talkmagic.co.uk

Made a new image because my old one was too big:


This one is a tad too large too, so I just resized it (clarity is a lot worse now) and put it in my sig.

purty...

i gotta make myself a legit profile image, too lazy though

wow, thats nice!

I'm pretty shure thats an animated gif, if it is could u give me a link to a tutorial site? thanks

btw: i have photoshop if it is needed

I have one program that has suited my very limited needs.

http://www.scrapoetry.com/articles/how_ ... linkie.htm

It converts images in .gif formats into animated images.

Enjoy,
~David


Edit: Stupid old me forgot the most important part of the post!

That looks great! I only wish I could use photoshop and make my own graphics but I unfortunately will have to go out hunting around for a designer.

About how long did that take to make?

~David

Perfelti wrote:wow, thats nice!

I'm pretty shure thats an animated gif, if it is could u give me a link to a tutorial site? thanks

btw: i have photoshop if it is needed

Well, not sure about tutorial sites, but when I started out using PS I referred to http://good-tutorials.com <----- thousands of tutorials.

Here's a mini tutorial of what I did, but it will probably be very hard to follow if you don't have experience in photoshop:
1. Find an image of a spade (http://themagicofbelieving.tripod.com/c ... spades.jpg)
2. Find an image of a spread of cards (http://david.bellot.free.fr/svg-cards/i ... ds-2.0.jpg)
3. Open in photoshop
5. Paste the images onto a new canvas
8. Crop the image so just the spade shows and also resize to your liking
9. Use the magic wand (W) and select the inner black of the spade (if using the example I used)
10. Copy and Paste (it should put it onto a new layer)
11. Place the layer on top of the original spade and below the layer of cards
12. Create a clipping mask (alt+click inbetween the top layer of cards and the duplicated layer of the spade)
13. Convert it to ImageReady (on the bottom of the tools pallete there is a little arrow from photoshop to imageready)
14. Duplicate the first frame (Looks like 2 pages)
15. Then drag the picture of the cards around (I just started from having it in the very right hand side in the first frame to moving it all the way to the left hand side in the second frame)
16. Then select the second frame and tween (rings looping diagonally) and change the number of frames to 10 or whatever you desire.

That's just to get the cards moving. Using that you could explore and finish the rest of the image. Sorry if it's confusing, but without taking too much time to explain it, that's the best I can do.

Edit: Oh yea, to export it as an animated gif, go to - in ImageReady - File->Save Optimized As->choose a directory and save.

Just a question...

I'm a professional web/graphic designer, and I find it difficult to keep up with the costs of Photoshop—upgrades etc.

How do you guys afford Adobe's software?

When I first started in business, one of the first priorities was equipment, and the initial investment in software almost broke the bank—well over £3000.

I know struggling artists who cannot afford Photoshop. How do 'would-be bedroom designers' like yourselves do it???

seige wrote:Just a question...

I'm a professional web/graphic designer, and I find it difficult to keep up with the costs of Photoshop—upgrades etc.

How do you guys afford Adobe's software?

When I first started in business, one of the first priorities was equipment, and the initial investment in software almost broke the bank—well over £3000.

I know struggling artists who cannot afford Photoshop. How do 'would-be bedroom designers' like yourselves do it???

Was that question just a tad rhetorical and delicately laced with a 'soupcon' of sarcasm, Seige?

CS2 is about £420...

i too have wondered - would anyone be an urchin and download it for free? I'm sure there's versions for free out there...

if you do, thanks for keeping the prices up for the rest of the people who DO buy it properly...

and may your computer crash

Nope.

It was a question based on years of forking out large amounts of money on software, with escalating prices, because of the amount of piracy around.

Photoshop is a professional tool. It's the top of it's tree. It's priced exclusively for production studios who use it to generate revenue, and yet it seems that it's now a common household download.

And because of this, we see a deluge of awful 'design' and over-usage of tools, just because they are there and available.

Not so long ago, these professional tools were out of the reach of charlatans and 'abusers'. It's almost like letting a 17 year old who's just passed their driving test loose in a McLaren F1... the results are predictably bad.

And what's more, the boasts of 'how to use Photoshop' would be better demonstrated if the end products weren't anything short of being awful, garish and lack-lustre attempts at using illegitimate software by amateurs.

This is a BROAD moan I'm having... this doesn't just apply here, but to the internet as a whole.

A classic and rather gratifying example is a local company to me consisting of two 21 year olds, running a 'web design' studio from their own homes, with pirated software and no more knowledge of the psychology of design and web marketing than a couple of short planks.

Now... to cut a long story short, the guys were producing websites for about £900 a throw. Which, for a badly written, search-engine hostile and generally terrible marketing website is expensive. However—using Flash templates and effects, plus a smattering of what appeared to be stolen stock photography—they actually made the sites LOOK good.

Here's a small lesson in 'design'. If it LOOKS good, is it?

As far as art on the wall goes, yeah, I guess so. But for MARKETING purposes, a website needs to have LOTS of thought and design which you DON'T see. Which is why our websites, which are marketing led by our marketing guru (40+ years experience with blue-chip companies!) run at about £3000 for a basic one.

However, the difference is, our sites PAY FOR THEMSELVES usually within 6 months, so our studies show. A website is an investment, not an expense.

So, to keep cutting the story short...

The same two 21 year olds landed a job with a large firm locally, who already had a website and just wanted a new look to it. So, monies paid, website done. Client sees glossy moving graphics and wets their pants with excitement, job done.

Or was it?

Client drops out of Goolge (they used to be in the top 3 consistently), client looses enquiry stream from website, clients phoning up saying they cannot access their old 'user area' anymore, and so on and so forth.

Client fuming, approaches web design company to question them. Unfortunately, web design company has been targetted by the 'anti piracy police' and have been shut down, because their debts for use of unlicenced software was astronomical.

Client is now very unhappy bunny, and needs to get the site fixed.

So they come to US.
They end up paying 4 times as much as they paid the 'bandits', but all of a sudden, they're back on Google, and their enquiries are through the roof. So much so, as a direct result of our marketing campaign, they now employ 2 extra staff.

The moral of this tale has several sides...
1. Owning a set of scalpels and a bonesaw doesn't make you a surgeon
2. Many of us would love to be driving a brand new supercar around the country lanes on the way to our country mansions. But we can't. Ergo, if you can't afford it, you can't own it.
3. Professionals use these tools as part of their trade, and the costs of the tools are part of the working cost. Bandits 'undercut' legit businesses' prices because their overheads are lower. And so are their software bills...
4. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. And you can't teach a puppy dog not to be enthusiastic and destructive.
5. Don't throw stones if you live in a glass house...

For those of us who want to play with this sort of thing in our spare time in a responsible fashion there is always the Gimp (www.gimp.org); free and open source. It's a little buggy occasionally, and some of the features aren't as flexible as those in Photoshop seem to be (based on descriptions in web tutorials), but I love it.

You could just keep downloading free trials, lol.

Delude wrote:You could just keep downloading free trials, lol.

But you can't save files from the trial.

Photoshop elements is often released with magazines as one of the cover disc programmes and is also fairly cheap to get legitimately amazon for instance.... I don't know how many features it has in it though

Jordan C wrote:Photoshop elements is often released with magazines as one of the cover disc programmes and is also fairly cheap to get legitimately amazon for instance.... I don't know how many features it has in it though

Elements is pretty fully featured. We buy it for our 'trainee' artists to practice at home.

Some very commercial work is attainable in Elements.

However, 'ImageReady' is a web graphics application which ships exclusively with the full Photoshop.

Sorry to whinge on about this, but it pi$$es me off big style. I'm no saint, but at least I give credit to the folks who help me make a living, by buying their software.

And don't let me hear 'Well, I'm not using it for commercial gain' a single time more, please...

seige wrote:How do you guys afford Adobe's software?

I'm legit. I use Gimp.