I just bought a drawing pad, but I still need a more dedicated software, paint[dot]net works good for pixel art and many other stuff I do on my free time, but it lacks of some features.

I have some choices in mind, but I would prefer to know which software has better or more useful tools, or if it has the chances to get custom stuff.

I don't have much experience on my own but many artists are using Photoshop to draw.

There are quite a few you could check out, though I'd highly recommend pursuing the cheaper options before settling on something for photoshop. Art Rage, Manga Stuido (I think it also goes by Clip Studio or somesuch now, too), Paint Tool Sai, and Corel Painter are all fairly inexpensive, especially compared to something like Photoshop. I use Manga Studio for the bulk of my work, only going into photoshop to do more complex transformation and level/color adjustments. Sai and Manga Studio both have built-in stabilization options, so if you happen to be interested in lineart-based work those would be the two I would suggest checking out first. Painter's reputation lies in reproducing natural media, but if that doesn't matter as much to you, you can have a look at the other options, as well. Photoshop is rather bloated, since it's software that many digital artists have repurposed for painting, rather than having painting as its specific function. It has a great many features that you may very well find yourself not using, and that can have a marked effect on both the learning curve and the amount of time it takes you to get a handle on how things work within the software.

TheGreatWolfgang said:
I don't have much experience on my own but many artists are using Photoshop to draw.

Adobe Photoshop is for picture editing , adobe illustrator is for illustrations. illustrator is better to use if your going to be making art, but if your the type of person who edits nudes into video gsme / movie characters photoshop is the way to go

Misappropriated said:
Painter's reputation lies in reproducing natural media, but if that doesn't matter as much to you, you can have a look at the other options, as well. Photoshop is rather bloated, since it's software that many digital artists have repurposed for painting, rather than having painting as its specific function. It has a great many features that you may very well find yourself not using, and that can have a marked effect on both the learning curve and the amount of time it takes you to get a handle on how things work within the software.

Well the thing is that I actually used Photoshop to the degree I can say I have an intermediate knowledge of the features, indeed I think that photoshop has a lot of stuff I wouldn't use, at least not for the stuff would do.
I want to test both Manga Studio and Paint Tool Sai, I do have access to a full copy of Manga Studio 4, the only thing thing I can say I don't like much of it is the lack of some coloring tools I use on regular basis.
However, I want to try Sai because I think it has more coloring features than the others, maybe not as photoshop, but I would be using them all.

i recommend paint tool sai because it has stabilizer (which allows you to draw smooth lines really easily) and it has transparent brush (its like eraser tool but it has the texture and settings of the currently selected brush)

Mutisija said:
i recommend paint tool sai because it has stabilizer (which allows you to draw smooth lines really easily) and it has transparent brush (its like eraser tool but it has the texture and settings of the currently selected brush)

Manga Studio 5 has this feature as well, and I didn't realize how useful it would be until I started using it on a regular basis. It's quite handy! Between the two of them, Manga Studio has more comics-related functionality, but it and SAI have a similar paint system, at least on the surface.

And I suppose I should mention that most, if not all, of the software we've mentioned will have third-party brushes available for you to use, which can really change the look and feel of your work.

• Krita : Free and opensource.
• Explicitly designed for creating art
• Has a pretty wide range of tools including cage-transform, 'multibrush' (draws symmetrically, with 2-6 divisions).
• Extremely powerful brush engine (enough so that it has 'sub-engines' aka brush types) and many, many prepackaged brushes.
• One of the primary tools used by David Revoy , a professional illustrator.
• Works best with Wacoms, but has some support for other tablet brands.
• Very quick to use, but I don't like the UI quite as much as MyPaint.
• MyPaint : Also free and opensource.
• Dedicated painting/drawing app. Pretty narrowly focused -- you will need something else, like GIMP, to handle things like chopping your drawing up and stretching the parts to change proportions, etc.
• Many brushes emulate natural media quite well, but MyPaint, unlike eg. Painter, isn't trying to do that, it's trying to explore -digital- painting (as opposed to 'digital emulation of traditional painting', which is what Painter seems to be about)
• Within it's domain of painting and drawing, the most fun and powerful program I've used.
• Has the best brushes full stop IMO -- the only criticism of the brush engine I'd make is that it doesn't support bitmap brushes. Very smooth and fluid feeling, though there is naturally some slowdown if you're using ludicrously huge brushes ;)
• As with Krita, there are lots of brushes prepackaged, and many more available freely on the internet .
• Makes it pretty easy to make your own brushes or customize the ones you have. The price of customizing brushes is spending time learning how the (many) various parameters interact. There are some tutorials about this subject.
• Very usable in fullscreen with no dockables showing, which is a huge plus for me.
• Erasing is a toggle, not a separate tool. This enables me to work very fast if I want to reshape something -- I can draw/erase/draw/erase/draw/erase strokes one after another in the space of a few seconds. I use this a LOT, it makes painting really fast for certain things.
• As long as we're talking about stroke stabilization, yeah, MyPaint has that ('Slow position tracking' parameter) and also the opposites ("Tracking noise", which makes the line more or less jagged, "Jitter", which perturbs individual dabs -> spraypaint/pointillism effect, and "Offset by speed", which offsets the actual plotted line according to how fast the stylus is travelling. All useful for different stylistic effects.)
• Paints in 15bits/channel, meaning airbrushing and other subtle buildup effects are far more reliable than programs which only use the typical 8bits/channel (128x less precise)
• I wouldn't recommend GIMP for painting, but it is excellent for editing (extending well beyond the functionality found in Paint.net), particularly with G'MIC (detailed below) installed. The GIMP_GAP plugin suite you can install is useful for animating/moving .. well, video-editing sort of stuff generally, but it's kind of hard to find a download for Windows.

Independently of the above, check out:

• G'MIC . Free and opensource. G'MIC is a filter-system, it collects many filters and provides a framework for defining more. There are two particular filters that, by themselves, make it worth it to bother installing.
• One is Interactive Colorization, which David Revoy explains in this article (basically a way of doing high quality flatting very, very fast.). Click in a few key places with the colors you want to fill that area, it does the rest.
• The other is Anisotropic smoothing (and all its variants, like Dream smoothing), which 'regularizes' the image ( a kind of smoothing that conforms to contours and doesn't blur significantly). I use that whenever I feel a drawing is too noisy, which is often the case if I've scanned a traditional drawing; If I've made a selection, I'll often use this to smooth the selection mask out to get the most neat, well antialiased edges I can before applying whatever change I wanted to make.
• The easiest way to use GMIC is through the gmic_gimp plugin (which requires GIMP, naturally). More recent versions of Krita also have GMIC support, but the GIMP plugin is the most mature.

On the subject of pixel art, consider trying either GrafX2 (free) or Cosmigo Pro Motion (Free trial, US$78 for full version) out; both have many pixel-art-specific tools that you won't find in a more generic paint program like paint.net.

Edit: For figure reference, also consider using MakeHuman , along with Blender to pose the generated models.

I'm a photoshop user myself. Learned it up to an intermediate level mostly through self teaching, then took it up a step after many classes on it in college. I actually have my adobe photoshop certification, so that's fun. But even though I might technically be a "professional photoshoper" lol, it's honestly not the best drawing/painting program on the market. If you want a program that's very good at drawing and painting and photo manipulation and photo correction and etc etc etc, then photoshop is great if you know how to use it and can afford it. However, if you want a program that's great at just drawing and painting, some of the aforementioned software is probably actually better. Even if only because it focuses on only art creation, and has a lower price tag. I've been testing some of the programs mentioned above, and am trying to wean myself off of photoshop and onto one of them, just haven't picked one yet.

However, if you're like myself and miss having those sweet, sweet color tools, filters, photo masks, and other photoshop shenanigans at your disposal while using different programs, but don't want to buy Photoshop (can't blame ya), then GIMP is a very good and free alternative. The UI is a little weird, especially since it's so very different from photoshop, but it does almost everything photoshop does nearly as well. For free! I'd highly suggest you pick it up if you want a photoshop alternative.

savageorange said:

• MyPaint : Also free and opensource. Dedicated painting/drawing app...

I could be wrong, but I think that url should be this: http://mypaint.intilinux.com/

The rest that you said is fascinating though, and I'm going to have to experiment with some of the programs mentioned on this thread. I'd never heard of half of them before now.

Tokaido said:
However, if you're like myself and miss having those sweet, sweet color tools, filters, photo masks, and other photoshop shenanigans at your disposal while using different programs, but don't want to buy Photoshop (can't blame ya), then GIMP is a very good and free alternative. The UI is a little weird, especially since it's so very different from photoshop, but it does almost everything photoshop does nearly as well. For free! I'd highly suggest you pick it up if you want a photoshop alternative.

Also, there's GIMPshop, which is basically the GIMP with an interface arranged to look like Photoshop.

Clawstripe said:
Also, there's GIMPshop, which is basically the GIMP with an interface arranged to look like Photoshop.

Sadly, last I checked it was no longer supported by the dev, and doesn't run with current versions of GIMP. Also, most easily found versions come fill with bloat/maleware. Easily avoided with some good searching, but still a huge annoyance.

furrypickle said:
I could be wrong, but I think that url should be this: http://mypaint.intilinux.com/

Wow. The perils of mentally rewriting http into https.

(http://mypaint.info is a redirect to http://mypaint.intilinux.com/ , but https://mypaint.info is just broken.)

Tokaido said:
Sadly, last I checked it was no longer supported by the dev

This is a critique than can also be labelled against Sai at this point, unfortunately. Seems like some pretty awesome options have been suggested though, and some of them were rather foreign to me. o.o

You guys have really given me a lot of options. I might have to test all to see which fits me better.

You could also poke about here and see if anything appeals.