My wife is a professional artist, and she uses the MS-Paint programme at our PC to pre-design her paintings. However, our program crashed and I want to take the opportunity to shop around for a more sophisticated paint program. Any experience that the teeming millions can share?
If you’re willing to spend the money (I think it runs around $600 bucks now), Adobe Photoshop is truly the industry standard. However, if your wife is usuing this mainly for sketching ideas, such a thing might not be necessary (most of its emphasis is on photo editing and such). A very similar program (almost a clone, really) is Paint Shop Pro, produced by JASC Software. It can do many of the things Photoshop can, and costs signifigantly less. If you guys have access to a Linux system (although there are actually Windows ports now, I believe), you might consider checking out The Gimp. It is another program that is similar to Photoshop (and in some ways, is actually more powerful, especially as far as programming it goes). The benefit: it’s free. If you’re interested in actually simulating real-world painting and drawing materials, you might want to look into Fractal Designs Painter (since renamed to simply “Painter”, I think). The manufacturer slips my mind right now, but basically its geared more towards pure painting, rather than photo editing.
The above are all “paint programs”, in which you deal directly with pixels. If you are looking for something more design-oriented, you might consider checking out either Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand. They are the two major competing vector drawing/illustration packages (both cost a few hundred dollars, but I know that Macromedia has a 30-day trial version of Freehand. Adobe usually doesn’t give out trials, annoyingly.). Check out some of these and see if you find anything that interests you.
The Gimp has been ported to Windows and is an excellent program at a better-than-excellent price.
Excellent program!
The makers Jasc Software, offer a 30 day evaluation version if you’d like to try it out.
Thanks for the help!