What program do you use?

MSPaint???

Lol yeah. Corporate locked down laptop. I get by though :confused:

Oh, thatā€˜s badā€¦ iā€˜m best friend with our IT man and so i have the luxury of Photoshop in our company.

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Google??

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lol, yep, searching for that right circle or image or backdrop that I can use or do as little as poss to in my limited tools before pngā€™ing it and exporting it to Creator. I use what I have the best I can :slight_smile: Can be painfull at times I admit, slower even but I get there in the end. Just means I cant make my own high quality pieces like you proā€™s. I do all my clever stuff with many layers in Creator to do what you probably do in one image in Photoshop :confused: Does make Creator slow though at times.

Are you saying that you canā€™t make shapes, images and backgrounds so you use the work of someone else?? The last time I checked the TOS that was not allowed. Have you checked into some of the free graphics apps?

I dont use the work of someone else in that way, Thereā€™s plenty of ready made free png shapes to use when you search. For example I might search for Free Black Circle PNG or another example, I might take a Bronze coin, Open it in MS Paint, apply an inner blue circle, then with onlinepng tools make blue invisible leaving me a bronze outer ring as a bezel. That kind of stuff. What ever looks like what I need iā€™m prepared to work on. Or on another face find the best image of a Pearl I can find then clip a section out for the background of my dials. I dont think any of thats gonna upset anyone. The black dials in my Black Widow were Bathroom mirror frames, The Spider itself was free clipart, the rings on my Black Pearl I think were tax disc holders.

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Man thatā€™s a creative use of design assets!!

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Seriously you should check out gimp. For instance the process your describing of having to create a blue circle then transfer to a different program to remove the circle can be easily accomplished in gimp with one step.

And itā€™s completely free. :wink:

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Our IT guy was onsite today and I got him to allow me to install GIMP. Havent had time to play with it yet though but im hoping its not too dissimiler to Photoshop. thx :wink:

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Corel Draw (because Iā€™ve been using it for 26 years), but any vector art program should do - such as Adobe Illustrator.

With GIMP you need to go into settings and change it to one panel view . Anyone used Inkscape ?

I used Inkscape for a while but not anymore since the only 32 bits available for Mac is not supported by Catalina 10.15.2

I too use Gimp, though having used Photoshop (albeit many years ago)ā€¦ Gimp is a nightmare in comparison >_< but hey, itā€™s free :stuck_out_tongue: Photoshop is great but what they ask for it is insane.

Iā€™ve been meaning to give gimp a go for a long time now but never get around to it. I have a very old version of photoshop, before all the subscription buisness, and itā€™s just so familiar. I was hoping gimp would have a bit of the newer bells and whistles that the current Photoshop may or may not have. Iā€™ve not tried any of the newer ones.

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You could get a used version of photoshop, they run stable even on newer windows systems. I once tried gimp but left it immediately. I brakes out creative processes because of the complicated handling.

To be true, i more use the older Photoshop versions than the newest. Adobe didnā€˜t change a lot on PS the last 10 years. Slight changes, optic make-up, some new instruments. But the basic is still the same.

At this point Iā€™m just too used to it. I would definitely move on to Photoshop if it was a recent-ish version, but something old that likely does the same or less (albeit probably easier) itā€™s just not worth it; the difficulty to pull off some effects/functions is somewhat negated by experience xD

All of that said, if anyone is thinking of moving to Gimp, I strongly advice against it lol, it really is a nightmare. To give you just one example, if you write out some text and want to try different fonts, you canā€™t even scroll through them easily to see what the text would look like on different ones, you have to either remember the name of the font, or click a dropdown of fonts thatā€™s kind of obscured and click on the list, then the new font every timeā€¦ Yikes.

Well, even an old version of Photoshop is far better than the newest Gimp Version imhO. It doesnā€˜t count if you are used to a thing when this thing isnā€˜t very good to use. :wink:

It counts in the sense that I know how to do everything I want on Gimp :stuck_out_tongue: Grabbing Photoshop again Iā€™d probably have to re-learn things, canā€™t really be bothered. Now if you told me Photoshop had some amazing features Gimp doesnā€™t, then fair enough xD the switch is worth it, otherwise, eh Iā€™m alright o/ But yeah donā€™t go to Gimp unless you have to xD

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