Krita vs paint tool sai
Definitely worth a try! I certainly enjoyed painting in it-it felt less like wrestling, which is sometimes how painting PS feels to me.
![krita vs paint tool sai krita vs paint tool sai](https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4367/36728525342_9a5bb25a64_c.jpg)
Generally speaking, it has a very nice interface, a lot of options to edit your picture (which was my biggest problem with MyPaint-endless canvas, no cropping, rotating, selection tools, etc.), but it also hangs on to some really neat painting options. Some of the blendy paint brushes are suuuper laggy, so I’ve been staying away from them, but there might be a way to make that less of a problem and/or it might just be my computer, lol. There are also a lot of cool brushes like a dodge/burn brush (neat for making magical-looking effects), a few screentone brushes that are pretty sick, and a bunch of other stuff. The brush selection and customization reminds me a bit of SAI and MyPaint (or what I remember of using SAI and MyPaint), where you can adjust the flow and options and things, and there’s a curve tool for the drop off of the brush and such, and the brushes are represented by images rather than a list or a small picture of the brushstroke like in PS, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing? It really does seem kinda like if you took the nice things about MyPaint and put them into a Photoshop that’s trimmed down significantly.
![krita vs paint tool sai krita vs paint tool sai](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NjY6THbr5Ds/maxresdefault.jpg)
I like that it has so many options that feel nice as a digital painter but it also has stuff for people who like to do digital lineart and coloring without doing a whole painting rigamarole. I ended up mainly working with the basic stylus-looking brush, but I also used a cross hatch-ier one to lay in some of the hair, and I could see using some of the pen brushes for finer lines. Generally speaking, it’s pretty comfy to use! I spent a bit of time messin’ around with the various brush options, and it’s kinda overwhelming how many types of brushes there are, so it seems like it’s best to just go through all of them and see which ones feel the nicest to use.
![krita vs paint tool sai krita vs paint tool sai](https://www.designyourway.net/art/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/1f667b2fa2a2a177b199f58f8ebaa92890d8.jpg)
Mostly I just did the face, hands, and some of the hair and sleeves. So on the left is where it started in PS (it’s cropped to what area I worked on, obvs), then I worked on it in Krita and that’s what you see on the right. I didn’t want to do a new painting because I’m lazy, so I figured I would test the ability to bring in Photoshop files (which it does with no problem) and work on a painting I started a while ago and never did anything with. So! I downloaded Krita and decided to mess around with it.