Adobe PhotoShop vs. Corel Painter

I use Adobe PhotoShop to do practically all of my business from my home in Turkey. Many customers find the cost of Adobe PhotoShop to be prohibitive, thus they turn to substitute alternatives and illegally downloaded pirated software. Regulations like torrents, sales, and price increases lead to a number of financial issues. Change can be advantageous.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Brush customization. There are many available brushes for illustration, and each can be customized to fit the needs of your specific style.
• Integration with other Adobe products. It is essential that the images I create be accessible in Adobe Indesign and Illustrator, and [Adobe] Photoshop can be placed and edited easily within those programs.
• Advanced editing. The possibilities for editing photos [are] endless, with new features being added constantly.

Incentivized

• Watercolor Compatible
• Multiple variety of Brushes and shapes
• Captured Dab Library

Incentivized

• Expensive - It is too expensive to buy Photoshop alone, and hence leading the user to purchase the entire Creative Cloud Package though he/she is not even aware of half of those apps.
• High System Spec - Requires high system specifications to run the application smoothly, and to use it at its best.
• Process lag - When it comes to large-sized files, the application becomes laggy taking much time even to render a single layer.

Incentivized

• 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

Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud 2014 is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud family of software products. Therefore, when you get a license to use Adobe Photoshop for a monthly fee, you are constantly up-to-date on any upgrades or new releases of the software. So, if you are using the product, you never have to renew and you are always using the latest version of the software, for perpetuity.

I've used it for a long time and would consider myself a Pro user at this point. I know where everything I need is, have custom actions set up to make common actions faster, and have my workflows automated so much that everything is easy. Occasionally, a new version of Photoshop will change a common usability feature which will slow things down for a short time before I'm able to adjust, but generally I really like my setup. However, if you're new to Photoshop, it is likely going to take you a while to figure out how you can best use the features.

Incentivized

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.

Adobe Photoshop is very reliable, but is never 100%. There have been times when Adobe Photoshop has had trouble opening, but nothing a little computer restart couldn't fix. I use Adobe Photoshop on a Mac for both work and at home on a daily basis, and I would be lost without it.

Speed can be an issue when you are dealing with large files for large format printing or billboards. When working on web images, speed is not an issue.

While I never contacted Adobe directly, there is so much content out there in the form of YouTube videos, Lynda/LinkedIn learning that almost any issue, including bugs, can be worked around (and this method is generally faster as there's no turnaround time involved).

Incentivized

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.

So, I received the training at the HQ and it was train the trainer training. A good time, I spent a week at their campus

I took a course so it really helped. I didn’t take the course until much later after beginning to use it, so I wish work would have sent me right off the bat. It would have alleviated a lot of frustratinon

Incentivized

Every software has its kind of users, and Photoshop is ranked as one of the most competitive softwares and is used mainly by professionals. Figma is great for working in collaboration and designing Ui/Ux interface. Illustrator is great for vector-based work, such as logos and branding. InDesign works best if one is building large documents that require a lot of text formatting.

Incentivized

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 seems expensive compared to the free/cheap programs now available

Incentivized

• Adobe PhotoShop in general is a great time saver.
• It does take a long time for the program to start up, however
• The most difficult task is onboarding new employees into Adobe PhotoShop who don't have experience with it. It's an investment for their future so we see value in it.

Incentivized

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