Corel Painter Is Still Alive and Still Ridiculously Good

Corel Painter 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…