[exo13]

Ok, It had to happen sooner or later.

I wanted to know what the majority of people here prefer for 2d graphic software.

I personally prefer Painter because of it's ease and variety of cool and unique features. I also like the interface better and the variety of costomizable brushes.

I own Corel Photopaint but I don't think that the the Mac version is all that stable. (my father's a beta tester for version 10!)

I haven't used photoshop since version 3.0 and with a really old 68040 mac.

Remember, I didn't ask which one is best because we could be here forever arguing about that.

Anyway, this should be interesting.

[Hippie]

I persoanlly use Photshop 6. I have tried Painter and own it as well, but it seems to be just as tough to learn as Photoshop. So I think my time is better spent continuing with what I know instead of spending time on a learning curve that would set me back a couple months.

Also regardless of what program you use I think it is up to the artist to use the computer as a tool. So it really doesn't matter which program you use as long as you are satisfied with your end product.

Great topic I'm interested to know what everyone else uses. And I would like to hear reasons, who knows maybe someone will give me adequate reason to give Painter another try.

[Briareos]

Painter is ok. But the way I see it, people get all caught up in all the brushes, papers and all those features that really are not necessary to make something painterly. Photoshop wasn't made for painting, but all my peers, mentors, and instructors use it for just that, because its pure power and simplicity. Its like 3d stuff, people get all giddy about new feature like nurbs, global illumination and such, and forget to make art! Thats what I think anyway.

[geoman2k]

I think that painter has some very cool brushes, but I think that Photoshop is just a much better program. Anything you can do in Painter you can do in Photoshop, if you're a good enough artist, methinks

[exo13]

One of the more signifficant quirks in Painter, I believe is the paper textures and grain. Some brushes like the Oil Pastels and dry media brushes are just plain annoying when it comes to picking up grain. You find little semi-darkened bloches and sometimes, incredably obvious patterns. Maybe I'm just not experienced enough but I usually find myself disabling the paper texture by pulling the contrast bar way down low so the preview is gray.

I really do like painter though, and since I spent enough time with it to learn most of it's base features, I don't see miself changing. Having every concievable paintbrush, pen, marker or tool you can think of right under your nose is pretty great. After a while, you learn what you like and can easily navigate through those brushes with their countless variations. I haven't gotten too far into building my own brush though. Too many settings to keep track of.

[y2kinG]

when talk about doing 2d graphics.

I'd prefer Photoshop. An i'm using Adobe Photoshop 6.0 now.
But then photoshop are too stiff. We could not move certain objects freely and individually.

Here's my two cents-->

Photoshop--> great at effects and layers.
Illustrator---> Great for making design and illustration. ...wide variety of functions. simply put-> flexible.

[ewiser]

Well I use them both. For more of a textural feel Painter can not be beat. IF you are doing alot of 2d art in is best to learn both Photoshop and Painter. With every new version of Painter (Version 7 due in the fall) it becomes more easier for someone that has learned Photoshop to pick up the use of the Painter user interface.

[NukleoN]

I am the same artist whether I try to draw with Painter or Photoshop. Here's my breakdown.

Painter: Rules for drawing, watercolor tools, airbrush, subtelty, line quality (not me, the program) and speed. Sucks arse for text, selections. Very easy to use. All this 'hard to use' stuff is mind boggling, since it is really quite basic.

PLus, Painter will let you connect to another Painter across the globe via TCP\IP, will record your painting session if you want, and is great for making patterns (I know, Photoshop has an offset filter). The scratchboard tool and watercolor tool in Painter RULE. Also, Painter has 32 undos, and Photoshop has this horrid thing called a History window..it is criminally stupid for Adobe not to have CNTRL Z serve as a replacement for the History Window. Painter has configurable hot keys too but I know Photoshop has actions.

I don't use nozzles and all those fancy schmancy paper grains.

Photoshop: Rules for selections, layers are awesome and better than Painter layers, text (yes), text effects, a New image is sized to the clipboard (love that). I hear Photoshop 6 has CNTRL Z for undo (DUH, Adobe).

So essentially, I use both. I would never draw with Photoshop if I could use Painter, and I would never bother with selections, layers or text in Painter if I could use Photoshop..well the magic wand in Painter sux, but the add\subtract selection in Painter is ok.

Most people have never tried Painter..and it is a shame coz it rocks. It is also quite simple to use, so I don't know why people would think it is difficult.

NukleoN



[ June 12, 2001: Message edited by: NukleoN ]

[Elessil]

I think the comparision of Photoshop and Painter is like 3DSMAX(without Character Studio) and Poser. Completely different, but both rock in their way.

I see Photoshop as the equivalent to 3DSMAX, the powerful allrounder, there is little one cannot do in Photoshop, altohugh some things may be easier done in Painter.

Painter is awesome for certain effects - just like Poser for animating. That is why one should try to be able to work with both of the programs. Not to say that I myself am really proficient with either

If I had to go with just one of them I'd choose Photoshop though.

[Mindsiphon]

I use Photoshop 5.5 with lot's of homemade brushes. I have not upgraded to 6.0 because I heard it was sluggish and that the brush palette is now a drop down box in the menu bar. I personally like to have my all brushes displayed.
I've tried Painter and I have found that it is great for sketching.
I haven't really messed with it enough to Paint with it though.

[y2kinG]

quote:

---

Originally posted by raist:
I use Photoshop 5.5 with lot's of homemade brushes. I have not upgraded to 6.0 because I heard it was sluggish and that the brush palette is now a drop down box in the menu bar. I personally like to have my all brushes displayed.

---

and yes..you're certainly correct. It sure make someone who's been older version of 5.5 confuse. And i say saty with 5.5. It's better!
Anybody uses Adobe Illustrator? well , this i have to tell too. Stay with version 8.0. Newer version of 9.0 simply sux.

[Anthony]

I use Painter and Photoshop. Usually I'll take one image between the two, at whimsy.

[Etict]

quote

Quote:

I use Photoshop 5.5 with lot's of homemade brushes. I have not upgraded to 6.0 because I heard it was sluggish and that the brush palette is now a drop down box in the menu bar. I personally like to have my all brushes displayed.

Well actually you can open the brush-box anytime anywhere in ps6, by clicking your wacom pen over the image.
I still want some incredibly easy and simple way of picking colors (other than alt-click) in ps.

[Pat]

Mmmm. I'm a long time Photoshop user --and I still swear by it. But using Painter makes you aware of Photoshops limitations, and vice versa. PS vs Painter is the wrong mindset. The equation should read PS+Painter=complete graphics toolbox. I find it hard to work without both of them.

-Pat

[Jin]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Hippie:
I persoanlly use Photshop 6. I have tried Painter and own it as well, but it seems to be just as tough to learn as Photoshop. So I think my time is better spent continuing with what I know instead of spending time on a learning curve that would set me back a couple months.

Also regardless of what program you use I think it is up to the artist to use the computer as a tool. So it really doesn't matter which program you use as long as you are satisfied with your end product.

Great topic I'm interested to know what everyone else uses. And I would like to hear reasons, who knows maybe someone will give me adequate reason to give Painter another try.

---

Hi,

I just joined yesterday day so hope you won't mind if I jump in and make some comments, mostly about Painter. Needless to say, because it's what I spend most of my waking hours about, I prefer Painter. It just suits my nature better and it's full of surprises, yet undiscovered things, even after years of using it on a daily basis. It's got a personality (some find it an annoying one), and is responsive to spontaneity and play, or to deliberate and planned out projects. Painter does just about anything I want to do and that includes most of Painter's features and capabilities. I either use them regularly or use them occasionally.

I agree with Pat, making this a "versus" thing is an inappropriate mindset. Some use both programs, some prefer one, some prefer the other. Both are great programs.

In response to earlier comments in this thread:

Hippie,

One of many reasons to give Painter some time is its literally hundreds of wonderful default brushes. There are about 15 brush categories and, at rough count, 179 variants within these categories in the default Painter brush library. Then, on the Painter 6 CD, there are 19 additional brush libraries containing even more brush categories and their variants... not mention what can be found on third party Painter book CDs as well as custom variants shared by Painter users.

These brushes are marvelous just as they come "out of the box". Any one of the variants can be altered by using combinations of the many settings in the Brush Controls palette. These include, to name just a few: Brush Dab spacing, squeeze, and angle; Bristle thickness, clumpiness, and hair scale; for Impasto brushes, draw to color, depth, or color and depth; in the Brush Controls palette's Expression section, Size, Jitter, Opacity, Grain (paper texture), Color, Angle, Resaturation, and Bleed (among others) can be controlled by Pressure, Velocity, Direction, Wheel, Tilt, Bearing, Source (Clone Source or Pattern), or be Random.

A few interesting example brushes are:

The Impasto brush and its 32 variants that paint thick brush strokes complete with lighting and shadows that can be altered using the Impasto Lighting dialog box.

The Pattern Pen brushes that paint either a 3-dimensional stroke or a flat stroke using the chosen Pattern or specified Clone Source image within the brush stroke itself, rather than revealing an underlying flat tiled Pattern with each brush stroke. (In Painter, that would be more suitably referred to as Clone painting.)

The Water Color brush variants that paint on an invisible Wet Layer and allow the Painter user to paint with both wet and dry brushes on the same Canvas without disturbing either the dry paint, by painting over it with a wet brush, or the wet paint, by painting over it with a dry brush (until the wet paint is dried).

If that's not quite enough to meet a person's needs, the variety of brushes we can create and store in custom libraries is seemingly endless.

Though this huge variety of brushes is attractive to fine artists moving from traditional to digital media, or using both in combination to create a single painting, they are also used for more commerial applications including: Children's book illustration, advertising art, Web graphics, cartooning, photo retouching, clone painting from other images or photos, and any number of other applications.

There are too many other features in Painter to cover here, but to name just a few more:

Movies - can be used to create GIF animations and QuickTime movies either by painting directly on the movie frames or by Rotoscoping, cloning another set of frames and painting on the new movie frames.

Mosaics - Paint tiles on an existing image to turn it into a mosaic with tile size/proportions and grout color and width specified by the Painter user, thickness applied to the tiles, masked tiles filled with another image, etc.

Dynamic Layers - Includes Dynamic Text that can be filled with color, a Pattern, placed on a curve, the curve stretched or distorted, drop shadowed, sized, angled, rotated, tracking and leading adjusted, and all while you see the actual font and text on the image (which can also be repositioned on the image while still in the dialog box).

Vector based bezier curves and Shapes - Drawn with the Pen tool and Quick Curve tool or the Rectangular and Oval Shape tools, editable using the Shape editing tools: Shape Selection, Scissors, Add Point, Remove Point, and Convert Point. Painter Shapes (which include text created using the Text tool) can be converted to Selections which can then be saved as Masks (as Selections can also be converted to Shapes), which gives the Painter user great freedom when creating images and special text. (This is not unlike Photoshop, though the terminology and some of the procedures are different.)

Net Painter - allows two or more participants to connect to the designated host computer using the host's IP number and do collaborative online painting while all participants see the Painter interface controlling participant's brush strokes appear on the Canvas.

Hope you find some time to explore Painter a bit more. There's lots of help available in the Painter related e-mail lists, message boards/forums, and newsgroups listed at the bottom half of my Tutorials section's home page:
http://www.pixelalley.com/tutorials/tuthome.html

Please feel free to visit the other sections of my site as well. It's almost completely devoted to Painter and includes many tutorials (available for individual use only), sample images, and explanations as to how they were created... in order to help new Painter users see some of what can be done.

Many people use both Photoshop and Painter and say the combination is wonderful as each has capabilities the other doesn't have.

I agree, Hippie, whatever program the artist feels happy using is the one (or combination of programs) to use. None is **the right** one for everyone.

Happy Sunday!

Jin

[ June 10, 2001: Message edited by: Jin ]

[mongi]

As someone said earlier I think PS and Painter completes each other. I use both just as much, depending on what kind of picture I'm after. I think PS is more intuitive, though.

[RoadMaster]

so I'm the ONLY person around here who uses Paint Shop Pro? Wow.... I am cheap

[+5]

How come nobody mentions Deep Paint 3d?

Photoshop and Deep Paint (with good layerhandling, lots of settings and brushes, as well as customizeable ones) complete each other extraordinarily well, and it can be used as a 3d texture tool for 3dsmax too. You can import 3d objects and paint directly on them, as well as export THAT into photoshop and do even more editing.

I think Deep Paint 3d serves as a much better painting and texturing too than Painter, and it allows the same artistic freedom...

But that's just my biased opinion since I haven't been using painter since I got deep Paint.

[hamilton]

PaintShopPro rules. i'm there with you roadmaster. i've tried photoshop and i didn't like it's interface as much as psp. i have psp 7.02, and it's all i've ever needed.

another fun program is zbrush. i like to mess around with it every once in a while. i think you can go to zbrush.com to find out about it. it's a 3d painting program. i'm trying my hardest to get painter (classic, fractal, corel... i don't care which) i just want to have as many options available as possible. i have photoshop... but i just don't use it as much. mainly because psp loads in an eighth of the time it takes to load photoshop yeah... so... that's my two cents.

[TylerHunter]

Nothing beats some good old PHOTOSHOP for me, Ive tried em all, and nothing has the robust and quick interface and option load that photoshop has. Plus photoshop easily combines with Numerous applications, Deep Paint 3D, any major 3D App (maya max light soft), Aftereffects, Premier, plus the Images in photoshop can be easily made web ready. The best of the best use it, and there isnt a thing thats 2D it cant do. Notably strong features, Curves, Hue/Sat, custom Brushes, Layer Mask painting, and Layer Opacity options and MORE! plus that fabulous smudge and paint tool!.

That sounded like an ADD!
Tyler

[specialbrew]

Since everyone has mentioned pretty much everything else, maybe you'd also like to look at the wonderful, res-independent Satori FilmFX 64... my site contains a slew of stuff, all completed on this package.

cheers

Peter

[NukleoN]

Hi there,

I would most certainly NOT characterize Painter as 'Poser' and Photoshop as 'MAX'. That is laughable. What I would say is that Painter is like what it is, more geared toward the artist, and Photoshop, tho can be used for art, is more technically inclined for precision.

Of course, I use both, but they have different strengths.

Photoshop blows for linework, Painter rules. Painter sucks at text, Photoshop is awesome. Painter's magic wand blows, but Photoshop's is robust and intelligent.

Also, Painter lets you make animation, record your art process and there is even a way to input your tablet pressure so it can adjust your lines accordingly...very cool.

There are other little reason why I love Painter, I can rotate the canvas, I can MOVE the canvas. In Photoshop, the canvas is LOCKED once you expand it, and this sucks coz you can't make optimal use of screen space. Painter's watercolor tool is amazing as well...people who I show this to are usually blow away with how cool it is.

Painter is very artistic, whereas Photoshop is artistic but more technical. I would not want to do everything in one package or the other, so both, for me, are inexorably linked.

[exo13]

Hey everyone

These sre some great answers. I guess I didn't mean "versus" as opposed to "with". I simply thought it would be cool to know what you all prefer, backed up with reasons and examples. I am personally very suprised though, that you guys haven't mentioned the more obscure programs out there.

I own an early version of adobe illustrator. I really liked it too. But when I first got my free version of Painter Classic with my Graphire, I sort of lost interest and pursued the Painter upgrades as they came along. Once in a while though, I will just install it on my hard drive just to fool around with it.

Another great program is Corel Photopaint, it's part of the Corel Draw Package. Photopaint, (I believe anyway) is a lot like Photoshap in many respects. I like how it handles layers and selection. I LOVE how it can remove those annoying white lines from a selection whenever I'm dumb enough to draw directly on the canvas. Photopaint though, I find to be supprisingly unstable on my Mac. It freezes up a lot and has some real issues with color. As I mentioned earier, my father is beta testing version 10 for the mac. I can't wait for it's final release but I've already noticed some bugs. One is that you can't delete a selection with the delete key. You have to drag down the menu and select clear.

Anyway, keep those respones comming. I'm still interested finding out about what people like to use to make digital 2d art.

[NukleoN]

quote:

---

Originally posted by mongi:
As someone said earlier I think PS and Painter completes each other.

---

You had me at 'Painter'.

[NukleoN]

quote:

---

[QB]
I think Deep Paint 3d serves as a much better painting and texturing too than Painter, and it allows the same artistic freedom...
/QB]

---

I don't agree.

I have tried Deep Paint 3D, and Deep Paint 3D is no Painter, but it is good for 3D models. Plus, Deep Paint is expensive.

Deep Paint does rock for painting on models, so I'd use this for that, Painter for drawing and painting digitally and Painter\Photoshop for painting texports for texturing in Max.

[NukleoN]

quote:

---

Originally posted by exo13:
Hey everyone

I am personally very suprised though, that you guys haven't mentioned the more obscure programs out there.

---

I pretty much detest most Corel products, so I am hoping they don't turn Painter into some horrid slopfest, and it was colossally stupid of MetaCreations to give it up and put all their eggs into the basket of interactive 3D for the web.

Painter 5.03-5.5 are perfect..uncluttered and brilliant at what they do. Painter 6 is nice with layers and such, but I would saw off an ear to be able to paint with WET layers (with the simple water tool) on multiple layers. Still, the brushes in Painter 6 are impressive, so I have this version *and* version 5.03 (my drawing workhorse) installed together.

I know, I am a Painter freek. 'ohmmmmmmmm'.

[The Stauminator]

I have been using photoshop for about 9 months now and have gotten used to how it works. I am constanly making little, or big discoveries, for instance I just started using the paintbrush with hard brushes rather than the arbrush with soft brushes for just about everything (something i should have done a long time ago), and it gives my stuff a much better look. I tried painter, but I never really gave it the time it probably deserved. I have heard the watercolor tool is amazing, but I haven't wanted to learn a whole new interface. I want to give it a 2nd chance, so if anyone knows some good Painter tutorials I would love to take a look.

[Donovan Keith]

This is my first post... hope I'm not breaking any rules.



For 2D image editing I really enjoy using "BodyPaint 3D" (screen shot above). It's actually designed for painting onto 3D models (like DeepPaint) but it is also really useful for 2D work. It's a v1 program so it has its issues, namely small problems with selections. However, it has some of the most configureable custom brushes out there.



You can load in a bitmap for the basic brush shape. Then you can alter size, pressure, spacing, jitter, etc. The really cool thing is that you can link each of these parameters to different aspects of tablet input (see above). You can then re-map these inputs with graphs which allow for some pretty cool effects.

I use it for most of my drawing/painting, however I still resort to using Photoshop for most image-editing work.

[pasakievich]

I love Painter, I love Photoshop, I love Illustrator. I love everyone.
I don't know whether everyone knows this or not, but there are extra brushes on the Painter 6 disk that are not part of the installation, including the painter 5.5 brushes. One of my now favorite brushes is a Painter Classic brush(oil paint) that I have imported into Painter 6 and adjusted a little. I was initially confused by painter 6's interface (and still get lost occasionally) but most of all I am frustrated by the brushes, most of them suck up too much ram for too little result. Does anyone know which brushes are best to use and perhaps, could you share with us the settings on the ones that you have adjusted or created from scratch?

[InsaneSpaghetti]

Nobody else mentioned the good ol' Photopaint! *sobs*
No matter what people say, it's just as powerful. The only lacking thing is the ability to set mode to an entire layer.

I use version 8...