Painter is a digital art and painting application, from Corel Corporation.
N/A
Krita
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Krita is a professional free and open source painting program, available under the GPLv3 license. An art tool, it aims to support users with:
-concept art
-texture and matte painters
-illustrations and comics
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.
Krita is well suited for digital painting and drawing. It has a wide variety of brushes and tools that allow for a lot of flexibility and control when creating artwork. Krita is also good for creating textures and patterns. It has a wide variety of filters that can be applied to images to create interesting effects. Krita is also good for retouching photos and for creating digital illustrations.
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.
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 will not compare it with Adobe of Affinity Photo. This is more for photo editing and is a paid tool. The better comparison would be PaintTool SAI (still a paid one.) Krita and PaintTool SAI are both digital painting applications. Krita is free and open source, while PaintTool SAI is a paid application. Both applications have their strengths and weaknesses. Krita has a wide variety of features, including support for layers, filters, and brushes. It also has a wide selection of brush presets, and users can create their brushes. Krita is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. PaintTool SAI is a simpler application with fewer features than Krita. It does not support layers or filters and has a more limited selection of brushes. However, it is faster and more lightweight than Krita. PaintTool SAI is available only for Windows. So even for a free tool, Krita would win in my book.
Its low cost and wide range of features make it an excellent value for the money.
Its ease of use means that even non-artists can produce high-quality art assets. This has saved me time and money in producing assets for my games, resulting in a higher return on investment.
