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Painter

Painter

Overview

What is Painter?

Painter is a digital art and painting application, from Corel Corporation.

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Pricing

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What is Painter?

Painter is a digital art and painting application, from Corel Corporation.

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  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Adobe PhotoShop?

Adobe Photoshop is the best known graphics product on the market.

What is CorelDRAW Graphics Suite?

Corel Corporation, headquartered in Ottawa, offers the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, a graphic design studio and library of tools.

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Product Details

What is Painter?

Painter Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(17)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-1 of 1)
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Iris Shields | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I am using Corel Painter for design, and art (painting, drawing) purposes.
  • 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
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.
  • Waste of money
  • Waste of time trying to work around all the bugs
  • Waste of time trying to talk to customer service
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.
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.
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.
  • They have made it look a bit like Photoshop, that helps if you're used to that
  • A lot of choices in brushes and drawing tools
  • Way too many functional bugs in general (too much to name one by one)
  • Way too many UX issues overall
  • Way too many inconsistencies (too much to name)
  • When you use two or more screens, the problems quadruple
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