i <3 healing brush
polycounter lvl 19
used to be a patch tool monkey but just recently found out how much more usefull the healing brush is.
also, been doing paintovers on some blocked in maps for the level designers recently and have found the vanishing point filter to be damn handy.
erm, yes!
also, been doing paintovers on some blocked in maps for the level designers recently and have found the vanishing point filter to be damn handy.
erm, yes!
Replies
Never heard of or seen the vanishing point filter though, what is it?
Basically, it allows you to drop an imaginary 3d plane down and apply clone brush and paintbrush strokes down with perspective. Say you're trying to paint something on a floor in a picture of a square room. Just click the 4 corners of the floor to initialize the plane, and when you use the tools, they will move along your imaginary 3d space. There was a neat video about it on the adobe site back when CS2 came out
#1: It makes my basic first pass retouch 10x faster
#2: It makes anybody who can pick up photoshop and click the healing brush think they are a great retouch artist.
The changes they made to layers were enough to make me want CS 2, but that just blows my mind
there is a cool redeming feature... where with the move tool, you can hold control, and drag select a box around layers to select multiples. such a time saver. The only downside is that it is still retarded, and does not know how to go inside layer groups.
cs2 is still trash.
cs2 is still garbage.
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...compared to what?
dismissing things as "retarded" doesnt make a point
It's not as obvious as you may think though. I have never had the opportunity to use Delexe Paint for example, so I'm unable to make that comparison.
I agree with you, PS is definately not optimized to be a paint progam, it's a photo editing program with a lot of flexibility. In that regard something like Painter blows it out of the water. Then again painter falls short on many fronts that PS is much better for (blendmodes, layers, batch processing etc.)
I'm not trying to defend the software btw, but if i see a strong criticism of on an app that everyone uses, naturally I'm going to want to know why, and what alternatives there are.
Thats the whole purpose of this forum, no?
I honestly don't get the "photoshop is crap" complains.
The only time I ever get brush lag in PS is if the file im working on is 20X30" print rez with lots of layers and I haven't bothered to save in a while. Or of course if Im painting with a complex several hundred pixel brush.
Personaly it seems to work just like I want it to, and yes I have to do photo editing too.
TONS of competition.
I think its a case of Adobe catering to what still remains the largest segment of thier market...photo editors & photographers.
I dont find photoshop to be clunky or unweildy at all. It has its bugs and its issues that grate on me sure, but every app has that.
I dont buy the "lack of competition" argument for one second. PaintShop Pro anybody? Sells for <100$, and has many of the same features as Photoshop. Gimp, Painter, Art-Rage, etc.
TONS of competition.
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I would be more impressed if you could name one studio that exclusively uses any one of those apps for its texture work. Technically, they aren't really competition, because they aren't stealing sales away from adobe.
I just wish i could have the option to pick up background colors on my brush. Smudge mixed with regular brush. Couldn't be hard to code that shit up.
<if="color on brush"/>
<if="color on background"/>
<then="mother fucking mix that shit"/>
My guess is because most artists are familiar with the industry leader...PS. Studios want to use an industry leading app, not budget-ware. Thus...PS.
There are alternatives out there. If you are truely fed up with PS, then try one. Perhaps you'll like it better.
My statement was really just that there IS competition, but frankly Photoshop is such a GOOD program, despite our gripes, that it remains on top.
<if="color on brush"/>
<if="color on background"/>
<then="mother fucking mix that shit"/>
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lawl! I wish scripting languages wrote like that. It make my work day waaaay more enjoyable
Photoshop used to have a little tick box that decided whether your current brush pressure sensitivity controlled opacity or size... I used this all the time. It was always on-screen. Simple stuff. Now, if you want to do the same, you have to bring up this huge crazy brush editor and go through 5 different menus to achieve the same result. The UI has become extremely inefficient. In CS2 I can't even figure out how to save a brush with modifications I've done to it.
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For this reason alone I have stuck with Photoshop 6. Photoshop brought in the 'brush editor' shit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRes
Basically it looked like Macromedia wanted the higher release numbers where as the programmers wanted the stuff in behind the scenes and then release to compete straight away.
So basically what you want is a scriptable interface for your paint program so it behaves exactly as you want it to.
Also per: In CS (I don't have 2 yet) SHIFT+LeftCLICK will select a number of brushes in a row in the preset manager, as well as Ctrl+LeftClick selecting the singles you click on. Saving them out use the little round arrow button and select "save brushes". They save out to an ABR file.
However the no "save changes to brush preset" option is rather annoying. You simply have to make your changes, save a new preset (little cirle arrow button again), and delete the old one if you no longer want it.
Why not simply have a "sharpen" button or tab? This could have a popup with all options under it. Same with all the Blurs. It could all be fit under a box with options.
I really wish I could mix colors easily, but it's a photo editor.
Photoshop is standardized clutter. For specific tasks, alternatives can be used.
Sheer madness.
I just like the app. It does what I want it to do. I also kinda have a tendancy to not get on these forum "Bashing bandwagons" that everybody seems so fond of. I have griped here and there about PS, Max, Zbrush, etc. There are always things I want to do faster, easier, better. But I like to console myself by thinking about how much better these tools are than any tools I've used in the past. As flawed as it is, its certainly better than anything else.
I think calling it "Rubbish" or whatever is a little extreme. As for it being "impossible to compete with adobe" What is your solution? I hear a lot of complaints, but not a lot of solutions. As you said, if any applications come to market with innovative features, Adobe will copy them for the next release of PS. I've used a lot of image manipulation programs, be they for "art" or for photo retouching. I just cannot say that I've ever preferred any of them to PS. OF COURSE there are things that can be better. That could be said of any software. Especially due to the iterative nature of software. Unless you go back to the drawing board for every release, your going to develop a bit of clutter. Some odd workflows. Thats inevitable. If you choose to start from scratch for a new version, and streamline things, THEN you take a huge risk alienating a large segment of your market/users. When millions & millions of dollars are at stake, they arent going to change everything so that a tiny minority of the users can have things their way.
i see no point in migrating to something that makes me less productive than when working with the former version. total waste of my time that is better spent picking up new tricks that actually save time...
however i have a hard time believing that some integrated paint toolset in 3d apps could ever be a real alternative. this kind of tools is in my experience too narrow-minded and clearly shows that they were developed as an afterthought.
can modo be extended with scripts and such? one of those days i will have to test drive it but for me so far it seemed like maybe a godsend to lightwavers but insignificant to the rest of the world.
btw. there is a fully scriptable paint software (scriptable in TCL. 2D and 3D painter, it even has full 16bits support). it's called amazon paint and is made by a tiny but longstanding hollywood company called ifx. it is available for more than 13 years now, afaik. timebombed evals can be obtained through the resellers. and better get your linux install and geek skills ready if you want to test drive.
As Per mentioned, some simple settings which used to be easily changeable (because they'd tend to be changed a lot) are now buried in about 3 submenus and drop-downs with no way of shortcutting it or changing that.
Similarly something I've found which is intensely stupid, is that when using the Sponge tool, the ALT key does nothing at all. Like, when paintbrushing, ALT is "pick colour" ... when dodging/burning, ALT is the opposite of whichever tool you have selected.
Now wouldn't it be sensible to have ALT as "Desaturate" with the Sponge tool, when its default action is to Saturate... but no, to change between actions you have to go to a drop down menu at the top and change it from "Saturate" to "Desaturate" ... so lame!
"Why can't I do something akin to the "symmetry" modifier in max?"
You can create an action which selects and copys, pastes, mirrors and flattens your image. I wrote one for this exact purpose. No its not realtime, and that would be nice, but...
Again, photoshop is not a dedicated texture creation tool.
I think a plugin to that end, or an entirely new app is a great idea. I just dont see anybody working on it...
As for distorting pixels when doing a rotation of 90 or 180 degrees, I've never seen this problem, so I cannot comment on it. Can you post an example of this issue?
You've revealed pretty early on in this discussion a bias, and a lack of will to view any other perspectives as evidenced by this post:
"Photoshop is garbage, and should be obvious enough why not to bother dissecting it."
You've got some axe to grind, because it doesnt match up to your favorite apps of yesteryear. Use them then, if they are so much better.
And yes, IM sorry to break it to you but Game industry artists ARE a tiny segment of Adobes' market for Photoshop. If you dont like truthtown, dont visit.
And for christs sake, if you dont like the application, dont use it. Why torture your self if its so awful?
What the hell are you talking about here?
"...personal characteristics and psychological evaluation"
I made no insults or judgements about anybodys character. Thats you all the way pardner.
by the way:
"you can't save changes to brushes or that you can't instantiate layers"
Yes you can, and yes you can. So, the problem in those particular instances I guess is that you just dont know how to do these things, and that frustrates you. Understandable.
As for being able to switch between brush sensitivity controlling size, or pressure, or both, I have brushes that I MODIFIED and SAVED (which you claim is impossible) adjacent to eachother and I just press the "next/previous brush" key. As for Brush Lag, I've only encountered this issue when working on either very large images, with big strokes or with scatter brushes & complex shapes. I agree it would be intelligent of Adobe to impliment some kind of GPU support for the program, but not being a programmer and not fully understanding how pixel processing works internally in photoshop, IM going to assume that this would be an expensive & difficult undertaking with minimal benefit. I mean, how often do you drag gigantic brushes with scatter & sampled shapes across the entire canvas?
And when you do....why the hell are you using photoshop?
Thats a case of Wrong tool for the Wrong job. When you want to be all paintery & artsy, use Painter. When you need to get technical and have some per-pixel accuracy, export to PS.
I want a better, accelerated fully customizeable app too, but Im not going to call my best option dogshit just because it doesnt reach out and suck my dick while I click the "make art" button.
Gah, I was trying to be jovial and pragmatic in my replies, but you've just take this to a whole new level, and thats unacceptable. YOU made it personal, and insulting.
"you can't save changes to brushes or that you can't instantiate layers"
Yes you can, and yes you can.
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Hey Scoob, I'd love to know how you can do this, since I've been wanting to do it recently.
Every time I try to save changes to a brush, it makes a new one with the same name, and I have to delete the old one.
I'm using Photoshop CS.
[edit] I just checked, its the same in CS.
What about this instanced layer thing you were talking about? I'm still interested in learning how that works.
OMG WHAT AREU EATING BTW!
I just re-read my posts and for the life of me, I cannot locate any insults OR harsh language. [edit] oh, I did say "hell" once or twice. Im a potty mouth.
Saying "I was going to say" and then just saying it anyway is still....just saying it anyway. So that equals:
Insults from Per: 1
Insults from Scoob: 0
"I was going to joke, like "why so sensitive, scooby, did you get photoshopped in the ass when you were young?" but realized it might drive you into a raving mad frenzy, threatening to ban me and hack me and so on, and my poor heart really couldn't take it."
As for this, please!? I've been a part of this community and doing this job for JUST about as long as you have. Im not a n00b. Ive yet to make ANY reference to l33t h4x or bans or any other such juvenile jabs, and for you to insinuate or imply that I would or do is just as bad as using those insults & threats yourself.
I have to say Per, I've always admired your work, and your manner in posting on the boards, so Im pretty darn taken aback by this onslaught of ire.
I understand artists are supposed to be imaginative, but I think your imagination is getting the better of you here.
Yes, I did address a number of your issues,albeit not all in the first shot. I tend to write a post, post it, re-read and recursivly edit to refine my point and TRY to be as rational & calm as possible.
Really, Im absolutly not hot under the collar or upset, its just I dont appreciate being insulted for presenting a contrasting view. You've gotta understand that from my perspective some random guy on PC starts essentially vaguely insulting me. Im not married to PS. A better tool comes along for what I want to do? Awesome! For now, its the best I've got, so I work with it to the best of my ability.
Being that I TEACH people how to use Photoshop as part of my job, Im used to people asking now to do this, or having misconceptions about how XYZ function works, etc.
As for the Instanced layers, you can convert any layer, or combination of layers into a Smart Object. This then is an instance of your original, and can be rotated, have layer effects applied to it all without degrading the quality, etc. Any modifications made the the original will propagate through the other instances. This is a feature new to CS2 I believe.
And for the record you did NOT say:
"I'm saying that a piece of software has significant room for improvement, I'm not insulting your mother."
You said that the tool that YOU and I and most of the other people here use on a daily basis to earn our living is, and I quote, "Garbage" "Rubbish" and "Trash", which is far more of an "emotional outburst" than "has room for improvement" or anything I've said.
Im writing a novel here apparently...
As for scripting your own interface, Photoshop does have a fairly new feature I think simply called PS scripting. From what I understand, you can have variables, programming language style arguments, etc to achieve even greater & more complex effects than are possible with actions alone. I've yet to investigate this feature, or spend any time learning the language, but I saw some really stellar re-designs of the photoshop workflow & interface at the PMA convention a couple months ago. A guy had completely re-vamped the PS interface and streamlined it using this language, to create what was essentially a "retouching wizard" that would take you through a portrait retouch, step by step, with a nearly new UI. New buttons that combined features, etc.
Photoshop CS1 here , wont upgrade to two...
From PS6 to CS2 the performance difference is totally ridiculous. CS2 is practically a slideshow and for what. In terms of what the program is doing, absolutly nothing. CS2 doing nothing is 10x slower. Why?
i guess we can be sure that photoshop in it's current state is one big hack with lots of patches and not some cleverly thought out efficient system that makes implementing new functions easy.
who knows what happened behind the curtains at adobe but it would not be the first app where development should have been left and re-started at some point.
I had to say that... I like it.. but I want more..!