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November 10, 2007

Comic drawing app recommendations? (, )

by fluffy at 11:03 AM
So, for the last several years I've been using Photoshop 7 to draw my comics. Unfortunately, I've read that Photoshop 7 doesn't run under OSX 10.5 (which I really want to upgrade to), but I'm not going to spend the $oodles to upgrade to CS3 (the price seems to go up every week... it's $1000 now!). I'm having a hell of a time finding a drawing app which fits my needs without being an expensive high-end photo-editing suite, though. And yes, I've tried a lot of them.

  • ArtRage: Really good for drawing natural-media artwork, but terrible for comics. No workflow management (you can't even load multiple documents at once!), no text tool (you really don't want to see my lettering skills!), its selection and filling tools are a joke (it's possible to take the "natural media" paradigm a bit too far), and generally just not very good for things other than sketches and paintings.
  • GIMP: There are two versions for OSX, the original X11 one and "Seashore," the Cocoa-native port. The X11 version is marginally okay (it's missing a lot of Photoshop's features and its UI is a bit gimpy) but X11.app still has no tablet pressure support, and its text tools have historically been pretty blah (I really like being able to lay out the text directly on the image). Seashore gets pressure a bit better (even though it still can only control brush size) and has a much better UI, but its layer support is pretty questionable, and its text tool is utter shit (it's even worse than GIMP 1.0's, and that one was pretty bad).
  • Pencil: Looks great for simple cel animation, but no still-image workflow, marginal layer support, gimpy flood fills, and so on. Its color workflow is also nowhere near how I like to work on things.
  • TabletDraw: It has by far the best tablet/ink model I've ever seen. Unfortunately, that's all it has. No text tool, no layers, very minimal color support...
  • ZeusDraw: An early beta of an interesting concept, being sold as production-quality software. Not usable. Sort of like just the drawing parts of Flash, without any real layer support.
  • And speaking of which, Flash (specifically Flash MX which I bought several years ago, back when it wasn't SEVEN HUNDRED FREAKING DOLLARS, and of course my copy is .edu so I can't use it to upgrade): Almost a contender. I should give it another try. I remember its sketch tools being a bit weird to work with and it's got a strange UI since it tries to do so many different things (is it a drawing app? animation studio? software IDE?) but for just drawing it seemed pretty okay.
  • Pixelmator: This one was utterly disappointing, as I was very much looking forward to it. No pressure support (!!), its much-vaunted realtime CoreImage compositing effects are gimmicky and not at all useful, and the UI is so glitzy as to be practically incomprehensible.
  • Corel Painter: Admittedly, I last tried version 9, and X is supposedly much better, but its UI was very laggy and obnoxious. I thought the days of an app where you couldn't see the document while you scrolled were long gone... Also, it's way too natural media heavy for my tastes. Sometimes I just want to draw things and not worry about what breed of horse was used to make the brush that's being simulated.
Ones I haven't tried yet:
  • Easydraw: looks like it could be okay, though it doesn't look like the sort of app which would have pressure support, what with being a vector drawing app. Also, subscription-based licensing? What?
  • DrawIt: Looks like it might be okay, but I'm always suspicious of apps which advertise "one simple window" UIs. There's actually a bunch of pretty good reasons to have screen-fixed palettes, especially when you're working on multiple documents at once, and of course if your tool area is limited to your drawing's window, then there are some pretty major tradeoffs you have to make. Also, it doesn't look like there's any way of actually drawing, which makes the name a bit disingenuous.
  • InkScape: Another opensource vector art app. Being GTK-based I'm wary about tablet pressure support, being vector-based I'm wary about tablet support PERIOD. While vector art certainly puts out a clean end result, it really sucks for sketching.

Comments

#10082 11/10/2007 01:10 pm
If you were willing to do Windows and worked for a place that had Photoshop CS2 available, you could use that...
#10083 patface (unregistered) 11/10/2007 01:58 pm
Have you tried Flash? I dunno about text, but seems like it might work for everything else. I don't use it but have a friend who uses it for lots more than animation.
#10084 11/10/2007 02:50 pm Elements?
Have you looked at Photoshop Elements? It's the "home" version of Photoshop and contains all but a few of the really advanced photoshop features. I know a couple of pro-photographers that use it at home and say they've never found a missing feature they really needed.
#10085 11/10/2007 03:52 pm
patface:
Have you tried Flash? I dunno about text, but seems like it might work for everything else. I don't use it but have a friend who uses it for lots more than animation.

I did mention my brief foray into Flash into the long writeup above. I'll probably give it another try, though.

kwsNI:
Photoshop Elements

Yeah, that's another one I've been wanting to try out, but Adobe doesn't have a trial version for Mac, just for Windows. Also apparently Elements also has 10.5 compatibility problems, so it wouldn't really solve the underlying problem here...
#10086 11/10/2007 04:21 pm
ucblockhead:
If you were willing to do Windows and worked for a place that had Photoshop CS2 available, you could use that...
And that solves the "upgrading to OSX 10.5 on my G5" problem how?
#10087 11/10/2007 04:26 pm
Why Photoshop/Flash instead of Freehand/Illustrator?
#10088 11/10/2007 04:36 pm
What an odd dichotomy to select. Photoshop/Flash implies that I use them together as a team or something, when really I just use Photoshop (because it works well for how I work) and am considering Flash because it happens to also provide the same subset of functionality that I care about (sketching and layers, mostly), though it bugs me how Flash (being a vector app) doesn't really have much in the way of pressure control (I like how in Photoshop I can have pressure control opacity or color in addition to the brush size).

I'm sure Freehand and Illustrator are both fine products, but neither of them seem particularly sketch-oriented.

Plus, Freehand is EOL (since it's completely redundant with Illustrator) and Illustrator, like Photoshop, is $hella_expensive.
#10089 11/11/2007 06:29 am
http://www.mininova.org/sub/27
#10090 11/11/2007 10:52 am
I still don't want to pirate Photoshop (it's not like I can't find torrents on my own, too). I'd much rather find something that does what I want (seriously, layered drawing + text, how hard is that?) which doesn't cost a hell of a lot.
#10091 11/11/2007 10:56 am
Okay, Elements 4 runs fine. Knowing that, I'll probably do the "make-your-own-trial" thing and then buy it if it works out for me. (Come to think of it, I might already have a copy somewhere, what with all the Wacom tablets I've bought...)
#10092 11/11/2007 01:39 pm GTK
I'm pretty sure it's some way off primetime, but there is an OS-X native port of GTK that might be worth keeping an eye open for if you would like to GIMP up sometime. The latest Windows version is quite a lot nicer than previous.

I'm not a graphics person though, so YMWillV.
#10093 11/11/2007 01:46 pm
Hm, cool, they're specifically working towards bringing CinePaint over, which is even more admirable than GIMP (since CinePaint is GIMP designed for proper colorspace support and with a decent UI which supports actual professional workflows).
#10101 11/13/2007 03:24 pm
Freehand was a half-assed attempt at an Illustrator clone. I tried to use it once (Freehand MX, IIRC). It was really painful to use; I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, even if it were still available.

All of the GTK-Quartz projects I'm aware of are dead. Currently, if you want the Gimp in OS X, you have to run it under X11, which is kind of broken on 10.5 (protip: reinstall the Tiger version). Even once you've got that working, it's still clunky, and you don't get full tablet support anyway.
#10102 11/13/2007 03:26 pm
Yeah, that's what I've been reading. I know 10.5's X11.app has preliminary XInput, as does XDarwin, but everything I can see about the state of it is just "we should have tablet pressure working soon."

On the other hand, Pixelmator promises pressure support in the next release, so maybe if they can get their act together I'll end up just buying that (and then upgrading to Leopard).