I’ve always been a bit of a duffer when it came to photoshop or other such image manipulation programs; I can work with pre-existing photos no problem – I can isolate images and put them together and do lots of the nifty photoshop tricks, like airbrushing people to get rid of blemishes, or reducing red-eye, or moving them slightly in a picture, or adding someone in or taking someone out, etc. etc. However, I’ve never been really adept at creating something from nothing. The current site design I did from scratch (all graphics by hand), and it’s not the most graphically exciting place in the world. I’ve done other things as well, but usually when it needed to be professional, I’d get our graphic design guy to do it.
Well, I’m still at the point where our graphic designer does much better work than me, but I’m improving, and most of it is due to brush sets. I think in the last 5 days I’ve downloaded almost 70 of them, and although I’ve since thrown out at least 40 of those sets, it’s amazing what difference custom brushes make to designers. I never knew. I was a design brush virgin. But NO MORE!
Look for more in this space soon.
What do you think of GIMP? I tried using it for some of my standard tasks, but it seemed slow in places and unintuitive in others. Maybe I’m just used to photoshop.
There are things about it that I like better than photoshop. The price is very nice, and the ability to write python scripts to do things is pretty cool. I like the distinction between master windows and slave windows better (though I think that’s more of a Windows Manager thing). I also have moved mostly into linux for my day-to-day computering, so I like that the Gimp actually runs on my OS.
There are things that I like Photoshop better for. I love layer management in Photoshop, and it’s just nowhere near as good in the Gimp. Layer grouping, editing multiple layers at once, lots of little things like that – it doesn’t happen in the Gimp.
I haven’t noticed that it is slow, but then again, I’ve got gigs and gigs of RAM. As for unintuitive, I think it’s mostly a question of being used to some things in Photoshop vs. doing them in the Gimp. And I think that, in general, it runs a little better on a linux machine.
congrats man, thats great! do you have any recent work posted?
Nothing recent comes to mind, though I’m hoping to update the look and feel here soon. Unfortunately (as you know) there’s a million and one other things that are getting done prior to my being able to update my personal blog.
Soon enough, though. Soon enough.