Painter is a digital art and painting application, from Corel Corporation.
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Corel PaintShop Pro
Score 9.3 out of 10
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PaintShop Pro is an all-in-one photo editor with advanced photo management, editing & creative tools that deliver everything a photo & design enthusiast needs, from Corel Corporation.
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.
Corel PaintShop Pro is well suited for photographers wanting to adjust photos and also for designers who want to create designs from scratch, working in layers and merging various elements. Due to slow load times, Corel PaintShop Pro is not well suited when you only have a few small tasks to do and when a lightweight alternative will do the job just as well (e.g. cropping and red-eye removal).
I would like to see better smart cropping, we have the need for use in our carrying and travel cases for foam cut-outs. This requires a picture to be taken of the product and then outlined. The latest Apple update does a much better job of it than Corel. A definite need in our business
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 previously tagged Corel PaintShop Pro as an 8, but I'm moving on up to 10. I've been a user for many years. I always purchase the updates when they come out, and they have consistently gotten better with each release. Corel PaintShop Pro provides features that I haven't seen in other similar apps at this price point - alot of bang for the buck. If Corel keeps making and updating this program, I will absolutely keep purchasing it.
I would say that the program loads a LITTLE slow, but that's not a problem, considering everything that likely needs to load in the background for it to do what it does. Once running, the program performs very acceptably.
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.
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.
