Corel Painter vs Procreate: Which Software is Better?

Both Corel Painter vs Procreate offer a broad selection of image drawing and manipulation functionality. Corel Painter is more aimed at professionals and is a desktop app. Meanwhile, Procreate is more beginner-friendly and is only available on iPad.

Corel Painter is a state-of-the-art app that offers all the features and tools necessary for creating digital art from scratch. You can use it to create sketches, digital paintings, illustrations, and photography art with the help of the provided professionally-designed brushes, blending, and all sorts of flexible artistic tools. Corel Painter offers a convenient UI and is very easy to navigate. Moreover, this app comes with multitouch and drawing tablet support.

Procreate is an award-winning drawing app that allows you to produce fantastic sketches, mesmerizing paintings, and gorgeous illustrations regardless of where you are. This application enables artists to create all possible shapes, perform color correction, and use the drag-and-drop UI to add different colors to specific canvas areas.

Corel Painter offers a fantastic brush system that gives you complete creative freedom. You can personalize even the tiniest aspect of every brush including its size, shade, shape, and flow. If you were to make a Corel Painter vs Procreate comparison, you’d notice that the former has a more functional and expansive color palette selector while also offering unlimited color mixing for coming up with unique blends.

Other than brush customization, this drawing software offers a terrific collection of standard brushes that can help you produce realistic illustrations and paintings while recreating classic styles. When pitting Corel Painter vs Photoshop, you’ll notice that both come with integrated toolsets along with third-party brushes. That said, Photoshop is more popular among professional graphic designers.

1/2

1/2
2/2

Large brush collection. Corel Painter comes with a large selection of brush features. The most notable brush tools include automatic masking, brush strokes, layer masks, angle grids, advanced blending mode, paint bucket, depth effect, preview/trace, B&W conversion, lift and deformation, automatic transparency, and many others.

The developers of this app have organized, renamed, and simplified brush categories and edits to make the process of selecting them as intuitive and convenient as possible. You can also mark brushes as favorites for instant access.

Broad range of sample palettes. Another significant benefit of this app is the large library of sample templates that let you thoroughly test it before committing to a purchase. Additionally, Corel Painter offers a collection of standard tools and palettes suitable for image editing and retouching. You can also assign tags to layers while the integrated brushes can be freely customized around the workspace.

Fantastic brush size customization. The brush size selector offers the easiest method for choosing the desired brush size. To access it, simply open the Size Library. Other than the standard sizes, Corel Painter lets you add new ones and reorganize existing ones. The size preview window is also customizable. If you feel like the size panel became overly busy, you can remove all unnecessary sizes from the list.

Watercolor brushes and functionality. Another terrific inclusion is the top-tier Watercolor brushes that can significantly improve your creative capabilities. With their help, you can create entire watercolor layers and later cover them with other dry media brushes to achieve unique mixed artworks. Corel Painter also lets you edit Watercolor layers without converting them to standard layers.

User-initiated improvements. Corel Painter developers constantly account for user suggestions regarding how the application can be improved. After analyzing the received feedback, the developers introduce an array of updates aimed at improving the workflow and helping boost your productivity. Some of the most notable improvements include mask selection loading, layer spotlights, clear a layer with delete, innovative color dodge and burn techniques, and Navigator grayscale mode.

Isn’t suitable for beginners.

This software requires a powerful PC to run smoothly.

Procreate is a professional-grade solution for creating digital art. Akin to Corel Painter, Procreate offers a large selection of brushes that includes various pencil, ink, and paint tools among many others. This app allows you to create projects in resolutions as high as 16MP.

Files can be imported from Dropbox or your camera and your completed projects can be saved to Dropbox, iTunes, or even as PSD documents. Afterward, you can post your illustrations on your preferred social network channels.

Moreover, Procreate allows you to customize paint filters and apply multiple effects to a single project with possible options including chromatic aberration, realistic blur, etc. You can also often see people pit Procreate vs Photoshop. Both apps are designed for different tasks. If you want to create digital illustrations using your tablet, then you should go with Procreate. Meanwhile, Photoshop is the go-to choice for performing in-depth image editing on PC.

1/2

1/2
2/2

User-friendly interface. Like with any other graphic design app, you have to first go through a learning curve. Thankfully, Procreate is among the easiest drawing tool to learn and master. This application was designed with touch controls in mind. You can perform intuitive multitouch actions with two or more fingers or by using the Apple Pencil without disrupting the creation process.

Expansive brush library. Procreate offers a huge selection of brushes that cover various pencils, inks, charcoals, and artistic brushes. Akin to Corel Painter, this app allows you to adjust brushes using the Brush Studio.

Alternatively, you can get thousands of professional tools online to satisfy any need you might have. Lastly, Procreate gives you the freedom to create your own personalized brushes that you can save for later use.

Full color control. Create illustrations and digital paintings using any color you want. The Color Dynamics, Color Harmony, and Color History features grant you unlimited control over all possible tones and hues.

At any moment, you can press and hold the workspace to choose the ideal color or employ the Color Companion to stay out of menus and remain focused on the canvas. If you want to achieve a more dramatic effect, you can alter the mood of an illustration using the Gradient Map.

Compatible with most popular formats. This app is compatible with PSD, TIFF, PNG, PDF, and JPG images, meaning you can save your project at any time and continue creating it in another software on your PC later. Procreate has also recently started supporting CMYK, which is the perfect color mode for printing. Additionally, it now allows you to create basic animations in MP4 format.

Impressive timelapse functionality. Procreate isn’t supplied with standard clip editing features like rotation, cropping, or speed management. That said, it’s still suitable for saving timelapse clips of the drawing process. The app lets you replay the video, add different layers, and make an array of adjustments. Afterward, you can set the resolution of the timelapse between 1080p and 4K. You can also pick the video quality setting, which ranges from Low (compact files) to Lossless (large size but all detail is preserved).

iPad exclusive.

If you want to get Corel Painter, you have to either make a single-time purchase or pay for the annual subscription. You can try out this software for 15 days for free first. There’s also an Upgrade option for $229.

The Corel Painter Single-App Plan costs $429 while the 365-day Subscription will send you back $199 (Includes all digital art and photography tools, standard and artistic brushes, unlimited brush customization, textures, and other assets).

Procreate can be purchased for $9.99 on the App Store and offers a collection of state-of-the-art tools, an intuitive layer system, and hundreds of professionally-made brushes.

Corel Painter vs Procreate who’s the winner in this battle? The answer should be determined by your needs and budget. Corel Painter is the better choice for professional artists who want to have as much creative freedom as possible when it comes to drawing. Its main strengths are a fully customizable brush system, smooth workflow, and unparalleled canvas control.

Meanwhile, Procreate is the preferable option for digital art enthusiasts or artists with a smaller budget. There’s an infinite number of ways in which you can personalize Procreate and improve your art creation workflow. This app also lets you open blank coloring sheets on a canvas to try out different features if you’re not interested in creating your own unique project.