Painter is a digital art and painting application, from Corel Corporation.
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PicMonkey
Score 9.0 out of 10
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PicMonkey, from the company of the same name in Seattle, is an application designed to help users create standout visuals for Insta posts, Facebook covers, YouTube thumbnails, web pages, holiday cards, posters or anything with a visual, offering graphics and templates, unlimited stock photos and features to support illustrative presentations.
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 would definitely recommend PicMonkey! It is diverse for the average person or the business professional. If you need to edit pictures, create graphics, or implement marketing media this is the tool to use! It may not be enough for someone who needs something a bit more advanced like Photoshop, but in my experience it has covered everything I need.
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.
PicMonkey's usability is outstanding! I was able to learn how to edit my photos and create graphics in a short period of time. Between the tutorials and the amazing user interface, I felt like a pro! PicMonkey is very detailed but not so overwhelming that you miss out on great features.
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 personally never really need support with PicMonkey. It works great, and I can find what I need. There may have been a few times when I've Googled for an answer related to PicMonkey, but I've not had a question answered.
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.
Adobe Photoshop is a better service with many more options, but for basic image manipulation for someone who is a beginner, PicMonkey is superior. There is almost NO learning curve. Canva has much better templates and design options, but not as many photo editing options. I like to use a combination of PicMonkey and Canva for my small-business marketing needs.
