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July 24, 2010

Reevaluating drawing apps again (, , , )

by fluffy at 9:42 PM
Since I'm in a break between comics, and I've been completely redoing my MacBook because of upgrading its hard drive and adding a dedicated NAS to my network and so on, I decided to go ahead and upgrade to Photoshop CS5. Which is, frankly, terrible in how slow and laggy it is.

I've owned a copy of Pixelmator for years, and they've improved it immensely over that time, but there are still a few glaring deficiencies in the UI. They've finally gotten the brushes to work really well, but now I'm finding that all tools are set to use the same brush all the time - including the eraser, which is always sized exactly the same as the brush tool. Which makes drawing much more of a chore than it should be.

So, once again I'm looking at alternate drawing apps. I have VectorDesigner as well, but vector drawing has never really agreed with me for a number of reasons (usually tablet pressure support is rudimentary or even nonexistent, and I also like being able to screw around with things at the raster level which I find to be much more flexible, even with its "inaccuracy"). This also pretty much rules out Inkscape, although I might give it a try again anyway.

GIMP on OSX is of course a joke (the various native efforts are in perpetually primitive states, and the X11 version doesn't support tablet pressure since X11 on OSX doesn't support much of XInput).

Basically, I need a drawing app with the following features:

  • Runs on OSX
  • A drawing/sketching-friendly workflow
  • Tablet support (pressure, subpixel brush positioning)
  • Layers (ideally with groups, and group blend modes)
  • Magic wand selection and filling, as well as fast selection refinement (expand and contract at least, ideally with fast keyboard access)
  • Is affordable and I can justify paying for it with the understanding that I'm an amateur who likes drawing for fun and doesn't intend to ever make money on this
There's a lot of free/cheap drawing apps out there, but most of them have critical flaws that make them pretty much not worth working with. It seems like there's a whole bunch of niche apps which work pretty well for their niche, and then Photoshop is what everyone else turns to, ignoring that it's slow, bloated, and massively overpriced for just a drawing app...

Comments

#13245 07/24/2010 11:58 pm
Looks like the winner might actually be Photoshop Elements - the last time I looked into this stuff, the Mac version was horribly outdated and had no demo, but Adobe has addressed both issues, and it looks like PSE actually includes most of the stuff in full PS that I use. So we'll see! I'm perfectly happy to pay $100 for PSE (or actually $60 after rebate on Amazon) for something that does what I need.

It also turns out that XQuartz adds Wacom support to X11 on OSX, so that and Inkscape might work well for some things too. (Or that and GIMP if GIMP ever becomes a reasonable drawing app again, which I find highly unlikely.)
#13246 07/25/2010 12:36 am
Unfortunately, Photoshop Elements can READ all my Photoshop files, but if I try to edit any of the groups or layers with effects, it wants to flatten those into simple layers, meaning that all my legacy files are screwed. So I have to have CS4 installed to work with my old stuff anyway, so I'd might as well stick with what works.

For the sake of transitioning towards something more legitimate I will of course continue to evaluate Inkscape and Pixelmator (and even GIMP/OSX) as they evolve.
#13247 07/25/2010 01:14 am
Inkscape:Illustrator :: GIMP:Photoshop

Nice try, but on the completely wrong path, and I'm amazed people can get anything good done with it.
#13250 07/25/2010 02:06 pm
Aside: Let us know how the Synology works out. I've considered getting one in the past, but couldn't really bring myself to get one without a good sense of how well it worked.
#13251 07/25/2010 02:30 pm
I've Bern meaning to write a review for a while actually. I like it. It's a little rough as an AFP server (mostly because Finder gets a bit confused with permissions and case-sensitivity, especially when trying to copy a large deeply-nested folder structure around), but everything else works great so far.

I love its built-in torrent and dlna servers in particular.