| General Category > General Discussion |
| Advice on which program to start with (versions of PS, GIMP, Paint.net) |
| (1/3) > >> |
| Fred16Bit:
I would like to learn one of these little by little in my free time and possibly make a contribution once I am good. I feel like there is a lot more Photo Shop community and help but could be wrong. Someone here was talking bout how there's another version of Photo Shop that is really meant for doing the cover art but I can't remember what it is called. I would probably like to get this version! TL;DR, which version of Photo Shop is best for what we are doing here with the covers? |
| sheep2001:
Photoshop cs2 is a free download from Adobe - it handles all the templates here just fine, and can do most of the editing you need. It's a great place to start. |
| E0N:
Most if not all versions are viable, but Adobe offers Photoshop CS2 on their website for free, and that's what I'm using at least. You don't really need a powerful computer or anything (mine's a crappy $250 laptop lmao) so I'd recommend starting there. Another thing is that most of the templates are in .psd format, which is basically the Photoshop file format, and while there are plugins for Paint.net and Gimp to open these, I've heard that they have things missing something. As for the others, I haven't tried Gimp and with Paint.net I did a few Mega Drive covers but since there aren't any lines that your image can snap to or anything, looking back with the spine the game logo would often go outside the area. So all in all, it's up to you, though I'd definitely recommend Photoshop. They are all free though, so just try each one out and see what best suits you. |
| Fred16Bit:
How about Illustrator (the one I was thinking of). It seems like it is geared specifically for this kind of work. Edit: I see that Illustrator works by using mathematics to create a line between two points. This makes it good for making vectors that retain sharpness no matter if you resize big or small. So would this be something useful for covers? Edit2: I can see immediately too that it would be highly useful in moving logos around. |
| PX0:
Illustrator is a drawing tool, with liitle to no photo-editing tools. It would only be usefull, if you intend to completely reproduce (redraw) a cover from scratch. But most of us are using existing images (scans, screenshots, etc.) and edit them accordingly. (Cleaning, cutting stuff out, adjusting colors, etc.) Photoshop is the much better option for such photo-editing. And it contains many drawing-tools anyway. So you can do vector based images in photoshop as well. ;) |
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