Review by Shala Kerrigan

I have a lot of friends who use Photoshop, and have found that while I can usually convert a technique from Photoshop to Painter- it doesn’t work the other way around. When they ask me how I did a specific techniques, the tools are just not available in Photoshop to do the same thing. What takes a few steps and layers in Painter, takes a lot more work and steps in Photoshop.

It does take a bit of time to become really comfortable with the program. But once you are comfortable, the variations possible make it a great product for digital artists. The brush tips, the patterns and shape tools make it easy to create an image from scratch. Working from a photograph, you can learn to make photo art that just pops.

Next year, I plan to enter the digitally manipulated photo section in our state fair, and this is the program I’m using. Because it will do everything that I want it to.

The tools are laid out well, and very intuitive. If you’re an absolute beginner, then I do recommend trying some tutorials to get really comfortable with the tools and what they can do.

My experience- I’ve worked in digital art and photo editing for my websites for the last 15 years using a lot of paint and vector programs. This is my favorite painting program.