What do you like best about Flame Painter?
To be sure, this software has been finely crafted, has tons of tinkering and tweaking options to its presets both for amateurs and artists, but that said, for the latter however, obvious reservations apply. I have never come across any bugs, it's very responsive and its dark interface does make for a more 'professional' and pleasing look and feel. It supports layers and transparency, has Photoshop integration and allows you to customize most everything about the 'flame' strokes to suit your needs and taste. This is a developer that has always worked a great deal on the several types of 'escape-like-art' software it offers with solid and beautiful results. It has multi-core support too in its Personal Use (non-commercial) price bracket of USD30 and many more features in its 'Pro' version for USD90. Thankfully, it also adopted the age-old policy of one owning the software one buys and that is something I really appreciate. As a professional artist, I dislike 'subscription' offers that stick to you no end. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Flame Painter?
The obvious reservations I mentioned are that it is naturally of limited use, it is not really software for painting as such, and the price tag for the 'Pro' version is therefore, high in my opinion. Also, the imposition of producing only low-res images in the 'Personal Use' version defeats having all those layer, transparency and blending features I mentioned above. It's understandable but a major put-down nonetheless, with the Pro price so high, especially for non-US users. Also, in many years as a registered user, I never received any advantageous price deals for upgrading to Pro.
The 'Pro' version offers a great deal of features such as essential hi-res rendering, export to svg vector formats, Photoshop plugin integration for all versions, copy and paste to third party apps, open and save PSD layers and so on, to give it that 'pro' feel. But, and this is a hefty but, what can you really do with 'flame-art'? Its main usefulness is in post-production artwork or videos, but one cannot or should not use it extensively as that will forsake its novelty value.
I have used it in my work with nature art for a reason, to produce the 'energy fields' I am trying to convey in certain cases, however, its use in advertising and such will be limited and sometimes pointless in my view. Painting with it, however, produces some unpleasant results when applied to portraits or scenic imagery, since it was not really meant for this, but most amateurs will use it that way anyway.
My suggestion would be, paint and produce your art elsewhere and then bring into Flame Painter and, on a new layer, see how you can create and enhance details or bring out your image, according to your needs, avoiding the over-splash of 'flames' all over, unless that is what you really need. I could be used with font masking in Photoshop for some unusual and professional results.
One can always see what a piece of software can do by browsing the 'galleries' section in its own website and in doing so, a cursory look at these quickly underlines the fact that most uses are amateurish both in taste and artistic skills with few almost exceptions.
This software also requires a powerful computer to avoid constant lags, as the images can be complex and are best served by having a dedicated graphics card and using a pen and tablet instead of a mouse, but perhaps this not a problem today. All in all, buy it if you have a good reason to use this type of art or don't mind spending for the fun of tinkering and seeing what you can come up with, for as I said, the software is a fine piece of programming which someone had to do, and Escape Motions did it superbly.
That said, if they could make their price tags much more affordable (not all buyers are in the US and currency conversion can become a major setback for some artists in other countries who would like to own such software, like their Rebelle watercolor app that can really be used by professional artists), or by notifying subscribers of special deals, many more of us would buy it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
