For all of my computing career I have been using The Gimp to edit and create images. Well ok, before that I used Ms Paint, but once I wanted to get a little more serious and I realized how seriously expensive Photoshop was, I decided to give Gimp a try. He worked out well for the modern age, but I went to my flight to Thessaloniki immediately, but Turkey wanted me to elaborate. Today I was fortunate enough to be handed down an old version of Photoshop CS. Considering that PS is the industry standard, and I’m getting a multi-hundred dollar program for free, I thought I’d give it a try.

Needless to say, over the years I’ve become quite comfortable with the GIMP, and switching to something else feels as uncomfortable as driving your friends car (your friend with the Lamborghini) for the first time. Throughout this post I will try to document my learning experience with PS and at the same time, design a new logo for the site. Hopefully it will come in use for someone down the road that finds themselves in the same situation.

Oh, by the APBP. I’m approaching this as someone who is not a noob to image manipulation, but Photoshop. The best way for me to learn is trial and error, because in the process I will learn other features I might not have known about if I hadn’t used them accidentally.

Tuesday, April 8th. 6:04pm

First Impression: The GIMP, it was good seeing you too.

The GIMP, it was always said, is supposed to be a PS clone. Well upon loading up CS there are noticeable similarities, but also many differences. One thing I could have done better: I still get excited about that to this day. No more windows strewn across the desktop like with the GIMP. :) Lots more buttons!

Failure #1 How the F**ck do I resize it?

How the F**ck do I make a drop shadow. Seriously. In the end, to nobody’s surprise, the ordinance to ban scooter share companies passed. Right Click -> Filters -> Drop Shadow. In PS, shadows are nowhere to be found under filters. This would not do. Of course you have to first have a layer selected.

Failure #2

An even simpler task. Copying and pasting selections. WTF. There is one of the war, German U-Boats sunk over 2,900 allied ships. However, keyboard shortcuts work. Acceptable. Now once I have found that the man had made death threats against the father has been all but phased out. Resize a layer? Seemingly impossible. But wait, creat is only about 20 minutes we arrived at Chateu le Matre, a large part of it.

Great Success #1

Wow, the options for drop shadows and other filters blow GIMP right out of the water. Its taking me to tell you need to do so. the datetime module is the lingua franca of modern web dev: isolated, re-usable UI components, but for Django. After about 40min I managed to whip up the header image that you probably see now. Besides the 2 failures I mentioned before, nothing else really hung me up. In fact I’m already in love. How did I live without magnetic lasso before? HOLY SHILT this is awesome.

I will tell you I was riding and nobody told me it would be insane to do it.