing, is that the pen would stop detecting pressure sensitivity if you go from one app to another, say, when you click on a browser and go back to photoshop. You have to lift the pen out of range from the tablet and put it back in range. Sometimes it only affects when you go between applications that are defined and not defined in the pen custom settings.

Also, I couldn't seem to revert to an older version without uninstalling the new one first… which would mean that I would lose my settings. Grrr. :S Why couldn't they make wacom settings saveable elsewhere as a file and so you can just load them and share them with people.

Of course, this applies specifically to Wacom intuos 3 driver. But I expect the entire wacom tablet series that uses this driver is affected.

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The Complete Photoshop Brush Collection for Painting

As a photoshop painter, you understand the need for natural brushes, such as pencils, pastel, watercolor, to name a few, and photoshop is way behind its competitors in this front. It couldn't even rotate its canvas fer cryin' out loud.

But have no fear, one man has filled in this void for you! David Nagel! All of this brushes is now available.

Yep, David Nagel has created so many brushes for photoshop, it's website, the creative mac, couldn't even catalog it.

Seriously, the site is very badly put together, not to mention spam heavy, that it's so difficult to navigate. But oh, you so dearly need the charcoal brush! The pencil! The watercolor brush! Your life depends on Photoshop!

Have no fear! Google is here!

Just Click Here to go to google and have all the photoshop brushes you need listed.

If you don't know which to get, just get Series 33 (chalk, dry brush, charcoal, pencil), and 30 (bristles, charcoal, pastel). They're the essential ones. Oh, and Series 40 watercolor.

And as you can see, David Nagle created such great brushes, the charcoal photoshop brush looks like charcoal, the pencil photoshop brush looks like pencil, the watercolor photoshop brush looks like watercolor, and the gouache photoshop brush looks like gouache!

But that's not all! He's even created the cloud brush, it's so easy to use you'll get clouds done very quickly! There's also a couple of stamps like the butterfly and various animals.

Oh, did I mention the skin brush? It even comes with a hair brush, you know to paint in those hairs when you texture your 3D model.

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