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 But let's admit that its brush engine is outdated by decades.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.
- 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.
