If you experimented with digital art in the early days of home computing, you probably had something of a frustrating experience. The hardware simply wasn’t up to the tasks we could imagine, and many artists felt that it wasn’t worth the trouble. But those days are long gone – although sometimes working late into the evening, we all still get frustrated with our favorite program.
One of the best things about digital art is that there are so many ways to create it. Whether you love to paint, to draw or to work with photos, there’s a perfect program for you. As a result, I’m going to break down the programs in this review into three main categories: an overall ‘one-stop’ program, a drawing/illustration program, and a painting program. There are many more categories of digital art such as 3D modeling, texturing and video editing, but those are distinct enough that they deserve their own separate posts.
by far is Adobe Photoshop, thanks to its unbelievably rich feature set and powerful yet intuitive tools. It is unquestionably the gold standard when it comes to photorealistic image editing, but it offers even more beyond that. The basics are easy to learn but hard to master, so thankfully there is a huge support community filled with active and helpful users, tutorials, books, workshops, and videos. If you can name it, there’s probably a Photoshop tutorial in that format.
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, the best program for you will be CorelDRAW. Almost as old as Photoshop, it boasts some of the best vector drawing tools in any of the programs I reviewed, and the latest version has a secret weapon for illustrators: LiveSketch. Easily one of the most impressive tools to be added to any graphics app in the last several years, LiveSketch lets you dynamically generate vector shapes as naturally as you would sketch with paper and pencil.
, look no further than Corel Painter. While I’m pleasantly surprised to be including two Corel apps as winners in this post, Painter’s success shouldn’t surprise anyone thanks to its incredible reproduction of brushstrokes and paint media. While it’s probably the hardest of the three winners to learn, the payoff is an incredible digital painting tool that works flawlessly with drawing tablets.
Hi, my name is Thomas Boldt, and I’ve been working in the digital arts for well over a decade. I first got my hands on a copy of Photoshop 5 in high school and combined it with my interest in 3D modeling and rendering to create a passion for all things graphical.
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Since then, I developed a passion for design, and graduated from the York University/Sheridan College Joint Program in Design in 2008. I started working in related fields even before graduation, and this experience has led me to work with almost every graphics program under the sun at one point or another.
Disclaimer: None of the companies mentioned in this article have provided me with any compensation for writing this article, and they have had no editorial input or control over the final review. That being said, I am a subscriber to the Adobe Creative Cloud program suite and use it regularly for my personal and professional work.
Adobe Photoshop is the undisputed leader of the graphics arts world, and with very good reason. Yet despite how it started out, Photoshop isn’t just for working with photographs. That is certainly one of the tasks that it excels at, but over the years it has added a huge range of additional functionality that allows you to create almost anything you could possibly want. If you like to dabble in a wide range of digital media or if you want to keep your creative horizons open, Photoshop is the best one-stop choice.
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After 30 years of active development, the tools it offers are unparalleled, and some of the new content-aware editing tools almost defy belief thanks to their automated editing abilities. You can do everything from editing RAW photographs to creating stunning photorealistic composites to painting and airbrushing original artwork, and it has an impressive set of brush customization options for working with drawing tablets. Photoshop can also create and edit vectors, 3D models and videos at a frame-by-frame level, although these tools are not as well developed as you’ll find in programs dedicated to those tasks.
With all these tools to work from things can get confusing fast, but Adobe has done a great job of allowing users to customize the interface completely. It’s easy to ditch the tools you never use and focus on what works best for your current project, or even hide the entire interface so you can focus on nothing but your image. You can use one of their preset workspaces, or create and save as many of your own custom presets as you like.
The flipside to this impressive functionality is that there are so many features, even one Photoshop expert admitted that she would probably never have time to use them all. I can’t seem to find the exact quote, but it stuck with me because I have often felt the same way. As much fun as it may be to learn all the 3D and video editing tools that are now included, Photoshop’s primary job is working with still, pixel-based images.
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But no matter what your project is, there will be plenty of learning materials available to help you develop the skills you need or answer almost any question. Some guides are even built right into the program, and there is a convenient search mode that allows you to look through a database of tutorials and other learning materials. If you can’t find exactly what you need, the incredible number of active Photoshop users will be happy to help out in any of the online forums dedicated to it.
There are many competitors for Photoshop, but nothing has been developed yet that can truly challenge it. There are other great image editors (as you can read about in the alternatives section below), but none of managed to combine the power, precision, huge featureset and total customizability that Photoshop has offered for years. For a more in-depth look at Photoshop, you can read the full review here.
CorelDRAW is actually one of the few graphics programs available today that is almost as old as Photoshop. It is a program specially designed for working with vector graphics, which makes it an excellent illustration tool. It comes with a full set of the tools you’d expect to find in any vector graphics program – various shape tools and a great set of pen and line tools for creating freehand shapes.
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As with most vector graphics software, it also functions as a great page layout program, which allows you to quickly incorporate your illustrations into larger designs like posters and pamphlets.
The reason that CorelDRAW managed to edge out Adobe Illustrator in this category is an impressive new tool that was released known as LiveSketch. As you can see in this video, LiveSketch offers a whole new way to create vector graphics by transforming your sketching into vectors on the fly. You can modify and refine vector lines by redrawing them the way you would when sketching with pencil and paper, and it even learns your sketching style
The interface has decent customization options, although you’ll have to dig a bit deeper through the menus to find them than you would in some other programs. There are an excellent set of pre-configured workspaces, however, including one that is designed specifically for touchscreens, a ‘Lite’ workspace for new users, and one designed to appeal to users who have been coaxed away from Adobe Illustrator.
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While Corel does a good job of introducing you to the program via helpful built-in tips and guides, you may find yourself wanting a bit of extra help. There isn’t much learning material in the form of books (at least not in English), but a few quick searches online should provide you with everything you need to learn the software. Corel has also developed a solid set of tutorials that are available on the Corel Learning Center to help you get up to speed. For a more in-depth look at CorelDRAW, you can read the full review here.
Corel Painter is another long-lived graphics program with 30 years of development under the hood, and it’s been refreshed in the new version of Painter. One of the biggest problems with it in the past was that computers of the past weren’t always up to the job, and so you’d wind up with brushstroke lag during painting. Those problems are a thing of the past, thanks to new optimizations and speed improvements – not to mention access to computers with 16+ GB of high-speed ram and CPU clock speeds of 4Ghz!
Painter is by far the best recreation of traditional artistic media in the digital world, and as soon as you get your hands on it you’ll understand. The sheer number of brushes available should be enough to keep you experimenting happily for days, as though you were suddenly dropped into a fully-equipped studio.
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