# Photoshop Vs. Painter



## sixesandsevens (Jan 16, 2008)

I recently effed around on my friends computer, she's always used painter, I've always used photoshop.

I like how you get a pallete and the colors mix and blend organically, but the rest of it is so unintuitive 

like my brush kept running out of paint and it was making scratchy non-awesome linework and I couldn't find the eraser.

some of the examples with like the super textured brushes and stuff look all super stylized and awesome. Stuff like that just seems to occur naturally in painter whereas it's all super deliberate in PS.

I was wondering, if you went through the trouble of really learning painter inside out, if it produces nicer stuff with the same amount of effort.


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## Arshes Nei (Jan 16, 2008)

Painter is more intuitive to me because it follows natural media more.

http://wikivid.com/index.php/Painter 

Photoshop and other digital paint programs don't properly follow the rules of pressure an opacity. 







Other programs "freeze" at a certain opacity until the second stroke is made. Painter does not. I have enough brush control where I can get it to color about the same in both with good pressure control.

http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=95703

What painter is ...is like a big art studio of media, what you realize is that you'll find your favorite media (for me it's digital watercolor on cover mode) and keep a custom palette/workspace and do it that way. Look in the Painter Wiki Vid to find out about creating custom palettes and stuff.

I also end up work in less layers in Painter because...well I'm painting.

Right now I'm trying to learn scripts so I can save the files for playback (like OC) to share with friends.


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## Kloudmutt (Jan 16, 2008)

i use both for pictures, P Shop for fast block color and then painter for smooth shading


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## RezzyWoof (Jan 16, 2008)

Well to be honest I think amost the same...

First of all... Painter is made for painting/drawing with a tablet while Photoshop is made for changing existing images imo... Painter puts emphasis on variety of tools and good and real representation of them when Photoshop cares more about dodging/blending/filtering/layers etc and so on... I had been using Photosop for few years but after I got a tablet I started using Painter. At first it was hard to get to know all important features but I think there is no better program for drawing than Painter, and I have to mention that using tablet with an eraser, like some Wacom tablets, greatly improves comfort of work with Painter...

Of course it's the matter of habit... nobody says that one program is better or worse... Both are excellent but their purposes differ a bit. For example as I finish a particular picture I sometimes use some Photoshop features to improve that... and well that's all...


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## Arshes Nei (Jan 16, 2008)

Yeah should add in to agree with Rezzy about file saving too. Photoshop saves images in more formats and better than Painter. PNG for example is available in Photoshop, it's not in Painter. Both programs should work together though Photoshop doesn't recognize Painter's native rif format, Painter does have the ability to save in PSD.

Some layer modes though don't exactly work in Photoshop when saving in PSD in Painter. If you have a Gel Composite you may need to change the layer mode (multiply) to make it work better.


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