Paintstormstudio.com

First of all I'd like to thank the developers for such simple yet powerful product for a reasonable price. I probably wouldn't buy it yet for hundreds, but at this point $20 is just OK.

I'm not that much of a "forum guy", but I just want to share my thoughts with the community. Hope it'll help to make this product even better (which I really interested in). This is my personal opinion based on more than 20 years span career in digital painting and CGI.

There are three main competitors for me: Photoshop (surprize!), Clip Studio Paint and now Paintstorm, which I'm really impressed with. I'm not mentioning Painter, because with all the rich features it has, personally I don't see any practical use of it. Whatever you do there's always something better than Painter. It's like entertainment for the sake of entertainment. Also there are number of dedicated drawing platforms such as Autodesk Sketchbook, but I think many agree that they are not suitable for serious painting. Krita is good, but not very useful really. It is like any other free software, wants to make it all and in the end does nothing properly. SAI is basically the same as CSP with less features so we better discuss it another time.

Photoshop is unbeatable because of its enormous and well balanced tool set. But let's admit that its brush engine is outdated by decades. Some artists can achieve great results using it, but all in all it's really a pain, everyone knows it. We can't even properly bind the brush size to the pen tilt in the year 2018, this is terrorism.

CSP is the best then it comes to painting and it has an impressive set of supporting tools, but also it is very strangely organized in some areas and sometimes this can become a bottleneck. Anyways it's a dedicated manga software and this fact influences overall workflow in a way that other workflows may become less convenient. I mean overcomplicated "materials" system, almost unusable 3D features and so on. And it can be laggy for some workflows. I work with high resolutions and have a problem with that in CSP despite using top hardware.

Now Paintstorm. Obviously it's not a mature and polished software yet. But it does the job, that's the point. I've spent a few days making brushes and I got a result that I wanted for a long time but couldn't have it with any other software (and believe me, I tried A LOT). I've been looking for an ideal painting software for a long time, and surprisingly this app appears to have the most capable brush engine out there. A couple of years of adding features and balancing things can make it a market leader. It has a very solid base already. Actually there's not much what it needs to really shine.

After getting familiar with it for some time, I've made a list of what I personally want to see in this program. Of course there's a lot of other things to do, but these are my personal priorities for the smooth workflow that isn't there yet.

Small improvements which probably won't require much effort to implement but make overall experience much better:

• Brush lock. Absolutely needed. Now I need to "load default brush" to return to my "ideal" settings every time after I change them. There must be an option to do it automatically then switching to/from another brush or tool.
• Option to keep brush size relative to screen size instead of canvas size. In this mode you can just zoom in/out without resizing the brush. One action instead of two. It is a very handy option in CSP.
• 1000px brush size limit seems strange. Is there a strong reason for that? If yes, it's OK, but otherwise I want more.
• Controller for texture size or ability to bind it to brush size. It's not a "natural" behaviour, but who cares. Maybe even texture rotation controller, but it's not that necessary. For my personal workflow this feature is very important, thought I haven't seen it implemented anywhere. Currently I have to use workarounds to get the desirable effect.
• Built-in controls (curves, ideally) to tweak texture's brightness/contrast, like in Photoshop. There is "tex. contrast" slider, but it seems not to be able to make contrast stronger. Maybe I just got it wrong, but couldn't make it work in a desirable way.
• Different folders should be remembered when saving workfiles and brushes (or other presets). Every time I need to save a brush to disk, I find myself in a directory where I last saved my work which is very far from where I store my brushes. And vice versa. It takes a lot of time to navigate if you do it frequently. CSP has this feature.
• More freedom in managing graphs. I'd like to be able to move, add, delete folders and individual graphs. Ideally in the small graph window itself (in bush settings), not only in the separate panel.
• Option to snap to round values when moving sliders (ideally to ones, tens and/or hundreds). Who and why would want to set values to, let's say, 10.1 instead of just 10? Also it would be simply more readable after that.
• Color picking action (I use right click for that) must automatically mean switching from eraser mode (if active) to normal painting mode. Obviously if you pick color, you don't want to erase anymore. I'm switching to eraser mode very frequently by a hotkey, and currently I have to switch back first and then pick color by another click. Again two actions instead of one, not good.
• Ability to *temporarily* switch to any (or some) other tool by press-holding an *editable* hotkey (i.e. in CSP while using brush tool I can press-hold Shift to draw a line or a guide, then release and go back to brush). Saves tons of time. There is such action for straight lines but it looks very limited.
• Duplicated brush preset must retain the name of the brush being duplicated with some suffix until edited.

Relatively large features which are not necessarily needed right now, but very welcome:

• Adjustment layers. Color correction filter is great, but adjustment layers are essential. IDK how hard it is to provide compatibility of those layers with Photoshop, but it would be really great.
• Dedicated tool for drawing various customisable types of lines. Including curved lines. Again, in CSP you can invoke this tool by press-holding a hotkey while drawing (as well as curved or linear rulers) and instantly return back to drawing. Just one (one) press of a button. Currently the Shift-click action doesn't seem to work properly with the brushes that have low initial opacity/pressure setup and has very limited functionality compared to CSP.
• A tool similar to Photoshop's puppet warp would be super cool, but don't know how hard it will be to implement, so it's more like a long-term wish.
• Simple pop-up color wheel under the cursor, like in PS. Krita's giant pop-up thing is terrible though, don't make it like this please.

Again, this is personal opinion. I'm aware that for many users these features may be irrelevant, but hope it'll help somehow. And thanks for reading this.

Евгений, спасибо за такой детальный анализ. Я записал в to-do лист большинство Ваших пожеланий (которых еще не было)
Некоторые комментарии:

1000px brush size limit seems strange. Is there a strong reason for that? If yes, it's OK, but otherwise I want more.

проблема в видеопамяти, Пэинтсторм имеет несколько другой графический движок отличающийся от других программ, можно сделать больше кисть, но это сильно нагрузит видеопамять и старые видеокарты могут начать лагать. Скорее это надо делать опционально, чтобы где-то можно было включить. Так или иначе это многие требуют, как-нибудь руки дойдут, сделаем.

Option to snap to round values when moving sliders (ideally to ones, tens and/or hundreds). Who and why would want to set values to, let's say, 10.1 instead of just 10? Also it would be simply more readable after that.

Если удерживать ctrl двигая слайдер то как раз такая привязка и будет. Если shift - то слайдер будет двигаться медленней.

Dedicated tool for drawing various customisable types of lines. Including curved lines. Again, in CSP you can invoke this tool by press-holding a hotkey while drawing (as well as curved or linear rulers) and instantly return back to drawing. Just one (one) press of a button. Currently the Shift-click action doesn't seem to work properly with the brushes that have low initial opacity/pressure setup and has very limited functionality compared to CSP.

На счет кривых - надо думать, сейчас в пжинтсторме только линии и элипс руллеры. Но если включить линии руллеров, то удерживая шифт можно мгновенно задать направление прямой и рисовать по ней уже с нужным нажатием - это очень удобно, так же можно использовать хоткей на быстрое переключение между историями направляющих - ведь чаще всего нужных направлений не больше 5-6 (hotkles: Guides->fast selection of ruller states)

Simple pop-up color wheel under the cursor,

Можно перетащить колорпикер на custom 1 окно и вызывать это окно горячей клавишей - удобно, так ка квокруг колопикера можно еще и любимые кисти раскидать или слайдеры

zamenabatareek wrote:

• Brush lock. Absolutely needed. Now I need to "load default brush" to return to my "ideal" settings every time after I change them. There must be an option to do it automatically then switching to/from another brush or tool.

This exists. It's called "Save as default brush". That locks in the brush settings. It will overwrite whatever it was before so you want to create new brushes.

HeroicNate wrote: This exists. It's called "Save as default brush". That locks in the brush settings. It will overwrite whatever it was before so you want to create new brushes.

It saves the settings, but you have to load it manually. CSP has both that and the lock feature. What I mean by "locking" is the ability to automatically discard any changes made to the brush when you switch to another brush and back. Using that toggle you can either keep the changes you've made (usually the size) or discard them without additional actions simply by changing brushes as usual. In CSP I prefer to have this toggle off while tweaking and testing the brush, then turn it on and never worry about loading it too frequently.

На счет кривых - надо думать, сейчас в пжинтсторме только линии и элипс руллеры. Но если включить линии руллеров, то удерживая шифт можно мгновенно задать направление прямой и рисовать по ней уже с нужным нажатием - это очень удобно, так же можно использовать хоткей на быстрое переключение между историями направляющих - ведь чаще всего нужных направлений не больше 5-6 (hotkles: Guides->fast selection of ruller states)

Да, это действительно очень удобно для прямых линий. Насчет кривых мне очень нравится то, как это можно настроить в CSP. Там можно повесить на хоткеи настраиваемые пресеты как из инструмента "рулер", так и из инструмента "линия". В каждом случае это могут быть не только прямые, но и кривые разных типов. То есть можно настроить примерно такой же функционал, как с рулерами в пейнтсторме, но только это могут быть еще и кривые. Получается, можно выбирать, рисовать по рулеру кистью или сразу линией. В принципе, если здесь просто добавить кривые рулеры в список вдобавок к эллипсу и перспективе, то уже будет круто.

Можно перетащить колорпикер на custom 1 окно и вызывать это окно горячей клавишей - удобно, так ка квокруг колопикера можно еще и любимые кисти раскидать или слайдеры

Спасибо, попробуем.

A global scale slider, which scales all brushes does sound useful, just dont know how would you scale down a brush set to 2 pixels for a 4k canvas if you decide to paint and 500 pixel image...Maybe there is a way, if so this is going to very good, scale the brushes according to file dimensions, 4k, 2k etc...

MNKYshield wrote:A global scale slider, which scales all brushes does sound useful, just dont know how would you scale down a brush set to 2 pixels for a 4k canvas if you decide to paint and 500 pixel image...Maybe there is a way, if so this is going to very good, scale the brushes according to file dimensions, 4k, 2k etc...

What I'm talking about is a little different. In this mode you set the brush size as usual, but it stays the same relative to screen size when you zoom the canvas in and out. Let's say you have drawn a human figure with the brush of certain size and now you want to zoom in and draw the details: face, eyelashes etc. You need a smaller brush for that. Currently you would have to zoom in first and then resize the brush. When zooming in and out frequently, it is really uncomfortable. In the mode that I'm suggesting you simply zoom in, but the brush keeps its size relative to your gestures and program's interface (thus becoming smaller relative to the figure you have just zoomed in). In every brush's settings should be a toggle between this mode and traditional one.