I’ve never been a big fan of Adobe, never liked Photoshop (to me, it was a giant mess of user-unfriendly gui and unintuitive options), but also was considering finally jumping the bridge to start using it in various ways in my art, using Manga Studio if I ever actually decided to draw a comic.
With the recent purchase of my new drawing tablet, I quickly realized my old go-to, Paintshop Pro 7, which I’d been using for years and pretty darn good at it nobody actually realized I wasn’t using Photoshop, wasn’t up to the task of modern drawing tablets. That’s fair, I hadn’t been in drawing form since I left college and stopped modding.
Shortfatotaku recently (rightfully) criticized Adobe for it’s subscription plans and at one point was like he was perfectly fine with his license of the older version until it became obsolete.
Days later Adobe comes out with that absolutely insane announcement previous licenses are void and companies/studios can be sued for using old software and are doubling their subscription prices.
Needless to say I won’t be hopping on the Photoshop bandwagon and it kind of needs to learn a lesson, so I’ve been collecting alternatives, some free, and some not, to Photoshop in the hopes of getting the word out and breaking the monopoly Adobe has on the digital illustration world.
Autodesk Sketchbook went free recently, entirely. I’m currently trying it out.
https://sketchbook.com/
MangaStudio/ClipStudio is the same program but recently had a name change. CD versions are still called Manga Studio. I bought my license a while ago for Manga Studio 4 on sale for $25. It seems to have a learning curve but I was able to do good looking line art with itrecently. It’s geared toward making comics and manga. You can get a trial. There’s several different programs and there’s a 3D modeling studio in the set.
https://www.clipstudio.net/en/dl
GIMP. When on Linux I tend to use GIMP, though I find it almost as irritating to use as Photoshop in a lot of cases. It has some useful features. There’s a version for Windows.
https://www.gimp.org/
Paint.NET is one of my favorites, and a must for modders of Skyrim or similar games. It handles DDS files natively which was a big bonus considering I refused to use Photoshop and everything else I had at the time I was modding required plugins. It’s free. It’s a bit like GIMP but in my opinion, easier to use.
https://www.getpaint.net/
Procreate was recommend by a friend of a friend, though I have not tried it. It seems geared toward computer tablets and things in the Android/Iphone nature. I may have tried it if my Galaxy Note 4 hadn’t been broken by obvious deliberately broken patch.
https://procreate.art/
Drawpile is for multiple people to draw on the same canvas, which sounds like a fun time with friends.
https://drawpile.net/
Affinity is a low cost alternative to Adobe. I know little about it but the price tag seems reasonable. It looks very well put together and the gui looks somewhat close to Paintshop Pro and somewhat userfriendly and I’m downloading the trial for Designer now. (It requires an account ??? and email verification ???? to download a trial since it counts as a “purchase.”)
https://affinity.serif.com/
Full disclosure: I’m not being paid by anyone to list these programs in any way. So yep, these are my actual opinions.
Considering there are a lot of free, really good programs out there to try there’s no reason not to try them or keep them around unless space is an issue. Sometimes I’ll load up a program just for one specific process it handles better than my usual and it’s worth it when doing a lot of drawing.
For the moment I’m going to stick with my good old Copics until I get a new workflow set up.