I was wondering if Photoshop Pro has any features that Photoshop Elements doesn't have that are crucial for game development? [Edited by - 3dmodelerguy on December 21, 2009 12:25:25 PM]

This is up to your artist.

Nothing about photoshop itself is "crucial for game development". There are many drawing and art packages that may meet your needs.


If it provides the things your artist needs, then it is fine.

If it does not, then it is not.


I'm not an artist, but it seems that Photoshop Elements is more about photo manipulation for scrapbooks and such. If that is what you need for your game, then it is sufficient.

Quote: Original post by 3dmodelerguy
I was wondering if Photoshop Pro has any features that Photoshop Elements doesn't have that are crucial for game development?

Disclaimer: I'm not an artist.

Photoshop Elements lacks:
* Nested layers -> very annoying if you want to keep your files tidy. Not that artists usually do that...
* Configurable brushes -> That's probably a show stopper

If you're looking for a cheap Photoshop alternative, try:
* Paint.NET -> free, very basic, useful for editing, not so much for drawing
* GIMP -> free, similar features to Photoshop, but less advanced

Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 is good and cheap too.

http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1184951547051#versionTabview=tab1&tabview=tab0

Quote: Original post by 3dmodelerguy
I was wondering if Photoshop Pro has any features that Photoshop Elements doesn't have that are crucial for game development?

Yes, Elements lacks a few of the things PShop Pro has... well, more like almost all of them. You'd be best just investing in a copy of Photoshop (not Elements). Elements (at least in my artistic comparison) like using Paint compared to using the full on Photoshop; simply put, it's great for the average end-user, not great for game developers.

If you're on a budget then you could probably find a good LEGAL copy of Photoshop somewhere like on Amazon of an old copy (rather than the new CS series, those will generally run your wallet up a tree). Try browsing Ebay Stores, Amazon, or Buy.com for various older versions of Photoshop and the price should drop pretty dramatically.

Honestly, I find The GIMP to be perfectly usable for almost all purposes. It's not perfect, but the fact that it doesn't deliberately try to limit makes it, I think, preferable to watered down versions of "professional" software. Supposedly the interface is really weird or something, but I've never been bothered by it (whereas when I end up using Photoshop on school computers or for whatever reason I take considerably longer to figure out what I'm doing).

Lots of people say that The GIMP is not even close to as useful as Photoshop but I don't know of any vital features that Photoshop has that The GIMP lacks. If there are any, I'm curious about them.

Quote: Original post by cowsarenotevil
Honestly, I find The GIMP to be perfectly usable for almost all purposes. It's not perfect, but the fact that it doesn't deliberately try to limit makes it, I think, preferable to watered down versions of "professional" software. Supposedly the interface is really weird or something, but I've never been bothered by it (whereas when I end up using Photoshop on school computers or for whatever reason I take considerably longer to figure out what I'm doing).

Lots of people say that The GIMP is not even close to as useful as Photoshop but I don't know of any vital features that Photoshop has that The GIMP lacks. If there are any, I'm curious about them.

I find GIMP a beautiful initiative, because it's a free photoshop replacement, but whenever I try to use it I'm spending more time being distracted by the multiple floating windows and the unintuitive way to work with selections, than with actually producing something. It's a real shame that they keep doing this multiple window thing. After e.g. viewing something in a webbrowser, you need to bring two or more windows to the front instead of just one (the tool window, the painting, a layer window, any other toolbox you have open). And for selections, I don't understand why they made it so unintuitive to move a selection with pixel content. I don't use GIMP that often, so every time again when I need it for something I forgot again what the way to do that was, while in other painting programs this is so simple: just draw the selection, then grab it with the mouse and drag it.

Quote: Original post by Lode

Quote: Original post by cowsarenotevil
Honestly, I find The GIMP to be perfectly usable for almost all purposes. It's not perfect, but the fact that it doesn't deliberately try to limit makes it, I think, preferable to watered down versions of "professional" software. Supposedly the interface is really weird or something, but I've never been bothered by it (whereas when I end up using Photoshop on school computers or for whatever reason I take considerably longer to figure out what I'm doing).

Lots of people say that The GIMP is not even close to as useful as Photoshop but I don't know of any vital features that Photoshop has that The GIMP lacks. If there are any, I'm curious about them.

I find GIMP a beautiful initiative, because it's a free photoshop replacement, but whenever I try to use it I'm spending more time being distracted by the multiple floating windows and the unintuitive way to work with selections, than with actually producing something. It's a real shame that they keep doing this multiple window thing. After e.g. viewing something in a webbrowser, you need to bring two or more windows to the front instead of just one (the tool window, the painting, a layer window, any other toolbox you have open). And for selections, I don't understand why they made it so unintuitive to move a selection with pixel content. I don't use GIMP that often, so every time again when I need it for something I forgot again what the way to do that was, while in other painting programs this is so simple: just draw the selection, then grab it with the mouse and drag it.

On all of the reasonably new versions I've found the windows work fine. If the main windows gets focus, all of the others come to the front, too. At least this is the case on Vista.

The selections can behave a bit strangely I'll admit, but if you select something and then cut or copy and paste it works pretty much the way you'd expect.

For someone who hasn't used Photoshop or The GIMP at all, I suspect The GIMP wouldn't take a great deal longer to learn, really. For someone who is already good at photoshop, obviously The GIMP will be less easy to use, and its certainly not without faults, but I've yet to discover anything so grossly wrong with it that would render it an unacceptable substitute.

Gimp is the one real thing if you can't afford Photoshop, in my opinion. Otherwise, it's Photoshop or nothing.

Except for the special case of texture generation (esp. seamless), in this case Genetica beats everything. Genetica has a quite outrageous price, seeing that it is only a tool for making textures and the "Pro" version (the "Basic" version for $109 is pretty useless) still costs $299 with the current special discount. The "Studio" version which can also do animations costs $669, which is just hilarious.
However, the "Pro" version, apart from still being a bit expensive, has a really stunning feature set, and thanks to the dollar being cheap, is currently is "reasonably priced" at least for EU developers, too. The user interface needs a bit of learning, but once you get the hang of it, it's pretty straightforward.
And hey, this program can do things... amazing.

I like Paint.NET for free image editing. It has just enough features to get stuff done without crashing every half hour. It's perfect for any sort of cartoon graphics for games, but photorealistic stuff is pretty hard to achieve.

You won't use most of the features in Photoshop or GIMP. Pretty much the entire "filters" menu is a waste of time. The only filters I ever use are blur (usually only gaussian blur), *rarely* sharpen, and an occasional drop shadow. Even drop shadow isn't necessary, as it's pretty easy to replicate with a duplicated layer + brightness/contrast adjustment + translation/scaling + blur. The problem with the other filters is that you know them when you see them, they are really fake looking. Color adjustments are infinitely more useful of tools, and that's where I have found that GIMP just cannot stand up to Photoshop. Photoshop is just so much more aware than GIMP of what can be done with color. I feel like GIMP has spent a lot of time replicating certain features of Photoshop (even though they claim they don't intend it to be a Photoshop replacement) that turn out to not be very useful in a professional setting anyway. Like, "look, we have the Clouds filter." Okay? Who even uses Clouds?

If Paint.NET could get support for custom brush shapes (not 100% necessary, but a nice-to-have), "fuzzy" brushes (brushes that are not uniform in their alpha channel, necessary for decent drawing), better pressure sensitivity (it has the 16 levels that Windows Tablet PC provides, but my Wacom tablet is good for 1024 levels, which is a huge difference), better layer masking (currently, there is no way to do non-uniform alpha blending between layers), and channel decomposition/mixing (again, it can be done if you're clever, but a specific tool would be nice), then Paint.NET would replace 99% of what I use Photoshop for. The only thing that would be left would be digital camera raw data support, which is highly unlikely to ever happen.