lee847•1mo ago

Learned that 75% of artists on ArtStation use Photoshop as their main tool now - that surprised me since I grew up on Corel Painter

4 comments

4 Comments

I saw this article the other day where some old-school digital painter was talking about how everyone defaults to Photoshop now just because it's the industry standard. Corel Painter always felt more like actual brush strokes to me, you know? My cousin is a professional illustrator and she switched from Corel to Photoshop a few years back just because clients kept sending her .psd files they expected back. It's kinda sad because Painter has those oil blending and watercolor effects that Photoshop still can't match.

charlescraig1mo ago

Oh man, I gotta call out one tiny thing there. Your cousin probably wasn't getting .psd files from clients, that's a Photoshop file extension. Corel Painter saves as .rif or .ps image files. Clients usually send .tiff or .jpg files, not program-specific ones. But your point stands, Painter really does handle oils and watercolors better.

avery_flores171mo ago

Exactly. I switched to Krita for the same reason and never looked back.

seth_singh201mo ago

Honestly, I gotta disagree a little bit. You say Corel Painter has those oil blending and watercolor effects that "Photoshop still can't match," but Photoshop has come a long way with their brush engine, especially with the mixer brush tool. I’ve used both and yeah, Painter feels more like real paint on canvas right out of the box, but PS lets you build pretty close to that look if you know what you’re doing. Plus the whole workflow thing matters too - being able to switch from photo editing to painting without opening another program is a big deal for most people.