Pros & Cons
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- The best software at simulating painting and working with artistic media.
- Generous upgrade policy.
- No subscription fees.
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- Not a huge upgrade from 2015.
- Some new tools seem included for the sake of having new features.
Digital artists who miss the smear of oil paints, the inconsistencies of chalk, and the weeping outline of watercolors can take refuge in Corel Painter. The latest version, Corel Painter 2016, is another solid release. No other digital media software simulates putting paint or pencil to paper the way Corel Painter does. With a rich array of brushes and media, Corel Painter 2016 is a worthy upgrade for those with older versions of the software. Anyone who anted up for Painter 2015 last year might find the improvements too modest to warrant another upgrade this year. But like Painter 2015, the 2016 version allows users to upgrade from as far back as 2001! That's generous, and it's a great reason to revitalize an old version of Painter if you have one. On the whole, it remains an impressive package and a PCMag Editors' Choice.
Price and Upgrade Options
Fresh off the shelf (or digitally downloaded), Painter 2016 lists for $429. With Corel Painter, you only pay a one-time fee, like old-school software. There's no need to worry about subscription fees, such as artists and designers and other creatives now pay for Adobe Creative Cloud products such as Adobe Illustrator CC.
View All The upgrade price is $229, and upgrades are valid for customers using software as old as Painter 7. You'll need your original serial number, and the upgrade won't work on Academic versions (or Trials, OEM, and Not for Resale products).
Whether an upgrade is worthwhile now depends on how long ago you last bought Painter and whether you run Mac or Windows. Mac users who didn't bother with Painter 2015 will find the $249 well spent, as they'll finally get 64-bit support, which was only added last year. It makes the program run much faster and smoother. And when you're painting digitally, responsiveness is crucial.
You'll notice from Corel's handy comparison chart of Painter 2016, 2015, X3, and 12 that the switch from 2015 to 2016 is really about having more brushes and tools, while the jump from previous versions is much more significant in terms of performance and support.
What's New in Painter 2016
As I said, Painter 2016 is all about getting more brushes and tools, and some of them seem a little over the top. A few of its interface tweaks are nice to have, but they're not momentous improvements.
The most bizarre new feature is called Audio Expression. When you use selected brushes and play sound, like music, the brush reacts to the change in noise. Enabling the feature was actually simpler than I had imagined it would be, thanks to a helpful dialog box that walked me through the steps. I searched for Audio Expression in the brush search box, picked one at random, and turned on Gotye's "Somebody I Used to Know," a song with lots of volume fluctuations.
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I fiddled with the brush thickness and paint opacity until I hit a sweet spot where the Audio Expression was more than obvious on the canvas. You can set it to influence the brush stroke's size, angle, or color variability. My lines got fatter every time Gotye yelled. It was weird, but it worked. I imagine the feature might be useful for adding variation to an artist's work, but it also feels a little hippy-dippy for my taste.
Dynamic Speckles were much more fun. They combine Particle System physics and brush-thickness control to lay down paint with a splattered look. With some adjustment, you can tighten up the brush to make the speckles look more like independent spots of color. I had a glorious time painting a canvas that, in the end, reminded me of a crackled glaze on pottery.
A much more practical change is the ability to adjust the color scheme of the user interface to be dark, frost, sepia, or the default. It's easy enough to switch from the menu (Corel Painter 2016 > Preferences > Interface), but you can't preview the themes, and it requires that you quit and relaunch the program to apply one. Frost wasn't what I expected at all. A thumbnail image showing the Frost theme before I rebooted would have saved me a chunk of time.
Novices will appreciate Brush Hints and Visual Tooltips, which appear when you're using certain brushes or attributes that may be a little complex to master. Hover over one of the attributes to adjust the Dynamic Speckles, for example, and a tip appears to help you learn what happens when you adjust it.
A few other new brushes and tools round out Painter 2016, such as Special Media brushes and Paper and Flow Map Rotation, and the best way to learn about them is to watch the many tutorial videos that Corel has posted online. Some of the tutorials are linked right in the application itself, but they bounce you out to a browser and drop you off at either YouTube or Corel's own site.
The only other big features worth mentioning for professional digital artists are those that allow you to extend where and how you use your custom brushes—or someone else's. For example, there's a new capability to import brush stamps of pixel-based brushes from Photoshop. Not all the attributes carry over from the .ABR files, but shape, texture, and dynamics do. You can further customize the brushes once they're in Painter, of course. With Painter 2016, you can also export not only custom brushes, but also papers, patterns, and flow maps. These go into a Custom Toolbox file that you can easily pass along to other artists.
Compatibility and Requirements
Corel Painter 2016 works on both Windows and Mac OS. The compatibility and requirements are as follows:Windows: Microsoft Windows 10 (64-bit), Microsoft Windows 8.1 (64-bit), or Windows 7 (64-bit), with the latest Service Packs; Intel Pentium 4, AMD Athlon 64, or AMD Opteron (Intel Core 2 Duo or higher recommended); 2GB of RAM (4GB recommended); 750MB of hard disk space for application files; mouse or tablet; 1024x768 screen resolution (1280x800 recommended); Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 or later.
OS X: Mac OS X 10.10 or 10.9 (with latest revision); Intel Core 2 Duo; 2GB of RAM (4GB recommended); 540MB of hard disk space for application files; mouse or tablet; 1024x768 screen resolution (1280 800 recommended); Safari v7 or later.
For both Windows and Mac, you'll need a DVD drive if you purchase the shrink-wrapped software rather than the digital download.
Some prospective Painter buyers wonder whether Corel's tool could be a replacement for Adobe Photoshop. The answer: It depends on how you use that program. Photoshop has a few capabilities that Painter doesn't, such as animation, 3D creation, and a much better set of intuitive tools for editing. Painter is, as the name suggests, about painting. It's nearly impossible to use comfortably without a digital artist's tablet, such as a Wacom Bamboo Splash. Creating artwork in Painter is a lovely experience, but for editing everything from graphics to photographs, you'll still want Photoshop. Painter has other capabilities, too, but digital painting is really at its heart.
Like Painting on Paper
Corel Painter succeeds in replicating the real-world experience of using oil paints, charcoal, watercolors, crayons, and other media in a digital environment that's a pleasure to use. For all those reasons, plus improvements over the years in speed and stability, Corel Painter is an Editors' Choice. Painter 2015 takes a lot of the credit, however, for the most important improvements in the last two years, particularly for Mac users, whereas the newest version is a more modest upgrade. If you have a Painter license older than 2015, the $249 upgrade is worthwhile. Otherwise, you might wait and see what the company has in store for 2017.
Final Thoughts
Corel Painter 2016
Corel Painter 2016 is one of the finest digital arts programs available, convincingly replicating the real-life experience of using oil paints, pastels, charcoal, watercolors, and other artistic media.