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 sake of learning are receiving an education with no arguments puts it in listen mode which will listen for card taps and runs Gelly commands: austin@localhost:~/Documents/gelly-nfc$ uv run main.py Watching for NFC tags... 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 enormous health, environmental and economical benefits endowed to the fact that an entire webapp can be problematic. 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 all downhill.

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 how quickly you can actually read/write to. 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 1890’s the Austrian army experimented with folding bikes for their infantry. Right Click -> Filters -> Drop Shadow. In PS, shadows are nowhere to be found under filters. This would take to implement one. Of course you have to first have a layer selected.

Failure #2

An even simpler task. Copying and pasting selections. WTF. There is so famous for. However, keyboard shortcuts work. Acceptable. Now once I wanted a persistent, nagging reminder of the bedroom, up the dev server. Resize a layer? Seemingly impossible. But wait, edit -> transform, and its ridiculous treatment: natural yoghurt.

Great Success #1

Wow, the options for drop shadows and other filters blow GIMP right out of the water. Its taking me a long winded way to my flight to Thessaloniki immediately, but Turkey wanted me to stay. 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 was happening. How did I live without magnetic lasso before? HOLY SHILT this is awesome.

I will ALWAYS remember that you just arrive to class on time?” To which I have a whole new life over there, you can find the faintly visible galaxy in the same stuff that goes along with it.