iconoclast

OK, but nice anyway.

Yes, of course the Affinity apps support pressure sensitive graphic tablets.

Not easy to depict with my rudimental english. I had something like in Apophysis, Wonderland or Mandelbulber in mind, where you can even change the forms of the fractals fluently with several settings. I'm not an expert in fractals and math, but as far as I know there are apps that are simply fractal explorers, that show certain fractal shapes (on my Linux-Laptop, I have e.G. installed Xaos, which is a fractal explorer), and you only can zoom in and out and change the colors. And there are fractal editors like Apophysis, Mandelbulber... The last ones are more useful, e.G. to create brushes and textures.

Very nice! Are there any opportunities to manipulate the shapes of the fractals?

Not implicitly. At least the pressure sensitivity is a feature that is not always supported, even not by all graphic apps. In some apps it must be activated first in the preferences of the apps. E.G. in GIMP and Inkscape. At least in the past. I'm not sure if you still needs to do it today. But it is easy to do anyway.

Sometimes the tablet distributors offer their tablets in combination with painting apps. E.G. some Wacom tablets come with a version of ArtRage. But you have to be careful, often those are only limited Demo-Versions of the software. A friend of mine purchased a Cintiq that came with a Demo-Version of Z-Brush, which is a very cool and expensive 2D- and 3D-Painting and Modelling-Software. My Cintiq didn't contain any painting software. Only the driver software to adjust the tablet. My old Wacom Bamboo came with some small apps for painting and vector graphic. But they were not really worth talking about..

Rebelle has this cool features to let watercolors drip and bleed. I would like to have something like that. To be honest, I always tried to prevent things like dripping and bleeding (or even visible brush strokes) in analogue painting, and it really drove me mad if my Airbrush sometimes suddenly spitted and created dirty spots on my paintings. But now that I paint digitally, I sometimes miss this dirty opportunities. It's of course not a problem to copy a spot to an image, and I already created some brushes especially for things like that, but it is not the same, because those spots somehow don't feel honest and I always have to change the brush to place aimed spots on the paintings. In my opinion, even digital painting should be as spontaneous, immediate and handmade as possible. E.G. HR Giger used this annoying deficiencies in analogue painting, like spitting Airbrushes, in a genius way as stylistic devices. One thing that still keeps me from giving Rebelle a try (there have been some acceptable special offers in the past) is that the additional content they offer (brushes, canvases...) are so expensive. It gives me the feeling of this goddamn In-App-Sales, that drive you into ruin. And it's not clear to me if you can create your own ones as easy as I use to do it for ArtRage, Affinity Photo and others. Flamepainter, Inspirit and Amberlight look interesting too. But I'm not sure if I would use them very often. By the way, have you ever tried Fractal Generators like Apophysis, Fractron9000, Wonderland or Mandelbulber? They are all free and open source, and I used them in the past to create brushes, canvases and background textures. GIMP has some Fractal Generators in it's "Render"-category too. Really useful to create content.

Maybe, I don't know Corel Painter. Will take a look at it. But it costs about 420 €, as far as I see, while ArtRage costs 40 € at the moment (normally 80 €). I had a CorelDraw Suite many years ago, and I liked it. But it crashed very often. And that is a thing I still often hear about Corel software. As I already said, it is very individual what people like to paint with and how. Even if different people e.G. like to paint with watercolors, they will not do it the same way. So maybe some people like the huge amount of watercolor brushes that e.G. Krita offers (even those that don't really look like watercolors), while I prefer to have one Watercolor brush that can be adjusted to all needs and almost acts like real watercolors do. By the way, Rebelle seems to be very good to. Haven't tested it yet, but it has some very cool features and creates very realistic painting looks. Unfortunately it is expensive too.

You can't test everything with every operating system and every hardware. Software like the apps from Affinity, Adobe and others are too complex to guarantee that there are no bugs in it. Sad but true.

I don't really know. Must be something that can be changed fluently while you are painting. Something in addition to the impact of the pressure sensitivity. I asked someone who tested it a long time ago, and he was not impressed by it. I'm thinking about buying one anyway, but it costs more than 100 €. My old analogue EFBE-Airbrush has double action, that means that you can drag the trigger back and press it down independently. One to manage the air flow, the other one to manage the amount of color emission. This in combination with the distance the airbrush has from the canvas allows you to modify the opacity and thickness of the stroke very subtle. One of these things must be the goal of the wheel. Possibly it is adjustable what you want to use it for. Don't know.

I don't really know, but I think so. As I said, the only tablets I worked with in my life were an Aiptek, a Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch and my Wacom Cintiq 16. The last one is pretty cool. But of course, for more money you get even better tablets. Unfortunately painting is an expensive passion. What I can say is that my Cintiq works pretty good with ArtRage, Affinity Photo and Designer, Krita and GIMP. It also works with Inkscape, but that is not so attractive for me. You can even set different sensitivity presets for each app in the software of the Cintiq.

OK, maybe I didn't notice that point. Yes, that is important, ArtRage is not a tablet, it is software. As I said several posts ago, you need both for painting: a tablet and a good software. In my opinion ArtRage is the best painting app - but it needs a good tablet. And vice versa. Like your computer is nothing without an operating system.

Yes, of course it's software. I already said that, as far as I remember. But you will not be lucky with it if you use it with a mouse, because you will have no pressure sensitivity. And that will not make much sense.

Yes, surprising that I forgot to say, because it is my favorite tool in ArtRage, and I even was an analogue Airbrusher before I started digital painting. The Airbrush in ArtRage is pretty good. As far as I know, Wacom also offers a special Airbrush Stylus, with an Airbrush Wheel - whatever that means. Think it manages the emission of color. Can't say anything reliable about that. ArtRage is a little bit different to other apps. While most apps have e.G. different watercolor brushes for different watercolor effects, ArtRage has one Watercolor Brush, that can be modified with a lot of functions. You can save certain settings, if you like them and want to use them again, so that you get a list of presets, in a separate panel, if you want, that is somehow similar to the way other apps handle their brushes. But the way ArtRage handles brushes is much more sophisticated and handy. In case of the Airbrush, you can e.G. set the brush stroke stepless (0%-100%) from very smooth, clean and soft to grainy. One other important thing in ArtRage is, that you can create Stencils, that are similar to masks in analogue Airbrushing. You can store those stencils in a panel. Stencils are simply images with black and transparent areas. You can easily create them by yourself e.G. in AfPhoto or AfDesigner and export them as PNG, then import them in ArtRage and add them to the Stencil Panel. Stencils can be set to three different modes: the simple Mask Mode, a Guide Mode (the brush stroke will follow the edge of the stencil) and a Ruler Mode (the brush stroke will follow the edge of the stencil, but will be cut a the edge). But there are also normal Selection functions and a Quick Mask too. Another very helpful thing in ArtRage is the Toolbox, a separate file, where you can save all the brush presets, colors, stencils... you used in a certain project. So you can easily load them again, if you need it - even in other projects.

Yes, the Kiwis are cool. Was seriously thinking about emigrating to New Zealand some years ago. But I think I'm too old meanwhile, for an adventure like that.

Your painting should be finished, if this is what you mean. You can't load the painting into Designer while it is still in progress. You can not only link the unfinished work into a document in Designer and then simply update it from time to time. As far as I know, ArtRage's PTG-format isn't supported by any other software than ArtRage anyway. ArtRage is developed by a relative small company in New Zealand (Ambient Design), not really a global player, so the PTG-format has no big importance to the worldwide digital graphic business. Even it is great software.

Yes, as usual you can save your painting in Artrage's own file format (PTG), while you are working on it, and then export it as PNG, JPEG, PSD, TIFF, BMP or GIF. But I wouldn't recommend the GIF. All the exported formats can be imported in Affinity Photo and Designer.

Do you mean the thing with the color management? ArtRage has no color management, that means, it only supports one color profile (sRGB, if I'm not wrong). For printing, you need to convert the colors of your images to CMYK (from the colors of light - RGB - to body colors - CMYK). Depending on the sort of paper, your painting shall be printed on, it needs special CMYK-color-profiles (e.G. different sorts of coated or uncoated paper, glossy...). That's a thing that ArtRage can't do, because it's only a painting app. You need an image editing software like Affinity Photo for this, or, as far as I know, even Krita can do this. Or you keep that to your trusted printer.

Looks very promising. It still doesn't seem to be perfect, if you look at the areas that contain very fine details like hair, as far as I could see. But it will make things much easier.

I can't say anything about the XP-Pen Artist tablet, but it looks very good, as far as I could see. One thing that is not clear to me is the weight of the stylus. The advertisement says, that it is rechargeable, so it seems to contain some sort of accumulator. Wacom styluses are very light weight, because they somehow don't contain anything that must be recharged or so. They are not heavier than an analogue pen or brush. My individual way to get as close as possible to the analogue feeling is to use my Cintiq with ArtRage for painting. ArtRage is presumably the painting app that is closest to analogue techniques. It is not the best for technical illustrations, I think, but great for Watercolors, Oils and Acrylics, Pastels, Pencil drawings and other techniques. But of course even there you have to push buttons and sliders to manipulate the behavior of the brushes and colors. And I personally have problems with touchscreen gestures, so that I still use the keyboard in addition, so that my desktop is pretty full. Wacom offers a compact add-on-device, to replace the keyboard, but it's expensive. And as far as I remember they also offer an add-on to make the tablet wireless. My favorite software for image editing is Affinity Photo, even to prepare my paintings for printing. Artrage has no color management. And Designer for technical illustrations and stuff like that. And Publisher for layouts. That's why I'm here.

Just to put in my two cents... It is not easy to recommend graphic tablets in a few words, because after all, it always depends on the necessities of the user. And the graphics tablet is not the only important thing, because it is only some kind of a very sophisticated mouse. You need a suitable app too, to satisfy your needs. In my case, I want to paint and draw as I did in the analogue world. And it should feel as analogue as possible. My first graphics tablet, I bought about 15 years ago from the well known IT specialist dealer ALDI. Officially it was sold as a Medion tablet, but it was in fact an Aiptek, and unfortunately completely useless. The stylus was thick and heavy as a trunk (because it needed a battery), and it was far from drawing precisely. My second one was a Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch. Simple, but OK. But the Touch functionality was a mess. It worked for me for many years, but it wasn't really like analogue painting, because the painting appeared on the monitor, while I painted on the tablet. That is still a bit peculiar to me. Some time ago I purchased a Wacom Cintiq 16, with display. That is very good. It is of course still not 100% like analogue painting, because e.G. if you want to rotate the paper a bit, as you used to do with analogue paper, this will not work. You can do this, depending on the app you use, in your app. But that is a thing you will have to get used to too. What I want to say: It will never be 100% like analogue painting. But you can come close to it with a good tablet and a good app. And you will even have some opportunities you didn't have in analogue painting. Unfortunately good tablets are expensive. My Cintiq did cost about 470 €. It was a special offer - normally it costs about 700 €. But I'm very satisfied to have it. For less money you can get a Wacom One, that has a display too. But I can't say if it really is recommendable. One important point may be that the canvas of tablets often get scratchy after a while. That was e.G. the case with my Bamboo too. The Cintiq has an etched surface, that is very resilient. I don't know if the Wacom One has that too. I'm afraid it doesn't. Finally it depends on your individual necessities what tablet is the right one. Possibly something like a Wacom Intuos - without display - is sufficient. By the way, one point that might be important for some users is that Wacom also supports Linux and Open Source Software like GIMP, Krita, Inkscape... very well.

Interesting. Must be a relative new option. But does it make sense? JPEG is a file format that uses lossy data-compression. That means, that each time you save a document as a JPEG, it will loose at least a bit of it's quality. Because of that, I would not recommend to save (export) images as JPEGs to work on them further.

Usually each app has it's own file format to save things like guides, selections, layers and so on with it, so that you are able to keep that stuff while you are working on that document. In case of Photoshop this file format is *.psd, in case of GIMP the *.xcf, in case of Affinity Photo the *.afphoto. As far as I know even Photoshop doesn't allow to save guides with file formats like *.jpg, *.png, *.tif, *.gif... All these formats are end-formats - not to save your work while you are working on it. That's, by the way, the reason why there are different functions for "Save" (*afphoto...) and "Export" (*jpg, *png, *tif...).

You could give Darktable a try in the meantime. It's free and open source and not bad, as far as I know.

OK, Sorry, it seems that I confused it with AfPhoto. In AfPhoto, if you change the settings of a brush - even if you only click e.G. the brush size or the flow function in the context bar - the highlighting of the brush/brush preset disappears - because it is no longer the initial brush preset. Brushes and Brush Presets are not clearly separated from each other in Photo - there is no separate access to brushes and brush presets. But in Photo v2 each layer has a memory function that remembers what brushes were used - in one session (if you reopen the document, even this memory will be lost). Designer doesn't seem to have such a memory function anyway, but at least the brush/preset keeps being highlighted if you change the brush size. Could be a case for the "Feedback & Suggestions" section. Would of course be a helpful function.