PaintSupreme for Mac

This review is for PaintSupreme 1.5. I'm giving it 3 stars because you can't go wrong for $6. PaintSupreme is basically a Windows app that has been rather hastily adapted for Mac. As a result, there are a few bugs. Most of the basic tools seem to work OK, but some do not. It seems fairly stable but is very slow. Though a few of the filters are useful, most are merely generic & I never could get any of them to work in layers. Plus, undo-redo didn't work at all. Though PaintSupreme imports & exports over 60 file formats, most are program-specific or device-specific & so useless. The interface is typical Windows; functional but rudimentary, clunky & not very user-friendly or efficient. Mac users will balk at the bare-bones controls. some of which just don't work. The layout is so dark it's hard to read. There are no shortcuts I could find & little in the way of support. The only tutorial I found was on Youtube, and it wouldn't play. When I tried again, it played OK, but the next morning when I tried to finish watching it, it said I needed Flash plugin. Go figure. Hardly anyone uses Flash anymore, & being flash-dependent is not a good marketing strategy. This app might work OK on Windows, but on a Mac it's hardly useful for more than a few simple operations, or for kids. All that aside, however, PaintSupreme has a LOT of potential, and it wouldn't take much for it to out-compete the over-hyped Pixelmator, which has a lot of problems of it's own. I know how hard it is to write software & I wish these guys the best. I hope they stick with it & upgrade PaintSupreme to a useful Mac program!

Brilliant, just what I needed Great set of tools and features, powerful, easy to use, and with only 3 weeks of usage to date I have not had a single crash (happy days). Working in Real Estate / Social media - this software is perfect. An absolute bargain at $10.

What a frustrating app. To start with, PaintSupreme lacks the ability to utilize pressure sensitivity from a tablet. It will recognise the basic input: that I'm drawing a line, that I've stopped, but it doesn't vary the line width at all. It also doesn't recognise when I flip the stylus around to use the eraser. Not very professional. I can't draw smoothly curved lines with any speed at all; I'm instead forced to slow down and draw them with significant care. If I have something that requires such slow work to result in a black line without varied thickness I'm just going to go with the default settings of the pen tool in Photoshop. The moment I attempt to draw a quick curve the line gets chunky and edged; the faster the stroke the more obvious it becomes. Not very professional. The interface is almost impossible to read unless I turn my monitor's brightness up to eyeball-searing levels. To make matters worse there was seemingly no way to adjust this at all. Unless I spent all my time working on a very dark canvas with middling colour ranges, I had to stop every few minutes to let my eyes rest. Not very professional. As has been mentioned before, the UI itself isn't very responsive. The standard Mac menus work fine, but the buttons themselves need some coaxing before they'll work. I really don't have the time or inclination to sit and constantly click just to make a simple command to go through. Not very professional. As has also been mentioned before: the very Windows appearance and lack of tabs is jarring. I can use Photoshop on my PC if I want that boxy look, so why bother with this less-functional app? And on the note of tabs: I can't even begin to work in my usual fashion without the ability to open multiple tabs; I found I had to have Photoshop open anyway so I could easily copy images from it to paste into PaintSupreme. Maybe an issue on my copy, but I found when I tried to open a new image it would force me to save or abandon my current canvas. Not very professional. I won't claim to have the best computer in town (3.06GHz Intel i3, 8GB RAM), but PaintSupreme easily becomes bogged down by only a few layers with a lot of linework, colour, or applied filters. A single paint-bucket filled layer as a background brought the app to a crawl; I can run PS CS5 with a 300dpi canvas of massive size with a hundred or better layers full of work before it starts to bog down. Not very professional. In short, if this were on the iPad and significantly cheaper it would be the sort of app I'd pick up as a last-resort if I really needed to get something down and nothing else was on hand. This isn't a professional app, and it doesn't even come close to being one. I've used Photoshop for a very, very long time and the very minor effects possible with the standard brushes don't come anywhere close. I wouldn't even use this for an outlining app thanks to the chunky and ragged lines. There is potential in this app--if it undergoes a massive overhaul. In the meantime it just doesn't make the cut. It's a glorified MSPaint, but even Paint has a more straightforward and clear UI.

Promising, not ready for prime time This is a promising pixel editor, which visually emulates (at least some versions of) Photoshop (with it's PS logo in the upper left corner not too subtly) - but at the price it has a lot to offer - or at least promises to offer a lot. The problem is that way too many interface quirks make using the App anything but a trying experience. Most dialog buttons don't work, or work only when you click multiple times. The new canvas dialog, for example, is one such offender. Since it's the first dialog you'll see (superimposed over an *existing* new canvas, by the way), the app does not make an impressive first impression. But there is more, and the interface feels decidedly 'windows-esque'. When you try to close a window without saving you are given the options to "don't save", "cancel", and "save". Unfortunately, pressing 'cancel' does not work. oops. Click it again, and perhaps it may work (it worked for me on the third try). Same with choosing a paint brush's color. A *modal* dialog opens, and it is footed with 'OK' and 'Cancel' buttons. You choose a color, and it is set. Click cancel, and instead of canceling, the dialog switches the cancel button to 'default', but DOES NOT CLOSE the dialog. You need to click again. Next time you change colors, it closes on the first try. Argh! This interface hates me. Many times I get the impression that the various dialogs try too much, be far too clever for their own good, only to trip you up. All work is done in a *single* tabbed window. If you work like me (who drags artwork between windows and uses side-by-side windows on a work- and a reference screen) you are out of luck (come on! usable screens only cost a couple of hundred bucks, and everyone uses them nowadays!). Oh, and closing the window will also exit the application (I know that Apple supports this behavior - I hate it, having grown up with the Mac this behavior is alien to me, and infuriates me. ( *I* tell an app when to exit. That's why they call me a control freak.) Using the Text Layer is incredibly counter-intuitive, and something I wish to forget quickly. I was unable to achieve the result I wanted. Everything lagged, and my clicks never registered where I thought they would. Worse, it showed selection artifacts from the layer I worked on before. When I tried to get rid of those I ended up in some kind of layer limbo where nothing I tried resulted in anything. All this is really disappointing because the app looks exceedingly promising. This is a textbook example how a dysfunctional UI completely destroys an otherwise *really* interesting application. Personally, and I know that I may be going against the grain here, but I wish the application was a bit more pricey *and* more robust. I know that nowadays developers are forced by entitlement-thinking customers to give away their software for next to nothing, but that hurts quality. I'm also painfully aware that this review does not help their case, so apologies for preaching. To sum up: great potential, good features, *very* unfortunate UI. You should definitely download the demo and see for yourself, because my impression is personal, and your mileage may vary. And perhaps in the meantime BrainDistrict may have released a new version that fixed all issues. Plus, at 10 bucks every photographer or designer knows that it's worth a shot.

Why use dark grey text on a black background? It’s barely readable! Don’t let Apple influence you too much. A little color and contrast would make it much easier to use.