Adobe Photoshop 7 vs. Corel Painter 8
Well I got a paper in the mail a few days ago about Corel Painter 8. Me being a computer graphics geek was drooling. I noticed the upgrade price was the same as the new version of Adobe Photoshop 7 upgrade(which had been getting mixed reviews).
I've been saving up money (which is very very slow right now lol) to get the upgrade but after reading thru this painter flyer I was very impressed. I decided to do some research on the two for which would be the better buy, and as a result you have a review :P.
Adobe Photoshop 7 Upgrade ~$150
Corel Painter 8 Upgrade ~$150
Adobe Photoshop 7 Full ~610
Corel Painter 8 Full ~$300
Needless to say I don't have money to get both, so I spent 10 hours d-loading the trial version of photoshop and still waiting on the trial version of corel painter LOL (1 out of 8 hours done X_X!).
Defending Champion:
Adobe Phtoshop 7.0
What's all the hype about the new version (that's been out for a few months so not really -that new-.)? Well everyone agrees that the brush system and the spell check are a major plus.
In my testing the brush system rocks!
-brush system
Everything is right at your fingertips. The control panel is on a tab off to the right for easy use. As you adjust your brush you can see a minature preview of what your -new- custom brush is going to look like. The things you can edit are:
shape dynamics
scatter
texture
dual brush
color dynamics
other dynamics
noise
wet edges
airbrush
smoothing
protect texture
and the best for last is you can resize ANY, YES ANY, brush to the exact size you need. WOW IMPRESSIVE!
Other things you can control on your brush settings (most of these are for total use with a wacom tablet) are; control dither, tilt scale, roundness jitter, and minimal roundness.
Tilt function finally! Adobe Photoshop 6 really didn't seem to do alot with tilt but the new version does! Total control!
-Spell Check and the text tool
At first I didn't know where it was but I had heard about it. I checked the help manual and found it very fast. Basically photoshop 7 has some built in language dictionaries. You hightlight and left click the text then go to "check spelling". It will give you a list of possible spellings that you can click and change. People like me need this (I am sooo bad at spelling), it's very nice to have on hand. Unfortunately I'm use to cut and pasting my stuff from word (works now though evil -_-;;) which has already been spell checked...
The text tool did get alot of nice tweeking though. It's alot easier to adjust the text the way you want it. And I don't know if anyone ever noticed those foreign words(oidashi, oikomi, and burasagari) in when you hit the arrow of the text pallet? (I did and when I first got the program I had to look them up to see what they meant ^^;), but those are gone now hehe! There's alot of more text features on there that make adding text alot easier than photoshop 6.
-healing brush and patch tool
This thing seemed to have gotten alot of hype also. I tested it and I don't really care for it. It's like an automatic version of clone tool? Maybe I didn't play with it enough but call me crazy it really acts like the clone tool! They also has something called a patch tool with the healing brush. Basically you make a "patch" of an area (sorta like free hand selecting) and can put various patterns in there. I haven't quite figured out yet why you need this...
-other extra features
There's alot of other cool extra features besides more new brushes (the stares were fun! and the "natural brushes" are starting to act like more natural media WHOO!). I noticed for the vector custom shapes that they had more, and alot more complex. They are fun to play with but some probably are only great for quick "clip art". Though you can do instant styles with all your vectors shapes now! It's alot easier than attempting it in photoshop since ,presto, it's right there.
-filters
I didn't really see any new filters here. I really wanted a pencil sketch filter though :/! I have to go thru a few filters (which I can later make into an action but sometimes it doesn't always work the same per picutre :/. Yes I'm lazy lol.) They did move the poor "liquify" over in the filters now so everyone knows where the hell it is. (seriously some people don't even know it exists, and it's in the "image" section incase you are wondering.) They also moved the "extract" over to the fliters section which was previously in the image sectin as well.
There is something new in the filter sectin though! They have something called "pattern maker". I wasn't too impressed by this...basically you can take a square of anywhere on the picturea and make it an instant pattern. Hmmmm I can do this by using the selection square tool then going to >define pattern. Seemed like a pointless additon to me :/.
Photoshop 7 Downsides:
First thing I noticed is that it was a major memory hog! 6.0 wasn't this bad...and sometimes the brushes when I painted went a bit slow (and this computer packs 512MB of memory!). Also I noticed one of the requirements was a pentium 4 processor. Whoah! Glad I had one then!
Overall it's a cool upgrade but that's it it's just "cool". I don't feel it's worth it's price. The brush system is cool yes and I am in love with the spell check, but some of these new additions are quite useless. I say save your money for next year and wait for version 8! It would probably be very good for the high end techies who do alot of photo editing, but for the average joe like me who does more digital painting it just doesn't cut it.
More to come when I test out Painter 8. Can Photoshop 7 defend it's title :o?
reference: http://www.adobe.com
Check out Corel Painter 8 at http://www.corel.com.
I've been saving up money (which is very very slow right now lol) to get the upgrade but after reading thru this painter flyer I was very impressed. I decided to do some research on the two for which would be the better buy, and as a result you have a review :P.
Adobe Photoshop 7 Upgrade ~$150
Corel Painter 8 Upgrade ~$150
Adobe Photoshop 7 Full ~610
Corel Painter 8 Full ~$300
Needless to say I don't have money to get both, so I spent 10 hours d-loading the trial version of photoshop and still waiting on the trial version of corel painter LOL (1 out of 8 hours done X_X!).
Defending Champion:
Adobe Phtoshop 7.0
What's all the hype about the new version (that's been out for a few months so not really -that new-.)? Well everyone agrees that the brush system and the spell check are a major plus.
In my testing the brush system rocks!
-brush system
Everything is right at your fingertips. The control panel is on a tab off to the right for easy use. As you adjust your brush you can see a minature preview of what your -new- custom brush is going to look like. The things you can edit are:
shape dynamics
scatter
texture
dual brush
color dynamics
other dynamics
noise
wet edges
airbrush
smoothing
protect texture
and the best for last is you can resize ANY, YES ANY, brush to the exact size you need. WOW IMPRESSIVE!
Other things you can control on your brush settings (most of these are for total use with a wacom tablet) are; control dither, tilt scale, roundness jitter, and minimal roundness.
Tilt function finally! Adobe Photoshop 6 really didn't seem to do alot with tilt but the new version does! Total control!
-Spell Check and the text tool
At first I didn't know where it was but I had heard about it. I checked the help manual and found it very fast. Basically photoshop 7 has some built in language dictionaries. You hightlight and left click the text then go to "check spelling". It will give you a list of possible spellings that you can click and change. People like me need this (I am sooo bad at spelling), it's very nice to have on hand. Unfortunately I'm use to cut and pasting my stuff from word (works now though evil -_-;;) which has already been spell checked...
The text tool did get alot of nice tweeking though. It's alot easier to adjust the text the way you want it. And I don't know if anyone ever noticed those foreign words(oidashi, oikomi, and burasagari) in when you hit the arrow of the text pallet? (I did and when I first got the program I had to look them up to see what they meant ^^;), but those are gone now hehe! There's alot of more text features on there that make adding text alot easier than photoshop 6.
-healing brush and patch tool
This thing seemed to have gotten alot of hype also. I tested it and I don't really care for it. It's like an automatic version of clone tool? Maybe I didn't play with it enough but call me crazy it really acts like the clone tool! They also has something called a patch tool with the healing brush. Basically you make a "patch" of an area (sorta like free hand selecting) and can put various patterns in there. I haven't quite figured out yet why you need this...
-other extra features
There's alot of other cool extra features besides more new brushes (the stares were fun! and the "natural brushes" are starting to act like more natural media WHOO!). I noticed for the vector custom shapes that they had more, and alot more complex. They are fun to play with but some probably are only great for quick "clip art". Though you can do instant styles with all your vectors shapes now! It's alot easier than attempting it in photoshop since ,presto, it's right there.
-filters
I didn't really see any new filters here. I really wanted a pencil sketch filter though :/! I have to go thru a few filters (which I can later make into an action but sometimes it doesn't always work the same per picutre :/. Yes I'm lazy lol.) They did move the poor "liquify" over in the filters now so everyone knows where the hell it is. (seriously some people don't even know it exists, and it's in the "image" section incase you are wondering.) They also moved the "extract" over to the fliters section which was previously in the image sectin as well.
There is something new in the filter sectin though! They have something called "pattern maker". I wasn't too impressed by this...basically you can take a square of anywhere on the picturea and make it an instant pattern. Hmmmm I can do this by using the selection square tool then going to >define pattern. Seemed like a pointless additon to me :/.
Photoshop 7 Downsides:
First thing I noticed is that it was a major memory hog! 6.0 wasn't this bad...and sometimes the brushes when I painted went a bit slow (and this computer packs 512MB of memory!). Also I noticed one of the requirements was a pentium 4 processor. Whoah! Glad I had one then!
Overall it's a cool upgrade but that's it it's just "cool". I don't feel it's worth it's price. The brush system is cool yes and I am in love with the spell check, but some of these new additions are quite useless. I say save your money for next year and wait for version 8! It would probably be very good for the high end techies who do alot of photo editing, but for the average joe like me who does more digital painting it just doesn't cut it.
More to come when I test out Painter 8. Can Photoshop 7 defend it's title :o?
reference: http://www.adobe.com
Check out Corel Painter 8 at http://www.corel.com.