So, I haven't been in much of a mood for drawing lately (it's coming back though!), but HumbleBundle is having a bob ross themed bundle and one of the included pieces of software is corel painter essentials. I recall using corel draw as a little pup, and I remember thinking it was real cool, so sheet, this is gonna be a nice opportunity for me to try an alternative to photoshop.

See, I've been a little annoyed recently at how ...'precise' photoshop is. it does precisely what you tell it to and nothing more, and nothing less. if you don't know how to set your brush up for the correct result, well, no hand holding. if you hand shakes a little, photoshop feels like a magnifying glass. I wanted to try another program; perhaps one aimed specifically at painting, and that featured some nice line smoothing and a good set of brushes with an easy to navigate interface.

In all fairness, corel painter essentials excels in this regard. The drawing tools are fantastic - smooth, beautiful lines, well adjusted pressure sensitivity on my tablet, and a brush selector which is just to die for - out of the box, it's divided into oils, pencils, crayons, etc - and each subcategory has nice big, visual examples of what the brushes look like. And they turn out good - crisp, smooth... they feel solid. It also has a great color wheel which kind of floats over your main window and is big and easy to use.

Unfortunately, that's the entirety of the praise I have for this software - the rest of it is lackluster, backwards, needlessly complicated, buggy, and generally shit.
Lets start with the basics - there's no way to customize keyboard shortcuts, and to even see the shortcuts I had to go to the online help file. I understand the professional version has this option, but essentials is still a $40+ piece of software, and that kind of restriction just is not acceptable. Fact is, the options menu has next to nothing of value - beyong choosing scratch disc and number of undo states, the only thing you can really do is choose if you want multi touch on your tablet, and choose how big the increments are in the brush sizing.

Speaking of shortcuts, I can't seem to find the eraser shortcut in the help file. So I was unable to bind that to my tablet button and had to constantly move back and forth to the toolbar. I also had to do this while transforming my selection, because instead of having an intuitive system based on ctrl, alt, and click dragging, the only way to rotate, transform, or skew a selection seems to be by using buttons. Perhaps there are shortcuts, but I don't feel like learning five separate shortcuts to activate five separate tools that do what one tool is meant to.

rotating my canvas can be done with alt + scroll, but only in one direction. and when you try to rotate the canvas from the edit-menu, it resizes the canvas and rotates your artwork within the canvas. There's also a line tool, but nothing as complex as photoshop's pen tool it seems - it just does lines. of one thickness. with no visible controls for changing the thickness... well, except that one time the line decided to be variable thickness for no reason and with no input from me.

On that note, it's also buggy as shit - sometimes, my canvas will just disappear, and after rezising the window, it comes back with a big line across it that I have to erase.

bottom line - the painting tools are wonderful, and I WISH photoshop had something quite as well put together. But the rest of this program is an annoying, frustrating, buggy, horrible, scum sucking, dog licking, spider eating, low life, aggravating, needlessly complicated, stripped down, nefarious and untrustworthy ball-chortling pile of ass.

Or am I wrong? Seriously, if you use corel painter and like it, and it works for you, and you think I'm being a dumbass, please tell me. If not, well... give me back my 15 dollars humblebundle. >:(