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LC
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LC


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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 10:08 am

I'm taking a Photoshop class, as I've always wanted to know how to use this program. I downloaded the 30 day free trial software from the Adobe website and may buy it. Who here owns it, or the whole Creative Suite? What do you use it for?
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lin
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lin


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Location : Mexico

Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 10:36 am

I own it. Use it for like two specific tasks.

Not recommended to newbies. You can get paint.net and GIMP for free and do more than you could surpass in a long. long time.
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LC
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LC


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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 10:41 am

Well, there must be a reason Photoshop costs money and Paint.net and GIMP are free. And everyone is a newbie at one point.

It's such a popular, widely-referenced program that I felt I needed to know how it works already. I also have some specific uses in mind, so I don't mind the time invested in learning it. I am wondering if I should try to find a deal on CS4, though, or splurge on CS5.
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lin
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lin


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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 11:27 am

The difference in price for photoshop is no means justified by the price. It has some good points, also some bad points. One of which is a huge learning curve.

If you truly beleive that anything that's expensive is that way because it should be, I'd love to sell you some stuff, get in touch.

Of course everybody is a newbie at one point. Duhhhhhh.
You were recently having one of your typical bipolar pissfits about not being able to use graphics and unwilling or able to learn.
Best solution, get GIMP and paint.net for free and have at it.
If you run into a situation where you need Photoshop and it's worth a couple hundred bucks, go for it.

And people can learn to do most tasks much quicker on paint.net without expense. Why it's recommended by so many. Very few people actually need photoshop.
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LC
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LC


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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 11:57 am

Well, Lin Has Spoken. We can all go home.
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lin
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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 12:04 pm

Gee... and here I thought you were asking for information.

I should have known better.
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LC
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LC


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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 12:18 pm

Yes, I asked who had Photoshop and for some insight between CS4 and CS5. I also said I was enrolled in a class and wanted to learn it due to its immense popularity. You came back with irrelevant info about Paint.net and GIMP, and threw in a tired fairy tale about me not wanting to learn new graphics. Of course, the context of that convo was me telling you that many people don't want to self-publish because they find formatting and cover design difficult.

Well, when someone only owns a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
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lin
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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 12:26 pm

No, look back at your post. That's not what you asked at all.

Actually I own about 10 graphics programs, not just a hammer. And use them pretty extensively.

You've declared yourself incomptentent of unwilling to learn graphics in another thread, I offered a suggestion that could help you get there easier, better and cheaper.

My mistake.
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LC
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LC


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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 12:29 pm

lin wrote:

You've declared yourself incomptentent of unwilling to learn graphics in another thread.

Link, please?
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lin
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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 12:46 pm

Your face-my ass
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LC
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LC


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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 12:49 pm

Yes, that's what I thought.
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lin
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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 12:52 pm

I think it's a common perception.
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Al Stevens
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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 1:02 pm

I have Photoshop and use it a lot. I do website design, and it's quite helpful for the visuals there. I use it to make animated GIFs, too, which are those annoying little moving graphics you see on websites.

I did all my book covers with Photoshop. When I produced music CDs and comedy DVDs of my own work, I used Photoshop to compose the artwork--jewel case inserts, disc labels, etc.

I've used Photoshop to produce advertising flyers for my entertainment pursuits.

I looked at paint.net and found that it can do most of what I do with Photoshop, although not everything, which might be because I have a large library of Photoshop plugins.

I don't find Photoshop to be particularly good with image editing. It's easier for me to edit individual image files with a different program (I use Paint Shop Pro) and use Photoshop to integrate them and text, etc., with visual effects into an image composition.
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LC
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LC


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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 1:19 pm

Al -image editing is what I'm particularly interested in. Adding light, text, and people figures to drawings. Are you saying Paint Shop Pro is better for that?
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Shelagh
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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 2:28 pm

I have Adobe Photoshop Elements 2. I use it for everything: gifs, jpegs, pdfs and pngs for red lettering because the ink bleeds (red ink does that!) in other formats.

You can use a magic wand to do things like this:

This is the logo for OEBD:

Photoshop OEDLogo

When an ex-army officer set up a blog for the UK OEBD, he didn't have a logo. From the original logo, I produced this in photoshop:

Photoshop OEDLogoUK

I don't have paint.net so I don't know how it compares.
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LC
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LC


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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 2:48 pm

Shelagh -is Photoshop Elements different from regular Photoshop? (the latter of which is also called Extended, I think?)
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lin
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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 2:57 pm

Also has ignore-adjustable magic wand--just easier to learn you to use. You also get the same effect by just quickly easily adjusting the paint bucket rate of generalization.
That sounds complicated, but it's just a bar from 0 to 100 percent you can slide around and keep slopping in color until you get exclusion like that without little crumbs around your images.
As typical with paint.net, there is no rambling around menus...you select paint can and the variables are all there.

Creating and fading layers is childs play with paint.net, a pain in the neck with photoshop.
Rotating an image is a breeze, with photoshop a major pain.
Etc.

One major factor of Photoshop is in the basic rendering: very bad program for reducing image size. you're better off reducing with another program then pasting back.

Another thing about Photoshop is only being able to undo one step at a time. Unless they've improved on that signally bone-headed characteristic.

With Gimp or Paint.net you can undo all the way back to the original upload, the redo as much as you want.

Big advantages of Photoshop:

-blur tool (both the drop and finger) very valuable and other programs don't tend to have it.

-convert to CMYK ccolor. Extremely important for preparing things to be printed on paper. Useless for internet, pdf and other ebooks, Lulu.com (for some reason), logos, etc.
I think most people who want to put up a cover for print would be just as well served by getting somebody with Photoshop or a more powerful program ot convert. A simple process, should be cheap...you could do a lot of them for the price of photoshop.

-tilts and perspective keystoning.

-I use extensis tools with Photoshop, which is great for generating shadowed, beveled, glowing type. (GIMP's Alpha to Logo is just as cool, but different)
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Shelagh
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Shelagh


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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 3:05 pm

My version is out of date. This is the latest version

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/

This is photoshop extended:

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshopextended/

It is a much more sophisticated package for professional graphic design. If you can afford it, you will be able to produce anything a top graphics design house could produce. It is expensive -- so is a vaio laptop or a mac notebook -- but if you get a great deal of use and/or pleasure from using it, then it's money well spent.

When I go to the supermarket and buy fresh cherries, the check-out staff always ask me if I really want to buy them and quote the price per kilo. They are expensive but I use them in fruit salad and they last for up to a couple of weeks. Raspberries may seem cheaper but they only last a couple of days. They have to be eaten immediately. raspberries are expensive but the check-out staff never ask me if I really do want to buy them.

That's a convoluted way of saying that what one person/group of people considers/consider to be expensive may be well within someone else's budget.


Last edited by Shelagh on Sun Jun 13, 2010 3:10 pm; edited 2 times in total
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LC
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LC


Number of posts : 5044
Registration date : 2009-03-28

Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptySun Jun 13, 2010 3:09 pm

I am only interested in print work, not web work. I'm mostly interested in modifying drawings. I've been told that some of the things I want to do are best done in Illustrator. I'm also interested in doing portfolio layouts, which I hear are best done with InDesign. Since the Creative Suite has all of that, it's what I'm considering buying. The list price is $1,800. I would probably be able to get a cheaper educator's price, but I haven't looked into it yet.

I still don't get the difference between Elements and Extended, it's apparent that they're two different programs, though.
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Al Stevens
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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptyMon Jun 14, 2010 6:14 am

LC wrote:
Al -image editing is what I'm particularly interested in. Adding light, text, and people figures to drawings. Are you saying Paint Shop Pro is better for that?
Not necessarily. I don't have Elements.
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Al Stevens
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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptyMon Jun 14, 2010 6:59 am

lin wrote:
One major factor of Photoshop is in the basic rendering: very bad program for reducing image size. you're better off reducing with another program then pasting back.
I haven't had that problem resizing pictures and text. In fact, it does a very nice job when you use the Edit/Transform/Scale tool, which works at the layer level. It does not, however, handle well the downscaling of layers with raster single line graphics. That might be what you mean. Not many image editors are good at that. If the graphic uses vector graphics rather than raster graphics, however, everything works fine.
lin wrote:
Another thing about Photoshop is only being able to undo one step at a time. Unless they've improved on that signally bone-headed characteristic.
Photoshop has a powerful undo/redo feature. You use the History panel to undo and redo actions. It's better than the typical Windows app push-down/popup undo/redo stack because it lists all the actions and lets you jump over a bunch of them with one click.
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LC
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LC


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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptyMon Jun 14, 2010 9:08 am

The Undo command is one of the first things discussed in the text. Photoshop reverses only one step at a time because files can be very large, hence maintaining multiple Undo steps can tie up a lot of memory (degrading performance).

And yes, using it via the History panel is great -you can undo one in the sequence without having to undo all others before it.
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Shelagh
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Shelagh


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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptyMon Jun 14, 2010 10:56 am

LC wrote:
I still don't get the difference between Elements and Extended, it's apparent that they're two different programs, though.
I used Elements to produce a 3D image of a book cover. I had to manually shape the cover and spine to produce a three dimensional image. The Extended software does this automatically.

This is a 3D image I produced:

Photoshop LF3Dimage
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lin
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lin


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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptyMon Jun 14, 2010 11:23 am

Pretty cool.

Can it produce type rolled around a circle or semi-circle?

Funny, I used to have several free programs that would do that, but currently can't find any around.
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Shelagh
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Photoshop Empty
PostSubject: Re: Photoshop   Photoshop EmptyMon Jun 14, 2010 11:28 am

The Extended software can. In Elements you would have to curve the text manually.
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