Corel Painter Is Still Alive and Still Ridiculously Good

Corel’s Spot on Memory Lane

I hadn’t thought about Corel graphics apps in a long time until I saw their flagship app on sale recently. I got my first tech-related job in 1994, when my ability to figure things out in Windows 3.1 earned me a promotion from the manufacturing floor to the quality department at the Westinghouse factory where I worked after getting out of the Army.

The tools I worked with felt absurdly expensive at the time: a Pentium PC, a Kodak digital camera, and the first color laser printer I’d ever seen. And then there was Corel; a professional suite of graphics tools I used to produce hundreds of technical work instructions for the people on the shop floor.

Corel still occupies a narrow but devoted niche in the graphics world. It’s loved by a small community of artists and designers and mostly ignored by everyone else in favor of mass-market tools from Adobe, Affinity, and a handful of others. The current version is Painter 2023. I took it for a spin and it’s more capable than anything else I’ve seen in its niche, but the real question is whether those capabilities matter to you.

But What Is It?

Painter isn’t a drawing app or an image editor in the conventional sense. It’s a digital canvas simulator built for artists who want the feel of oil paint, watercolor, ink, and charcoal without the mess. The brush engine is the entire product. Everything else exists to support it.

The target user is a professional illustrator, concept artist, or fine artist working with a Wacom or another pressure-sensitive tablet. If that’s not you, Painter probably isn’t for you, and Corel doesn’t pretend otherwise.

The Brush Engine

The reality is that no software on any platform simulates natural media the way Painter does. Photoshop’s brushes are powerful but fundamentally digital. Procreate feels great on an iPad but remains a raster drawing tool. Clip Studio Paint has excellent line tools but doesn’t attempt to simulate paint physics at this level.

Painter 2023 ships with hundreds of brushes organized across dozens of categories: Oils, Acrylics, Watercolor, Gouache, Pastels, Chalk, Charcoal, Inks, and more. Each category behaves differently at the physics level. Watercolor bleeds and beads. Thick paint builds up and catches light. Impasto brushes create actual texture relief on the virtual canvas.

The Fluid Brushes iappear to be a real game changer. They’re built around layer transparency and allow subtle glazing and blending effects that previously required awkward workarounds. Corel claims they run up to 50 times faster by leveraging both CPU and GPU acceleration. On Apple Silicon hardware (my M4 Mac Mini), the effect is genuinely impressive.

The Feature Set

• 900+ brushes covering nearly every traditional medium
• Fluid Paint with build, sculpt, and blend brushes plus precision opacity control
• Thick Paint with three-dimensional impasto simulation
• Particle Brushes that flow, fork, and react dynamically
• Color Selection Brushes that combine selection and painting workflows
• AI Photo Painting tools powered by Core ML
• Clone Painting for painting directly from reference photos
• Photoshop compatibility with layered PSD read/write support
• Tablet support for Wacom, Xencelabs, and Huion devices with pressure, tilt, rotation, and bearing support
• Customizable workspace with movable palettes, panels, and brush libraries

The Catch

This is not an easy app to learn, even for experienced users. Nobody is going to master Painter in an afternoon. Corel provides tutorials, webinars, and learning materials through its Painter portal, and if you decide to invest time in the app, you’ll probably need them.

The UI looks exactly like what it is: decades of accumulated decisions packed into a single workspace. Tool panels feel cramped even on a large laptop display. Honestly, two monitors feels less like a luxury and more like a requirement.

The current version is still Painter 2023. It runs fine on the last several macOS releases, including Apple Silicon Macs, but there was no 2024 or 2025 release, and it’s unclear whether there will be a 2026 version. I understand that it’s a mature product serving a mature niche, but some transparency about the development cycle would help inspire confidence.

Under normal circumstances, I couldn’t recommend that an individual pay the full perpetual-license price of $429. That’s the kind of software purchase employers are supposed to absorb. Especially when Procreate costs $12.99 and Clip Studio Paint EX runs about $50 a year.

But don’t stop reading yet.

The Justification

Right now, you can get a perpetual license for the full version of Painter 2023 for $49 from BundleHunt. That’s still real money, but it changes the equation dramatically.

If you’re genuinely curious, already own a pressure-sensitive tablet, and have the artistic skills to take advantage of what Painter offers, this becomes much easier to justify. At that price, it’s less a reckless software purchase and more an opportunity to experiment with what is probably the most sophisticated paint-physics engine ever shipped on a desktop computer.

Painter 2023 for Mac
Developer: Corel Corporation
Price: Regularly $429 | BundleHunt Price $49
macOS: Sequoia, Sonoma, Ventura
Apple Silicon: Native (M1 and later, optimized)
Website: painterartist.com