Moreover, on those occasions where Painter can't keep up with your strokes, the new multi-stroke spooling means that you aren't left twiddling your thumbs. After tackling its interface and brush engine, Painter 6 turns its attention to how its images are built up as compositions. In the past this was handled through the use of floaters which were effectively bitmap objects floating above the main canvas. These floaters have now been turned into Photoshop-style layers that act like a stack of acetate sheets across the image as a whole. To an extent the shift from floaters to layers is largely semantic as layers now fulfil much the same function as the floaters used to.
Painter now supports industry-standard layers for creating photomontages.
However, the fact that new layers ready for painting on can be created with a single click makes a huge difference in practice as does the fact that you can now handle selections on each layer. The new Photoshop-style Layers section of the Objects menu also makes it much easier to change the stacking order, opacity and blend mode and to temporarily hide layers. The difference in terms of the ability to experiment and be creative is immense. In short, as soon as you see layers in action, you wonder how on earth you managed to create compositions with Painter in the past. In fact of course most users did so by constantly swapping between Painter and Photoshop.