What's your favorite paint/photo touch-up program?
By xenpen
@xenpen (90)
United States
June 17, 2007 10:55pm CST
So, what is it? Do you like Adobe Photoshop? Corel Painter? Corel Paint Shop Pro? Project Dogwaffle? Open Canvas? Do you like free programs like ArtRage2, Pixia (now updated in English!), Artweaver, or just good old MS Paint? Are there any more I'm missing?
I've tried the lot of these. I like Photoshop for my graphic design projects, but I do dabble in digital painting with it. It's a very good program for that. So is Paint Shop Pro. I find my lines being too jittery in PSP8, so drawing line work in that program is out for me. Painter is lovely; I've been trying to get my hands on a legitimate copy for a long time now. I'm not too interested in Dogwaffle. It looks great, but it can be integrated with Artweaver, which is a great free alternative to Dogwaffle. I remember when ArtRage was in beta. It was a resource hog, but it was really good at emulating real paints and drawing media. Now you have to pay for it if you don't want the free crippled version. :(
I still have Open Canvas 1.1. It's still free if you can find it, and you can use it to network and draw with your friends from far away. It can blend colors when painting with the brushes. Pixia's English updates have been on hiatus for a while until the beginning of this month. The only thing I don't like about Pixia is that the brush strokes don't blend the colors as you're painting. MS Paint, imo, is still really good for pixel art, 2D game graphics, and creating blinking graphics used on cutesy websites. There is the newer MS Paint, Paint.NET. The .Net version doesn't come with Windows by default because it's a joint venture between Microsoft and an University (I forget which, Google it). It's still free, and now it's worthy enough to do quick photo manipulation with.
That's all I have for now. If anyone has a program that I didn't discuss please don't hesitate to add to the list!
4 responses
@MrNiceGuy (4141)
• United States
18 Jun 07
I always use Photoshop. I am very familiar with it and I find it easy to use. I took classes on how to use it (kinda) and have it on my computer. I really think it is one of the most powerful and user friendly so I am pretty comfortable with it. I'm willing to try a couple other options but I don't really think I'm gonna find anything as reliable.
@xenpen (90)
• United States
19 Jun 07
As far as reliability goes, Photoshop is the industry standard for photo manipulation and graphics creation. It's used by illustrators and comic book colorists. It has such a wide range of uses, it's awesome. Unfortunately it's very expensive. I believe you don't have to buy the entire Adobe Creative Suite to get it, but it's still very high in price. I suppose it's justified, but when I use Paint Shop Pro, I think otherwise.
Now I'll say that Paint Shop Pro has plenty of bells and whistles of its own, is user-friendly like Photoshop, can do vector graphics like Photoshop, and can even save in Photoshop's file format. But my biggest complaint (and I'm sure for other graphic designers) is that there is no CMYK mode. You can output files in CMYK, such as saving your work as tiff files in PSP8. PSP11 is much better working with files, and there are workarounds for saving work intended for print in CMYK mode. I just wish they would include it already. The price for the latest Paint Shop Pro now is $99. I don't fear that CMYK capabilities will jack up the price of the software more, so I don't see why they just don't add it. Even if it would make the program cost more, it won't be much, and I could gladly continue purchasing Corel's Paint Shop Pro.
@Kierstal (142)
• United States
20 May 08
For a long time, Adobe Photoshop was my only paint program. Then I discovered Corel Painter, which I dabbled with a little bit but it's still quite overwhelming, because it's soooo customizable.
Right now, I use the newest OpenCanvas, 4.5 Pro. I do still have OC 1.1 which I use to paint directly with friends, but 4.5 is my program of choice for 'solo' projects; It can read and play the event files from every previous version of OC, including the .wpe's from 1.1, it has very similar tools and a LOT of customizeability a la Photoshop. Absolutely worth download and the price. I still use Photoshop to do some touch-ups sometimes, because OC is meant to be a paint program and not a photo editing program, and thus it's included tools are different, but overall I use OC almost exclusively.
@youless (112131)
• Guangzhou, China
18 Jun 07
I like Photoshop. Although it's a very complicated software and I don't know all of its functions. I just know its basic usage and I often deal with my photos by this software.
