by HEXORCISM » Sun Oct 31, 2021 8:34 am
i've really only fooled around with painter essentials; it's a really heavy program if you use the ai painting, but it's a lot of fun to mess around with and combine styles. you can use it to paint normally and it comes with a ton of different brushes. i don't paint so i can't really say if they're good but any other corel programs i've used are pretty good quality so it probably applies here.
the other two i have. not touched at all. i briefly opened up after shot & csp when i initially got them and my impressions are they're very similar to photoshop, but rather than being 1 program like photoshop, they've been split and further specialize in what they were made for (after shot for photo editing & csp for drawing).
you can download and redownload these whenever you'd like and however many times you'd like, so if you would like to mess around with them and you don't like them, removing them is no loss for you. you just have to make sure you deactivate the program before doing that as you can only have 2 activated versions of each program per registered account. after, you can redownload them at any time.
though just because it came with your tablet don't feel obligated to use it, especially if it doesn't feel right! there's a lot of free art programs out there you can play around with too; fire alpaca, medibang, and krita are some off the top of my head. i used krita for the longest time but i moved over to medibang after finding the smoothing and brushes much better in my opinion.
i've never actually figured out how to properly use the buttons on my tablet or pen; they're really more of annoyance to me because of that whenever i accidentally hit them, but if you can learn how to use them i'm sure they'd be as useful as any other shortcuts.
but overall? keep your tablet driver up to date; a lot of funky things happen when it isn't and it tends to solve a lot of problems. if you don't have pen pressure, mess around with enabling and disabling windows ink. and don't wrap the cord around your tablet when you're not using it lmao. i learned that the hard way with my old tablet when the cord split. the cord definitely seems. a bit flimsy around where it connects into the tablet itself. my tablet still worked, but i definitely had to be a lot more careful with it. if you've got something you could possibly reinforce it with without ruining anything, i'd probably do so. we just put electrical tape where it split on my old one and it seemed stronger than when it just had its rubber covering. i probably wouldn't recommend any tapes for a new one just because if you ever decide to remove it you'd likely have a very hard to remove sticky film left over but,,
for the most part both my intuos tablets have been very sturdy and lasted a long time. the pen on my old one also survived a dog chewing and still works fine; a little messed up but the button just popped back in and it worked like normal -- sans the non-drawing end but i never used that anyway. i have fallen asleep on them, leaned on them all day, had dogs step on them, dropped my laptop on them, pulled the cord from catching it on things or forgetting it was plugged in,,, and they've been fine (the unfortunate trials of using them in bed). the pad scratches up relatively easily from the pen nibs but i haven't. really heard or seen any way to prevent that. it doesn't seem to impede on any sensors though. just a little ugly after a while hgjbnhg
I have used many programs over the years and clip studio paint is by far my favorite out of everything available. I 100% recommend using that one. For my drawing tablet I have used the wacom intuous medium and currently the wacom one, both are reliable and last a long time.
