photoshop elements /sl tutorials

Is there any thing in the way of specific photoshop elements, offering hep on the things we do with SL textures. I can find plenty of photoshop tutorials, but they all see to deal in photography, working with SL textures just seems to be different. In general

I haven't found much written specifically for Photo shop Elements. I am using 5.0 and have to convert the Photo shop information into Elements' terms....it can be difficult at times.

The reason there aren't a whole lot of texturing tutorials available for PS Elements is because it's not a tool most texture artists would ever use. It's under-powered, and many of it's capabilities are deliberately hidden by its authors. It's not something I would ever recommend anyone buy.

As much as I love most things Adobe, I really wish the company would stop slapping the Photoshop name so haphazardly onto so many other products. They really do a lot of damage that way, both to their customers, and to their own reputation. People buy PS Elements, thinking "Oh, that must be the 'for-dummies' version of the same thing." It's not. It's a separate program that happens to share some of the same interface design.

For the exact same price, Paintshop Pro is far more powerful. Given the choice, there's absolutely no reason anyone should ever go with PSE over PSP.

That said, I do realize an awful lot of people have PSE. It's is practically given out in gumball machines these days. It comes with just about every low to mid priced digital camera under the sun. That's not necessarily a bad thing. For simple touch-ups of amateur digital photos, it's really not a bad choice, and it does do a pretty good job of familiarizing new users with the Photoshop style interface, so if they ever want to move up to the real thing, it's an easy transition. I just wouldn't use it for much beyond that.

That's not to say it's not capable of doing more. It's just that since so many of its features are hidden (why that is is anyone's guess), you have to approach a lot of tasks in very round-about ways. There's often no direct route to your given goal. You have to take a lot of non-obvious detours to get where you want to go with it. That's pretty annoying, in my opinion, not to mention just plain silly.

In any case, there is an alpha channel tutorial for it in the transparency guide, stickied at the top of the forum. And as Morgaine said, you can often translate Photoshop tutorials to PSE pretty easily, since they do share almost the same interface. It's when you start to need the hidden features, or features the program just doesn't have, that you run into trouble. And that can happen rather quickly.

Your best bet is to look at Photoshop tutorials, and then when you run into a step you can't translate, ask questions on forums like this one, in as specific terms as you can. It's very unlikely you'll come across very many texturing tutorials written directly for PSE.

thats interesting, I bought paintshop pro a year or so ago and I seldom use it. I had a couple people tell me PSE was much better, so Ive just been working with that. Maybe Ill give paitshop pro another look. But I was just loooking for less photgraphy and more SL oriented stuff.

Ummm... just for the record, if you're on a Mac, PSP is not an available choice.

It's not there, hasn't ever been, and I doubt it will ever be (unless you count running it in Windows on a Intel Mac, and since not everyone with an Intel Mac has Windows, the fact that it is possible doesn't make PSP "available" on the Mac.)

So there is a reason for people to choose PSE over PSP. It's basically choosing a very limited program over one that won't run at all. And since it's perfectly possible to make textures for SL with PSE, it's not a bad choice.

The real problem is that it is very limited, so most of the people who write tutorials don't write them for PSE.

However, for those of you who have it, if you get stuck on something in a Photoshop Tutorial, ask, and someone here will do their best to "translate" it into PSE terms.

Which is about all we can do.

Good point, Robin. Sorry, Mac users, I'd forgotten about you.

id learn the gimp rather than deal with PSE

i guess if your not used to a full featured product you could feel empowered by having PSE, but if you are accustom to using the real deal id give you less than 10 min before hitting a brick wall

"but what about the linux users?" we have it easy, its called wine, it will run photoshop up to cs2, full cs3 support is around the bend, and it will do psp upto version 10...

wine for ppc mac is "still in the works", which to me means "aint gonna happen", the intel version is there but it only says "runs simple apps" i dont know what the consider simple

i still use the gimp for almost everything, since i have no clue where my psp 8 disk has ran off to, and my photoshop is version 7

Sounds like time to load PSP and give it another shot.