This is a an old post I made years ago at Sijun, and although all the softwares I mentioned has moved on and improved, it contains some stuff that’s still relevant. Read it more for entertainment, since it’s a biased view anyway. http://forums.sijun.com/viewtopic.php?t=14691&highlight=
Oh, and excuse the vulgar language. I’m not as uptight in other forums as I am at cgtalk. Other forums tend to be more relaxed, and I act more like myself in other forums.
So, you said something about turning off resaturation in Painter to use any brush as a blending tool. Maybe I’m retarded, but how do you do that? I just got Painter IX a couple weeks ago and have been trying to figure it out on my own. (Going through books is too tedious for me in most books I have to wade through a bunch of crap I don’t care about.)
edit: Never mind, I found your tips and tricks section while checking out your web site. Great trick! And your brushes are awesome too.
Well damn, that brings back memories. 
I’ve yet to try out Satori or PhotoPaint, but I’m still mostly a photoshop user. I’ve dabbled with Painter 9 over at a mate’s place, and it’s pretty nifty, but like you said, takes some time to really dig into the UI.
I’ve found Open Canvas a fun one for some form of wet on wet, and the networking in 1.1 is still awesome.
ArtRage is pretty nifty, too.
As far as Painter and PS, I think you did a pretty good assesemnt (I just don’t know the other tools). I am just getting my head around brush creation (its one thing to create a brush, quite another to create a good brush, and know how to use it). I have worked mostly in PS, but see value in both.
I have painter (v.8) and PS 7/cs2
I love Painters brushes (the variety is amazing) - and I haven’t even got into custom brushes. Also I love the colour mixing capabilities/interface - esp the ability to create palettes which simulate the real thing. I get really peaved at the memory issues - (it doesnt handle even moderate sized files), that I experience in Painter - its like hitting my head against a brick wall - when all I want to do is paint!
In PS I love its ability to manage large images without choking, I love the ability to manipulate images - the transform tools, image manipulation tools, and filters (I have the KPT plugin and love it!). I think filters are much maligned. The bottom line is that they are like anything else - used with inovation and a healthy inquisitivness they can yield tremendous results - esp if NOT used to mimic other media, but to create new unique imagery, which can stand alone, or be integrated into a more complex situation.
When I bought Photoshop (cs2), I purchased it as part of the Adobe Creative Suite. There are some other very nice tools in there - not to mention terrific toolset integration. I have began to work with Illustrator, and find it to be a much more flexible tool than I ever would have imagined. I believe I will be using it quite alot - esp considering its integration possibilities with so many other tools - 2d and 3d.
Gord
Ha ha! A blast from the Sijun past - I’m still using Satori even now, but these days augmented by a bit of Photoshop and a bit of Expression… although Satori has been pretty much mothballed, Spaceward continue to produce the odd beta now and again, and the latest release is very stable and runs well on XP.
Just mention it since no one else have: Gimp is a free 2d app similar to photoshop, but since it is free you can’t expect that it is as good as a program you buy. But I will say that it is quite powerfull(espesial if you think of the prize:p). You have layers, filters, plug-ins and scripts(and so on).
Gimp works on linux(unix), windows and macOSX, and can be found here
Well, I would have to choose Photoshop based on two things:
I’ve used it for so long, it’s second nature to me.
I strive for my digital work to look like my traditional work; as a result, my Photoshop stuff best represents this endeavor.
With that said, I do like Painter’s rotating canvass. :drool:
I hear that photoshop CS3 will have a rotating canvas like Painter. That will definately make it my preferred app. Having said that I am having problems with CS2 crashing when I use custom brushes, I hope there is a fix for this soon as I am having to use CS1 at the moment.
I’d chose Photoshop, allthoug Painter would be a good option aswell.
I feel the need to know my hotkeys and be able to customize them easly for a better preformance. Recordable action keys for quicker horizontal flip and on and off actions for the sketch/reminders layer is a big advantage.
I have tryed customizing Painter to my liking, but I find this a little too complicated as it is now. For ne there’s too many options and sections and all that to go trough. (Painter IX)
Since I use a heap lot of layers, Painter gets way to slow for me at times while Photoshop doesn’t. I am trying to get rid of this habit tough.
It’s easier to make new custom brushes in Photoshop aswell.
I still haven’t tryed Photopaint, and I haven even heard about Satori, so I can’t really say much there
Some great points there Luna. I love photoshop 
I have painter as well but…I just can’t get to grips with it. I often pop an image into painter to play around with (I’m determand to get to grips with it!) but I like to work big! and well I can’t stand the lag.
I love the brushes I just wish it wouldn’t lag so much, I think that’s the main problem stopping me from working in painter 
Maybe you should send your comments over to Adobe and Corel, perhaps they could get together and combine the two?
enialadam, Painters brushes are actually typically much faster than photoshop’s. You should have a look at some of Luna’s tips and tricks regarding tweaking the ‘feature’ of brushes.
Painter was the first graphics program I got to know and I really love it. I would never dream of painting with PhotoShop - but will go there now and then to change colors and such on something I made in Painter. I have Painter 8 which I find quite nice, so I haven’t really wanted to upgrade for the moment - I’m waiting for number 10.
Later, I got a photographer diploma and needless to say that since then, PhotoShop has become absolutely necessary to me. That’s the program I open every day. I’m still on number 7, but do think that I will upgrade soon if for one thing only : the raw - even though I’m not very keen on digital photo …
Can’t tell you how sorry I am to open Painter almost never these days …
Artrage and OpenCanvas track brushes/tablet extremely well versus PS… I use PS7 and the brush lag tracking drives me nuts… Using artrage and opencanvas , having the tablet and brush with no lag is like a breath of fresh air
OpenCanvas4.06E plus can do layers and read write PSD files, waiting for artrage 2 to come out!
if this ever makes it out of beta and functions as designed…this may be interesting “PIXEL image editor” … though I think its farther than the author thinks from being ready http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=9
are u guys considering any free apps?..
…i mean, Art rage and Gimp…
I like art rage quite a lot, its simple and very renpossive, i wish it had some more brush option and layers. it looks like a trimmed down free version of alias sketchbook pro to me!
I have never used gimp, but seen people producing ipressive stuffs with it.
For serious work I personally like photoshop as i am really used to with it and it could be used as an image editor as well as for painting…
Painter is a lot of fun and its one of my most used programs (especially for 3D texture work). It really is a complex program though; all the brushes and parameters are a lot to absorb especially for a newbie.
I started with photopaint which is basically a photoshop clone. It doesn’t have the speed and power of Photoshop and that the biggest argument against it. The good thing about that program is that It was really easy to transition to Photoshop after using it alot.
Just now with the image I’m working on currently, I must admit that I’m using PhotoShop much more than Painter.
However, I think that Painter is the place to start for me - that’s where I make the basic sketch/paint, but the more I advance, the less I open Painter.
I find Painter a quite intuitive program actually, particularly if you just want to paint … PhotoShop seems much more complicated to me, but as I use it every day, I get to know it better and better of course.
Gitte
I have been using Photoshop for the longest time to paint my work even though I have really wanted to use Painter (which primarily sits on my HD unused). My problem is that I’m already so familar with how to use PS’s functions, that I get things done faster with the program. Case in point, when I try to create a piece using Painter but I need to mirror two layers… I have to do that individually (plus match them up). PS I can do it quick and easy. Merging of layers… PS: Lock em and hit CTRL-E. Painter: Group, select, go to pull down menu and select merge layer (if I even did the process properly, half the time I can never get merge layers to show up). Two things that really irritate me about Painter though: The small color picker and how copy and pasting things into seperate layers never line up. Unlike PS, Painter just likes plopping your paste randomly on the layer rather than directly in line with the bottom layer you copied from.
No matter how many times I tell myself to just sit down and learn Painter, I always hit a roadblock and end up going to PS instead since I know how to do it faster that way. Which really distresses me because I really love Painters brushes a lot. However it’s just quite frustrating trying to do editing work with it, hitting a brick wall, then needing to spend 10 minutes looking it up in their ‘help’ section or a book to figure out how to do something. 
(whats sad is how long it took me to figure out how to crop in that program. I mean come on, why can’t I just hit ‘enter’ after I select the areas I want to crop out? :sad: )
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