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Chapter 5: Painting and Brushes
Photoshop Paints Like a Pro
Once upon a time, there were gobs of digital painting programs. And when I say gobs, I mean bucket loads. And when I say bucket loads, I mean squillions. They had names like Lumina and Studio/32 and Deluxe Paint and Color MacCheese and — well, I really haven't the time to list them all. Suffice it to say, in the last dozen years, there have been more than 100 of them. At one time, there were more painting applications in circulation than word processors, spreadsheet programs, and database managers combined.Their astonishing abundance is made all the more amazing by the fact that virtually every one of them is now stone, cold dead. The one notable exception is Corel's powerful Painter (www.corel.com), which enjoys a loyal but tiny following. There's also Paint Shop Pro from Jasc Software (www.jasc.com). But although it has the word Paint in its title, it's more of a general-purpose image editor, in many ways a lesser, and less expensive, version of Photoshop.What killed them all? Photoshop. If painting programs used to roam software shelves like bison roamed the plains, Photoshop was the drunken cowboy perched on a train car and filling the colorful software boxes with so much virtual lead. Okay, that metaphor might be a bit extreme, but it makes my point: This one program made mincemeat of everything around it.
This is ironic because Photoshop never was a painting program. Traditionally, Adobe has concentrated its efforts on making Photoshop a terrific image editor. Oh, sure, Photoshop has always provided a few very basic painting tools, but most of the now-dead applications offered better. The fact that artists abandoned other painting programs in favor of Photoshop largely seems to be an indication that folks preferred image editing to painting. So if Photoshop was a drunken cowboy, it was unintentional. Adobe was shooting at something much larger, and the painting programs just got in the way.Taken at face value, Photoshop's brush options may not make much sense. Why should Photoshop want to integrate capabilities from an unsuccessful category of software? The answer is timing. Although the painting programs of yore provided a wealth of amazing tools and color selection options, the hardware of the time was only barely able to keep up with them. Memory was expensive, hard drives were small, and 24-bit video was rare. As a result, painting programs tended to be slow and capable of producing only low-resolution artwork. Software has long been judged by whether it will save you time or make you money, and painting programs could do neither. They were therefore clever playthings and nothing more.Photoshop has long since proven itself a capable, practical application, with a loyal following among professional designers. Meanwhile, the hardware has grown several times more powerful. Memory is cheap, hard drives are spacious and fast, and a modern video card can render anything Photoshop can send it in a matter of nanoseconds. So now seems a perfect time to rediscover the lost art of painting, as you and I will do throughout the following pages.
