Sunday, December 04, 2011
Top 10 Photoshop Tricks You Can Use Without Buying Photoshop
LifeHacker: You can do just about anything to an image with Photoshop, but if you don't have the cash to shell out, free program the GIMP—available for Windows, Linux, and OS X—can take you pretty far. Here are our favorite Photoshop how-tos that also work in the GIMP.
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12 comments:
These are really useful techniques to learn about if you are a casual Photoshop user, using the software to retouch photos you take. A lot of people assume that they need Photoshop when the tasks they're trying to do could be much more cheaply accomplished. For a lot of these things something as simple as iPhoto is really all you need, and that's the freest. However there's not that many full replacement softwares for Photoshop or other programs that you can't get around spilling all of the money for, like InDesign or Illustrator. These programs are so full of all the tricks you could ever need to fully realize a design. What I would like to see is an organized post about how to do some of those Photoshop tricks, since a great number of us are already working with that.
I used to have photoshop, and I loved it. I used it all the time and taught myself many tricks. However I didn't necessarily need all the things that photoshop offered me for my day to day work. Many things you need to do can be done with print screening, and other programs (i Work numbers, keynote, Microsoft Powerpoint). If you know how to manipulate programs and images, you can get a lot of milage out of what you have. I'm not so sure that these tips are entirely helpful for the photoshop tasks I need, however the idea is important. There are tricks.
All these tips struck me as things that people use to be able to do with special pends back when film was still a thing. On top of this, I am pretty confident that a lot of moderately decent digital cameras have built in functions that actually do much of what this article covered. What this article kind of misses is that the reason you buy Photoshop in the first place is that it makes all of these actions almost effortless since there are very specific and intuitive tools for all of the mentioned tasks.
I read a bunch of articles similar to this one when working on my tesselation project and it really frustrated me because:
a) even my pc has a basic photo editing software built in that accomplishes most of these tasks
b) they didn't do anything to explain certain basic principles of Photoshop or Gimp
c) I could not find one article about how do things like color images in, or other seemingly basic tasks that don't have much to do with the photography realm. It was really frustrating as someone who has not used Photoshop or a similar program, and there just wasn't any literature on the more design-y aspects of the program.
These are tricks... I wouldn't say these are exactly critical or common photo editing and manipulation tools. The #1 was how to make your photos look like a hipster. Need a say more? (Yes, I have to reach a character limit for this post.) Okay, so basically all of these "essential photoshop tools" can be emulated by a plethora of free or already owned software. I really cannot imagine that this would be so hard for the average user to figure out how to do. So, what's the usefulness of this article? I am not sure. I feel like part of being able to be a participant in today's digital world is to understand things like basic software, and how to get it.
I taught myself GIMP years ago for a random project, and I am so happy that I did! Once it came time to actually learn photoshop, I found that all I had to do was translate what the icons were for my favorite tools in this new medium, and change a few ways in which I did things. I am not yet at a point in my life where investing in an adobe software package is logical, so I'm really glad to have taken the time to learn a free alternative. So far, it has allowed me to do anything I can do in photoshop, though it may take a few minutes longer and be a bit less straightforward.
YES. I am a huge fan of GIMP! It does many of the same things that photoshop does, and it's free.
In terms of photo-editing programs I started out by using GIMP, which helped me to understand concepts for more "professional" programs. And while I really like other programs, GIMP's interface is relatively easy to use. I find it easier than photoshop and corel.
I think these are some great things to go through and I think for the casual user, as other people have mentioned, its a good assortment of things that GIMP can do. I think what a lot of people don't realize is that photoshop is for power-users who need the extended features. That's why it costs so much. GIMP is great for photo editing and such, but it can be slow, and working with layers and some of the higher level functions can be a little cumbersome. Photoshop is generally quicker in its processing, at least in my experience. But, the wonderful thing about GIMP is that it is free, and I wish there were other Adobe Suite elements that had free equivalents.
I'm a big fan of GIMP as a FOSS alternative to photoshop with a very similar feature set. While I'm sure photoshop offers some things that GIMP doesn't, it is certainly functional well beyond my needs. Unfortunately neither program is very intuitive and there is a steep learning curve to each. Photoshop has a large culture of commercial explanation and also community-based instructions. GIMP is strong on community instruction, but there are many fewer books, magazines, or professional articles about it. This means you have to figure out a bit more for yourself, but compared to the cost of photoshop, it's well worth it.
When it comes to most products, it's very easy to get wrapped up in the big name product that is most famous for its purpose. "Photoshopping" itself has become a verb synonymous with photo editing. This article does a good job of pointing out that a lot of the simple editing that most people need for their computer images can be easily obtained without spending a lot of money.
I've always been pretty photoshop illiterate, but in the past year or so I have become pretty adept in Photoshop Elements, which is a simpler version of Photoshop- set up the same but without the ability to do some of the more complex tasks that Photoshop can. Through googling and asking around, I've been able to use it for a number of projects, and it seems like a great jumping off point to anyone hoping to teach themselves Photoshop. I've never used any of the resources mentioned in this article, and I'm not sure if I plan to, but before having/knowing Photoshop Elements, these would have been great tools to be aware of.
This is such a helpful article, especially being in a major that will require a good amount of photos for portfolios. I had to edit all of my photos for my portfolio when I was applying to college. I could have definitely used these tips because I ended up just using the edit features in iPhoto, which get the job done. It does lack a bunch of features that allow you to edit more specific things such as blurring things out, smoothing, editing the color of one small spot, etc. iPhoto and other similar apps only let you do general things like brightness, color saturation, use filters, etc. If I had known about gimp, I would have definitely used it, probably in addition to other apps. It is nice to know that there are people out there developing apps for artists who cannot afford such a pricey application as photoshop.
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