Documentation

My first foray into the digital art world (like many others) was with Procreate over a decade ago. Back when the apple pencil first came out, it was magic. Even though the hardware was slow by today's standards, it was so well done that it gave a real pen-to-paper feeling.

This was the first time a drawing app was fully optimized for a mobile device, using predictive pen tracking and GPU powered brush+rendering engines. Then they dropped a clean and minimalist UI on top of it, which then became the industry standard for all modern drawing apps.

Once you get into proper comic/manga work, the simple tools don't cut it anymore. Lasso fill is your best friend, and you learn to live with the necessary evil of masks.

There are many tools out there for professional illustration workflows, CSP and medibang are often what people learn first. And they are great, easy-to-use and inuitive software. All you have to do is follow the process and it usually turns out OK.

While they are true workhorses, they are slow, built for an era where all rendering and compositing was done on the CPU instead of the GPU. So they never were able to match the powerful, realistic paintbrush engines in modern apps like Fresco and Rebelle.

Mobile devices are becoming more capable every day. It seems like OLED screens are everywhere, and my old phone saves its images in P3 HDR format by default. SRGB is a thing of the past.

To this date, the only painting app that properly supports wide gamut HDR is Krita. HDR is a complicated beast and is hard to get right. When you publish HDR and wide-gamut images online, you need to control the gain mapping so that it still looks good on SDR devices. Of course no photo editor is complete without the all of the basics (proofing, effect chains, the whole enchilada)