The best overall digital art program by far is Adobe Photoshop, thanks to its unbelievably rich feature set and powerful yet intuitive tools. There are many more categories of digital art such as 3D modeling, texturing and video editing, but those are distinct enough that they deserve their own separate posts. As a result, I’m going to break down the programs in this review into three main categories: an overall ‘one-stop’ program, a drawing/illustration program, and a painting program. Whether you love to paint, to draw or to work with photos, there’s a perfect program for you. One of the best things about digital art is that there are so many ways to create it. But those days are long gone – although sometimes working late into the evening, we all still get frustrated with our favorite program.

The hardware simply wasn’t up to the tasks we could imagine, and many artists felt that it wasn’t worth the trouble. If you experimented with digital art in the early days of home computing, you probably had something of a frustrating experience. Note: There have been some feature changes on the latest versions of below selected software, our reviews are largely intact and we may update the write-up in the near future.