Give it to me straight - do I need to get Photoshop

Blessings

@pam-boutilier Hey, you’re welcome! Even though I said ‘when I left them,” please don’t get the impression I’m against them. Adobe has great apps. Here’s a post about an illustrator who uses both programs: http://www.inkspokes.com/2014/08/07/artist-showcase-rosie-butcher-childrens-illustrator/ She uses Painter for coloring. Both programs have special things to offer so Corel Painter is not any less professional and the software improves with each debut. It just depends on what you’re doing.

Andyg

I’m a bit of a software junky. The driving forces for me are can i get a good pencil, a good colouring pencil, and something that looks like watercolour?
Then of course when ‘back in the day’ they salted putting apps on tablets and the like I had to do the same investigations..... hey, I have even completed art on ‘colours’ which was a home brew app on the original Nintendo days, which actually had a pressure sensitive screen (hands up if you knew that!). You had to run it on cyclo ds...
Anyway, here’s my findings...
Gimp crashes. And could never find a place to download from, even apparently their own website where I didn’t seem to have some sort of virus at the end of it....
Painter crashes too, but I quite like how badly it behaves for it’s randomness, and have done some paying art on it. It’s quirky
ArtRage shouldn’t be overlooked. Love it, and hardly ever had a crash. Very responsive, and the way you can build brushes which create patterns created my best Quentin Blake quill. The pencil was the first to feel right as well, and the roller fast and responsive. I think their flagship poster boy is nick Harris? Great work.
Clip studio paint is fantastic. Why ever did they change it from manga studio? And really it was the perfect system for inking, that was until photoshop introduced their smoothing system recently. U less I was missing it all along, quite possibly! But clipstudio paint does have one trick up it’s sleeve... you can ink in vector lines on just one layer, and still adjust each line. I think it’s fill system is also more intuitive than illustrator too. The 3d integration is far better than ps seems to have yet achieved to my mind.
Which brings us to photoshop. Which is still my workhorse, though because of recent commissions I am now branching into illustrator. Ps is great, particularly that you can add to the canvas size without changing dimensions. Dodge and burn is better than any of the other packages, and masking just seems more intuitive.

On tablet, Procreate wins with the most recent update

But still no one has really created a perfect watercolour brush. Best I’ve found is using bought painter watercolour brushes but you still have to carefully mess around to fake the look. Drop watercolour paper textures over the top in overlay mode. Better yet, use a light box, transfer tour drawing to real watercolour paper and get out the paint box. There are a couple of watercolour engines out there but still nothing I like, and painter....well it still just doesn’t seem to do it quite right. It feels fake.

My recommendation if on a budget is clipstudio paint together with ArtRage. If you can afford ps then go for it and enjoy kyles brushes.

But in the end, if you’ve got a software that creates a picture which people love, and you dont run into problems working at hi-res or issues with printers, don’t buy what you don’t need.

Put it this way, I’ve sold art I’ve made using a lolly pop stick dipped in acrylic ink....

smceccarelli

@andyg Have you ever tried Rebelle? It’s a very bleak piece of software but it’s the best watercolor simulator I have ever seen. I use it sometimes for backgrounds or special wash effects (never to paint from beginning to end, it’s very clunky). Maybe it would solve your search...

Andyg

@smceccarelli yeah. It’s the closest I’ve found yet. I think that’s the one I referred to but thanks for the name reminder. I think it needs a couple more iterations for it to be right....or maybe sell to one of the big boys/girls. One day I think it will be perfect, for now I agree it’s clunky.

rcartwright

@andyg Since their last big update in the summer version 2 is much better

Andyg

@rcartwright ah....may take another look then. Thankyou.

Christine Garner

I used to be a die hard Corel Painter user since 2007 up to about 2 years ago. I got really frustrated with Corel Painter though for various reasons (not least the pop up adverts they inserted into the software).

I still have and use Photoshop CS3, and even though its older, I find it far superior to Corel Painter (2016) for using layers and just getting things done in general. Corel Painter is really over technical and strange to use. I didn't realize what I was missing until I tried Photoshop.

I also use Krita which has nice blendy brushes and some cool features like seamless tile painting and symmetry modes. I've used lots of other software's over the years, and they all have strengths and weaknesses. I wrote an article about it on Medium recently: https://medium.com/@thimblefolio/whats-the-best-software-for-beginners-to-digital-painting-86efe527a2a1.
I don't buy into the "industry standard" argument, I just use what works for me depending on the result I need, but Photoshop is a good program.

JamesH

Hi there,

I too have become frustrated with Adobe, especially as it seems that lightroom is headed towards fully subscription based too...

I use Adobe CS5.5 at work on a daily basis but working in an educational institute they are not too keen on the whole subscription model. As I’m not earning anything from creative endeavours at the moment I struggle to justify the subscription for myself at home too.

An alternative to Adobe that really seems to be gaining ground is the Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo software (Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop equivalents respectively) and next year the beta of Affinity Publisher (InDesign alternative) is being released. No subscription and it has pretty good .psd and .ai compatibility. For drawing I’ve been happily switching between Affinity, Sketchbook Pro and Procreate without any problems using .psd. You can also load .abr format brushes (but sadly not .tpl). Only thing with Affinity at the moment is Designer is Mac only for now, but Photo is Mac and Windows. It has a great community forum, and the developers have a clear roadmap for development which is brilliant.

Sorry if that sounded like a sales pitch, wasn’t meant to be... It just seems as if they are genuinely working to be a viable non subscription alternative, and they appears to be getting darn close...

Hope that’s of interest!

Blessings

@christine-garner Yeah the 2016 version was terrible on crashing, but they've since improved and the pop-up intro always had the ability to be disabled. However, the 2018 has amazing texture brushes. I agree the learning curve is different.

Christine Garner

@blessings It was terrible that I upgraded to it only to be told of the 2017 version about 2 weeks later which fixed some of the issues but was another paid update. I felt pretty miffed about it to be honest. I solved the pop up problem: I uninstalled the thing.
I've been using Paintstorm Studio a bit more lately, it has very painterly brushes not unlike the ones in Corel Painter. Art Rage's oils are really nice, and Rebelle is a great watercolour simulator. None of these programs beat the real thing though.
To be honest my set of colouring pencils is the best option when I get fed up of all the digital painting and it's problems.

Pam Boutilier

@jamesh Not at all like a sales pitch! I'm so glad to get input on other software - I'd not even heard of these!

~ Pam

Pam Boutilier

Thanks again for all the input!

I just watched some predictions about the 2018 version of the iPad pro - it sounds like the processing power is kicking up. I wonder what that will mean for apps like Procreate and Clip Studio (which I believe has a fully functioning iOS version, so @Andyg I'm glad you mentioned it, that might be a good in-between option).

I've been working on my 2018 budget and right now am going to hunker down with Corel Painter 2016 and Procreate for the time being. But all of this information is helping me with decisions of where to aim in the coming year and I'm definitely tagging this thread!

~ Pam

Andyg

@pam-boutilier clipstudio is subscription based on the iPad. Don’t get too excited. I’m not sure it’s worth it that way. But bought once on the pc it’s cool

MOO

I am just learning really to use digital but I have Photoshop (for now), GIMP, Clipstudio pro (which I still haven't even used for about a year). I have a ton to learn! Mostly I use photoshop (or GIMP) for cleaning up traditional art and for the class assignments I just finished. I really want to use it mor to help me save some time on adjusting scale and placement of my images and to do pgintion for my book projects. I don't know if you can use them all together or not but, hopefully I will figure it all out Going to have to give up hotoshop soon so, I need to use the others.