Welcome to Gaia! ::

I prefer Photoshop. I love the interface and have worked with it for over 4 years. You can make custom brushes very easily and they are great for adding texture and depth to a piece. Let's say you want to make a butterfly brush, here's how I would do it...

First, make or find a suitable photo of a butterfly. Scan/save it to your computer. Uncluttered backgrounds work best.

Next, open it in Photoshop and turn the image b&w. Use desaturate or Image --> Mode --> grayscale, then contrast and curves to make it stand out. All white will be invisible so keep that in mind when making your brush. Gray will be semi-transparent depending on how dark a gray it is.

Go to Edit --> Define Brush. Name your brush something like 'Butterfly' then click ok.

Select your paintbrush, use the drop down where you select your brush style, scroll to the bottom and you will see your brush.

For added fun and customization, go to the right where you see two tabs - file browser and brushes. Make sure your brush is still the active one and play around with the options like color dynamics. Depending on the two colors selected you can get a lovely palette of colors.

If you mess up you can simply right click and choose to delete your custom brush.

Hope this helps biggrin

eh. i've tried GIMP before.

it's nice for a while. but idk, it didnt really catch my attention as much.

I personally like to use GIMP. It's much easier to use for me and since I don't use editing tools too much. Really, my photographs are not edited too much. Only lighting, contrasting, and sometimes colour. Of course, I have to add a border as well. xD But since I only do those things, I use GIMP because it's more easier to navigate to then photoshop.

I have a friend that says that paint shop pro is more easier than photoshop.. o.o and im like.. omfg, i luv photoshop and i dont understand paint shop pro... But anyways, I'll keep using Photoshop cuz i luv it... biggrin