Celsys headquartered in Shinjuku City, Tokyo supports creators to create artistic content with digital technology. They provide solutions for content creation, distribution, and browsing, including support of creative activities through our illustration, manga and animation production app “Clip Studio Paint” and web service “Clip Studio”, as well as our e-book solution, “Clip Studio Reader”.
$49.99
one-time fee
Painter
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Painter is a digital art and painting application, from Corel Corporation.
I cannot really imagine a situation other than creating custom 3D models in which Clip Studio Paint would ever be inappropriate; it offers tools for art such as: 2D, pixel/voxel work, vectors, painting/drawing, comics, animations and more. The only place that Clip Studio Paint does not shine is in the creation of 3D models, but I think that that is fair given that it's competitor, Photoshop, also cannot do this; this was never a tool meant for 3D model design or creation, but the fact that you can import models and that there is a library of free and paid posable models native to the app is rather impressive.
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.
I think that once one gets the hang of how to navigate and use Clip Studio Paint, they will find that it has so much more to offer than one might expect when looking at it for the first time. There are hidden gems all throughout this program, and they are all there to make your creative experience all the more streamlined and natural.
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.
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.
I have used a handful of other free art programs, including MediBang Paint, and while they are all good, and I'm sure perfect in the hands of the right artist, I feel as though they simply do not offer the number of options necessary for my needs. They feel very limited and stale; customization is limited and their UI's are outdated. Clip Studio Paint is modern and sleek, highly customizable, and offers far more tools than the other options around it.
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.
I think that the initial price was incredibly steep, but I managed to get it on discount. As a starting artist, this was a hard blow to take at the start, especially before these subscription options existed.
After years of use I have more than paid off the cost I sunk into Clip Studio Paint EX.
I see myself making marked profits by continuing to use the program, even with the new subscription service rather than a perpetual lisence.
