Corel Painter is the leading natural media painting program for Windows and over the years its feature-set has expanded with each new version. Its range of brushes, markers and other drawing tools makes very good use of pressure-sensitive graphics tablets, and now of tilt-sensitive ones, too.

With each new iteration of the product, there's been some new feature to add to its collection with, for example, bristle effects being introduced into Painter X. With the new version, Corel has deserted Roman numerals and there's nothing as original as bristles in Painter 11.

The main new features of Painter 11 are Hard Media Controls, RealBristle Dry Media, a resizable Color Palette and a new Color Management interface. There are extra controls in Hard Media profiles - tools like chalk, pencil and pen - which give added refinements to the shape of tips.

RealBristle technology isn't new, but a couple of the effects are. You can now make strokes with the marker pens, for example, that get darker as you overlay each one, just as real marker pens do. The width of pen lines is now dependent on speed of drawing, too, so you can make thick and thin lines with the same tool. Stroke width can also be altered by using the tip or side of the graphics tablet stylus, assuming your tablet supports this.

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Undock the Color Palette wheel, which normally resides in the floating menu on the right of the screen, and you can resize it. With a larger wheel you have more control over selecting a particular colour and, for further precision, the cursor keys can also be used to move around the palette. The Mixer Palette is also resizable, so you have plenty of room to mix colours and can then dock it away until it's next needed.

Colour Management may not be at the forefront of painting tools, but working in commercial environments often requires you to ensure colours are consistent with design elements created with other tools. The new Colour Management interface is simple and more like Adobe's, and you can now save a colour profile for each document.

There's a number of other enhancements, such as a new polygonal selection tool - it's surprising this wasn't already available - and improved colour matching when importing Photoshop images.

As a last enhancement, Corel claims a 30 percent improvement in brush speed, so brushes perform more naturally, though this is dependent on the system you run the application on. As before, both PC and Mac versions of Painter 11 are included in the box, so if you work dual-platform it's very good value.

The new features in Painter 11 are good to have and may make you more productive, particularly if you regularly move between Painter and Photoshop, but it still feels more like Painter X.5. At £137, the upgrade is reasonably priced and, even for new customers, it's still the best PC and Mac painting application there is.