ArtRage 2 is out. There is a limited free version and a full version for about $20 US.
that looks really cool.
why isn’t it all free there is so much more of the full version.
Not bad for 20 USD, I might buy it.
Ha. I just bought it!
Don’t feel too bad, there’s still a free version which can do all the same as v.1 plus rotate the canvas and it’s more optimized.
The full version has layers, .psd export and more tools. Now there’s a smudge brush - just turn down the amount of colour on your brush to 0%!
Sweet and well worth the price.
Same here, I used version 1.1 and Microsoft’s tabletPC version and did pretty well, but I was frustrated by the lack of layers and no way to keep a ref image on the screen. Now those features are added, and the brush turn bug is (mostly) fixed too! Definitely worth the price.
Artrage has a nice UI
There is another software much like painter:
http://www.artweaver.de/index.php?en_version
Has layers, smugding etc… Plus its free.
Krita is adding alot of similar paint functionality… Can’t wait to play with the “wet paint” tools in the next major release.
http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/software/krita/naturalmedia.html
Also, an interesting reference to blender… a guy helping develope the paint simulation used blender to model the paint brush.
http://research.edm.luc.ac.be/~tvanlaerhoven/paint/paint.html
Try downloading this program and see what you think…
http://research.edm.luc.ac.be/~tvanlaerhoven/paint/bin/paint_v0.zip
It’s a windows app, so I haven’t been able to try it yet, but from the pics it looks like you can do some really cool watercolor stuff with it.
http://research.edm.luc.ac.be/~tvanlaerhoven/paint/images/results/lamort_frame0.jpeg
http://research.edm.luc.ac.be/~tvanlaerhoven/paint/images/results/watercolor_flower.png
ArtRage runs on Linux using Wine 20050725 ( 0.92 I guess ). I didn’t play around with it a whole lot, but it seems to run well.
Edit–> I’ve been playing with it for a while and it runs great on my Linux box. The only issue I’ve had so far is that the PSD export doesn’t produce a file that will open in anything that I have on my machine. Hmmm, it’s certainly not the end of the world, but it would be nice.
Hello there,
Yeah, I was having the same problem on WinXP with the demo version. I bought the full version and that seemed to fix it. 
Are you using the demo too? Maybe they disabled the .psd support in the demo and it produces an unusable file (don’t know why they would let you save as .psd then afterall).
Matt
Yes. It would be nice that if they did disable the PSD export for the demo version that they would have had the ‘upgrade’ splash screen like they do for the tools that don’t work. You said it works fine for the pay version?
Okay I did some more testing and it seems that my first tries worked out alright. Today when I went back to it I wasn’t able to get one to export with the multiple layers. I am uploading some files for you to test. The first file “ar_test1.psd” was one of my first tries and here is what I found.
PhotoShop: imports as expected with layers.
GIMP: imports as expected with layers.
Painter: imports with layers, however, it creates a layer mask which is completely transparent. Deleting the unwanted layer masks reverts the image back normal.
Paint Shop Pro X: imports all files merged on to the background layer.
Deep Paint: imports with layers but changes some of the colors to an unusable degree (pink).
With “ar_test2.psd” which I made today seems to have problems.
PhotoShop: imports but only merged onto the background layer.
GIMP: does not import and comes up with the error message “***unkown compression type in channel.”
Painter: does not import and complains about an unkown file type.
Paint Shop Pro X: imports all files merged on to the background layer.
Deep Paint: imports with layers but discolors one layer and completely corrupts the second layer.
Here are the files for you to test: http://www.primatestudios.com/temp/artrage_test_files.tar.gz
Also I tried to re-import the files back into ArtRage, the first one works fine, the second one doesn’t import.
Hopefully the developers will have a fix for this soon.
Matt
Thanks for sending the test files. Neither one of them opened in Gimp 2.3.6. This isn’t too surprising; the Gimp team has been struggling to keep up with recent Photoshop changes. I heard that there is a good import filter floating around, but until now the old filters opened everything I needed them to.
One interesting thing happened. On the second image, Gimp first threw an error “Unknown Compression Type in Channel” before its regular “Plug-in could not open image”. This may be a clue.
Other than that, OpenOffice Draw and Kuickshow (the KDE image viewer) can open both files fine (one layer only), although Kuickshow thinks it fails before the image opens. I guess it is a bad layer. Scribus seems to think that it can open PSD files, but can’t. At least not on my box.
Too bad one license can’t be installed on OS X and Windows. I guess I’ll buy two licenses or something…
I wrote to ArtRage to let them know that this program runs under Wine on Linux and that the PSD export feature seems to be broken. This is the response:
Thanks for the mail, glad to know it runs using Wine, the code is mainly non OS specific anyway so I can imagine it’d be fairly straightfoward. We’ve considered a Linux port a number of times, we’ve just never had the time to do it.
The PSD export system does indeed have a bug that is causing some files to fail exporting, the problem is that all of our test cases worked fine, the bug is one of those ones that happens in many cases but not the reasonable ones we tried out (it relates to data packing in compressed images). We’ve fixed it internally and we’re working on a patch that will include that to come out really soon.
It would be nice if most Windows application would run under Wine. <shrug> Thanks for sharing that information, I will keep an eye out for the patch!
Matt 