Photoshop question

I like The Gimp.

 

You guys are amazing, I really appreciate this.

I sent her an email last night asking what she's working on, how she wants to use photoshop. Here's her answer, please keep in mind that she is 17, going to a summer art program at a world-famous museum:

'Spent all week drawing naked people, one guy was hot. I have seen penis's before but not ones that just lay there for so long. LOL!'

Can photoshop get penises to not just lay there, I don't know.

Seriously, she's very dedicated, getting scholarship offers from the top art schools around the country, her parents aren't particularly supportive ('what can you DO with that except [roll eyes] teach??'). Her work is mostly drawing in chalk and ink, no graphic design or layout stuff, she wants to get creative with images and color and...you know what, I have no idea. I need to get more info.

 

What program is best at making animated GIFs? Can you do it in Photoshop?

 

Illustrator. I don't know about Photoshop, but I've never tried. I have, however, made them pretty easily in Illustrator.

 

When I make animated GIFs, I use Adobe ImageMaker. It comes packaged with Photoshop most of the time.

As for your niece...I haven't used Illustrator much but I love Photoshop. I would definitely recommend going through something education-wise. I was able to get CS2 (even though CS3, while being the same program with the same functions, has a different set-up that I find easier to use. It has collapsible toolbars, as opposed to having all of the toolbars willy-nilly around the desktop, you can combine them all into one and make it so they aren't all visible, but they're still readily accessible) for my laptop for a fraction of what it would cost to buy it for a non-student from my student union.

So yes, several places online do offer discounts. I wouldn't recommend getting the full suite for her yet unless you think she'll actually use the design software and stuff (which I do, mostly for my resume). One thing I would definitely find out is what kind of computer she's planning on loading the software on and how much RAM it has. My laptop only has 512MB of RAM (I'm working on upgrading this because it's driving me bonkers.) but it barely is enough to run the programs smoothly. 1GB would definitely be ideal for running these programs because they do use up so much memory on the computer.

 

I'm going to correct myself here. The current developers of The Gimp have done a standout job with a complete overhaul of The GIMP's interface for version 2.6, released last fall. Unlike the original dev team, which saw it more as a programming experiment, the new team seems to be very interested in making an open-source Photoshop competitor. The guy that ported The Gimp to Windows also came up with a way to use Photoshop plug-ins in The Gimp. Also, last week Smashing magazine posted a list of Gimp tweaks to make the program more useful.

There are still some things it can't do (notably, actually working inside a CMYK colorspace rather than just making separations) but overall The Gimp's a lot better than it used to be.

 

Well, I still like The Gimp. (But The Gimp is sleeping)

 

I saw some other people mentioned it, but at my uni bookstore, you can buy the entire CS for a tenth of the price of retail.

 

Oh, don't get me wrong: I'd still recommend paying the bundle for the stated need and for the following reasons ...<blockquote>GIMP features support for 8-bit per-channel images, compared to Photoshop's support for 8, 16, and 32-bit per-channel images. Its Intelligent Scissors are similar to Photoshop's Magnetic Lasso tool, and some basic tools and filters have identical functionality in both.

GIMP and Photoshop differ in their color management features in ways that matter to some users. Photoshop has support for 16-bit, 32-bit, and floating point images, support for the Pantone color matching system, or spot color and support for color models other than RGB(A) and greyscale, such as CMYK and CIE XYZ. GIMP, like other open source applications, does not support Pantone numbers for spot colors; it has rudimentary CMYK support via a plugin. Photoshop features extensive gamma correction support.

In addition, Photoshop contains several productivity features and tools not supported by GIMP, such as native support for Adjustment layers, which are layers that act like filters, layer styles and text blending options like drop shadow and glow, undo history "snapshots" that persist between sessions, the history brush tool, folders in the layer window. GIMP also requires basic programming knowledge to build an automation upon it ... while Photoshop can record the user's actions and repeat them with a "Play" button.</blockquote>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP#Comparison_and_compatibility_with_Adobe_Photoshop

But for somebody who maybe just wants to fix photos (even quick and dirty for sending back to the office), it's a decent alternative to Photoshop Elements. Don't know if I'd even have gone that far before.