Adobe Photoshop

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Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems Incorporated.

Photoshop history begins on 1987, when Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. This little program will turn later (in 1988) into a fully-fledged image editing program.

Adobe Photoshop is a quite generic digital editing software with lots of features and posibilities. Painting, drawing, photo editing, ... Photoshop allows the user to experiment with tons of different techniques. One of its best features is the layers system, first released in this software as a total revolution for digital art.
The Photoshop format is the .PSD (Photoshop Document) stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop. These include layers with masks, color spaces, ICC profiles, transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colors, clipping paths, and duotone settings. Photoshop uses color models RGB, lab, CMYK, grayscale, binary bitmap, and duotone. Photoshop has the ability to read and write raster and vector image formats such as .EPS, .PNG, .GIF and .JPEG.

The current version (CS5) was released on April 2010.

Official Website: [link]

Art Rage

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ArtRage is a digital painting software created by Ambient Design Ltd. It's designed to be used with a tablet PC or graphics tablet, though it's perfectly compatible with mouse. It has many differen brushes that imitates traditional media, such as oil paint, spray paint, pencil, acrylic, etc. Other tools include tracing, smearing, blurring, mixing, different types of paper for the "canvas," (i.e. crumpled paper, smooth paper, wrinkled tin foil, etc.) as well as other special effects. uses a proprietary file type, ".ptg" though images can be exported to formats such as PNG, JPEG and Adobe Photoshop's PSD format.

The current version is ArtRage 3 and comes in 2 different editions: ArtRage Studio for the casual user, and ArtRage Studio Pro for the professional user.

Official Website:  [link]

ArtWeaver

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Artweaver was developed by Boris Eyrich and released on September 30, 2009. It's a creative software oriented to users that already have used digital painting softwares like Corel Painter, since there are som similarities between both. As may other softwares, ArtWeaver is able to simulate traditinal media effects via special brushes. It also offers other great features: filters like sharpen, blur, emboss, and mosaic; transparency and layer support in its own AWD format. Artweaver is available in two versions.

The Artweaver Free version for free and an Artweaver Plus version with costs which has more features than the free version. "Free" version cannot be used for commercial purposes.

Official Website:  [link]

Corel Painter

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Corel Painter is a raster-based digital art application developed by Corel Corporation. It was initially developed for the Macintosh system by Mark Zimmer and Tom Hedges, founders of the Fractal Design Corporation. Fractal Design later merged with RayDream, then with MetaTools to become MetaCreations. Metacreations sold off all their creative interests and Painter was acquired by Corel Corporation.

The application offers a wide range of traditional artists' materials and tools. With the aid of a graphics tablet the user is able to reproduce the effect of physical painting and drawing media such as watercolor, oil, chalk, charcoal and color pencil. There are also a few non-traditional items such as the Image Hose, pattern pens, F/X, Distortion and Artist tools to allow artists to apply less conventional elements to an image.

Painter emulates the visual characteristics of traditional media such as oil paint, pastel sticks, air brush, charcoal, felt pens, and other traditional artists' materials on various textured surfaces. Many of these emulated media types work with the advanced features of Wacom tablets, for instance, the airbrush tool in Painter responds to pressure as well as tilt, velocity and rotation.

Official Website:  [link]

Easy Paint Tool Sai

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Easy Paint tool Sai is a painting program for Microsoft Windows developed by SYSTEMAX. First official release was on February 2008.

One the most important features of Paint Tool Sai is its weigth: Only 5MB. This makes of it a incredibly friendly software with huge portable posibilities, without losing features. Sai uses the layers system, implements an easy way of customizing brushes and includes selection tools, raster drawing tools such as the Airbrush, Watercolor, Pen, and Marker, vector drawing tools intended for inking, etc. Documents can be exported in a range of popular formats, such as .PSD or .BMP files, in addition to the native .SAI format.

Official Website:  [link]

GIMP

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The GNU Image Manipulation Program, also known as GIMP, is a free software raster graphics editor available for most of Operating Systems. It was originally released on January 1996.
It presents similarites with Photoshop, as it is also intended to be a general image editing software. Some of its feaures are: Color palettes, selection and path tools, dodge, burn, sharpen, clone tool, filters like Blur or Noise, Scripts and Plugins with different filters and effects, etc.

Its native format is XCF (experimental Computing Facility). GIMP has import/export support for popular image formats such as BMP, JPEG, PNG, GIF and TIFF.

The current version is GIMP 2.6.

Official Website:  [link]

openCanvas

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openCanvas, also known as oC, is a Japanese image editing program for Microsoft Windows developed by Portalgraphics. openCanvas is specifically designed for use with pressure-sensitive drawing tablets; it is a sketch program rather than a general-purpose graphic design program.

The most remarkable feature of openCanvas is the presence of Even Files. Users can save event files of their work, which when opened, will replay the steps that were taken to create the work. These files can also be shared among users. These files are useful for showing others how something was drawn, or for one's own reference. Event files can be locked, so they cannot be edited, or unlocked and editable.
Another great thing about oC is the network support, allowing artists to collaborate in real-time over the internet, using different layers of the same drawing. This feature was only avalaible until the last free version, 1.1-b72.

The current version is 4.5.20, and was released in July 2010.


Official Website: [link]