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An honest review of Corel Painter 2018, from an artist who has been using it since version 8.
Painter is like the most beautiful lady, filled with so many bad habits that never change.
And I say so with all my heart.First, let me get this straight, I love Painter, I wish I could be using Painter for all my painting needs. Alas, after giving Painter a chance for so long, I realize that love is a life long journey, and it’s better to be married with someone who has a great character than just beauty, and that someone is Photoshop.
But sometimes, for an exciting fling with ex, I go back to Painter just occasionally, hah.
Now lets get to the good sexy points first:
PROS
Painter has the most robust brush engine in a painting software available today. The options for adjusting it are so diverse, that it can be a little daunting to anyone who hasn’t use it before.
Painter has the best brushes to mimic traditional media. Once you tried it, you will know it. The oils, pens and palette knives are some of the tools that I wish other software have.
Painter can apply different colors to each bristle of the brush, hence creating that organic multi-color strokes that is very difficult, if not impossible to do in other software.
Painter can “paint on a path”, which is super amazing. Which means you can use that oil brush and still achieve a very sleek finish even with complex shapes, while varying degrees of pressure and strokes to make it look natural.
Take a look at some of the line work I did using Painter:
Look at the lovely brushstrokes on their hairs, and sleek line work through out all 3 art. These are easily achievable in Painter. Their natural brushes are so good that I’ve never had to create my own brushes, they are good right out of the box.
Painter also has a palette for mixing colors the traditional way, which is very good for people with long traditional backgrounds.
Then Painter has “Blenders”
If you are starting digital art, chances are you have been using traditional mediums for a while, and you know traditional mediums are not the easiest to blend totally smooth colors.
Now if you look at her pink hair above, painter can blend exactly that smooth very easily. You can just lay down 2 blocks of solid colors, and use blender “just add water” and brush over it, until you achieve the smoothness you want. For beginners, this seem god send. For more experienced artist, you can change/use different brush tip for the blenders and achieve a more textured look.
But what makes blenders so good is not the smoothness of it, but rather, it can change the approach you create art and speed it up. Rather than blending every element slowly, you can just lay down blocks of solid colors fast, and blend them altogether later.
So Painter has fantastic brushes and a great brush engine, plus a nifty blender right? But that’s about it.
CONS
Now its the cons. Prepare yourself.
Painter as a software is very clunky, glitchy, and it has been the same ever since so long. The people at Corel is either incapable of improving it, or they just doesn’t care.
1. Using Tablet Eraser Lags
Yes you read that right, even basic feature like switching to eraser lags. But hey, that’s the faster version. You know what’s slower, switching to eraser tool command also lags, for half a second or a second I don’t know.
This makes rough sketching extremely annoying for me. Where I tend to draw and erase immediately, the constant switching of tools creates a constant sudden lag which is really frustrating, breaking momentum.
2. Default eraser cannot be adjusted.
What? Yes, you are stuck with a pressure sensitive eraser, with a soft or hard edge version. Yes, ever since forever they never change it too. In order to change it, you need to do some out of the box file editing, but that means you can’t change it while you are working, so it’s useless as well.
Well you can adjust the eraser, but only as a “brush tool”. Which you have to select a new brush to erase, and you have to reselect your previous brush to paint again.
Again this is very annoying for me, whereas in PS I just need to press “e” to erase and then “b” to paint again immediately with my brush cursor still in the same place on the canvas. In Painter I have to go over the canvas to select the eraser (b), erase, then select again the brush, and back to painting, which takes up tons of time. You can’t use a different shortcut like PS, because as I say, the “adjusted” eraser is considered a brush tool.
3. The 1st time you open the brush engine, it lags, for about 3 secs
Yes, it lags again, though only for the first time, but I don’t know why, it never change since forever.
4. Using big brushes lags.
Painter always claim that their current version is faster than before, but that only shows how bad it is the previous version was, and the current version is not much better.
I often paint in large canvases in PS so that I can put in tons of details. Sometimes there are tons of layers, sometimes just a few. But in all cases I can use brushes up to 800px wide without problem, in 1000px I have to paint slower or the strokes will not catch up. I usually do that to cover large areas.
One may argue that Painter’s brushes are more sophisticated, but most brushes lags when they pass 100px, with few layers. With tons of layers? Its a nightmare.
5. Painter’s drag zoom, zoom you to the MAX.
Sometimes, when you are trying to paint a certain area, you put one of your hand in Ctrl-Z (undo), so that you can keep immediately undo each time you didn’t get the strokes right.
Occasionally, you didn’t press Ctrl in time and pressed the Z, so it becomes “zoom” (shortcut for both in PS and CP is same), and then you stroke your brush in zoom mode.... you zoom a little in PS, so you just zoom out back once again, but in Painter, you always zoom in to the max, 1600% zoom. So you zoom out repeatedly to get back again.
Like wtf Painter? who zooms in 1600%??
6. Painter’s “Canvas” is a mystery.
For a long while, I often wondered what the “canvas” layer is for (The bottom most layer), until now I still don’t have clue. The canvas layer cannot be edited, moved, or duplicated, so if you open up an image in Painter and would like to duplicate, or erase the background and paint underneath it, you are out of luck.
It is unbelievable, that in 2018, you can’t drag an image and put it on another layer in another document.
The canvas is more nuisance than useful. You can’t create another layer underneath the canvas. You can’t even copy and paste the canvas.
Ah but you can move that layer into another layer or another document through an unorthodox method, you know what? You have to go under layer tab, and choose “Lift canvas into watercolor layer”
Then you can drag “that watercolor layer”. So essentially, you need to convert to watercolor layer and thus it duplicates the layer for you and change its blending mode to “gel”, but it cannot just duplicate that into a normal layer? Yeah, that’s Painter’s canvas. I always start my image in PS.
7. Color Picking from another image causes it to select it, so you have to click your file again.... and IT LAGS, EVERY SINGLE TIME
It’s no surprise that in the digital era, picking colors has become so easy, and as an artist, I often use color reference from other images. But imagine when you have to reference many colors and each time you reference there’s a lag in between, it’s like painting back and forth 2 different file, and with a lag.
I will add on to list in the future, these cons are the only ones I can remember for now.
(Switching brush selection and brush engine.)
(path tool)
CONCLUSION:
It’s 2018, and Painter still doesn’t fix the most basic functions to allow Painter to be used easily. There are more issues, but these are the most basic issues that stops me from fully using Painter as my go to software. And these are issues that have persists for a very long time (forever?), instead Painter introduces gimmick features like “music brushes” and charges a whole lot for each new version of Painter.
I use Painter only for my line/brush work for now.
Instead of improving and fixing to make Painter a fully usable wholesome painting software, Painter chooses to focus on trivial features that nobody asks for.
Painter could beat Photoshop and become the King of painting software, but it can’t, because it never changes it’s bad habits.
