September 01, 2022

The Best painting app with multi device/OS support

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Engineering

Computer Networking Company, 5001-10,000 employees

Score 7 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Corel Painter to design multiple structure designs and architecture diagrams for multiple different clients. The major benefit that this application gives is the uniqueness in the finishing and final product or design.

Pros and Cons

Watercolor Compatible
Multiple variety of Brushes and shapes
Captured Dab Library

This product has multiple bugs in terms of overlaying.
Customer support could be improved.
Frequent updates to shapes, design, and colors could be done.

Likelihood to Recommend

Corel painter is one of the best tools in the market for specialized designing and painting. The spotlight option with watercolor marking is very unique. The new Captured Dab Library is one of the best features of the latest update. The new enhanced brush settings and the redesigned brush libraries make life so much easier.

Most Important Features

Brush setting
color options
integration with multiple layers

Return on Investment

Customer support could be improved in my opinion.
Multiple bugs while working with layered designing.

Alternatives Considered

Adobe InDesign, Design Pickle and Oki Data ColorPainter

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.

Other Software Used

Adobe InDesign, Altium Designer, Oki Data ColorPainter

October 13, 2020

A horrible amount of functional and UX bugs

Iris Shields

Senior UX/ UI Architect

Self Employed (Arts & Crafts, 1-10 employees)

Score 2 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I am using Corel Painter for design, and art (painting, drawing) purposes.

Pros and Cons

Emulate real art material like paints, drawing materials, etc.
Has a lot of different brushes and other art materials
It has a set up that can initially test your system to analyze and enhance performance

Way too many functional bugs, makes it hard to work with
Bad UX and usability, too much unintuitive behavior, makes it particularly hard to work with
Overall looks and behaves as if it was coded in the '90s, it really needs a complete UX overhaul
Did I mention the many bugs yet? Yeah? I'll mention it again because it's bad

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Return on Investment

Waste of money
Waste of time trying to work around all the bugs
Waste of time trying to talk to customer service

Alternatives Considered

Adobe PhotoShop

Like I already mentioned Photoshop is so much more pleasant to work with. Though out of the box Photoshop definitely has a lot fewer brushes; you can definitely download bushes often for free, or otherwise a small fee (you have to pay to add more brushes with Painter as well). Painter has so many horrible bugs, functional as well as usability bugs, it's just very, very sloppy definitely compared to Photoshop which is virtually bug-free nowadays. All due respect to programmers, I have been a coder myself, but it is obvious that Painter is built by coders and coders alone, it is obvious there have not been many designers (UX or otherwise) involved in the development of Painter.

I got Painter on a discount (luckily or I would have been really ticked off) and I wanted to try it out. I would NEVER pay $500 for it now I know it is riddled with bugs.

Support Rating

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.

Usability

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.