Shards

I hope you found the Levels tutorial to be useful last week, I did receive some positive feedback from it. There will be further tutorials to come, but I wanted to address something else this week. I've gotten a few emails from people addressing alternatives to Photoshop.

I am at a bit of a disadvantage answering this, since I've never used Paint Shop Pro, but I did look into it a bit. It is a very powerful tool, and you can do quite a bit with it, but at the same time it's got some major distinctions from Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop is an excellent graphics program, and is probably the most popular and powerful imaging tool available to artists today. However, it is heavily oriented towards photographic imaging. That's perfect for some types of work, but artists who are used to mediums like paint and ink, or even simple charcoal, may find it lacking. It can be very difficult to get a traditional painting out of Photoshop without resorting to the default filters. (And you should avoid doing that, because people will take one look and know exactly how you made it... not the result we want.)

Paint Shop Pro seems to be more oriented towards this painterly style of work, but you may have trouble using some of the more powerful imaging techniques in this program. I highly recommend you check out the Paint Shop Pro Users Group. It's a very comprehensive site which is totally focused on the program, with plenty of tutorials, archives, tips and forums for you to learn the ins and outs and abilities of Paint Shop Pro. There are even online classes offered there. So take a look and see what you can do with the program you've already got, then perhaps think about Photoshop once you know more fully what Paint Shop Pro is capable of. As well, you can find demo versions of Photoshop (often called Photoshop LE) packaged with everything from scanners to printers to digital cameras, and even sometimes with modems (don't ask me to explain the logic behind that one).

I should mention that there are other tools available besides Photoshop. Definitely worth checking out is The Gimp, a continually evolving graphics program that is currently free and looks to be growing into something at least as powerful as Photoshop, and possibly even better. Unfortunately, this is a Unix-based application, and I haven't yet heard of a Macintosh version in the works.

Always remember that the program you use is nothing more than a tool through which to create art. An artist can create wonderful images with even inferior programs. Some guy who happens to own Photoshop 6.0 running on his badass dual-processor G4 with 2 gigs of RAM and one of those gorgeous 22" flatscreen Cinema Displays, but has no artistic skill, isn't likely to make anything too impressive. Your images come from within.

(But man... what I wouldn't give for one of those Cinema Displays...)