Image editing app of choice.

I guess I will see how CoreDraw and Painter is once I get it. I will start saving for Photoshop soon, that way I can keep my Mac busy.
I have Photoshop 3.01 on my old SGI o2 along with Illustrator 5. Thats the only photoshop I touched. But the o2 is seeing its days finally.

I’m a photoshop lover. Can’t stand anything less now. It’s rare to see a market leader in such a well justified position. The thing everyone always seems to forget is how stupidly fast it is compared with the other tools, both at layering, and filters.

And it has real colour management!

I basicly have every bit of software mentioned in here installed. This because for some reason everyone has to get me imagery that I can only open in a specific program, and never the same specific program.

I would love to only use the Gimp but find the threshold a bit high.

I don’t like photoshop at all… it doesn’t do things the way I want it to. I mean… exactly those things that I want shortcuts for don’t seem to have them and so on… and I find it way too bulky.

Paintshop is lovely, though not the most “exact” of programs. I really like the options it gives you when you’re about to save an image. Especially when doing a .gif for the web it’s grand.

I still like microsofts photo editor for straight cut/paste action.

For some reason Ulead’s Iphoto handles fonts much better than any other proggy I’ve found.

And Corel… is crap, but usefull for some things.

Oh yeah - forgot about Pshop color management. I only do color conversions (cmyk-rgb-cmyk, or your shop’s cmyk to my shop’s cmyk) via profiles now. It is phenomenal. It’s just become such an integrated part of my workflow that I forgot about it.

Gimp was designed for linux. Most of the window managers in linux support multiple desktops, which make gives gimp certain advantages in being designed the way it is IMHO.

Yeah i had linux for atime and it wasn’t any more convienient. I still had to pick through a bunch of windows to find the one I wanted.

Have you tried running gimp with litestep??

I try to avoid installing software so that I can use other software. A rare exception is the GTK.

Personally I use Ulead’s PhotoImpact 8.

It’s very fast and relatively inexpensive.
Unfortunately it’s windows only…

What I like about it is that it has all the bells’n’whistles
from Photoshop…and much more intuitive. Photoshop
has that bothersome “old-school” interface that forces
you to use short-cuts all the time…when you work
with layers and objects. PhotoImpact is smarter…
you just point and click realtime on that object/layer
you “SEE” instead of having to click a selector to select
an object/layer…makes the work flow a LOT easier…
you can also just “mark” and copy anything at ANY layer
without using shorts…

Not only that…Lets say you work with a vector
graphics object that you’ve given some material
attributes such as bevelling and texturing…reflections
and much more…and lets say you want to DRAW another
object with the same attributes…all you have to do is to
click on that object with these attributes…and draw another
object anywhere you want…and it will automatically draw
in realtime with 3d-bevelling and the works…without having
to “re-insert” all these attributes…how’s that for designer handy?

I love that program…

I use GIMP. I used to use photoshop, but since I’ve dumped my windows partition I’ve gotten used to using GIMP and I can’t complain.

cheers,

Bob

Eh. I’m boring. Photoshop.

never did understand the extract tool, what does it do?

Alltaken

Photoshop all the way. I never got my hands dirty with GIMP, but Photoshop + Illustrator + Painter is all I need to be serious in 2D.

It’s a question of getting used to it. Besides, with the Move tool you can turn on Auto Select Layer. But what do you do in PhotoImpact when you have lots of layers that fill out the whole document?

Another bonus of using Photoshop is that it’s an industry standard - I landed a job the other day because of my PS skills. Strange this would come from a Blenderhead who is used to not using an industry standard in the 3D field… Hmm…

Photoshop is certainly the most widely compatible.

You use the Layer manager of course :o)

Another bonus of using Photoshop is that it’s an industry standard - I landed a job the other day because of my PS skills. Strange this would come from a Blenderhead who is used to not using an industry standard in the 3D field… Hmm…

Yeah…hold on to that “last” thougt…because I actually landed the
jobs when I switched to Blender…could have been the fact that I’ve
somehow matured in 3d…but …then again…who knows?

3 years with 3dstudio max (legally purchased for a small fortune) didn’t
land me a single assignement…

Now…with Blender’s improvements, and (hard work of course)
landed me a HUGE full-time job marketing products with 3d-
mascots and composition. heh…they liked that work better
than the 7 ad-companies that use Maya and photoshop…

…guess that kind of implies that it ain’t the tools alone…

So if photoshop will do it for you - fine! the fact that it’s
industry standard…won’t do squat!

OK… The presets seem to be inverse of PS’s ones.

Er well, in my case it did, but ah well. As a freelance artist it usually doesn’t matter what app you use, but if you are hired permanently by a firm working with a team they often want you to use their tools. Anyway, let’s not make this a long discussion.

I’m on a team (in fact - I’m the project leader :smiley: ) and we hired
a video games company to co work with us to do programming,
fun fact is…they (and the team) didn’t care what programs where
used…as long as they got the formats they wanted and there
where no fuzz with the layers.

well I’d have to say:

paint shop pro is okay, it is about the cost of elements [I have 7 on my computer, but I have used 8]

though I HATE how it has different color settings for each tool

I’m kind of tempted to go back to five

well anyway I could swear that paint shop pro lets you edit vector paths, and photoshop elements not [just the usual scale/move/rotate], but I haven’t tried any in either.

the thing photoshop has [even photoshop elements] is those KICK ASS brushes. in photoshop elements I don’t think they are editable much [only size and opacity], but in photoshop [7 and up] the brush editor allows all sorts of cool things I REALLY WANT TO PLAY WITH

the gimp seems to fall behind here as well. the gimp is really nice at some image operations like selecting, moving selections, several filters, KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS, but it’s painting abilities are lacking. tablet support in windows is … difficult to come by and get working.

as far as interfaces go, I guess except for the multiple sets of fg/background colors I like paint shop pro the best because [except for the layer pallate and tool options, which can be turned on/off with the L and O keys respectively] the interface is not on top of what you are working on. it is very annoying in photoshop to move the layer pallate to get to the corner of the image, the close button, or the scroll bar. the same applies to the gimp where I have like 6 images open [on two monitors] all somwhat overlaping. It is disappointing in photoshop not having shortcuts for things like the offset filter [shift+control+o in the gimp, I’ve never looked for it in paint shop pro], but paint shop pro seems to have keyboard shortcuts for nearly everything.

and version 8 is scriptable with python, which I can get used to a lot more quickly than scheme (kinda like lisp they say) which is used in the gimp.

that said, paint shop pro is only in windows, and I don’t do a lot of major image editing, or texture painting. I would be much more willing to use photoshop to paint textures, the gimp to modify images [like taking an environment map as saved from the texture buttons and converting it into something I can map onto a cube for a skybox], and paint shop pro for… umm, pallatizing images when I save them for the web [I guess mostly because it starts A LOT faster than photoshop elements]

I didn’t even scratch the surface… well anyway, if I had the motivation to paint more things I would seriously consider painter, mostly because it would be fun to play with, but also in the hopes that I could remotely equal the likes of ursula vernon [she does physical art too, you need to check]

I use micomedia fireworks mostly for web dizing anyewaz if you want to spend alot of money i suggest getting this . It works the same as photoshop

See the following site: www.kamionline.8m.com

On the front page, you’ll see a huge GIMP screenshot customized to match ‘well almost’ photoshop.

Just installed that plugin - much nicer to use gimp without a gazillion windows!


Brian

Photoshop gave a me a lot of jobs(as well as lost many for saying I don’t handle (in the past) 3ds Max).Mostly all of them, as my main thing is illustration and 2d stuff in general, only recently started to be picked for 3d, though been in 3d for a while.

You can do perfectly the job with Gimp or Psp. I have used them at jobs too.

I keep needing for certain stuff the layer modes of Photoshop, and its relatively recent thing of sets (grouping of layers) ,but haven’t used gimp so deeply; surely there’s a work around.

I like several tools in Gimp that you don’t have in Adobe (the jump into its animation tool to check the sprite anim done with layers is not as fast as checking the avi in gimp.Or the web map maker. Or its control of indexed pallette graphics stuff, to mention some.) and th eother way too. Selection power like quick mask, and may others, and some image adjust tools, aren’t in Gimp.

But in 2d is easier and quicker to fake the effect with the main tools. is not so easy or quick or accurate to do for example hair if you don’t have hair in 3d :wink:

PSP has its lacks compared with Adobe (a lot) and with Gimp too. But is a very nice and compact interface, is a lightweighted tool and the animshop addon is a dream gift to make sprite anims with it. And if you’re asked to do them with tight milestones, is a real gift.

To be sincere, I like the 3 of them.

Open canvas(th free beta and the latest comercial one) being my fav for traditional painting, followed by Painter 7, Pixia and that thing called Art Rage is really interesting, being the oil very similar to what u get when one paint with real oil. Only miss the real bumps :wink:

I have Corel 10, and I’ll probably upgrade to 12 one of these days. I have used Photoshop and for me anyway, Corel Photo-Paint can do anything that Photoshop can do, with one exception that I know of: processing Digital RAW files. And I much prefer Corel Draw to Adobe Illustrator, but that’s probably just because I am used to it.

But Corel isn’t the industry standard, it’s harder to find tutorials and add-ons and Corel-specific resources.

If you need the standard, if you need to work with other people’s files and others in the industry, then you probably need Photoshop. If you just need to get the job done, then Corel (or GIMP) will work just fine.

There are some other gotchas though. Corel Painter works better with Photoshop than Corel Photo-Paint (!), that’s not a big deal to me, but it could be a problem for others.

If you are making enough money that spending three times as much is worth just to get the standard, then do it. It irks me though that Adobe (like Autocad in the drafting field) charges extortionate prices just because they can. But maybe that’s just me.