Which Graphics software? Argh!

Hey,

I'm looking at playing about designing my own clothes at some point and maybe even other stuff.

But which software is suitable? I hear about PaintShopPro, Photoshop etc etc and the various versions of each, not to mention various costs..

What would you recommend i use to design clothes?

Any advice is greatly appreciated and i apologise if this information is buried 43 p[ages away somewhere else

Thanks!

Lokirian

Personal preference. No seriously, I ended up with Paintshop Pro 9 simply because it was the cheapest I could find that was at least semi current.

Paintshop has most of the features of Photoshop, there are several other programs you can get instead of either I don't know these though I am sure someone will come along espousing one of these over Paintshop or Photoshop.

Though really, it all boils down to which one has the features you want and can afford.

Thanks... looking to spend anywhere from $80-$160 kind of range.

I'm perfectly happy with the GIMP; but then, I don't believe the other packages run on Linux...
Still, it's competitive on features and unbeatable on price, being free. ( www.gimp.org )

If you have never done graphic design before, then go with Paint shop pro.
Gimp while free has a STEEP learning curve.
PSP is friendly, can use most photoshop plugins and is fairly popular.

And that it is only reason for existance. It wouldn't exist if Corel or Adobe would actually make a product for Linux.
I personally find it to be crap. It is non intutive, master containerless and has a steep learning curve. Yes, its free. But what is the industry standard? Photoshop. Gimp is lightyears behind it.

Oh, please. It's hardly like Photoshop is even remotely intuitive (well, it wasn't last I looked at it, and judging by some of the questions that come up, I don't think it is now. Maybe unfair to judge by the past, but then, what version of the gimp are you condemning?) Not that it matters. "Intuitive" is important only for applications destined for casual use. Writing a memo needs an intuitive app; and an MSPaint level 'play at drawing' ought to be intuitive. But when you create a tool for real work, what's important is what the user that knows the tool can do, not how easy it is to pick it up and use without looking at the instructions.

And, yes, I know, Photoshop has a lot of stuff that is useful for professional work destined for a real printer (or film), but, in terms of 32 bit RGBA textures? Not so much.

All I can say is that I, too, use The GIMP. Yeah it has a steep learning curve.....took me almost a year to even play around with it. But once you jump in and do some online searching for books and such you get a little less intimidated with it...........it's free. It will do most anything Photoshop will do. The main "steep learning curve" part is the lack of a printed instruction manual being readily available.

Funny, how I have never had that dreaded "halo" all the PS users are complaining about. Don't shoot down a program because it may not be "the industry standard". It shows your true "expertise".

I use a PC............I got The GIMP on purpose because "the price was right". I'm keeping The GIMP because it is truly a good program. And it is intuitive once you learn a little about it. I definitely have a ton to learn about it.......but I've yet to fail to get the program to do what I want it to do. Might take me a long time...........I don't have a printed book to thumb through. But that's a lot of fun to "figure it out" on your own for me.

ive got gimp photosnot and painshop pro

they all have a learning curve, paintshop pro is the first one i learned (many years ago) it seemed more accesiable

it has alot of power and it does work with many photoshop plugins

it has its quarks and limitations too

the standard is photoshop tho, and you can get a free copy of the lite (or ls) version with most cameras or scanners, which brings its functionality way down, but i think that it could work for SL, and in the long run you really would be better off learning the gold standard (but dont pay for lite, get CS or better if your shelling out cash)

Like anything, it takes some time to get good at it. Study. Work. Effort.

Starting from scratch, all the advanced tools are difficult. The more options, the harder to learn. I actually started with Photoshop CS (aka v. I found it totally mystifying. When I switched to the GIMP, (and rad a book) it all became clear

Read a book. Or a web tutorial.

BTW, a "steep" learning curve means "easy" to learn. It is a "long" learning curve that means "difficult". See any basic Psychology of Learning text....or just be wrong.

That's true, everything has it's quarks. Many, many, many quarks.

Everyone: Please ignore the quantum physics... There's nothing to see here, move along...


But seriously. Having used Deluxe Paint, Corel's Photopaint, Paint Shop Pro, Ulead PhotoImpact, Adobe Photoshop and the GIMP:

- Photoshop is good, but in no way more intuitive than anything else. Transitioning from Photopaint to Photoshop was ugly...
- The GIMP is far better than many realize, but the UI is truly cumbersome. There's the Gimpshop plugin which mimics Photoshop's UI, good for Photoshop users.
- Paint Shop Pro was good last I tested.
- Don't go for stuff like Photoshop Elements. It's a neutered version of Photoshop, and you're way better off with the GIMP. Feature-wise at least.


My advice: Try the GIMP, it's free after all.

There are quite a few tutorials to get you started:
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/


If it doesn't deliver I'd probably go for Paint Shop Pro. It's also quite possible to find used copies of Photoshop. Photoshop 7 is quite well featured, but I don't know how it compares to Paint Shop Pro.

There are also other apps in the same league as Paint Shop Pro, but I have no experience with them.

My 2 L$: Doesnt matter which one you use, they all have a learning curve.

It's a semantic argument... the term is in flux even in academia at the moment. It's the great proscriptive/descriptive debate, once again... or, more simply, a billion people can't be wrong, in language. Once a term comes to mean something, it means something, regardless of a few holdouts who want to preserve an increasingly archaic meaning.

In any event, having owned and used all three programs in question, in terms of ease of use, I would rank them with Paintshop being the most "intuitive" for most simple functions, then Photoshop, then GIMP. Please note that this is not, strictly speaking, the same thing as a learning curve. They all have that, and honestly its not worlds different. But most of the learning curve is software independent... It's figuring out how to make X effect or Y effect with the tools presented. Photoshop wins slightly there, because it has the most tools at your disposal... but for tools that will be relevant in designing textures for SL, it's not by a huge margin.

When I say Paintshop is the most intuitive, understand that I'm speaking subjectively, of course. But it relies very little on keyboard shortcuts, and most of the menus seem to be arranged how I would arrange them. But I'm biased; I used Paintshop for years before making the step up to Photoshop, and I *still* use Paintshop for anything that isn't very complex, because I'm more comfortable with the interface.

The one thing that I feel Photoshop adds that Paintshop falls down a bit on - in terms of designing for SL only, mind you - is that while Paintshop can do basically anything Photoshop can do - again, see proviso -, Photoshop can do it more ways, and often much simpler ways.

GIMP is powerful, yes, and I've seen some fantastic work done with it. But it's not for the faint of heart. It's not very intuitive, it's not very user friendly, it has (in my opinion) the worst user interface, and from my experience any ways, it's the most crashtastic of the three programs. And Jake Trenchard... It's not just because it lacks a printed manual or good online help. Honestly, Chosen's good advice in other threads aside, I learned both Paintshop and Photoshop almost entirely by trial and error and found the process not all that painful. GIMP I've used for years (on my Linux-running laptop) and I still struggle to do things sometimes. GIMPShop makes things a little better, but it doesn't fix all the problems.

So, to wrap all this rambling up...

My advice is, in the price range your looking to spend, you realistically have two options... GIMP or Paintshop Pro. If you aren't afraid of a long, profanity-laden learning process, GIMP will most likely work for you, and save you some money. If nothing else, heck, it's free... Go download it and see what you think. I recommend GIMPShop, although plain old vanilla GIMP has it's fans too.

But if you use GIMP, and get disgusted with the interface, and want something that can do more or less the same thing, and has a nicer interface, get Paintshop Pro.

I think the difference in the learning curves, whether we want to call them "steep" or "long" or what have you, is that all the major commercial raster editors tend to follow established conventions, but GIMP really does not. If you know one of the standard commercial programs, you can learn another very quickly, but GIMP is totally its own animal. Knowing another graphics program will not very well help you learn GIMP, and vise versa. It's powerful, but it does a lot of things bass ackwards compared to established industry norms. That gets frustrating.

Now, as for the question of whether or not Photoshop is intuitive, I'll say yes and no. It really depends on what definition of "intuitive" we're talking about. Let me explain what I mean.

I'll take the non-intuitive part first. If you've never done anything with graphics before, then when you're first confronted with ANY of these programs, it can be very difficult to know how to get started, and Photoshop is certainly no exception to this. I myself didn't have a clue how to begin when I first tried to use it.

However, all it took was about half an hour of someone saying "Here's how the interface is laid out, and here's what the program can do", and I was on my way. Everything fell into place from there.

That, of course, leads me to the "yes, it is intuitive" part. Photoshop has a very distinctive logic behind how all its various functions operate. If you know one or two pieces of the puzzle, it's really easy to intuit the whole thing. Once that basic logic "clicks" in your mind, you have one of those "oh duh" moments, and from there on in, there's really nothing in the program that you can't figure out in seconds. It's almost like one big fractal; every component is pretty much like the whole.

So, I think the reason half the crowd always goes, "Photoshop is extremely intuitive," and the other half always goes, "Are you kidding? It's not intuitive at all. It took me ______ even to get started!" is that the first half were able to adopt the underlying logic early on (like I was) and the second half weren't. I'd wager that that has more to do with how the program was introduced to them than anything else.

GIMP, though, doesn't seem to have that same kind of logic throughout. Parts of it do, but many do not. Whenever I use it, I get the sense that I'm using not one program, but several very different programs all at once.

Of course, I'm probably gonna get yelled at by the programmers in the crowd for saying that, as programmers tend to insist that GIMP's logic is flawless. But I think that kind of underscores my point. GIMP is designed by programmers for programmers, and for whatever it's worth, programmers don't necessarily think in the same way as everyone else. At the very least, they tend to look at things quite differently than artists do.

Anyway, my guess at the reason behind GIMP's inconsistency is this it was developed not by any distinct organization, but by the general public. While Adobe and other software companies task people specifically with making sure things operate with conformity, GIMP, as an open source project, does not and cannot. At best, it has a loose knit collection of volunteers who contribute pieces of code here and there.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again; what GIMP really needs is for someone to do with it what Mozialla did for Firefox, which is take all that open source material, and put it in a really nice, user-friendly package. If and when that ever happens, GIMP might become a serious contendor in the industry. Until then, I doubt it will ever me more than the red headed step child of the graphics family.

GIMP ain't so bad. I used it daily for three months before deciding I needed Photoshop.

Usability: If you use it you'll get used to doing things the GIMP way, so the user interface won't seem so bad.

Features: The masking and selection tools in GIMP seem primitive compared to Photoshop. This is it's biggest feature drawback. Runner up would be layer locking and sub-layers. Can't do those in GIMP. These things aren't needed for making clothes and textures for SL; they just make life easier.

Documentation: There are some tutorials, but I never found any of popular-photoshop-book quality. There are, as far as I know, two books available for GIMP. I haven't read either, so I can't comment on them except to say there are three point four bazillion books on Photoshop, some of them excellent, and many of them available for previewing at your local book store.

Online help: Here's where Photoshop outshines all else by leaps and bounds. Want to know how to accomplish a particular task? All the tutorials are for Photoshop. Don't underestimate this. And if you follow photoshop tutorials and try to accomplish the same things in GIMP you'll find that some options are missing even for those functions that seem to be in GIMP, and the numeric ranges of parameters are often scaled differently or arbitrarily limited in GIMP. You'll spend a lot of time re-inventing the wheel.

Stability: GIMP crashes sometimes. It's not crashtastic, but it's not commercial quality, either. Save your work often and this isn't a big deal.

If you're a tinkerer and are handy with Google, GIMP is a capable tool. If your time is precious, just get Photoshop.

What Chosen said. I started out with Paintshop Pro and after a period of slow learning and lots of frustration I eventually "got it" and then progressed very rapidly. Before I'd reached that point I also tried Gimp, and frankly, it made my brain hurt. About a month ago I moved over to Photoshop and WOW! After a month I'm doing stuff I never could in PSP, and doing the stuff I used to do better and quicker. One thing no-one has mentioned, is that Photoshop seems to me to respond MUCH better to a graphics tablet than does PSP. Drawing seems smoother, and the response to a pressure sensitive pen is just so much more.....responsive.

I wouldn't say PSP is that far behind, and obviously it's much more affordable, but to me Photoshop was worth every penny. As for the Gimp. Well, it's free I guess.

This is true, but it's getting better with each version it seems. With XI, graphics tablet support is pretty darn spiffy. Or, at least, it seems to like my Intuos2 just fine. I can't speak for any other tablets.

Hi everyone,

I truly appreciate your input and advice here. I also appreciate that you guys n girls didnt turn it into a huge argument, but kept it objective

I think im going to go deliberate between Paintshop Pro & Photoshop. I don't want to spend a month or so figuring out something like GIMP. I also want to use it for touching up my photography as well..

Once again, thanks to all!!!

Yours in appreciation,

Loki

You can download a 30 day free trial of PaintShopPro IX from www.corel.com

I think before you download the trial for paintshop, head onto Ebay and see what you can find for the price you want to pay. How I ended up with paintshop, downloaded the trial after just because heck may as well try it out earlier than I get the CD.

I say try it out after because if you don't get paintshop downloading the trial for it is a bad idea, paintshop and photoshop work differently, doing something this way in paintshop means you do it that way in photoshop and will make getting used to the one you buy that much harder.

One key peice of advice for finding one on Ebay, buy the newest version you can afford, and make sure it is listed as having a CD, OEM is fine, what I got, but there has to be a CD and preferably a business type seller. If you go with a person selling you never how good or bad the CD is, a person just wants to get rid of it, not all look and say it has scratches or really how bad said scratches are.

For buying Photoshop (and other software including Windows) at a discount, I've been using:

www.9software.com

Its where I picked up Windows XP Professional for $81. The software is Legit and Legal (a big plus). HEH! I might even re-do my whole house network using Windows Server 2003 one of these days!!

Be careful that the software sold there might be OEM only software and its use may lie in the grey area of legality.

This is very true. While laws in different countries more or less universally recognize that you can resell a product you've bought, software companies try to counter this with EULA's (End User License Agreements). These usually have a bunch of extra restrictions, and while it's unclear if it's all enforceable, can still become an issue.

The Windows OEM license for example states that the OEM copy is tied to the motherboard of the computer it's first installed on. If you buy a used OEM copy you might well find Microsoft won't activate it.

I personally feel that reselling software should be allowed, but it makes sense to be aware of the risks.