To calculate her media cost, she could use a simple equation: everything multiplied by zero. She would have more fun loading up a tracing image of flowers while getting better results than she could with little watercolor training-not everyone is looking to develop hardened art skills and ArtRage has these users well covered. I can see recommending this to my mother, who has wanted to learn watercolors, a medium that is notoriously difficult to learn and expensive to maintain. While the results of tricky operations like eraser on oil paint aren't realistic-since people want to erase what's there, not mash oil around with an eraser-the pens, pencils and crayons are very convincing when mixed. The felt tip pen has a blending marker art pen preset that's begging to be used in Syd Mead-style product sketch:Īlthough there aren't a ton of tools when compared to Painter, the ones that exist behave just as you'd expect them to. The airbrush, graphite pencils, eraser, crayons and pens behave pretty much as expected and have a very good cross section of installed presets. There are no pastel, conté, or charcoal brushes, but a customized graphite with wide diameter should fill in fine for most needs. The brush palette holds the standard roster of brushes, pens, and pencils, with a few frill effects for playing around. ArtRage has a well-honed workspace and if you don't like the default key setup (I'm looking at you, command Y for redo on OS X), every command can have a custom key binding. It's a bit pokey but it works well and you can quickly reset the paper scale and rotation by hitting the D key. You can rotate and scale the canvas with alt-right click and shift-right click. The larger palettes are also collapsible:įor users who won't want the cheekier effects like Stencils and Stickers, these "Pod" modules can be disabled in the View preferences.įor working quickly, there's a shift modifier for brush size so you don't have to use the brush size widget at the bottom of the screen, or you can use the hotkeys to increase the size in increments. The interface works well on both my 1400x900 MacBook Pro screen and my dual 1920x1200 screen Mac Pro, letting me drag palettes to separate screens outside its workspace. The default green highlights can be changed, but you're not going to get it looking as sleek as something like Autodesk's Sketchbook Express/Pro. ArtRage treads this line well enough-it's cute enough to appeal to my six-year-old niece but space-efficient enough to avoid getting in my way or getting bogged down by frills. As I mentioned in the Photoshop Elements portion of my Pixelmator review, hobbyist apps sometimes look a bit kitschy for my taste. The interfaceĪrtRage definitely rolls on the cuter side of interfaces. I knew not to try 64-bit Photoshop CS5 filters, but older 32-bit Intel ones mostly failed as well (the India Ink plug-in was the only one I got working). In my testing, Photoshop filter support turned out to be pretty weak, with many of my filters not showing up, crashing ArtRage, or just failing altogether. Appeal may be limited but, for those who need this effect, it's pretty awesome. Even the spot where the tube lifts from the canvas is accurately displaced. Physically displaced paint using the exported paint channels with V-Ray for Maya. It also boasts a cool 3D channel export feature that exports your painted image as a 3D-renderer compatible stroke: The cheaper package contains many of the tools found in the bigger package (the full comparison chart is here), but the major selling points for the Pro version are a text tool's per-character formatting, more advanced color blending, Photoshop filter support, and more color and layer options. ArtRage StudioĪrtRage Studio comes in two editions: the $40 ArtRage Studio and the $80 ArtRage Studio Pro, both available for Mac and Windows. I'll also compare ArtRage Studio Pro to other applications that cover similar ground. As someone who has used ArtRage for a few projects, I wanted to write this review to help people cut through the "Better than Painter!" Internet chatter, understand this app's strengths and weaknesses, and determine if it's right for your project. If Wacom's ever-increasing array of consumer-oriented tablets is any indicator, it's not just professionals who are looking to get their fingers wet with some pixel paint-and not everyone can afford Painter, Corel's undisputed champion of natural media painting.Īmbient Design's ArtRage has built up a reputation as an inexpensive Painter alternative, and it has a loyal following of artists who are producing some very good work.
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