All that said, Krita can be a bit slow at times, and won't be as good on battery life as the likes of Artrage, Sketchbook Pro, or Manga Studio. Krita has some excellent default brushes, my favorite of which is the simple Wet Round Brush, which gives fantastic control over edgework, something I find to be quite tedious in digital work as compared to traditional oils. It has been very stable for me, and although the interface is a bit cumbersome, it's quite easy to forgo using it thanks to the mini popup palette that can be assigned 10 different brushes, and also contains a color wheel with saturation/value triangle.
Krita 2.83: I must admit, much to the amusement of my wallet, that the open source Krita Desktop is currently my favorite application.
That said, certain particle brushes have caused it to crash, it's not the quickest of programs, and I find the interface to be a bit cumbersome. New particle brushes have some great uses for concept sketching, general doodling, and very specific purposes. The best for real-media imitation in everything but impasto (which I find to be cumbersome in Painter). Painter 2015: For me, a mixed bag of love and hate. While the brush engine is great, and it does have the ability to do more naturalistic painting, the natural media emulation is not quite as good as the likes of Artrage or Painter, at least so far as out-of-the-box brushes are concerned. Has a good brush engine, great tablet interface with recognized gesture support, and seems to handle palm rejection better than other programs for some strange reason (Maybe in my head?). The smoothing here brings it closer to feeling like a real pencil than any other program I've tried. Manga/Clip Studio 5: Simply the best program I've used for pencil/ink work. If you're not interested in a more real-paint type of mixing, but want smoothing on your brushes, you can get Lazy Nezumi Pro to add smoothing to photoshop, which works quite well (Though still not as well as the smoothing present in Clip studio 5) While it does have the mixer brushes which do this to some extent, they're far too slow for me to use.
Photoshop: Great all-arounder, but lacking in the area of real-media emulation and paint mixing. It's also only $50 on Steam (last I checked). Another great thing Artrage has is selection/masking brushes and stencils. If you're willing to spend the time to learn it, it even has a nice custom brush engine similar to that of photoshop, the downside being that it takes a bit more work to get a brush working (These more customized brushes are called stickers, which can be turned into custom brushes via sticker sprays). Easy interface for tablets, particularly with the Artrage Toolbar that someone somewhere on the internet created. Has the best and easiest to use impasto effect I've found yet. They all have benefits in one way or another.Īrtrage: Great for more traditional style paintings. Having just made the switch to digital, I've spent the last month and a half trying out (nearly) every single digital painting program I could get my hands on. It really depends on what you want to get out of your digital painting.