Digital Painters

This topic was created in the The Arts forum by aquasnoz on Sunday, March 17, 2013 and has 18 replies.

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@aquasnoz
14 Years10,000+ Posts

Hello my digital painters, graphic designers and illustrators alike! Wondering what you thought of Photoshop CS6 because yep I'm still using 5 and thinking about upgrading. I've heard numerous upgrades to the entire suite of which I'm interested in the After Effects and Premier Pro upgrades.

Photo Manipulation is fine with me I don't do too much of that work and I mainly paint using Painter XI so if you have experience with XII also I'd like to know the differences. I guess I got out of touch with the software side of things a while back 😢

Just a bit of sample this is the style I paint in so if anyone else paints similarly any tips and tricks or just improvements in general with these new programs?

Also if you are familiar with After Effects, are the GPU acceleration worth getting? I know Premiere Pro CS6 is leaps and bounds with amazingly fast rendering speeds and instant effect preview renders but I can't seem to find information on animation effects.

Profile picture of aquasnoz
@aquasnoz
14 Years10,000+ Posts

Yeah I've always wanted a few workstations at home catered for those different needs. Just finance limited so I try to cater my home computer to do everything at a reasonable speed lol.

I do have the new Nvidia line and has CUDA capability but haven't gotten the software so far. I do notice programs like Maya to be running a lot faster. What are you experiences with OpenSource software? Mine has always been a bit iffy purely because the industry here rely heavily on Proprietorial software from Adobe. 3D side it's definitely a lot easier but seems Photoshop/Illustator/InDesign are still dominating the design industry.

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@aquasnoz
14 Years10,000+ Posts

Posted by everevolvingepithet
My comp has trouble running Aftereffects smoothly but it only has 4gig of Ram so it could be that, I haven't had any problems with Premiere though and it seems to run pretty smoothly so far. I'm still pretty new to using Photoshop and have yet to fully delve into it outside of photo manipulations. Is all that work done in layers, Aquasnoz? It's a style I want to start practicing and getting into more.

Hmm there's a few forms but yeah mainly layers just for the sake of changes further down the road. I use it mainly for painting and photo manipulation. Best way is getting acquainted with the mask feature because it saves me a lot of time later on if I need to make changes.

4gigs of ram is plenty I think! It's only when you start to render Hour long videos or a MASSIVE image file with a gazillion layers 😄 What's the style you're thinking of?

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@aquasnoz
14 Years10,000+ Posts

Posted by everevolvingepithet
Ah cool, so that's more like a base to build on in colour? Ta for the masking tip.

With aftereffects, I was thinking of editing all the individual elements in photoshop first then compiling it all in ae, but whenever I try and run anything in that program the frame rate seems to lag so I've put it to one side for now, although I've only tried using vids around 4mins long so far, I was thinking of trying to build something from scratch in ae.

Well for photoshop that's the simplest, most effective and popular technique, if we're talking digital painting and taking a cartoon for example, your top layer might be your line art, followed by highlights, shadows, base colours etc.

After Effects might depend entirely on the where you want to take the art direction. AE has a nice toolkit but I find it lacking for certain effects but definitely possible 🙂 I think even at 4gig of ram it shouldn't be that slow, have you tried playing around with the preview quality?

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@aquasnoz
14 Years10,000+ Posts

Thanks for the insight VFlirt! I really do believe Australia is still a bit slow on the uptake for opensource! I've actually stopped working for a studio so my privledges were revoked!

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@aquasnoz
14 Years10,000+ Posts

Hmm neither lol hangon *digs up old one*

This is probably more easier to tell so the skin colour, hair colour you can probably notice a base colour. SO think of base being the FLAT 'middle' colour and you're just filling in the shadows and the highlights on separate layers. Progress pic might make it clearer:

The two from the first post are actually painted on a digital canvas using another program that simulates paint so it's just one massive layer and I blend it all together! Really depends on which feels more intuitive for you 😄

Profile picture of brianafay
@brianafay
19 Years25,000+ PostsSagittarius

Explain this process to me...do you paint strictly in photoshop? or is it something you sketch up, scan in, and then edit with paint and other tools??

I am getting pretty good at photoshop tricks for making my renderings and floorplans look magical...dodge and burn tools changed my life...but idk how you guys do it using the paint brush with such ease! It's really hard :/

Profile picture of bb909999
@bb909999
1 Year

Posted by durp
The whole Adobe subscription model is a racket, gone are the days where you could purchase the software outright or even download the ripped versions for free.

Creative cloud is $ 150 per month, which is evil considering you'll could purchase photoshop outright for $ 300 in the day.

I pay for Lightroom and that's all I need at the moment, but even that's offensive.

Man lol I crack everything. I have the crack version of photoshop, cc, audition, premiere lol I'm not buyin shit

Profile picture of bb909999
@bb909999
1 Year

Posted by durp
Posted by bb909999
Posted by durp
The whole Adobe subscription model is a racket, gone are the days where you could purchase the software outright or even download the ripped versions for free.

Creative cloud is $ 150 per month, which is evil considering you'll could purchase photoshop outright for $ 300 in the day.

I pay for Lightroom and that's all I need at the moment, but even that's offensive.

Man lol I crack everything. I have the crack version of photoshop, cc, audition, premiere lol I'm not buyin shitclick to expand

lol show me your ways

I had the ripped versions of cs5 in the day, but got the worst viruses so I stopped doing that shit.

plus photopea exists, and I'm thinking affinity suite if I want to purchase outright, but it's not needed right now. I use davinci resolve for editing, I just can't bring myself to pay for a lifetime subscription like thats genuinely offensive.

click to expand

Lol yea photopea definitely exists. I got u ill send u like a torrent link if u need, and yo I still use cs5 right now I ain't gon lie and it aint give me any viruses too, I think it depends on the download and shit ..

But no lie too I got the latest davinci and shit but I don't know how anyone uses it lol the shit is so hard to use for me personally but I still get shit done w it I rather stick with vegas or premiere and shit though. Man matter fact I actually got a copy of davinci resolve if u want it lol no cracked shit too I ain't open it up fresh out the box shit

Profile picture of bb909999
@bb909999
1 Year

Posted by durp
Posted by bb909999
Posted by durp
Posted by bb909999
Posted by durp
The whole Adobe subscription model is a racket, gone are the days where you could purchase the software outright or even download the ripped versions for free.

Creative cloud is $ 150 per month, which is evil considering you'll could purchase photoshop outright for $ 300 in the day.

I pay for Lightroom and that's all I need at the moment, but even that's offensive.

Man lol I crack everything. I have the crack version of photoshop, cc, audition, premiere lol I'm not buyin shitclick to expand

lol show me your ways

I had the ripped versions of cs5 in the day, but got the worst viruses so I stopped doing that shit.

plus photopea exists, and I'm thinking affinity suite if I want to purchase outright, but it's not needed right now. I use davinci resolve for editing, I just can't bring myself to pay for a lifetime subscription like thats genuinely offensive.click to expand

Lol yea photopea definitely exists. I got u ill send u like a torrent link if u need, and yo I still use cs5 right now I ain't gon lie and it aint give me any viruses too, I think it depends on the download and shit ..

But no lie too I got the latest davinci and shit but I don't know how anyone uses it lol the shit is so hard to use for me personally but I still get shit done w it I rather stick with vegas or premiere and shit though. Man matter fact I actually got a copy of davinci resolve if u want it lol no cracked shit too I ain't open it up fresh out the box shitclick to expand

lol nah I was joking, but thankyou.

I have free access to creative cloud for the next year, and I just use lightroom for my own stuff. I just use the presets which us all I need atm. And I use desktop version davinci resolve, are you using it for music? I saw your Satan video but I don't get down with Satan so I didn't watch it lol.

click to expand

I use it for video editing for music yea lol and light room is a blessing no lie. That be all you need sometimes

Profile picture of LadyNeptune
@LadyNeptune
10 Years25,000+ Posts

The last time I used photoshop was for a pool permit that was dragging cause the soils engineer was mia and they had the wrong apn number on their report. So I adjusted.

Felt kinda shitty to do that to another consultants work, but also was annoyed by how long this one was dragging.