What art programs do you use?
Don Anderson Jr.
Surveyor
Just for a little change of pace, what art programs do you use?
I love Paint.net for really quick edits, crops and screenshots.
For artwork I use Krita.
I have used inkscape a ton, and this is my weapon of choice if I do work in vector graphics. (I used to use Corel ten years ago, but really don't like the company anymore.)
Tried GIMP, but I really didn't grasp it at all.
So what programs do you like to work with to help in your CC3+ work?
Comments
I use the Affinity suite. mostly for Publisher.
I have a very large toolbox of apps for making assets for CC3.
The apps I have are either free or one time only purchases with lifetime ownership.
The main free ones are: GIMP, Blender, Wilbur and Krita
The main purchased ones are: CC3, FT3, Affinity Designer, Sketchup Pro (that's the 2019 lifetime licence version), Genetica (sadly now abandonware), and Corel Paintshop Pro 2019 (which sounds impressive, but I only got it so I could reduce large pngs to 64-bit colour and effectively halve the file size - for a specific commission).
Things I've used only once include: Gaea, Artrage, Inkscape (which I don't recommend), and Rebel.
...
Most of everything I make for Profantasy is made using Affinity Designer, Blender, and Genetica.
I mainly use Paint Shop Pro 7.04 (From 2001, before Corel acquired the company)
And a bit of Affinity now and then.
And of course ImageMagik for that sweet command line processing.
I have never heard of Affinity - what is publisher?
Have tried Blender a while ago. So interesting that you don't recommend Inkscape Sue. There are some bugs for sure, but I didn't find it so bad. Heck just yesterday I had some bugs with Krita that really made me beyond mad.
Yea I love free programs. I really got turned off of Corel and Adobe type companies back in the day, for extorsionitic pricing policies. I recall some programs from some of those companies to be in the hundreds of dollars in the late 90's.
Affinity used to be a British app, but Remy tells me it's been bought out by an Australian company. I won't post a link here because it's paid-for software, but you will find it easily enough by search engine. When you do find it, compare the cost of that one time purchase with a lifetime of paying for PS.
A lot of people regard it as an affordable alternative to PS. I wouldn't know for sure. By the time I could afford to buy PS it was just going rental, so I never bothered with it.
I never got on with Inkscape because it's outlandishly complicated and clunky compared to Affinity.
I picked up the Affinity suite (on Sue's recommendation) and have never looked back. Great quality/value.
Affinity has three programs:
Affinity Photo - which is close to Photoshop or GIMP
Affinity Designer - which is a vector graphics drawing tool
Affinity Publisher - which is like InDesign. That is a program designed to layout books for printing or PDFs.
They used to be like $50 each, now they are $70. In the US, they have a Black Friday/Xmas sales that plummet the cost by 50% or more.
Affinity Designer does most things that Photo can do. It has a bitmap mode. I have Photo as well, but only use it once in a blue moon for warping bitmap images.
To get comparable functionality from PS I would have to pay that much every month for as long as I continue being an artist.
Slightly tangential, I also use 1NOTE, because you can put an image in, set it as background, then sync it to my tablet and take notes over the top of it with the pen.
7.04!?! That's loyalty!
(I tried to trim the quote, but it's not working on Android Chrome.)
@Kertis Henderson wrote:
7.04!?! That's loyalty!
It does almost everything I need to, and it is blazing fast. With most modern image editors, I am sitting around waiting for those things to start, even on a pretty beefy machine. PSP7 just appear on my screen instantly.
(Related, my image browser/viewer is ACDSee 2.42 from 1999. Most of my software is not this old, but somehow I am really pleased with the old image editing/viewing stuff.)
GIMP's the only thing I've tried in this line, and haven't used that in a very long time (to create some symbols for use in the Atlas on this map there, as described in the opening post of this Forum topic from May '21). It has a learning curve worse than CC3+'s now (or so I gather from some who've battled with the newer versions of the program). I've only used the older versions, which were easier to learn - sort of...
I don't think GIMP is that bad, but the way each of us feels about various apps is all very relative on a personal level. I was pretty good with Corel Suite before I came onto the mapping scene, so everything else seemed quite simple to me - including CC.
All except Inkscape!
I've not used GIMP in a long while, so my thoughts on its later versions are likely biased by the problems others have had with it - some of which may be down to user error, of course!
I'd only used MS Publisher (and a few earlier similar programs) for creating maps, graphs and diagrams prior to CC, and I'm not sure many would think of those as really art programs as such 😁.
My personal experiences are more with desktop publishing, not design. Used to be reasonably proficient with things like PageMaker and Quark and MS Publisher — none of which is useful here. I used the Corel suite in the 90s but haven’t owned it in decades. To create the circular symbols for my Modern Journeys map, I did download GIMP and learned just enough of it to be able to crop an image to a circle. But for quite a lot of stuff, I have used (of all things)…PowerPoint!
For me it's Blender and GIMP. I've done some 3D renders with Blender, and I love it. It gets complaints about the UI, but after watching a video or two, it's great, just like CC3. Same with GIMP. I've used them all, and once I got used to the UI, I can't complain.
Take care.
I used to use Adobe CS4, my son got it for when he was doing a graphic design course. But when I upgraded my Mac it was incompatible...and I hate subscriptions (the annual is an exception!). That's why ended p getting the Affinity suite.