I did most of the work with regular pshop. the painting on 3d part is .. well. rough starts to cover it. I mostly used it to fix seams on the markings and suchlike. Most of the work though was done flat. You can do the 3d seam checking in blacksmith, which is cheaper and has a trial you can check with your hardware so that might be an option for you.

Filter forge is great for all those odd little bits. I used 'rough leather' for the paw pads. 'woodland animal' fur I think? for the base of the fur texture, I made my own brindle striping, and I used some bone filter for the teeth and claw bases. There are a lot of great eye and iris filters.. I know I used the eyewhite from one of Rawarts filters. The skin which is really only visible around the mouth where the fur is patchy, and the inner ears is from a nice human skin filter, colour tweaked in pshop. I'm going to be trying me hand at a merle fur patching pattern, and other patches as well. Dalmation spots I have a photoshop brush for already Lyrra