I need to know whether Photoshop can match Painter in the following areas: Cloner brushes (and making your own cloner brushes) Painting with patterns using cloner brushes Paper Textures (especially the "Apply Paper Texture" feature) Image Hose and nozzles I'm preparing my first Computer Graphics lecture, thanks in advance!

Can't help much, but: Cloners: PS has the cloning stamp, healing brush and the art history brush. It doesn't match Painter's range, but PS's cloners are more geared towards image correction, I think. Painting with patterns: Sort of. The PS paint engine is differently arranged though. Paper Textures: I don't think PS allows paper texture to affect painting. You can apply a textured finish to layers, but paint won't follow the texture "contours" nor would it affect subsequent painting (it's a one-shot effect). No in-built image hose. Not sure why but it's conspicuously absent from PS's feature set, but there are a few 3rd-party plugins for that (PhotoSpray for example)

If you need abstract results, the very good way is to use art history brush. But the clone stamp have the option for painting with pattern :) Hope some of this will help you :)

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The difference between these two paint program is that Painter tends to mimic natural medium and produce art like results while PS is meant for image processing purpose such as preparing image for print matching, find tune colors for various applications and file format. Notice a lot of 3d artist prefer PS is because of its straight forward tools, offset image for seamless tiling, snaping accuracy just to name a few. Often we can't affort both programs so PS is more practicle for multi tasks in a multimedia society. Unless artistic expression is more important, then Painter would be best.

if you want to paint with patterns, you can always use a brush set, either create you own, use bundled brushs, or download some, there are a squillion on the net, a plugin called filters unlimited v2, has got a heap of paper textures, as well as stone, color effects, about 350 effects all up, most have sliders so you can get the exact effect you want before applying, they can also be saved as a preset.