Affinity Photo is a software solution for photography and creative professionals, a fully-loaded photo editor integrated across macOS, Windows and iOS, from Serif Ltd.
$21.99
one-time fee
Painter
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Painter is a digital art and painting application, from Corel Corporation.
For small, fast-changing design/photo editing teams, it's a no brainer. More seats for less cost and an almost unnoticeable difference in the feature set. For older, more established or antiquated teams, you almost have to stick with Adobe. I know which side we're on. Innovation, a.k.a. Affinity. If you or your clients require specific formats like .psd, .ai, or .eps, Affinity can give you an alternative or more robust options to manipulate those files.
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.
If you're a long time Adobe user of Photoshop or Illustrator, there is a learning curve, but it's not too major. This learning curve was well worth the cost of admissions for our organization.
I'd like to see them use the same names for certain features as Adobe's products, but feel like licensing/copyright concerns as the reasoning behind this. Overall, the transition has been smooth from Adobe to Affinity.
They just recently released their Publisher program for print designs, similar to InDesign. They're a little late to the game in this arena, but I'm very interested in a low-cost alternative to Adobe. I wonder how they'll compare to other competitors like Canva in the space?
For a regular user of Photoshop, Affinity is a very easy transition. It has all the same features and once you adapt to it, and it provides a quick return on investment.
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.
I don't have direct experience with a member of Affinity's support, but their forum and YouTube videos that other users have made make it relatively easy to find similar features in Affinity that are available in Photoshop or Illustrator. The differences are negligible for our small, yet experienced team.
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.
I think Affinity Photo is on par with Adobe PhotoShop. They are very similar products with both bringing many features users need. The main reason I picked Affinity Photo was its pricing of it. I didn't require Adobe products all the time. And felt they weren't offering me as much value.
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.
