Question for Tablet Users

[Misuzu]

Hrm... I sadly don't know this even after owning tablets for over a year now >.>;;...

I was just curious for all your artsy tablet users out there, what kind of software do you use when you want to draw straight into your computer and not traditional pen and paper?

I'm essentially looking for good drawing software that understands pressure levels from the tablet so it draws thicker lines when you press harder down and lighter when you do a sketchy stroke.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated ^^;;...

[frumplstlskn]

Try Open Canvas, Corel Painter, photoshop and alternatively shii-painter + jtablet. There's a lot more but those are the best. Shii-painter is an online java applet that I like to use because it's quick and submittable to oekaki boards. Open Canvas and Painter are somewhat similar though I don't have much experience with Painter. Photoshop is always good. People don't like the way it works because it's not meant for illustrating and there aren't good preset brushes.

[Hime]

Uh, I think most of the programs have pressure sensivities, but well... Of which I know, Open Canvas, Paint Shop Pro (I don't know about the newer versions though) and Photoshop at least. The best out of them is Photoshop of course, but it costs a lot too! I think Open Canvas has a free version, if you don't have much money to spend or just want to try it.

[Misuzu]

Yeah, as frumpstlskn mentioned, my beef with Photoshop for drawing input was that it wasn't meant for that, and its not as smooth of a usage experience. I was looking for something built for inputing with a pen for the sake of drawing ^^;;. Thanks for the suggestions though, I'll try them out.

[Jake]

I honestly don't understand the problem a lot of people have with Photoshop; I use Elements (the cheap cut-down version) on an almost-daily basis and find it fine for sketching in. I guess I've just got used to it. The program certainly has a lot of UI... 'issues'... but I don't find 'aptness for drawing' to be one of them.

Painter is great if you want to reproduce a natural-media look, but not so great if you don't. Barely any of Painter's hundreds of tool variants are anything like Photoshop's 'hard round' brush, for example. The nearest you get is the pen-and-ink tools... I love messing around in Painter, but I've yet to really produce much of any worth in it. It's too much like the original media it mimicks, down to the irritations as well. The only real benefit I have painting in oils in Painter is that I don't have to wait two days for a layer to dry completely, which isn't always a good thing.

OpenCanvas would be my tool of choice, but last time I checked it still totally fails to behave itself with anything remotely unusual in monitor terms; it stretches the tablet mapping (regardless of what you have your tablet drivers set to) across your whole desktop, which in my case is nowhere near the same shape as my tablet's area is. In fact, I not only have a second monitor (which OC stretches the tablet's mapped area across) but if I disable that then my primary monitor is in a portrait format, meaning that the aspect is all wrong. That aside, it's exactly designed for digital drawing and colouring, so it's directed and good at it. It's not good at anything else, but that hardly matters, 'cause that's not what it's for. Although I don't find it really any easier to use than Photoshop, myself.

[frumplstlskn]

...
It doesn't do that with me. Are you using a wacom? Mine keeps perfect proportion and area.

Mine works just like this:
http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs312&d=07081&f=rablet.jpg

I use photoshop for everything imaginable but I like to use open canvas for the drawing and painting. When I hit a snag I can save as a .psd and fix it in photoshop.

[Zarcon]

Open Canvas works fine for me as well.

I use Photoshop for pretty much everything though. Mainly due to the fact that I know every single shortcut by heart and can quickly swap between tools and such without a second thought.

It's not that Photoshop can't do what Open Canvas or Painter can, it's just that by default it's not set up to do what those programs can do. A lot of artists achieve the same look and such that OC and Painter can produce in Photoshop.

As for your question, if it's just doing the sketch and not colouring then pretty much any art/graphic program will do it perfectly.

If you're planning on colouring them then Photoshop can do it all with a bit of work.
OC and Painter can get the soft-style down pretty easily.
Illustrator and Flash can do the cell-shaded style pretty easily.

[Jake]

...
It doesn't do that with me. Are you using a wacom? Mine keeps perfect proportion and area.

Yes - an Intuos 3. And OpenCanvas works fine for me if I set my desktop up so it looks anything like the one you show in your screenshot, but normally it doesn't - it looks like this:

http://www.eviscerate.net/scraps/20070219.jpg

- the black bits are off the top and bottom of my second monitor (the blue area), to the left; the primary monitor is in portrait mode, and the tablet isn't. OpenCanvas ignores what I have in my tablet settings:

http://www.eviscerate.net/scraps/20070219b.jpg

and remaps the entire tablet area to the entire desktop area. It doesn't affect the settings in the tablet dialog, it just affects the functionality of the tablet.

I asked on PortalGraphics' support forum and they acknowledged that it was a known problem with non-4:3/multi-monitor setups, but regretted that they had no plans to ever address it. I check the latest version periodically, but to no avail.

[Recca Phoenix]

Don't know if you're on a Mac...
I use Seashore (like GIMP) when I want to do simple things.
I use Corel Painter 2 when I want to do more complicated stuff.
I also have Photoshop Essentials, which is useful for filtering....

The latter two came with my Wacom tablet, but I still use Seashore more often....

[mrsulu]

Yeah, Photoshop is the jack-of-all-trades. The academic version was nominally cheap, but I needed a fast machine to make it perform on large images. It can kind of do anything, but it takes time to get good at it. If you've ever taken drawing classes with lots of different kinds of media, think how long it took you to switch media, like from pencil to paint, and that's the learning curve.

Going fast on Photoshop for me means using keyboard shortcuts constantly, using the hand tool to manuever around the canvas, and constantly reminding myself that layers are cheap and you can duplicate them if you want to experiment. Oh, and zoom way in most of the time.

ArtRage feels all yummy at the beginning, but pretty soon you're like, damn, I just want control of this, and then you go back to Photoshop.

GIMP is like Photoshop if someone hit it with a hammer and made it slightly stupider and a whole lot harder to use. It does one thing very right, which is it has variably-sized layers, but otherwise I only use it when Photoshop is too far away. GIMP's support of pressure-sensitivity is...suspect, but if you can get it to work you can get the effect you want (large/small based on pressure).

I also really, really like absolute mode rather than relative mode. Thanks, Lemmasoft Forums, for discussing this so I knew out I could set it!

Has anyone tried Alias Sketchbook?

[Jake]

Has anyone tried Alias Sketchbook?

I tried a trial of it briefly a couple of years ago when I first got my Tablet PC - it felt to me just like ArtRage, to be honest. I didn't investigate it further.

[DaFool]

Yeah, Photoshop is the jack-of-all-trades.

Up to now though my company upgraded Flash, Animo, USAnimation, we are still using the beloved Photoshop 7.0. Most of the BG artists can't afford their own personal copies to work on while at thome, so we have no choice but to sneak / pirate our own copies. Most of the skills essentially grew up on them. As an entity, we're pretty loyal to Adobe. Definitely worth the license costs (*compared to *cough* USAnimation)