Which Graphics software? Argh!

You know, this may be true, but its kinda interesting just how flexible at times the Windows XP locking system is.

My current computer has exactly two (internal) components left from when I first installed my current copy of XP (legit, albiet OEM): The sound card and one of the three hard drives. Yet it still activates just fine. Meanwhile I hear horror stories of people installing a new video card and getting locked out.

I've put my Upgrade version of XP on three completely different computers. Nothing, absoulutely nothing, is the same as the first (orginal installation). No problems activating the software at all. Just had to go through the "Genuine Microsoft Product" stuff......took an additional 10 minutes to get my updates on this computer (this was the last time I installed XP about a year ago).

If I do it again I figure I might have to call MS on the phone...........luck only goes so far, you know. LOL

I don't design clothes, I make quilts for selling in SL. However I've tried some little bits of clothing and the easiest program I found by far, and you can download an old version for free, is TwistBrush by Pixarra. It it truly intuitive, you can layer, copy to tga, use alpha. It's an excellent program for getting your feet wet. Channels aren't quite the same, and it doesn't have the types of brushes some of the others do, though it does have a lot of them. But for something to play with and even for creating quite a few items, it's worth looking at. Being able to put what you do into artists workbooks is the easiest way of filing things I have yet to find. You get unlimited artbooks, each with 500 pages. Each page has 32 layers for use. I find I can design every part of what I do using one or two pages. Used in conjunction with GIMP and the application is almost unlimted in functionality. And inexpensive, if you want the unlimited use of the newest version and upgrades, it costs about 150, if I remember correctly

http://www.pixarra.com/

This looks like quite a nice natural media software. I think for beginners, the choice can be rather daunting at first. And there is often a confusion between an image editor and a paint or illustration program, since many of the functions overlap.

Photoshop and Paintshop Pro for example are slanted towards image editing and tend to benefit those who recomposite and modify existing material. They are however quite feature limited when it comes to painting or drawing things from scratch.

I'd suggest not to work and rely on one single program just to get things done. There are lots of small and fun software to experiment with depending on the intended end result. There are things like ArtRage or Inkscape, for example, which are a straightforward to learn, and that do things a pure image editor can't.

Firstly, try some of the inexpensive things out there, see if it's even what you want to do. Don't spend a fortune for something you may not enjoy. Secondly, don't be shy about using more then one program. For my purposes a mixture of GIMP and TB is quite good. Thirdly, SL should be for fun, profit is nice, but have fun with whatever you do.

"Steep" to me means a lot to learn on the road to becomeing proficient. Such as running up a steep grade is difficult. Intuitive and Steep are not necesarily opposites. A program that is Intuitive can have a Steep learning Curve. The "Intuative" part of an interface should such to allow the user to work with the tools Intuitively and not hassle with the interface.

Once you learn the interface there is no hassle...............so it becomes intuitive.

Every software has a learning curve.........and if you are not familar with the interface that learning curve can be "steep". The more complex the program the more complicated the interface............the "steeper" the learning curve. When applying the learning curve to any software you must take into account any documentation and how clearly it is written and organized. When talking about GIMP vs, say, Photoshop your learning curve is different (depending on your graphics experience) but also depending on information being available that is easy to look up or refer to. Photoshop has a written manual, GIMP has congomeration of technical explanations. Both tell you how to do what you want to do.........one is written in language that the majoity of people can understand and the other is not. But that does not mean one is vastly superior to the other. It just makes it easier to use.

I use GIMP and struggle with a few things. But as time goes on, GIMP is getting quite "intuitive" for me............that means I'm learning the software. I put up with the "struggles" for a very good reason..........I cannot justify spending up to $800 USD for a hobby. I can do for free............well free monetarily, but I do spend a lot in effort. But, to me, that's almost as much fun as creating textures to make clothes and buildings with.

Having learnt the interface does not necessarily mean that it becomes intuitive. You can learn a software with a terrible interface, such as GIMP or Blender, and commit the actions to memory but there are actions that still cause you to take a longer time to perform as compared to using another more streamlined application.

Blender has an interface?

I assumed one just prayed to some dark god for results. I couldn't figure out anything else that worked.

I have the same experience with Blender: got it and spent the rest of my time trying to figure out how to do anything, anything at all. I pretty much gave up on it. It's one thing to mess things up, but with this program I just couldn't even figure out how to *start* messing things up.

Just a few days ago I got the GIMP though, and that was a completely different experience. Never having used Paintshop Pro or Photoshop is probably a huge advantage here, I don't have to realise how different the interface is and can instead just concentrate on learning how to use it. Using Chip Midnight's templates I was able to whip up my first cute little top in no time.

I often wonder how many people complaining about the gimp interface being unintuitive are already familiar with photoshop and expecting it to work the same.

The main reason I chose the gimp was that when I decided to start doing graphics on PC I hated the Photoshop interface. Things just weren't where I expected them to be or under familiar names. It struck me as an interface that had to be learned rather than played with.

The Gimp on the other hand (more often than not) has things where I expect. For me at least it was the more intuitive interface. Case in point from googling "photoshop crop image":

"Another new way to crop in Photoshop 6 is with the Trim command found under the Image menu"

When speed reading menus looking for "Crop" "Trim" really doesn't leap out at you..

What's the equivalent in the Gimp? It's Image - Crop Image of course..

So intuitiveness depends on the user and expectations. For me with a fair knowledge of photography terms, the gimp won hands down. Sticking to terms used in photography rather than renaming them for no good reason made it easier to find my way around.

Have you ever considered that 'Trim' and 'Crop' in Photoshop actually does two different things?

Nevermind, GIMP wins hands down, for some reason.

That's my point. Photoshop makes me stop and consider. From that point of view it's unintuitive to me and just reinforces my point about needing to learn it. For some people I'm sure it's the other way around and Photoshop suits their mindset and expectations more.

I'm not trying to convince anyone which is best for them. With demos available for the pay programs and the free ones, well being free, I was just dropping a hint to try them out and see which connects with them. It might be photoshop, it might be paint.net, paintshop pro, the gimp, gimpshop, pixia or something else entirely.



It's obvious from your earlier post that you don't like the gimp, that's no reason to get snarky with people who do. I made the reasons for MY choice quite clear.

I don't think the GIMP interface is as horrible as people say, but after reading a recent slashdot discussion

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/10/1817230

I think I know what's tripping up a lot of people. If you don't have a large screen, GIMP's multi-window interface may drive you crazy. In Photoshop you have one menu, and palettes float over your documents. In GIMP, everything is in its own window. If you need to overlap windows you will need to switch and re-stack and arrange and move quite often.

There is no reason to have the need to stop and consider. If you need 'Crop', you select 'Crop', instead of 'Trim'. You do not go to a supermarket looking for cabbages by asking the salesperson where the lettuce is. By that same example, it would mean that a supermarket is unintuitive to use, because it provides more choices than you need, even though the products are all placed in their logical sections.

I do not have 'likes' and 'dislikes' for software. They are just inanimate tools, all meant to serve us. But it really is a terrible reason to say something else wins hands down because of some misunderstanding that you have. While people can think for themselves, some might actually believe you and torture themselves with GIMP for a period of time.

Who knows, they might like working with it. I do.

Yes, there are about as many who love bdsm as there are who love gimp.
I guess it doesn't really matter, as long as you know thats what you really love.

Trust me, it was no misconception that I hated the UI of Photoshop. Trying to take one small example of why I found it unintuitive and extrapolate that into my entire reasoning is unfounded. I found the Gimp interface more intuitive than the Photoshop one and that's the fact that is important. Whether that would still be the case with the CS versions of Photoshop, I don't know. Is the crop tool still only available via it's icon or is it in the menus now?

There is a difference between a fast way of working when learned and an intuitive way of working. And intuitive is a personal thing, there is no way for anyone to know what someone else will find intuitive. While not disliking the Gimp, you think it has a "terrible interface" and that using it is "torture".. How odd.. That was my experience with Photoshop and I hated it. You must be more easy going on stuff like that than I am.

For someone like Lokirian who is just looking for something to play about with, then spending a little time with different applications and finding the most intuitive application for him is time well spent. His initial progress will be faster and if he outgrows his initial choice will have a good founding of knowledge and techniques that will make learning another application easier.

I have not seen anyone mention PAINT dot NET yet.
It is free and it supports TGA-files with alpha channel.

So I downloaded and at first I was disappointed about the way you have to work to use the alpha channel. I have fixed that by installing the alpha mask plugin. This is enough to make SL cloting.

Sure I would love to have the features of more advanced programs, but I am NOT going to shell out US$ 800 for Photoshop... I may consider buying Paint Shop Pro, that has a reasonable price.

Wow. Everything all right at home? You sound a bit frustrated about something, and I really can't imagine anybody would care enough about some stranger's choice of graphic software to use this kind of sarcasm.

I've been using GIMP for awhile now, and am mostly happy with it, but I downloaded Paint dot Net the other day to try it. I haven't done much with it yet, but it looks promising. I also downloaded the free trial of Photoshop, and am trying to learn that as well. But there's no way I can afford it once the 30 days are up. I've got lots of other things I'll spend that much money on before I spend it on a graphics program.

I cut my teeth on PSP 7. ( My dentist wants to know, "How the heck did you do *that* to them!" )

And I still use it for almost all my graphics work. Every now and then I switch over to PSP 8 to use a couple of PS plugins.

I looked at a friends PhotoShop once, then he told me how much it cost him... My head exploded!

Ihmo, PSP seems a lot easier, and cheaper.

I have used Photoshop only briefly on other peoples' computers. I found it complicated, but I didn't really get a chance to learn it in detail. I was able to do what I wanted to do with it.

I do use GIMP and I don't find it at all torturous, rather easy really, and I never had a book. I learned it by playing with the program itself, trying to edit and draw. But, I am a programmer, perhaps that is why I found GIMP fairly 'intuitive'. Programmers do seem to think differently than non programmers

Paint shop Pro I have also used, though not for many years now. I found it the easiest of all, but when I used it it did not have many features I found I needed. And my trial expired.

Actually, it has the most innovative, versitile and efficient UI I've seen in a long time. You just need to think "out of the box" (i.e. out of the standard Windows UI if you run it under Windows) and spend a few hours on tutorials to get a feel for it. Once you do, you can do a lot of stuff with little effort. A good memory for shortkeys helps, I must admit that.

Most people (not pointing my finger at anyone in this thread, I'm generalizing here ) will simply bash anything because it looks different or because they can not figure out how it works in 5 minutes. In my experience however, these are the most powerful and versitile products in their field, or at least amongst the best of the best, for example;
* GIMP
* Blender
* VIm

Takes a little time to get to know them, but if you do, they reward you with the ability to do stuff most people can only dream about doing (in mere seconds while they take minutes to do the same with with poorer results).

I run 4 different operating systems on a daily basis with a total of 5 user interfaces (XP, Vista, OSX, Linux, which make four, and I use both KDE and Gnome alternately, as the mood strikes me). I've used 3 different "professional" 3D packages in my life, and just about every free one known to man. I won't say Blender has "the worst" interface, but to call it the most innovative or versitile?

Compared to what, KPov or Art of Illusion? Then you might have a point. Truespace? Then you might even be within the realm of realistic.

Maya? No. 3DSMax (Assuming 3DSMax's interface is at all similar to its free counterpart GMax, unlike some people *cough* I can't afford multiple high-end 3D packages)? No. Heck, for the one and only type of modeling it's made to do, Wings3D's interface beats Blender.

I give Blender huge props for trying. And heck, I give them huge props for -succeeding-. It's not an understatement to say that I think its one of the most impressive pieces of free software to ever be created. But it's interface... not so good.

By the way... hint? "Intuitive" doesn't mix well with "You have to think outside the box" and "You have to memorize a lot of shortcuts".



I'd place a half a dozen commercial products before any of these. Well, ok, maybe not Vim. But GIMP and Blender? Easily. And it's not a question of me "not being able to figure out how it works in 5 minutes" - I use both GIMP and Blender frequently on my laptop, as it runs Linux exclusively. I can use both. I just find their interfaces obnoxious. GIMP more so than Blender, but not by much.



Uh... If you mean "If you know how to use Blender, you can do something someone who doesn't know crap about their chosen package can't do", then I agree. Otherwise? No, not so much.