Winner: GIMP, which has a huge range of image creation and editing tools above and beyond the world of digital painting.

Paint Tool SAI’s adjustments are limited to Hue/Saturation and Brightness/Contrast. GIMP is intended as a general-purpose image editor, which means that it contains a huge range of tools for manipulating existing images (far too many to list here). Just a few of the additional tools found in GIMP 2.10

Both GIMP and Paint Tool SAI offer support for most of the popular drawing tablets that are currently available, although you’ll have to test yours to make sure that there are no issues. Most digital artists prefer to work with a tablet and stylus, which provides far better control than a standard computer mouse. Paint Tool SAI has near-perfect responsiveness at large sizes, although it doesn’t offer as many brushes by default. GIMP offers a huge range of flexible brushes and options but can lag severely when working on high-resolution images. GIMP also allows you to use multiple layers, but it doesn’t have vector support beyond very basic paths, which I find to be quite frustrating in practical usage. Paint Tool SAI also offers specialized Linework layers that use simple editable vector lines to help sketch/map your painting project. This may not be an issue if you only want to paint for the screen, but if you’re ever planning to print your artwork, you’ll need to work in a high-resolution format. It’s hard to paint when your brush stroke appears 3-4 seconds behind your cursor position, which sort of defeats the purpose of having such fancy brushes.īy comparison, Paint Tool SAI’s brushes only started to lag slightly when I pushed them to their very highest quality and complexity. However, even during my quick testing, the MyPaint brushes in GIMP lagged quite badly when used in a high-resolution image, even on my extremely powerful desktop computer. (MyPaint is also a free, open-source digital painting app in its own right, but that’s a topic for another post.) J ust a few of the presets available in GIMP using the MyPaint brush There are only 14 presets and a few different brush tip shapes to choose from, but this is more than enough to get started.Įach brushstroke interacts with the existing digital paint on your canvas, allowing for very natural blending that mimics the feel of working with physical media. Paint Tool SAI and GIMP don’t exactly overlap, so some of these categories will be a little bit different than usual because I’m guessing you’re most curious about how they compare to digital painting tools.Īt first glance, Paint Tool SAI’s brushes are fairly simple. When comparing software, it’s important to outline the criteria that I’m using in the review. GIMP is a much better all-around image editor that includes some decent painting options, while Paint Tool SAI is an excellent digital painting app with almost no other image editing capabilities at all.

Paint tool sai blur brush