I kind of like Sai. It makes outlining much easier and I love the easy rotating canvas.


I've tried GIMP 2.8 once and went right back to 2.6 within a couple hours.

yeah im going back to 2.6

I really like sai for drawing (the pen/vector tool is awesome), but it seems you can't get a fully working version anymore, or I just don't know how to do it or where to look. The only thing I don't like is how the smudge and blur tools work.
I still use Gimp 2.6, 2.8 is buggy for me and pretty laggy on my old system. It has some nice new texture brushes, better transformation tools and more fancy visuals, but I can live without that.

GIMP 2.8 is "more or less" usable on my Windows Vista system - I say more or less because image panning is a hell of a lot laggier than in 2.6. I can't decide whether the single window feature and pen/brush smoothing in 2.8 is worth the slowdown and lack of responsiveness...

You know, I've just realized that I haven't tried painting with GIMP since I'd updated to 2.8; then again, I don't think I've ever made proper use of the brushes themselves. I generally like to smear color around the canvas. Otherwise, I've only ever played with brushes when screwing around with sprites, and the differences between brushes don't make any difference when the size has been reduced to 1 pixel.

What I'm missing in GIMP is a 'good' stabilizer like SAI has.
I dunno why the GIMP-dev's don't borrow code from Inkscape, since Inkscape has also options for stabilizing.
From the other side has GIMP a couple of new cool effects, like sparkling and such, which could also be used when you finished sketching and stuff with SAI.

But still....I rather like to work with 1 tool instead of 2-3... |=(:/

What do you mean by "stabiliser"?

Do you mean "smoothing" of a pen/brush stroke?

I mean this: http://i.imgur.com/LSk4v.png

Er, the screenshot tells me nothing as I've never used Sai. What does it do?

I don't know how to describe it. It has to do something with the sensitivity with the tablet.

I like the rotating canvas and the stabilizer. I don't actually own sai, though. I'd like to, someday.

For the gimp brushes, copy the brushes from the old version and put it into the new one. If you don't have access to the old one any more, i could copy mine. I still have 2.6 and haven't noticed old brushes disappearing since I updated, so I'm guessing those are the ones you want?