While useful to known one of theses packages it still does not help if you use it to create something like http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/images/cs3.jpg
I keep reading about The Gimp’s ultrahard interface. To me it’s just a bit strange / different, but not that hard to use.
Oh, and I agree with Nathan Bowers. Do learn the fundamentals of colour, type and composition. At least the basics.
“I can accomplish almost anything that I need as a programmer in Paint.NET except open PSD files. Why oh why won’t someone create an open source application capable of this”
Not an application, but a library: FreeImage can read PSD files (among many others) a href="http://freeimage.sourceforge.net"http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/a
Maybe Paint.NET could incorporate that?
- Roddy
Learn to handle photoshop, thats my advice.
GIMP has no PANTONE color support, so it’s useless to me.
Here’s two recent examples of the kinds of things you can do with basic graphics editor chops:
http://www.unfocusedbrain.com/projects/match_color/
http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2007/05/03/simulacrum/
I find walkthroughs like this very instructive.
Am I the only one missing the point here?
Shouldn’t be worried ore about the generic, maintainable nature of our code, rather than the flashy UI et all?
Isn’t this Vista, Silverlight and what not, hohalla moving us away from what makes us a good developer? Wont we all end up as paintshop people?
Get one of the stripped copies of Photoshop, like elements or lite or CE. They’re cheap, they help you learn photoshop and they have functionality. GIMP is clunky.
Jeff, you are so right. I have found that I often get poorly designed graphics from designers in photoshop format that I have to work real hard to make them work on the web. They look great, but they are not done to work on the web platform. Having basic Photoshoping skills has saved my rear end several times along the way. Plus some clients just are not interested in over the top design anyway and I can quickly get a good layout done for them and keep the margin in my pocket!
Hey … I know that screenshot 
My friend Marie took that picture in Seattle and then I edited it. For those who’re interested, the original image at 1920x1200, sans-Paint.NET frame, is available here: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/27687013/ . Makes for a great wallpaper (not that I’m biased ;).
I’m always completely disappointed when I see people working on UI and checking in code for a dialog where everything looks like it was almost randomly placed. Please take 20 minutes and make sure things are lined up and spaced properly! I think that’s one thing that HTML and WPF are really helping with: instead of specifying that a control should be at an X,Y position, you can just declare things using a flow layout and certain things take care of themselves much more automatically.
Also, if you like Paint.NET, I hightly recommend checking out two things:
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The forum! There are tons of passionate users on the Paint.NET forum. New tutorials are posted daily, new plugins probably come out every week, and everyone’s pretty willing to help out to answer any questions you might have.
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CodeLab. For developers, this is a slick plugin that Tom Jackson wrote. Basically what it does is pop up a text editor within Paint.NET and let you write the Render() method of an Effect. And, when you pause typing it will recompile and then re-render the effect. This is super cool for rapid prototyping, development, and experimenting with the effects system and with computer graphics in general. And refer to (1) for help using and mastering it! CodeLab is available on the forum here: http://paintdotnet.12.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=1096
-Rick Brewster (the Paint.NET guy / author)
You should not call this a ‘programming tip’, but rather a ‘web site development’ tip. If someone is programming websites all day, sure, this makes sense. If someone is writing desktop apps, this applies about 10% (rough estimate). If someone is programming at the command line, network level, business logic, database code. This makes zero sense and it only serves to distract them.
This is a website specific problem. And in reality, someone could go their entire career making ajaxified websites (or even web applications, which are quite different than websites) and never know a lick of CSS/Design/Typography/Photoshop. The truth is that designers are very cheap. That is the sad truth. Just write the app and have someone put a skin on it. Sure, you might have to pay for it, but you could also make more money just picking up more work and handing more design work off to someone.
It is a nice skill to have, but not critical. And don’t say it is related to programming in general, because it is not. it is specifically related to website building (for the most part).
Chris, I have to disagree with you. First I’d never say that learning something is a “distraction”. Even if you only ever use something 2% of the time it’s always nice to know a little bit about it.
Second I’ve been a developer for quite awhile, everything from command-line only, backend, desktop, web-based and everything in between and in almost every project knowing a bit about Photoshop has helped. Whether it was just knowing how to convert between strange formats, how to take a screen-shot and crop it for the help document, re-touching the splash screen for a desktop app, creating a quick and dirty header for our issue tracker, etc.
So no, it’s not a tool you’ll use everyday, or even every month, maybe not even every year but it’s always come in handy for me. In fact during one interview they asked if I knew how to use an image-editing package because they couldn’t afford to pull their designers off of “real work” to do things like tweak a splashscreen or recolor an icon.
You’re right, maybe he shouldn’t have said “Programming Tip”, perhaps “Developer Tip” would have been better. I usually think of a programmer as someone that does just that, you hand them a spec and they churn out code. He also wasn’t saying that you should learn a graphics editor instead of having a real designer, as nothing can replace a good designer, but it’s nice to know you can make some tweaks without having to pay someone for the small things. It’s like the fact that you should know how to change your oil, change a flat, rotate your tires, etc. Sure, others may usually do it but you should know how to do those very basic things.
IMO, Photoshop is a lot like C++; it makes difficult tasks doable and easy tasks mind-bogglingly complicated. For instance, fixing a photo in Photoshop makes the product’s name sound like an oxymoron compared to Paint Shop Pro or even Paint.Net.
Unfortunately, Photoshop is indispensable for web graphics. I’m sure that something like 90% of results one can get with Photoshop are obtainable using allegedly inferior tools, but it will come at the expense of a lot of time and effort. Adobe has a near monopoly for a good reason.
To paraphrase a wiser soul whose name I can’t recall at the moment: to be a software developer is becoming a matter of learning less information about more subjects, to the point where one knows nothing about everything. I think this is especially true when it comes to graphics, especially considering that a lot of the stakeholders I had the dubious pleasure of working with (especially higher-ups on the corporate ladder) don’t care much about functionality or content as long as it looks pretty :S
I’ve just started playing with Photoshop Elements (after using paint shop pro for a while). I’ve noticed that there are quite a few video podcasts out their that show you have to do stuff with Photoshop. Check iTunes and you’ll find several.
hi how are you?
Jeff,
Just perusing your archives and found this. I agree fully with you about GIMP, but thought you might want to know about this: http://www.gimpshop.com.
It’s a different version of GIMP redesigned to look more like Photoshop. It seems to fairly accurately recreate the look feel of Adobe’s little cash cow, while maintaining the cost of GIMP.
What, no good word for scissors, gluestick, pen and markers?
Seriously, if you’re doing UI usability prototypes, it’s worth at least thinking about doing it on paper and making them look “sketchy”. Doing that conveys the message that what you’re doing is an initial effort, negotiable, flexible, and open to change.
Doing a polished looking graphic mock-up may have the result Shawn Oster mentioned above - "more than a few times I’ve created a “placeholder” splashscreen or graphic only to have upper management say that it looks fine and we don’t need to invest in a designer."
Why? Because it visually conveys the message “it’s nearly finished!” even if you haven’t written a line of code yet.
Same problem in spades for UI mock-ups: if your first try looks like polished finished code, it’s more likely you’ll get told to implement the very first thing you showed, even if all you wanted was feedback. If you want feedback, always do at least two different versions, and make them look “rough” visually. (I’m working on paper sketches of four alternative configuration approaches for the next rev of the UI I’m working on at the moment.)
Have you used GIMP lately? It used to have an intolerably bad interface but the latest versions seem much better- I use it in preference to Photoshop now- although I do have a fairly old version of Photoshop I don’t find GIMP any harder to use and it is very full-featured.
Couldn’t agree more. After 5 years of development I went back to school for a BFA in design in order to cross that barrier more effectively (had never even took an art class before either, haha). Even before that I always encouraged my developers to learn design - if only to gain perspective.
In my opinion, at very least learning design will help the developer respect the designs they are implementing, and in its highest form learning design will lead the developer to new insights and solutions that would have been overlooked. In the end design and development are simply two approaches to solving problems. Being able to combine both allows one to tackle a larger set of problems than having just one or the other.
(Not to mention solving the whole “when all you have is a hammer everything becomes a nail” problem)
One more for Ulead PhotoImpact. Best Graphics Editor I’ve ever used.