Soft instead of Photoshop

paint tool, gimp or krita

Procreate if you have an ipad, because its great.

Before I knew how to use Photoshop, I painted in Paint tool SAI and I loved it. It's an affordable, easy to learn program, nothing as complex as PS, but it has some nice brush customization, color dynamics and stabilizers, and everything else you need to paint basically.

Sketchbook pro - free, has a lot of really good functionality, fun brushes with great effect.

Oh yeah, sketchbook pro being free is pretty damn awesome too, has some really cool perspective tools.

Hello, bit of a noob here - but a very invested noob

I’m currently on photoshop as I feel two starbucks coffees a month for the developers is fair for the app and liking it so far. Anyways, as others pointed out, for ipad definitely procreate, I have it as my mobile art app and its pretty awesome not to mention super affordable (tablet not withstanding)

As for other apps on PC/mac I can recommend clip studio paint and corel painter (goes for heavy discounts every now and then in bundles over at the website humble bundle and is a one time purchase). As said before bit of a noob, got both of them through discounts to play around with before I joined here and started the digital art course

From. Y very limited experience what I can summarise from the experience is that painter has a metric ton of painting and drawing tools with fancy blending that simulates real life but the actual brush stroking feels weird, like bad performance but probably just is that way. Its not laggy but feels slow, sticky I dont know (this on a beefy rig)

Clip studio seems more promising to me, lots of little tools that help digital artists to make your life easier, but im avoiding thise for now as they could become a digital crutch or shortcuts I shouldnt take until im more advanced. Also, its emulates real media with its brushes and i couldnt find a simple round hard or round soft brush for example, so maybe some more getting used to the UI

Krita is free but I haven’t really tried it out well XD

Photoshop personally so far seems much more intuitive. Just my two cents

Cheers