Affinity Designer is a vector graphics software developed by Serif (Europe) Ltd, replacing the former Serif DrawPlus. It is designed for professional illustrators, web designers, game developers, and other creatives.
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Painter
Score 9.9 out of 10
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Painter is a digital art and painting application, from Corel Corporation.
I first started to use Affinity related tools with Serif in 2004. When these tools became available, I started using them, and much to my surprise of the people that use Affinityit is now universally accepted. More people will use this in the future due to the total cost and value it brings.
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.
Coming from Photoshop and Illustrator, the transition was pretty smooth and most tasks translates well. There was a bit of a learning curve with certain tasks, like masking images, but nothing too steep. The align tools are excellent and the use of personas (especially the Export persona) adds a lot of functionality when exporting slices or working with different formats. The interface is user friendly with frequently used tools easily available
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.
I have not had much opportunity to go directly to support, but the training modules that are employed by the company are fantastic. I also find that if I need to understand something, there is always another user ready and willing to share their secrets. As this tool becomes more accepted local communities will also start to organize
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.
Affinity Designer stacks up really well against Illustrator, especially for the kind of work I do. While Illustrator might have more niche features that Affinity does not but It does covers the core functionality I need for vector design. And without the ongoing subscription cost. I chose Affinity Designer primarily because it's a one-time purchase, which makes a big difference for my small business.
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.
