Painter is a digital art and painting application, from Corel Corporation.
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Procreate
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Savage, headquartered in North Hobart, Tasmania, is dedicated to making exceptional creative tools. They are the creators of Procreate, a digital art and illustration app for iPad. Offering 100s of handmade brushes, a suite of artistic tools, advanced layer system, and its Valkyrie graphics engine — Procreate is designed to enable the creation of expressive sketches, rich paintings, gorgeous illustrations and beautiful animations.
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.
We are using Procreate less and less as Adobe tools catch up with more iPad applications and sketching styles, but Procreate is still superior in flexibility and online tutorials. We are using other, more formal tools more, just because the changing nature of work is less illustrative.
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.
We broadly use the Adobe suite for other applications, so as Adobe tools have advanced, it is difficult to have an outlier in the toolkit, but Procreate still offers a lot of ease of use and competes with more formal Illustrator tools. We use Illustrator a lot for general design work once they pass initial concepting.
