When saving a custom variant in Corel Painter, you may have noticed a small checkbox in the Save Variant dialogue, which gives the option to save the current colors along with the brush variant. Once saved in this manner, as soon as the variant is selected, the associated colors will default to the saved values.

This feature can be useful, but an issue arises when one creates a second custom variant using one with pre-saved colors as a starting point. In theory, we should simply be able to uncheck the Save Current Colors check box and click OK. Unfortunately, the new variant will still save with the current colors even though the box was unchecked.

Fortunately, apart from not creating a custom variant from one with previously saved colors, there is a workaround using our trusted text editor (say, NotePad for Windows or TextEdit for Mac).

The solution is to remove any saved colors property from an xml variant file as follows;

1. Open the variant xml file in a text editor.

2. Scroll down to the line pen-control-flags="SaveColors"> (as depicted on the left in the image below).

3. Delete the SaveColors attribute (as shown on the right in the image above).

4. Click Save in the text editor menu.

Sandman's Note;

Although the Save Current Colors feature can be useful, bear in mind that as soon as you select such a variant, your previously selected colors would have to be either re-entered manually, sampled from the canvas, or re-selected via a color set (if available).

Save Colors Bug and Workaround