Corel Painter 2018 Digital Art Suite for PC/Mac (Old Version)

The media could not be loaded. Coral Painter is everything you need as a serious digital artist. Looking forward to upgrade to Corel Painter 2020 although Corel Painter 2019 is a bet faster program than 2018. I recommend this for anyones budget. Music to my soul.

Very complicated, but very versatile.

I am using a bamboo tech tablet and I have just come off of using Sketchbook Pro 6 with no update. Compared to sketchbook pro, Painter 18 has many more options and features, such as gradients and magic wand, grouping layers and the numerous layer effects, etc. It has all the brushes of previous Painter iterations, but I find that trying to switch between these library has a significant pause. If you are impatient, this is a major pain, but if you are happy with the 2018 brushes provided, you won't even notice. Finding the particular brushes you want is somewhat overwhelming and difficult, even with using one library. From Sketch Book Pro it takes many more steps for me to draw because Sketchbook's interface is designed with the interface in mind (ex. zoom can be adjusted with a flick of the stylus and is tuned with the move tool.) Painter, on the other hand, takes extra steps (press the zoom button to zoom, switch to the hand to move the tool, switch back to zoom back, etc.) I assume this is more in line with the likes of Photoshop, which the interface is very similar to, the switch to this program won't be as notable.I have experienced three crashes with Painter. Once when trying to mess around with the gradient tool and twice when trying to use the transform tool. This brings me to a feature unique to Painter: it creates backups with your works. It can create backups using any file type (.rif, .png, .jpeg, etc.) It creates only one back up with it updates along with your progress.So is Corel Painter 2018 worth the purchase? With prices set around $400, I do not recommend beginner artists to buy. Many similar programs, like Photoshop and Sai, run cheaper and have many tutorials compared to Painter to help beginners adjust to the interface. If you are a long time Corel user, you might known what you're getting into and enjoy the product, but I would recommend waiting for the price to drop before rushing out to purchase.

I really like this program so far, but I still have a lot to learn. Here is a couple of paintings that I have done with this program.

Works as expected.

Works well with my Mac.

I am a completely casual user of photo editing/design software. I got this to play around with family photos to have some interesting prints made.While there is a bit of a learning curve if you haven't ever used software like this before, it is easy enough to use and I made some prints I rather like and will probably have printed large scale. That being said, I just don't think the product is worth the price for a casual user like myself. Obviously, if you are a design student, run a business, or are a power user, this could be the software for you. For me though? I can find the functionality I need/want at a much lower price point.

I'm not an artist or designer by any means but I've used Photoshop for years, until they switched to the subscription. I had used their final version for a while instead. I had grabbed this program in its 2016 version, and it worked well for my needs, so I was curious about the new version.Not a fan of the price fluctuation though - initially it was $150 less than it is now when it first debuted on Amazon. That may have been just a little window of opportunity for a new product, them trying to get people to purchase it, but still sad for people who look at camel camel camel and see where it's at now. That may make them not buy in hopes it drops drastically again.The program itself, though, works very well. If you're familiar with Photoshop this won't pose any problems as much of the functionality is similar. I used this on a 2017 HP Spectre X360 with a 4k touch screen and stylus, and it worked great. I get pressure, speed, and while it still really never will *feel* like a real drawing surface no matter what you're using other than actual pencils, pens, brushes, and paper / canvas, it still gives the sense of drawing.I've got an i7 with 16 GB RAM on this convertible and it ran about as smooth as I could hope. I had no lag with the pen input, or fingers.The interface itself is simple to get used to, with quick access you'd need and expect for things like the color wheel, layer controls, brushes and brush size, and effects. What I found frustrating for pen use though was some of those tiny carats to open the control boxes are tough on a 4k screen to hit right to open them. So for example if I hover my pen over the brush size button, or opacity, it opens a window with what you'd think is a slider to allow you to change between sizes and such - but you can't. If they had that little identification window actually do more than just show what the button is you're hovering over with a pen, then it would've been so much easier to change things in the middle of working with a pen. But they didn't, so it makes it more of a struggle sometimes.I like the "clone" feature - not the drawing one, but off the file menu, you can clone something in its entirety into a new window. I often like to play around and see "what if" but don't want to be stuck by any Undo limit in the number of steps. So this is a much used feature for me so I can see what might happen if I try one thing or another without touching the original.There's a handful of file types to save things as, including the standard graphics formats like JPG, BMP, TIFF, PNG, as well as Photoshop PSD files.The only Photoshop "purist" I know gave a grudging nod to this. With the current Photoshop pricing, if you're the kind of person that would rather buy a software product then use it for two, three, four years, (I've known some people back in the day that used their one purchased version of Photoshop for six, seven, even more years if it did everything they needed to do) then this is a great option, since you aren't forced into the software rental game.