I'm in search of a program for my digital art. I have been using GIMP 2.0 till now, but I was unhappy with it.
A lot of people recommend photoshop, and i agree, it is an excellent program to use but since there are a lot of versions out there i wouldn't know which one to choose :(
I am a beginner so please, help a brudda out with a recommendation :)
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photoshop, corel painter, sketchbook pro. those are all good, photoshop the version doesnt matter that much although in cs5 (i think since this version maybe before) and onwards you can press R and rotate the canvas( especially useful for line drawing and not having to paint with your hand in a weird position). There's manga studio to, but I havent used it.
They all also have trial versions of the full software you can try out to see what you feel most comfortable with.
There are free digital painting softwares such as mypaint which is a good free alternative to.
It's all done to personal preference but I think corel painter and sketchbook pro try to replicate traditional media a lot more than photoshop does. Not that it cant but It's probably easier in those softwares.
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I predominantly use open source software as a matter of principle. (Down with the Capitalist Pigs! :P) though there is no denying that PS is really good software.
I have used GIMP for almost 3 years exclusively. I found it to be a fine program, even exceeding photoshop in functionality. I never really was able to justify the price tag of moving to PS once I got comfortable with GIMP. I never had issues with the interface or using it that quite a few people seem to complain about. Granted there was a little bit of trial and error in learning how to configure it to work with me rather than against me, but it wasn't so hard.
Another free variant I have more or less transitioned to this year from Gimp, is Krita. It is more like PS than GIMP and has better transform tools, perspective and alpha/layering functionality than gimp (the only thing I missed in Gimp)
The brush engine in Krita is also very powerful and there are some awesome presets ready made. There are some unique brush presets in Krita that you won't find in any other program so far that I have tested and it really convinced me to switch. Definitely worth a trial run before you head down the lifetime of rape alleyway. :)
My Paint (also free) has a simple user friendly interface and an amazing brush engine that really does well with mimicing traditional media, but it sucks with layer handling, so basically I see it as a paint/sketch tool more than my main workhorse program.
Heard good things about Manga Studio and for 40 bucks (around?) it is still much better than being continually raped by PS and Creative Cloud fees.
Keep in mind that if you end up working in a studio at some point, you will need to get familiar with PS, but having said that so many of the tools and things are common across programs, I haven't really found much issues jumping around between any of them if needed.
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Another good software is Paint tool Sai.
It relatively cheap, it has a nice simple interface.Almost anything you need and it has got imo the best vector based linework wokflow ever.Very simple and easy to use.
