Adobe Acrobat is Evil.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t care much for Acrobat reader. I love the PDF format, and have since it’s introduction. The idea and execution of the format seems really rich and very useful. Thus it confuses me how the inventor of the PDF can make a reader that is so slow and buggy. Don’t get me wrong, Acrobat professional is the best thing since digital sliced bread for creating .pdf documents. It’s the reader I hate.

Luckily I have finally found a replacement. So far so good. It’s fast and has reasonable features. It can open huge 100MB manuals almost instantly. Pagination is almost instant as well. Overall I find it useful and outstrips the real artifact in speed by quite a factor. Be my guest and test it out. If you have different or even the same result please post your experiences here.

drum roll please. The product is Foxit reader.

Here is the download.com link.

Natural Media software done right!

I stumbled across Artrage about a year ago. At first the low price of $19.99 (now $25) actually turned me off. But I was looking for a simple, easy to use painting tool for my 12 year old daughter. She has a little tablet and loves to paint. However, Painter is very complex and Photoshop really doesn’t do oil paint very well.

PROS:

1. It’s fast. LIGHTNING fast. There is almost zero delay when you make a stroke. Even with complex tools like watercolor and various 3D paint effects. I’m using it everything from my laptop (P4 1.8ghz/nvidia 5200 portable) to my workstation, (P4 3ghz/RadeonX800) and on everything it’s equally as responsive.
2. Convincing tools. Paint looks a LOT like paint. Pencil responds exactly like it should. In fact everything it does it does very well.
3. Cool artsy features! Loaded with very useful tools, like the ability to easily rotate the canvas to very easy to make and use stencils/masks. You can pin a reference photo to your screen just like you would in real life, or import an image into the background and paint using the color right from the image. You can even export the bump map for rendering in another package like Lightwave, or output to devices that take Z information.
4. Size doesn’t seem to slow it down. Very large paintings like 3000×5000 seem very responsive. The only thing noticeable is the difference in saving time.
5. Price. This software would be a steal at $100. For $25 it’s downright crazy. The low price actually hides how good this software really is.
6. Quick hide moves all the palettes out of the way for unencumbered painting.
7. Interface.  It’s clean, slick and makes sense.  Everything is designed to be learnable for a child, thus for a growed up artist it’s like a second skin!

My congratulations to the developers. I am a huge fan of your software. I haven’t touched Painter or Deep Paint since!

CONS:

1. The lack of a dedicated blending stomp. This is a vital tool for editing/modifying actual imported drawings.
2. The 3D aspect sometimes gives you trouble with imported images, that is, the brush will create a depression in the painting. Small quibble. The blending stomp however is a major oversight. You can use the paintbrush with the settings tweaked but then you can’t also use it for painting.
3. Would be nice to create your own tools and have a custom tool shelf.  This way one could switch between various settings on the paintbrush to maintain consistency and speed painting.
4. Set your own quick keys. (this may be possible, but I haven’t found a way)

check it out. ARTRAGE home >>