A Painting Tool from the East

Despite the reputation of Photoshop as the almighty, all-inclusive, universal digital art software program, the truth is Photoshop does not necessarily meet the needs of everyone in the creative industry. Because of the way Photoshop is built to process raster-type graphics as smoothly as possible, many users do find it notably difficult to use Photoshop for drawing sharp, crisp, and smooth lines (Larc, 2013). With the shortcomings of Photoshop dully noted, SYSTEMAX software created a solution known as PaintTool SAI (SYSTEMAX Software Development, 2013).

The advantages of PaintTool SAI come from the fact that the program was built with only one purpose in mind; facilitating digital drawing. In contrast to Photoshop, which had to cover everything from filter effects to frame-by-frame animation, PaintTool SAI was built only for digital illustration, and as a supplemental program to be used side-by-side with Photoshop instead of as a replacement. This is made apparent in the program design which allows users to export their works in multiple different file types, including Phtoshop's ".psd" file format (Larc, 2013).

PaintTool SAI itself is a very lightweight program, especially compared with the bulky Photoshop. For users with systems that may not have abundant memory or processing power, this can be an important deciding factor. Completely installed, Adobe Photoshop CS6 takes up 2 GB of memory by itself, not including any plug-ins, files, or active memory. In contrast, PaintTool SAI only requires a humble 512 MB of free space to function. In addition to its small size, PaintTool SAI is a completely portable program, requiring no installation at all; only the application file is needed, and it can start running wherever you unpack it (Yang, 2008).

The greatest asset of PaintTool SAI is the program's dedication to being a specialized drawing/painting program. All of the tools in the user interface is very simple and intuitive, and they function exactly as they are made to function (nothing like the three to five different variations of every tool Photoshop seems to have). As an illustration program, PaintTool SAI allows the user to build and save custom brushes in a similar way Photoshop does, through the tweaking and arranging of several brush traits and options (Larc, 2013). The flexibility of PaintTool SAI does allow for more "traditional" brush effects when painting, and the program fully supports the use of graphics tablets such as Wacom tablets (Yang, 2008).

While SYSTEMAX's PaintTool SAI is not freeware, it is definitely much more affordable and competitive in price at slightly over 50 USD, compared to Photoshop CS6's near 1000 USD price tag (SYSTEMAX Software Development, 2013). Add in the free 31-day trial period (PaintTool SAI does not require purchase for the trial duration), and there is absolutely no reason at all not to try this program.

SAI is quite popular and affectionately praised by many illustrators in the industry; this tool definitely has among some of the best to offer to the creative industry.

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1. Larc, R. (2013) Photoshop VS PaintTool SAI. Rizian Larc. Retrieved from http://rizianlarc.blogspot.com/2013/02/photoshop-vs-paint-tool-sai.html
2. Yang, A. (2008) Paint Tool SAI Review. The 8th-Circuit Network. Retrieved from http://8th-circuit.com/node/285
3. SYSTEMAX Software Development. (2013) Easy Paint Tool SAI. Retrieved from http://www.systemax.jp/en/sai/
4. Adobe Systems Incorporated. (2013) Adobe Photoshop Family/Adobe Photoshop CS6. Retrieved from http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html