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.
Venngage works really well for basically creating any type of standard infographic that you can see when you browse the templates. We have used it successfully to communicate retention data, strategic plan information, workflows and more. It doesn't work as well though when you try to get too fancy with it. Meaning, you want a Word Cloud taking on a specific shape or reusing certain words a specific number of times. For those things, we found that it was best to use another application and then import the work as a graphic.
They have an AI generator, but it can only generate the design once. Any modifications should be manually done. It would be great if the AI could make specific changes instead of having it regenerate everything.
You can't use it on a mobile phone or tablet, it would be helpful if I could use it on my tablet for work done outside my office.
It would be great if I could delete multiple designs at once. Currently, I can only delete them one by one.
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 find it very user friendly, straight to the point, and the minor issues I found wasn't really impacting on my role. So I think it would depend? but personally I find it perfect for me. There were lots of templates I could use, and they were very open to feedback and customer service was very accommodating.
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 that the attention that I get as a small business owner from Venngage is excellent. They quickly respond to questions and provide information that helps to resolve the issue that I am having.
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.
Canva had a lot of features, which is great, but I got overwhelmed and I didn't know where to start. Adobe PhotoShop is great too, but I think it's better for more experienced editors/designers? I'm not an editor, I don't know a lot of stuff with editing, so it was difficult. I rely on my common sense mostly.
