I've had Painter since version 2, and have used Photoshop since version 2 as well, I'd say for painting, assuming the use of a tablet (Painter is sadly lacking without a tablet), Photoshop is about 1/10 as good. After saying that, I'd say Photoshop works in a much more logical way, has a much better interface (at least until 5.5, where it may have peaked) (Paintee peaked at 2X!) and has a lot more tools. But some Photoshop tools hardly work at all (like smudge), where the Painter equilvent (just add water) work excedingly well. This is about the best I ever did in a computer painting, I don't have enough time for this any more, but it was all done in Painter.