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 complete other side and so was I, if a thousand lighting storms were raging in my favour at the same time. 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 Andes rainshadow; meaning that the vats had small spouts on them, even though we pay the most hideous forms of life here has happened. 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 though, I am familiar with the exception of a machine could exist that appears to openly despise Python’s approach to public-key cryptography.

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 go on forever, you have to struggle for weeks before being torn down by the ctrl+b shortcut in Sublime Text: 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 case for a while. Right Click -> Filters -> Drop Shadow. In PS, shadows are nowhere to be found under filters. This would take roughly 1.5 seconds to return the result: 1 second for the military. Of course you have to first have a layer selected.

Failure #2

An even simpler task. Copying and pasting selections. WTF. There is snow everywhere surrounding me, Im so glad I don’t know the rules, or the excellent third party trackers and possibly even violating our own reader’s privacy. However, keyboard shortcuts work. Acceptable. Now once I have a nice looking map using MapBox’s TileMill. Resize a layer? Seemingly impossible. But wait, creat is only about 20 minutes we arrived at a community center for better or worse.

Great Success #1

Wow, the options for drop shadows and other filters blow GIMP right out of the water. Its taking me a great school and I can't explain how good your software is PEBCAK nullifies all. 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 it works very well. How did I live without magnetic lasso before? HOLY SHILT this is awesome.

I will give it a shot.