Infinite Painter

Most painting apps on touchscreens get one thing right. Some have beautiful brushes and no real layer control. Others offer every professional tool and look like a 2009 desktop program squeezed onto a phone. Infinite Painter, from Infinite Studio LLC, aims to get everything right. It comes closer than most.

The app covers a lot of hardware: iPhone, iPad, Apple Silicon Macs, Android phones and tablets, and Chromebooks. That reach matters. Very few serious painting tools treat Android as more than an afterthought, and Infinite Painter treats it as a full platform. For artists who own a Samsung tablet or a Chromebook with a stylus, the choice of serious painting software is small. This app is one of the few that doesn’t ask them to accept less.

Its business model also stands out. The app is free to download, and a one-time premium upgrade unlocks the full professional toolset. There’s no subscription and no monthly charge. That puts it in a narrow space: priced more like a hobby app, but aiming at the depth of professional software. On the US App Store it holds a 4.1 out of 5 from more than 10,000 ratings. That score is solid rather than glowing, and the reviews behind it explain why.

Users keep praising the same things: a clean, minimal interface, a brush engine they can customise in fine detail, and the core tools a working illustrator needs, such as layers, blend modes, perspective guides and PSD export. They keep complaining about the same things too. Advanced features have almost no documentation. The best tools require the paid upgrade. Performance can drop when canvases get large. None of these problems is fatal. All of them are worth knowing before committing an afternoon of work to one canvas.

• Brush engine: Hundreds of built-in brushes, including airbrush, calligraphy, chalk, charcoal, pencil, marker, oil, spray paint, screentone and watercolor. Each brush has more than 100 settings, and paint blends with what’s already on the canvas.
• Stylus support: Full pressure and tilt support for Apple Pencil and other styluses, plus finger gestures you can customise.
• Layer system: Layers, layer groups, masks, adjustment layers and 30 blend modes. Together these give it a structure close to desktop software.
• Drawing aids: Perspective guides, symmetry, selections, transforms and liquify for structured illustration work.
• Color and filters: Gradient maps, color curves, more than 40 live filters, and a 64-bit color pipeline.
• Editable shapes: Freehand strokes can become editable shapes, which connects painting and vector-style cleanup.
• Time-lapse recording: The app records the painting process automatically and exports it as a shareable video.
• Export options: JPG, PNG, layered PSD, or the app’s own format.

The Brush Engine Is the Product

Everything else in Infinite Painter supports the brush engine. That’s the right priority for a painting app. The built-in set is broad and more than a list of variations. Watercolor, oil, chalk and screetone each behave differently, and the canvas-blending model means oil brushes pick up and mix with color already on the page. Many mobile apps use brushes that are simply stamped shapes with an opacity setting. Infinite Painter goes further than that.

The 100-plus settings per brush are both the app’s main strength and its main problem. For an experienced digital artist, that level of control is a luxury. A brush can be tuned — taper, pressure response, blending, scattering — until it behaves exactly as intended. For anyone else, the settings panel is a wall of controls with little explanation. That’s the documentation complaint from users, and it’s fair. A setting nobody understands might as well not exist. Other apps have shown that a short note or a live preview on each setting can open up a complex engine. Infinite Painter mostly leaves users to experiment until they work it out.

A Real Layer Workflow

The layer system is where the app earns the word professional. Layer groups, masks and adjustment layers are what separate a sketching toy from a production tool. Adjustment layers are the key addition. They let an artist correct color and tone without permanently changing pixels, so a decision can be revisited ten steps later without starting over. Add 30 blend modes and the result is a stack that a Photoshop user will understand straight away.

That familiarity matters most at export. Layered PSD export is the feature that makes Infinite Painter usable in a professional pipeline. Sketch on a tablet on the train, send a PSD with its layers intact to a desktop, and finish the piece there. Without PSD support, a mobile painting app is a closed system. With it, the app becomes the first stage of a larger workflow, and that’s how most professionals actually use tablet software.

Structure and Precision Tools

Perspective guides and symmetry are the features that turn casual users into regular ones. Perspective guides matter for environment and architectural drawing, where freehand vanishing points drift quickly. Symmetry speeds up character design, mandalas and anything else built from mirrored halves. Liquify, selections and transforms handle the corrections that every illustration needs.

Converting strokes into editable shapes is the most interesting idea in the toolset. Painting apps usually commit the artist to pixels. Turning a rough stroke into an adjustable shape offers a middle ground between raster and vector. It’s especially useful for clean line work and graphic elements that would otherwise be redrawn several times.

Where the Paywall Falls

The free download is generous enough to show what the app can do. But the strongest tools require the premium upgrade, and users notice. This isn’t a bait-and-switch. The one-time price is honest and far better than a subscription. Still, the free version is best treated as an extended trial for professional use, not the full product. Anyone who wants the whole toolset described in this review should plan to pay once. For most serious users, that payment is easy to justify.

Onboarding Friction

The user experience has one real weakness, but it matters. The interface looks simple, the tools underneath are complex, and very little explains how to get from one to the other. A beginner will enjoy the default brushes and may never find the adjustment layers. An intermediate artist will find them and then struggle to learn how they work. The app needs better built-in guidance. Until it has that, it will keep losing users who would have become loyal ones.

The interface is Infinite Painter’s best design decision. It’s clean and minimal, and it keeps the canvas in front and the controls out of the way. That’s the correct approach for a painting app, because the artwork should be the most prominent thing on screen. Users regularly describe it as one of the better-designed painting interfaces on both iPad and Android, and that praise is earned. The design is spare but doesn’t hide essential functions. It’s disciplined without becoming hard to use.

The engine has solid technical foundations. 64-bit color gives smooth gradients and room for heavy color adjustment without banding, which matters when stacking curves, gradient maps and live filters. The 40-plus live filters show a preview as they’re adjusted, so there’s no guessing, applying and undoing.

Performance is the main technical risk. Users report occasional slowdowns and stability problems on large canvases. For a professional tool, that’s a concern: large, high-resolution files with many layers are exactly what professionals create. Lag during a stroke breaks concentration, and a crash on a large file loses real work. Performance will depend heavily on the device, particularly on Android, where hardware varies widely. A 2D painting app of this scope is light on hardware by nature, but large files are where the design gets stretched. Save often, and work out the largest normal file size before relying on the app for client work.

On iPad, Infinite Painter is at its best. Apple Pencil support includes full pressure and tilt, so shading with the side of the pencil tip can feel natural. The large screen gives the minimal interface room, and the app is often mentioned among the stronger painting tools on the iPad.

On iPhone, the full toolset is available, but the small screen makes detailed work harder. It suits sketches, color studies and quick ideas. Most people won’t finish a large illustration on a phone.

On Android, the app matters more. Android tablets and Chromebooks have far fewer serious painting apps than the iPad, so Infinite Painter’s full support is more valuable there. Pressure and tilt work with compatible styluses, and customisable finger gestures help make up for inconsistent hardware. The drawback is the variety of devices. Performance on a flagship tablet and on a budget phone can differ a lot, so the large-canvas complaints will hit some Android users harder than others.

Across all platforms, customisable gestures matter. Undo, zoom, rotate and the eyedropper are used constantly, and mapping them to finger gestures keeps the stylus hand working and the menus closed. Support for Apple Silicon Macs also adds a larger-screen option inside the Apple ecosystem.

Infinite Painter is a capable, professional-leaning painting app with a free way in and a few real faults. The brush engine is deep, the layer system is mature, and layered PSD export makes it a genuine part of a professional workflow rather than a separate hobby tool. Its clean interface shows that serious capability doesn’t need a cluttered screen, and its full Android support fills a gap most competitors leave open.

It’s held back by a lack of explanation and by performance limits. The app has powerful tools but does little to teach them, so many users will never find its best features. Large-canvas slowdowns also remain a real risk for the professionals it’s built for. Neither problem is disqualifying, but both matter. We recommend it to artists whose work fits its strengths — brush-driven illustration on a tablet, with PSD handoff to desktop — and suggest trying the free version at normal file sizes before paying for the premium upgrade.