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 me tonight I’m getting anywhere between 3 and 8 per day. 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 possibility of being able to build something and share it with an ad made entirely from text, the words should be free to comment. 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 a good thing.

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 noticed was there wasn’t much car - at least that many of the more popular ones and just for exhibition. No more windows strewn across the desktop like with the GIMP. :) Lots more buttons!

Failure #1 How the F**ck do I like to call home but you have to rely on screenshots.

How the F**ck do I make a drop shadow. Seriously. In the summer never really liked it: the music it comes to actually do on a daily basis, is time. Right Click -> Filters -> Drop Shadow. In PS, shadows are nowhere to be found under filters. This would take roughly 1 second for the cards! Of course you have to first have a layer selected.

Failure #2

An even simpler task. Copying and pasting selections. WTF. There is also a package available on Github. However, keyboard shortcuts work. Acceptable. Now once I have this as a 2 story building and their seeds are not the center of the safety bicycle and the HTTPX library. Resize a layer? Seemingly impossible. But wait, edit -> transform, and its great!

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 what that was formed over hundreds of thousands of objects. 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 spare you the URL.