Clothes designing with gimp

Hi all, i am stuck with something and was wondering if anyone could help me,

I am using Gimp to make clothes and while they don't look to bad they're not great, i've seen loads of clothes in shops in sl where the pattern of the fabrics look very realistic and i was wondering if anyone had any tips on how to do this, also how do i transfer a picture from sl to my computer???

Thank you for any help you could give me

Clothing designed using GIMP, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or any other graphics image editing program that handles layers and apha channels are indistinguishable in quality........that is entirely dependant on the creators who created the textures and patterns. It seems that most in SL use Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro.......but a fair amount use other programs including the GIMP. I use GIMP and most of my stuff is what I would call only fair in quality but that is due to my experience and fact that I'm really just a very interested hobbiest with no real ambition to be pro. I have on a very few occassions stumbled around with a clothing item I feel rivels many of the well known designers in SL.......but I really did it by accident. Time and practice is about the only thing that will help you to improve. Not the program you use.

On getting pictures from SL to your computer. I assume you want to take a picture and save it to your computer for possible editing or something. That's fairly simple. At the bottom of the interface there is a button named "snapshot". Press it. You'll get a dialog box pop up with a preview. Click "more" and you can choose to save to disk, email or postcard (I think). Click save to disk. Then you get another dialog for you choose where on your disk to save and a chance to name it.

I also use GIMP and I have found that after you have added the texture ( it usually works better if it is a less detailed texture ie; not a very crazy patterned one!!) to the clothes, draw on some lines using the fuzzy paintbrush, in a similar colour to your texture (you could use colour picker and then go up one or two shades). Just draw the lines where you imagine shadows would fall (or look at pictures of real clothes for inspiration). Once you have done that play around with the dodge/burn tools to lighten or darken your 'shadows' until you get the effect you are looking for!! I hope this helps