They're nowhere near the same thing, except for the base fact they work
with images. Painter is a "natural media" drawing program, designed to
emulate artist materials found in the real world: brushes, pencils,
paints and all that sort of thing. Lots more sophistication than that
simplification implies, yes, but that's basically it.
Visit news:alt.fractal-design.painter for more info.
Yers,
John
Thanks
John is right, they're more of a complement to each other than a
competitor.
If you're into metaphors, Photoshop is the photographer's darkroom,
Painter is the artist's easel and palette. You wouldn't correct a
photograph using oil paint, and you wouldn't paint a picture using a
ruby lith mask.
Apart from the huge range of artistic brushes (like crayon, pastel, felt
pen, watercolour, pencils, oils, chalk, ... with thousands of
customised variables), paper textures, patterns, weaves, gradations
etc., some extra things that Painter will do that Photoshop won't
include:
1. The ability to paint with an "image hose" -- painting with a series
of images that you can make (e.g. leaves, shapes, cubes), then "spray"
anywhere.
2. A cloning/tracing technique where you can copy or transform any
picture into any artistic style
3. The ability to make "frame stacks" or numbered files -- series of
drawn images that can be used to create animations such as GIFs or
movies, including techniques such as onion skinning and rotoscoping.
4. The ability to import animations into frame stacks, batch operate on
them, then re-export as animations.
Colin Wilson
Publishing Innovations