[Nathan Marciniak]

Does anyone know what the difference is between how Painter's brushes work and how Photoshop's work? Take the smudge tool for example: In Photoshop it is abysmally slow. The only way it works usably fast is if you set the opacity to 100% which is useless for blending. At lesser opacities it is only usable at very small brush diameters. Otherwise you make a stroke, watch the hourglass, make another stroke, wait...then give up altogether. Doh! (At the moment I'm using a dual PIII 500MHz, 1GB RAM, UltraSCSI-2 RAID array)

Painter's brush performance on the other hand, is quite fast. The "Liquid" and "Drip" category brushes, which perform the same kind of smudge\smearing effect of exisitng pixels, is phenomenally faster than Photoshop. But I don't know why that is. Is Photoshop's bicubic interpolation that much more of a hog than Painter's or something? In Painter I've made custom Liquid-category brush dabs that were 700 pixels square, but even at that size the drawing performance is better than say a 100 pixel Smudge Tool brush in Photoshop at 50% opacity. There's something fundamentally different between the two apps here!

If anyone has any tips about how they use large-brush Smudge Tools in Photoshop I'd be interested to hear it. In my experience, on both Mac and Wintel even with powerful processors, the Smudge Tool has always seemed to be DOGGIN'!

Still, even the Airbrush in Photoshop; although I think it gives a much better look than Painter, seems slower. I've read that in Painter 7 they're handling the airbrush differently than before - is this hype or is it truly better? I wouldn't know, the stupid company won't even offer a demo!

[Malachi Maloney]

I use all of the tools you've mentioned above in PhotoShop 6 and I never have a slow down problem.
However, say running a Gaussian Blur on a piece 10x10 at 300ppi or larger is a different story. =/

What version of PhotoShop are you using?

MDM

[Anthony]

I used to use Painter for painting more, but for my recent stuff for my new demo reel animations, and for the speed painting, I'm using Photoshop, just because it gives me easy control over the brushes, they're very predictable(I use mostly hard paint brush). It's faster on my system too(dual AMD 1.4, 1GB Ram). I use Painter for drawing, a blank canvas texture and the charcoal tool. I also use Painter for textures for my 3d stuff. In general Painter seems a little slower.

[worthless_meat_sack]

Try turning the brush spacing off. I should run much faster.

My experience is just the opposite, PS being speedy and handling large complex files well, and Painter being glacial.

[Socar MYLES]

Hm...you could try allocating a greater percentage of your system's RAM to Photoshop (in PS's options menu)...but what I would suggest is just not using the smudge tool. It is one of Photoshop's clumsier tools, and has a very distinctive (and unattractive) mark, unless you spend a lot of time with it and render carefully (a nightmare on a slow machine). Using the Paintbrush and Eraser at various opacities, you can get much smoother, more convincing blends, anyway.

[Bg]

I had the same problem (slow smudge), but craig's tip solved it (turning spacing off).

[Nathan Marciniak]

Socar: Actually, it was your Clouds tutorial I was reading that involves the smudge tool, right? And actually clouds were what I was trying to mess with when it occured to me that the Smudge tool has always been slow, regardless of Photoshop version. I had made various blotches of colors and was trying to smush them into cloud patterns in the vein of your tutorial.

Meat Sack: Your solution seems to be the winner. Turn spacing OFF altogether! You know, in the 8 or whatever years I've been using Photoshop, I never really noticed that you can turn spacing OFF. I usually used lower values to get smoother results but never really noticed the little check box. What the hell was I thinking? I'll be damned, you uncheck that and it IS faster! When you turn it OFF it seems that spacing is then based upon VELOCITY and for whatever reason, when I smudge with it OFF I can use decent sized brushes and it redraws in real time, or close to. Wow...You learn something new every day. Thanks everyone!

[ November 05, 2001: Message edited by: Nathan Marciniak ]

[Socar MYLES]

Oops...yeah...guilty as charged. I did recommend using the smudge tool in that tutorial. However, I only meant to use it for the background, to make the large field of colour in the sky less sharp and focused than the foreground (clouds). The clouds themselves were done with just the paintbrush and a few strokes of the Airbrush.

As a general rule, however, I would still advise not using the smudge very much, no matter how fast your computer goes.

[specialbrew]

When I read posts such as those above, I feel almost duty-bound to remind everyone of the wonderful paint app Satori; as it's resolution independent, it can handle brushes of astonishing size and then render to any res you require. Since adopting Satori about two years ago, I've never had to worry about brush performance again...

Check out my site at www.pawprint.demon.co.uk or the main Satori site which you'll find here.

best wishes to all

sb