I haven't used Gimp in a little while, does it have anything that compares to this? With scattering & all the dynamics? That's basically the pinnacle of art programs right there, pixel art and solid-colour cartoon styles notwithstanding. The mere thought of doing concept art or texture work without those brush customization panels makes me want to cry.

But if you don't need it then you don't need it. High-end tools exist for high-end users. Photoshop is a lot more useful for AAA 3D game development than low-res spritesheets. The average hobbyist game developer is going to be fine with GIMP or Paint.NET.

I generally do most of my art in Flash these days because I'm doing simple vector 2D games and it has nice animation features (ghosting & onion skins, editing multiple frames at once, immediate playback).

Quote: Original post by capn_midnight
Like, "look, we have the Clouds filter." Okay? Who even uses Clouds?

Dunno, maybe clouds can be a good "starting base" for creating a texture?

Also, Gimp has got the things like Curves, Balance, Hue Saturation, Contrast, .... Which color things has Photoshop on top of that, which make it so much more color aware? I don't have Photoshop myself so I can't check.

Quote: Original post by Lode

Quote: Original post by capn_midnight
Like, "look, we have the Clouds filter." Okay? Who even uses Clouds?

Dunno, maybe clouds can be a good "starting base" for creating a texture?

Also, Gimp has got the things like Curves, Balance, Hue Saturation, Contrast, .... Which color things has Photoshop on top of that, which make it so much more color aware? I don't have Photoshop myself so I can't check.

To start, GIMP has no concept of color profiling. It knows RGB in whatever default color space the operating system handles. Even RGB has various interpretations when you start to account for color space mappings.

CS4 is excellent for texturing 3d models. They really improved on CS3. I'd suggest trying out the trial version.

They lost me after photoshop 4 and acrobat 4.

I really like CS4, but i do have the advantage that work paid for it. On the lesser priced stuff I don't mind Paint Shop Pro and or Gimp. It does really depend on the scale of editing you need to do and if you are creating from scratch or just resizing and cropping. The biggest adavantage with CS4 (besides colour) is its integration with the rest of the suite if you are doing video etc.

Quote: Original post by Lode
It's a real shame that they keep doing this multiple window thing.

This was a total turn off for me too. Luckily someone made GIMP-Shop.

Quote: Original post by Lode

Quote: Original post by capn_midnight
Like, "look, we have the Clouds filter." Okay? Who even uses Clouds?

Dunno, maybe clouds can be a good "starting base" for creating a texture?

Generally I use it as some sort of mask, but the cloud filter has been enormously useful to me in a number of ways.Though I vastly prefer GIMP's cloud filter as it has scale and detail level controls Photoshop's doesn't. In fairness I haven't got my hands on anything since CS1 so it could have been tweaked but I kind of doubt it.

As for Elements I am surprised by the number of features that are included in the newer versions. Its not a bad thing to have though. I'm trying to remember the deal breakers for me . I think I could live for awhile with lack of channels but the apparent inability to create layer masks hurts badly. I did notice you could load a photoshop file with a layer mask and be able to edit it but creating one didn't look possible.

I like the GIMP. Feature wise it has most of the key elements and feels something like going back PS5 which is quite functional. A lot of the serious rough edges have been dealt with over the last couple of years but there are some issues that make working with it a somewhat overly laborious task at times.

The manual layer boundary maintenance is annoying. The custom brushes including the use of Photoshop brushes is great but there is not way to load sets as you need them. I thought doing so in Photoshop was annoying until I had to wait for GIMP to spend 5min loading brushes at startup every time and then have to dig through hundreds of brushes to find what I'm looking for. The biggest problems is it is soooooo damn slow. What Photoshop does in the blink of an eye can take a long time in the GIMP. Its fine for small files but trying to work with 6000x4800 pixel images for example is real rough work. Budget dictating I've done it but its far from ideal. Then it like everything else it lacks anything that compares to Photoshop Actions. It has some sort of command line batching but thats vastly inferior.

The last time I tried Paint.NET I found it charming and solid for what it does. However, I can't imagine it being useful for any serious or professional work. It simply lacks too many critical features, though as a replacement for MS paint as it was envisioned it accomplishes its goal in spades.

Quote: Original post by Konfusius

Quote: Original post by Lode
It's a real shame that they keep doing this multiple window thing.

This was a total turn off for me too. Luckily someone made GIMP-Shop.

I have to remember that. I never managed to get anywhere with Gimp (what an appropriate name) in the same way I was totally lost with Blender. But then, I'm a total GUI/Windows fan.