“The gold standard of image editing programs for over three decades.” Best for Windows: Corel Painter “Having the right blend of performance and features, it’s the perfect digital art software for Windows.” Best for Mac: Affinity Designer “Serif’s Affinity suite of image editing programs has become a force to be reckoned with.” Best for Beginners: Autodesk SketchBook “Straightforward design makes it ideal for beginners.” Best Freeware: Krita “Loved by professionals and amateurs alike.” Best for Watercolor-Style Art: Rebelle 5 “It allows you to create realistic acrylic and watercolor artworks with little to no effort.” Best for Comic Books: Clip Studio Paint Ex “Trusted by professional comic book artists and manga illustrators around the world.” Best for iPad: Procreate “The award-winning digital art app lets you easily create sketches, illustrations, and more.” Best for Android Tablets: ArtRage “You can paint using thick oils, delicate watercolors, and even experiment with textures.” Moreover, you can create with numerous pencils, pens, markers, and brushes that feel just as authentic as their real-life counterparts. The newest version of Photoshop comes with a bevy of advanced features, including a “Paint Symmetry” mode that lets you create intricate patterns (e.g. Mandalas) on custom axes of symmetry while a content-aware fill workspace provides an interactive editing experience. Other goodies include a frame tool for easy masking, multiple undo levels, and live blend mode preview. And since Photoshop is now a part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud (CC) suite, it is constantly being updated with new enhancements. The program comes with color harmonies that can be saved as sets, making color selection an effortless affair. It also uses guides and grids based on classical image composition techniques, allowing you to create digital artworks that have a unique sense of proportion. Using mirror painting and kaleidoscope tools, you can easily design symmetrical illustrations by reproducing brushstrokes on the opposite sides of the canvas and by having multiple reflections of mirror planes. With Corel Painter’s intuitive guides, you can either quickly convert a photo to a digital painting or paint the canvas using the photo as a cloning source. Then there’s the nifty “Brush Accelerator” utility, which automatically optimizes your CPU/GPU settings for up to 50x faster painting. Affinity Designer’s engine can easily handle even the most complex of documents and lets you organize objects with layer groups and color tags. An interesting feature of the program is its ability to switch between vector and raster workspaces with one click. This means that you can create scalable artworks and enhance them with detailed textures, seamlessly. In addition to RGB and LAB color spaces (with up to 32 bits per channel), Designer supports Pantone, as well as end-to-end CMYK and ICC color management functions. Other notable features include unlimited artboards, comprehensive vector tools, live pixel preview, one million percent zoom, advanced grid (standard and isometric) controls, and custom typography styles. Affinity Designer works with all major image/vector file types, such as EPS, SVG, and fully-layered PSD. The program comes with 18 unique brush engines (e.g. Color Smudge, Particle, and Shape) that can be tweaked extensively and then organized using a unique tagging system. A pop-up palette lets you quickly pick colors and brushes while the resource manager makes it easy to import brush and texture packs from other artists. Krita features a “Wrap-around” mode that allows you to create seamless textures and patterns, whereas the “Multibrush” tool can be used to mirror illustrations about multiple axes to achieve a kaleidoscopic effect. Other noteworthy features include full color management support (using LCMS for ICC and OpenColor IO for EXR), PSD compatibility, and brush stabilizers. The program comes with a wide range of tools (e.g. Wet, Dry, Blend, and Smudge), and uses a new “DropEngine” to emulate watercolor drips. You can even “tilt” the canvas to reproduce flow effects and design custom brushes with the powerful brush creator. Rebelle 5 features over 100 different canvas, stone, and paper presets including paper styles such as Cold Pressed, Washi Fine, Kenaf, Lokta, and Bamboo Soft. The software also includes a plethora of creative stencils and masking tools. Also included in the package are new color filters, a “Masking Fluid” layer, and a Photoshop plug-in. Rebelle 5 sports a customizable user interface and supports multi-touch gestures. Available for both Windows and macOS, it’s compatible with all standard file types, such as PNG, BMP, TIF, and layered PSD. These include panel tools, customizable speech balloons, effect lines, and rulers to draw a variety of lines and shapes. You can also add perspective and realistic depth to backgrounds, position 3D figures (with adjustable body shapes and camera angles) directly on the canvas, and do a lot more. The program makes it simple to draw vector shapes in smooth strokes and even comes with a “vector eraser” tool to easily erase intersecting lines. Clip Studio Paint Ex gives you access to thousands of customizable brushes, as well as “effect lines,” that can be used to add dramatic effects (e.g. speed, action) to illustrations. Managing the storyboarding workflow is a breeze too, thanks to the page manager and story editor features. Once complete, the finished manga/comic can be previewed in 3D and even published directly in popular formats such as EPUB. You can choose from more than 200 handcrafted brushes, import custom ones, and even make your own using the powerful brush engine. Procreate includes many features that have been developed exclusively for iPads. For example, “ColorDrop” quickly fills your artwork with seamless color. Then there’s “Drawing Assist,” which automatically corrects your brush strokes in real-time. You can also add vector text, as well as a wide array of dramatic finishing effects and filters (e.g. Warp, Symmetry, and Liquify) to your illustrations. Other goodies include a full-featured layering system, 250 levels of undo/redo, continuous autosave, and the ability to record the entire process of creating digital illustrations as time-lapse videos (in 4K resolution), which can be then shared over social media networks. Thanks to a diverse range of realistic tools (e.g. pastels, shading pencils, and precision ink pens), you can sketch and draw just like you would on paper. ArtRage supports unlimited layers and is compatible with all industry-standard blending modes. Using the “Metallic Tinting” feature, you can also add reflectivity to pigments. If you want to use an existing photo as a guide for painting, the same can be done by importing it as a tracing image. The app even samples colors from the tracing image automatically, allowing you to focus on brush strokes. ArtRage is compatible with both Wacom and S-Pen styluses. Are you looking for more programs to take your digital art to the next level? Check out our article on the best 3D software to download. Our writers spent 6 hours researching the most popular digital art software on the market. Before making their final recommendations, they considered 15 different software overall, screened options from 9 different brands and manufacturers, read over 170 user reviews (both positive and negative). All of this research adds up to recommendations you can trust.
