I need advice on wacom tablets and corel painter X.

Question

I'm looking in to buying a drawing tablet and iv done some research. I know that i want a wacom intous3. it comes with several different types of software. adobe photoshop, corel painter, Essentials 3 are the only three i think i will be needing. how much space is this going to take up on my hard drive? do i need all of these programs? if not i was thinking of just buying corel painter x. if i did will i still need the photoshop and the essentials program? iv never bought anything like this before and i don't want to spend this kind of money and make a stupid decision. any advice?

Answer 1

I've never used Corel Painter--just Photoshop, and I'm not familiar with the Essentials program.  But in terms of having the basics,  I think you just need one or the other.  So if it's Corel Painter you want, choose that and forget the others for now.  

And Photoshop 7 takes up approximately 130 MBs on my hard drive.  

Answer 2

Depends what you want to do. If you're more interested in drawing/painting, I'd go with Painter. There are a lot of different art brushes (you can download brushes into Photoshop though) and at first it's kind of confusing, but once you play around with it a bit I find it easier to draw with than Photoshop. If you want to make more graphic design type images or edit photos, get Photoshop. (Although I'm guessing since you're buying a tablet you're wanting an art program). I've never used Essentials... I have Photoshop and Painter, and since getting Painter I have always used it for drawing, I only ever use Photoshop for editing pictures now.

Photoshop CS3 takes up about 346MB... Painter X apparently takes up 16.9MB, but I find that difficult to believe... That is only the actual application, I think there's more stuff that goes  with it... I don't know, I could be wrong. It's not in a folder on mine, and with all the things that aren't (Which I think are all Painter) it takes up 46.1MB

Personally I prefer Painter, I find it doesn't crash nearly as much as Photoshop does (for me, anyway), and it runs much faster and smoother. (My computer is old and dying, lol, so if yours is shiny 'n' new then Photoshop should work fine)

Oh, and no, you don't need all of them. You don't actually need any of them to work the tablet, they're just very good programs to use it with. :)