Likelihood to Recommend I use Adobe PhotoShop to do practically all of my business from my home in Turkey. Many customers find the cost of Adobe PhotoShop to be prohibitive, thus they turn to substitute alternatives and illegally downloaded pirated software. Regulations like torrents, sales, and price increases lead to a number of financial issues. Change can be advantageous.
Read full review Corel Painter does have a lot of great brushes, and they do emulate real art supplies very well. Especially the thick paint is well done. But unfortunately there are so many functional and UX bugs that overall it is just horrible to work with. When contacting customer support about it, they really seem clueless about the seriousness of the situation, and clueless about what proper UX is in general. They have tried to make it work a bit like Photoshop, which is a good move but then some things are absolutely not intuitive at all and they are definitely missing the mark horribly with so many issues. I would highly recommend using Photoshop instead, though you'll have to download them separately; it also offers a lot of great brushes nowadays and works much much smoother without all those aggravating bugs of Painter. The price of Corel Painter is just not at all worth all these horrible bugs.
Read full review Pros Brush customization. There are many available brushes for illustration, and each can be customized to fit the needs of your specific style. Integration with other Adobe products. It is essential that the images I create be accessible in Adobe Indesign and Illustrator, and [Adobe] Photoshop can be placed and edited easily within those programs. Advanced editing. The possibilities for editing photos [are] endless, with new features being added constantly. Read full review Watercolor Compatible Multiple variety of Brushes and shapes Captured Dab Library Read full review Cons Expensive - It is too expensive to buy Photoshop alone, and hence leading the user to purchase the entire Creative Cloud Package though he/she is not even aware of half of those apps. High System Spec - Requires high system specifications to run the application smoothly, and to use it at its best. Process lag - When it comes to large-sized files, the application becomes laggy taking much time even to render a single layer. Read full review Way too many functional bugs, makes it hard to work with Bad UX and usability, too much unintuitive behavior, makes it particularly hard to work with Overall looks and behaves as if it was coded in the '90s, it really needs a complete UX overhaul Did I mention the many bugs yet? Yeah? I'll mention it again because it's bad Read full review Likelihood to Renew We get a lot of use out of this software. It's vital for work with production in our industry and has a lot of cross-functionality - creating social media images, retouching photos, editing photos, creating gradients, and more. It's pretty fuss-free in that we haven't had to reach out to support and the program hasn't crashed on us. We are trained on the software (so again, this isn't for beginners), but for detail-oriented designers and creatives like ourselves - it's a no-brainer.
page V CEO (Chief Executive Officer)
Read full review Usability I've used it for a long time and would consider myself a Pro user at this point. I know where everything I need is, have custom actions set up to make common actions faster, and have my workflows automated so much that everything is easy. Occasionally, a new version of Photoshop will change a common usability feature which will slow things down for a short time before I'm able to adjust, but generally I really like my setup. However, if you're new to Photoshop, it is likely going to take you a while to figure out how you can best use the features.
Read full review If it wasn't quite clear yet, I'll state it again: the usability of Corel Painter is, simply put, horrid. And I am not talking about rendering, lagging, etc., it is not even all that bad there. I am talking about the weird issues like being unable to move a brush into a custom brush palette when you work on a second screen, like being unable to move the software onto the second screen in the first place unless you separate all the palettes and the windows (and if nobody tells you upfront there is no way of knowing because the manual doesn't state this at all), and then having to drag all your separate windows and palettes over one by one every time your computer wakes up again, and they won't really want to move to the other screen but only through a tiny corner of your screen, and the fact that you have to scroll through lists and lists of fonts but can't search and when you apply this font, add another piece of text the font jumps back to the default font of all the text already applied even when you haven't selected any of the text. Just to name a very small few.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Adobe Photoshop is very reliable, but is never 100%. There have been times when Adobe Photoshop has had trouble opening, but nothing a little computer restart couldn't fix. I use Adobe Photoshop on a Mac for both work and at home on a daily basis, and I would be lost without it.
Read full review Performance Speed can be an issue when you are dealing with large files for large format printing or billboards. When working on web images, speed is not an issue.
Read full review Support Rating While I never contacted Adobe directly, there is so much content out there in the form of YouTube videos, Lynda/LinkedIn learning that almost any issue, including bugs, can be worked around (and this method is generally faster as there's no turnaround time involved).
Read full review It was really hard to get them to understand what I was having problems with. It was hard to get the message through that Painter has an unacceptable amount of functional and UX bugs. When I finally talked to someone who was easier to communicate with, he was very stoic about the situation, like they didn't really care about the awful amount of bugs.
Read full review In-Person Training So, I received the training at the HQ and it was train the trainer training. A good time, I spent a week at their campus
Read full review Implementation Rating I took a course so it really helped. I didn’t take the course until much later after beginning to use it, so I wish work would have sent me right off the bat. It would have alleviated a lot of frustratinon
Read full review Alternatives Considered Canva is a great tool for creating infographics and it's free with limited options.
Adobe Illustrator CC and
Adobe InDesign are much more suited for creating infographics, however, I still selected Adobe PhotoShop primarily because of my familiarity with all of the tools and hotkeys. There are always workarounds from with Adobe PhotoShop, and I just haven't taken the time to learn how to use
Adobe Illustrator CC as effectively.
Read full review Corel Painter has support to multiple OS and across all the devices. Coloring and multi layer imaging works very well. The new enhanced brush settings and the redesigned brush libraries.
Read full review Scalability It seems expensive compared to the free/cheap programs now available
Read full review Return on Investment Saved our company thousands of dollars by editing in house. Has given us the ability to do things on the fly and get projects done faster. Having the original .psd files saved has given us the ability to go back and reuse and update photos and graphics instead of starting all over again. Read full review Customer support could be improved in my opinion. Multiple bugs while working with layered designing. Read full review ScreenShots