Official Luthiers Forum!

Hi,

Just thought I'd let you know that there is a seminar being given August 24th, 2005 in Indy, IN for Photoshop users. Actually, it is traveling around the Country but I happen to be going to the one in August for work. The link is below.

Photoshop Seminars

For those who are unfamiliar with www.photoshopuser.com, it is a wonderfully helpful website. It has all sorts of hints and tutorials. The price per year is $99US but it has already paid for itself with me.

I know that a lot of you have your own websites and do some photography. Photoshop can help you in all these areas. I started with Illustrator but have discovered that Photoshop can do so much more.

Regards, Steve Brown

Just thought I'd add to this, since I have some experience with Photoshop, (Photoshop) Elements, and Paint Shop Pro.

Photoshop is a high-end professional tool, with price to match. It's $600 or so price tag is enough to give the occasional user pause. However, Adobe makes Elements for those who don't need all the power that PS has, but it is still quite comprehensive. And for PS users, the layout is quite similar.

Another product, priced about the same as Elements (around $100) is Paint Shop Pro. PSP has been around for years. I continue to use an early version of PSP for massaging images that I put up on the net. The current version is a heavy-duty program, and can handle most anything PS can, at a small fraction of the price. My daughter is a budding graphics artist, and can do just about anything she can imagine in PSP, including all sorts of ways of massaging photos, which is mostly what we would be interested in.

Still, I think it would be a good idea to attend these PS workshops, because even if you don't use that product, you will learn some valuable tips. Think I'll see if/when they make it down here to Houston.

Best,

Michael

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Live to Play, Play to Live

Here are a few other ideas.

Occassionally I see REAL copies of software being sold on Ebay. Sometimes they are slightly older versions etc. but if you shop carefully you can pick up decent software cheap. (Not blatent bootleg, just stuff people don't use)

Another program worth checking out is Fireworks. It is a Macromedia product and I think it is much more suited to "humans" rather than "designers".. PS is a professional quality product and it requires quite a bit of effort to learn how to use it. I find Fireworks to be a much shorter learning curve -- granted it is not as powerful, but it is pretty good.

:-)

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

You can also pick up some pretty cheap name-brand software from nothingbutsoftware.com. Things like TurboCad will sell for 5-10 bucks there. They are new and in the box, just a couple of revs behind the newest versions.

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Dave Rector
Rector Guitars

Another endorsement for Paint Shop Pro. I have used it for years. The manufacturer (JASC) has recently been bought out by Corel, and that could be good, but probably will not be. I know Michael McBroom uses an older version, but around version 6 or 7 the resizing algorithms got better. (Translation: when you re-size your photos, it does a better job.)

I have Adobe Photoshop CS, Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Fireworks MX, Macromedia Freehand MX, and Jasc Paint Shop Pro (v.8.1) I use them all at different times, but I still rely on Paint Shop Pro for some of my work. If I had to pick just one program, and had $500, I'd pick Photoshop CS, but for almost anyone, Paint Shop Pro will do the job, and do it well. You can pick up Paint Shop Pro v.7 or 8 for less than $40 on Ebay, and it might be the best $40 software purchase you'll ever make.

Oh yes, classes in Photoshop will help anyone trying to better understand and use "digital darkroom" tools. Almost all of the concepts will be applicable, regardless which software you use.

Dennis

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Dennis Leahy
Duluth, MN, USA
7th Sense Multimedia

I agree on Paint Shop Pro. It's entirely intuitive and as capable as you want it to be. You can click a couple button and be done, or click a dozen buttons and make something pretty special. The latest version, PSP 8, vastly improved the resizing and compressing algorithms. It's also great for converting from any format to any other format. I give it three thumbs up!

Dennis and Jerry,

I am troubled to hear that JASC was bought out by Corel. I still use WordPerfect (I've always liked it better than Word), which has been a Corel product for years now, and they've done a decent job of maintaining it. But PSP might be percieved to be encroaching on Corel Draw territory. I hope they haven't acquired JASC to eliminate competition (a Microsoft technique).

I use PSP v4.0 because it's fast for what I need. Typically, I'll load an image from my digicam, resample it to 800x600, hit it with the sharpness feature once or twice, and save the image to a new file name. Takes me maybe 30 seconds per image.

My biggest pet peave with v8.0 is I have not been able to figure out how to get it to default to saving images as jpg's. It keeps wanting to default to its own proprietary image format. So, with every single image, I'm having to reset the format. And if I have a stack of a dozen or more images to get through, this becomes quite annoying, so I end up using PSP 8 seldom.

So, do you guys know if there's a way to get PSP 8 to change its image saving defaults?

Best,

Michael

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Live to Play, Play to Live

[QUOTE=Michael McBroom]do you guys know if there's a way to get PSP 8 to change its image saving defaults?[/QUOTE]
Michael,

I don't know the answer to your question, but here's the new newsgroup:

cnews.corel.com
corel.paintshoppro8

Probably easiest to click on the appropriate link on this page:

Corel Newsgroups

Dennis

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Dennis Leahy
Duluth, MN, USA
7th Sense Multimedia

I own both Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop. Trust me they are two different products and while they both can work on digital photographs, there the similarity ends. Photoshop does so much more and where the two have similar functions, filters etc, Photoshop's are frankly, far superior. The only thing against it is the learning curve. I was convinced to try it btw, because of my daughter. I, like you folks had been using PSP very happily. Now, I'll never go back.

As for cost, I started with CS by buying an older (legal) copy for $50 and then sprang for the CS upgrade (also very legal) for $149. By my calculations, (of course, I am a business major ) that's $199 plus shipping. I mention this to point out that there are ways (legally) around the stiff retail price. Even if you do wish to buy retail, the price is generally discounted and you can buy CS for about $350 and CS2 for $450 or so. Check eBay.

I just bought the CS2 upgrade ($149) and couldn't be more pleased. It has some amazing new stuff.

Still, if you don't need it, you don't need it. I just brought the subject up because I have seen some of the work produced by the guy giving the seminar. He is awesome!

Regards, Steve Brown

If I hit Save As, it defaults to whatever format the pic is already in. I normally save first in .PNG for archiving and web use, then save as a <100K .JPG for forum posting.

The nice thing about it in all compressible formats, you can optimize to whatever size you want the file to be and get a preview of the compressed file as you're doing it.

Edited to add: Just one more thing on PSP. There is a huge difference in the last three releases of PSP. PSP 8 is a lot more capable than earlier versions. I also had PS and simply didn't want to invest the time I needed to learn it.

Edited to correct. The most recent version is PSP 9. That's the one with the greatest enhancements, a very large step over earlier versions IMO. Jerry Hossom38556.8251273148