[antx]

Well, PS is very slow with the tablet. Try to draw very fast long strokes. In PS you get very ugly lines and in Painter (at least in classic) they are rather nice and round.

[Light]

Is it just me or does Painter 7 somehow make the tablet more precise?

Even when I set the tablet to "pen" mode in Photoshop it feels "mousey". I just got the v7 so maybe this is partly the reason?

[Jin]

Painter (not Painter Classic) has a zillion ways to set up brushes to work well with the Wacom tablets and vice-versa. The two products are well designed to make the most of what each offers.. Wacom tablets and full Painter versions.

I'm using a very old ArtZ II tablet so much of what's available with the newer Intuos tablets is not available to me. Still, most of the main capabilities are there.

What is a problem, though, is that Painter 7 brushes are processor intensive and until you learn how to make setting adjustments they can seem impossibly slow at times. This is especially true with the Painter 7 Water Color which is a whole new technology with this version.. and Liquid Ink variants which are also new.

Those of us who've been using Painter 7 for a while have learned how to make them work better for us, so there is hope.

Painter Classic doesn't have any of the more complex brushes found in even Painter 5 from which it was taken as a very limited appetizer to get people interested in buying a full Painter version. Most of us who have used those Painter Classic brushes love a good many of them. They are simple and work beautifully, as do many of the Painter 7 brushes.

There's a lot to learn about Painter 7!

[PixelPeZ]

Actually the ugly lines of Wacom in Photoshop are a more Wacom related problem. The Wacom's refresh rate is 50hz, while I've seen some other manufacturers tablet which was a 100 hz ... so it gives much smoother lines. I suppose Painter has some way of solving this problem, and that's why it uses a bit more resources on the brushes.

[Jin]

Sometimes the unsmooth look of a brushstroke in Painter is a display problem.

We're having a problem now that continuous zoom and other zoom feature changes are included in Painter 7. One of them is that when we zoom out, a brush stroke that's perfectly smooth at 100%, and prints smooth, is terribly jaggy.

There doesn't seem to be any set of zoom increments or methods of zooming that prevents this and it's annoying, to say the least.

I'd call it a bug in Painter 7, and hope the developers will fix it pretty soon.

[Torstein Nordstrand]

Hep, that ugly Painter 7 zooming bug is really a terrible flaw in an otherwise terrific program.

Now, about those strokes. I own a Graphire2(?), and it is absolutely limited by the usb refresh rate. If you do a superquick highresolution large curved stroke in PS, and you zoom in, it will be clear that it consists of some 5-6 dots with lines connected between them. It looks terrible and mechanic. If you do the same quick stroke in Painter, it will be a full, organic looking, smooth curve.

The reason must be that Painter 7 interpolates the missing dots, calculating a reasonable stroking route. This might also contribute to Painter's slowness. Anyway, the refresh rate is actually a hardware problem, probably related to the usb, I'm not sure. Anybody out there knows more about this? Is it better on bigger, more expensive Wacoms?

[Light]

I just wanted to add that Photoshop 7 has a smoothing option.

See the thread about brush controls if you have trouble getting your tablet to work proper in it.

I wasn't speaking of the connect-the-dots line algorithm. I was speaking more of the "tiny movements" that painter seems to do better.

Hmm but perphaps it is refresh rate.

[Joachim]

for me it seems that painter has a better way of smoothing your stroke movements while working, but maybe that is also the reason why it's going so damn slow. Only way to paint with some speed it seems that you have to turn down all the effects to a lower setting than pshop so for me it turns out to be just the same as pshop with more messy interface because of all the options that are more or less impossible to use anyway. So, for me pshop is the king, and you can do more or less whatever you want in pshop and get the same effects + - just depends on how you think and plan out how you work. But, I guess it's a matter of taste, so nothing that is possible to discuss anyway.