Corel Painter

Painter is one of Corel's more expensive flagship offerings and definitely one of the best digital paint apps on the market.  While aimed primarily (as the name would suggest) at digital painters, it also offers several features that are on interest to photographers.  Foremost among these is the AI auto-paint that was first introduced in the 2021 version and that can also be found in Painter Essentials and Paintshop Pro, though it's important to note that Corel has been wise enough to offer different styles from one app to the next and even from one version to the next.  In fact, that offered in Painter, as befitting a premium app, is a bit more complex as it comes in two levels: the user first selects a preset for which an AI style is suggested but which can easily be overridden.  If this sounds unnecessarily complicated, it is actually much less so when actually working with the app.

Previous to the introduction of AI, photographers had to access another form of auto-paint using the app's smart stroke brushes and that feature is still included in the current version.  Corel provides a helpful tutorial describing the process that can be completed with a single click of the mouse.  To provide greater control, the process can be stopped at any point while in progress with another click.  One can also use auto-paint in conjunction with the app's cloning brushes by simply selecting among that category of brushes.

The above auto feature, however, should not be confused with the process of manually cloning a photograph into a digital painting, a process that is much more time consuming but provides far greater control and a superior end product.  There is a fairly long (one-hour) tutorial entitled Expressive Beginner Photo Painting that exhaustively explains the process in full detail.

Finally, the 2021 version of Painter introduced Clone Tinting, which Corel describes as the ability to "create new compositions or make minor color adjustments by dynamically adding color to mix with a clone source."  Personally, I've found this feature to be of limited usefulness in my own work, but that's not to say it won't provide other photographers with new and original forms of expression.