Brushes are grouped into similar styles, from the simple strokes, to the wackier offerings, more of which later. This is more like Painter and works well, once you get used to it.

You actually have a further palette with various brush types. Choosing the brush tool from the main tool bar doesn't work quite like other options, such as Photoshop. As mentioned before, this is what you will spend the lion's share of your time doing so they have to be good and they don't disappoint.

The real power of PSS comes in its brushes. This is by far the most customisable UI I've used. Custom palettes are easy to make too, meaning your can build a UI with just the tools you use most and where and at what size you want. On top of this each palette can be changed too you can nest palettes, hide them, move them, even have them small but so they enlarge when you move your cursor over them.

This in itself is nice, so you can change it to suit your other applications, including keyboard shortcuts. The overall UI can be coloured, scaled and saved as a new preset. First off it ships with a number of preset workspaces, which go a long way to showing you what is possible, which is a substantial amount. Okay, so booting up PSS you are faced with the UI, which may look a little dated but after a little use you will come to love it. The default UI is large and a little clumsy but does show you the options well while you learn your way around However the mac version has never given me any problems and, considering updates are free for life, I imagine any bugs will be ironed out soon enough. Certainly not enough to make me stop using it but I did get the odd freeze now and then. I found the windows version to be a little buggy. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of what is on offer a word of warning. The developers of Paintstorm Studio (PSS) recognized this and the detail and control on offer make this a hard one to ignore. While there are other tools and features that can be useful, if the brushes don't feel right or don't meet your needs then you won't continue to use the software, no matter how many filters there are. Key featuresįull control of all brush options Bristle brushes of any form and kind Stroke post correction Parameters binding to the perspective Dynamic interface (panels scale, opacity, color, tab-lock) Custom panels Full controlled mask-brush Takes underlayer's color while blendingĭigital painting is all about the brushes. Rob Redman opens up Paintstorm Studio and puts it through its paces – check out the latest digital painting tool.

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