Painter 9

I say use it as you would real media.
Don't think of it as a digital picture, think of it as a painting shown on your monitor.
Too many brushes, hmm? Well, it's no different than if you were looking at it in real life - watercolors, chalk, inks.... - many, many things to choose from. Figure out what mediums you are going to use first, it really helps.


Hope that helps you a bit...

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You can modify existing brushes in the Brush Creator, so if you want a plain round brush you can create it there. Although then there's no point in using Painter. Way I see it, the main advantage of Painter over Photoshop is that Painter's brushes can actually interact with the colors already on the canvas - you can smear the color around with the different brushes, which makes blending a hell of a lot easier. The downside is that Painter isn't all that stellar for effects - no filters, no layer effects, only basic color correction tools, and if you work in high resolutions and use a lot of layers you'll run out of RAM real fast, way faster than you would in PS (in my experience, at least). It's really a program for painting; if you want to go berserk with effects or do photomanips, this ain't gonna cut it.
Anyway, my advice is that you should experiment and try to find and/or create brushes that suit you. I've had Painter for a few months now and I'm still getting used to it.

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