Wow, add a random factor and suddenly things change.
A few weeks ago, I found that wonderful suite GIMP Paint Studio, and bemoaned my inability to afford Photoshop. Then my birthday rolled around, and I got a new tablet – a Wacom Intuos 4 Wireless. Let me tell you, that’s a great tablet. It cut the cord between the tablet and the machine, and has improved my work a lot, just by giving me a larger working area and a more sensitive stylus. The buttons on the tablet help a lot, too. But one thing I didn’t expect was a software bundle and upgrade deal included with the hardware!
Wacom offered a copy of Photoshop Elements 9 as a download, which I took (along with a couple of other things). But that entitled me to an upgrade to Photoshop CS5 at a drastically reduced price, something I could actually afford! So now I have a full, legal, and supported copy of Photoshop CS5, which I am methodically learning how to use. I have a couple of different online video tutorial sites (Adobe uses Lynda.com), and several books that caught my eye by Steve Caplin. I’ve already learned some techniques for Photoshop that I’ve been able to apply over in GIMP that have improved my work, and I see that trend continuing.
It will be a while before I start using Photoshop directly. There’s a LOT to absorb, and it’ll take some practice before I’m ready to switch the comic over to it. But I’m already getting a lot of benefit from what I’m learning.
I’m a huge advocate for open-source. But sometimes — certainly not all the time — paying cash money for a professional’s core tools makes sense because yes, it *is* that much better. MSFT Office is not that much better than Libre Office. But in my professional realm I’ve found that IntelliJ IDEA *is* that much better than Eclipse (although there’s now an OSS version of IDEA).
Looks like Photoshop may be in that category too.