I'm becoming frustrated with the instability of Painter Essentials and most of the feedback I've heard about this (http://www.portalgraphics.net/en/) peice of FOSS is good. Does anyone here use it?
I don't use it currently(had a trial version, but I didn't have the money to upgrade to full at that time), but I have in the past, and it's fairly decent. I wouldn't be able to give you a fair comparison to Painter essentials or anything, but from what I saw of the program it's very easy to use and to pick up, and it works very well if you happen to have an art tablet. I know a few very capable artists who swear by it, and use it almost exclusively for their work.
But again, I didn't really testify to any stability or quality of the work produced because I haven't used it in awhile, nor did I use it for any serious length of time.
Semi-threadjacking: Do you guys like Painter? I've only played with it briefly (I got a demo of it on a magazine disc. I made my current av with it), but I found it kinda hard to use. Granted I didn't get too deep into playing with brush settings, but I found it hard to get colours to paint on top of others without blending.
It's definitely a neat piece of software, but I think I prefer the lower-tech airbrushing in The Shop. :)
I like it. Essentials is gimpy when compared to 9 and 10, but once you get a better idea of the brush settings and control it's really fun.