Newfound appreciation for DM Icon Editor in Off Topic

ID:182605
 
Apr 7 2008, 2:32 pm
The ability to independently edit the alpha channel versus the RGB channels in the DM Icon Editor is disturbingly convenient when compared to Photoshop and The GIMP.

I spent the last forty-five minutes trying to convince The GIMP to let me change the whole icon's colour to an exact RGB, irrespective of current alpha. In DMIE? Easy as pie: switch to "RGB only" and flood-fill the whole thing. In The GIMP, I have to use the "Levels" feature and explicitly set each channel's minimum and maximum threshold to the value I want, which took ten minutes to figure out all on its own.

Another problem that would be trivial in DMIE is increasing the opacity of the icon by a flat multiplier instead of just adding a value (or setting the threshold) of the alpha channel. More specifically, I'd like to increase the icon's current "thickness" to about 500%, such that an opacity 1 pixel becomes an opacity 5 pixel while an opacity 35 pixel becomes an opacity 175 pixel.

In DMIE, that's easy: Ctrl+C, then Ctrl+V four times.

In the GIMP... well, I'm still working on it. =P
#1 Apr 7 2008, 2:47 pm
The GIMP drives me nuts. I do everything in Inkscape now. Luckily for me, I don't do any pixel art work.
#2 Apr 7 2008, 3:13 pm
I use Photoshop Elements, which sadly is lacking much alpha support. When I need advanced alpha stuff, I'm forced to go over to the GIMP and I end up cursing at it. DM's icon editor may lack a lot of bells and whistles but it makes up for some of that in duh handling.

And I'm totally with PirateHead on the love of Inkscape. That is one freakin' awesome program.

Lummox JR
#3 Apr 7 2008, 3:18 pm
In response to Lummox JR (#2)
Yeah, I actually rendered the image I'm fooling around with via Inkscape. I think SVG is going to be de facto within a few years, and not just because of web standards, but rather because it can produce such good looking images!
#4 Apr 7 2008, 4:11 pm
In response to Jtgibson (#3)
I think that what will really push SVG over the edge, so to speak, is scripting. With SVG+Javascript and some nice libraries and GUIs yet to be written, you'll be able to do almost anything you could do in Flash... without Flash.
#5 Apr 7 2008, 4:40 pm
I use Paint Shop Pro 7 and all I do is make it a layer and slide the alpha percentage to where I want it. :P
#6 Apr 7 2008, 4:45 pm
In response to Foomer (#5)
You can slide the alpha level above 100%? 'Cause I think any program can "translucify" between 0.0 and 1.0 -- The GIMP certainly can -- but actually "opaquing" the image is much more difficult.
#7 Apr 8 2008, 7:07 am
In response to Jtgibson (#3)
Jtgibson wrote:
Yeah, I actually rendered the image I'm fooling around with via Inkscape. I think SVG is going to be de facto within a few years, and not just because of web standards, but rather because it can produce such good looking images!

I've always liked the quality of vector graphics, but until recently there was no real standard for them so you had to have an expensive program to use them. SVG has really been great for that, and between its native support on Firefox (not perfect but pretty good) and a great tool like Inkscape being available for it, I think its time has really come.

One nice thing I love about it is that even if I want to make a PNG graphic with this tool, I can keep my SVG flie and then down the road it's trivial to make changes.

Lummox JR
#8 Apr 8 2008, 7:15 am
In response to Lummox JR (#7)
I hear IE 8 may have SVG support as well. They care at least enough to cripple the standard with a buggy and half-assed implementation.
#9 Apr 8 2008, 7:19 am
In response to PirateHead (#8)
PirateHead wrote:
I hear IE 8 may have SVG support as well. They care at least enough to cripple the standard with a buggy and half-assed implementation.

Cool. It's reassuring to know Microsoft will live up to their usual standards. I'm sure they'll figure out how to put some security holes in there between now and release.

Lummox JR
#10 Apr 8 2008, 7:19 am
The GIMP is notoriously inconvenient.

I may or may not have a copy of photoshop cs3, and I may or may not believe that it may or may not be based on what program you may or may not have gotten used to using.

I dunno, it's based on preference and what you learned first, really, but I design most of my graphics in paint, or with larger images, I may or may not use a copy of Macromedia Flash to do the outline, then paste it into paint to trace as an outline, then I may or may not touch it up in photoshop, and do most of the color, shading, and animation between the three.

Trust me, you don't even want to complain about difficulty to me. I was designing VTF textures for source mods very recently, and only had a copy of the GIMP on hand. You try making a decent transparent/semi-transparent texture for a 3d game using alpha channels, especially if the level of transparency gradually becomes less.
#11 Apr 8 2008, 7:29 am
In response to Ter13 (#10)
Ter13 wrote:
The GIMP is notoriously inconvenient.

The GIMP sucks on toast. Maybe GIMPshop is better because it forces the thing into a Photoshop-like single window environment; I haven't tried it. But you can tell it was written by penguin-thumpers. The regular version in Windows is a study in frustration because the menus don't behave as a Windows user has every right to expect. Plus, if you want to use a plugin, you'd better have gcc installed because you have to compile each one.

I may or may not have a copy of photoshop cs3, and I may or may not believe that it may or may not be based on what program you may or may not have gotten used to using.

Photoshop Elements is the lite version of Photoshop. It lacks quite a lot of alpha channel features. It is however perfectly good for most editing purposes.

Lummox JR
#12 Apr 8 2008, 7:51 am
In response to Lummox JR (#2)
I played with it a few days ago and once I got the hang of it, it was really fun. I was able to trace several pictures(converting raster to vector) rather quickly and accurately, which is a feat for a man who can't draw a straight line to save his life. I'm going to have to show my mom and brother it, and see what they pop out, because they are great artists with a pencil and paper, but not so great when they hit a PC.
#13 Apr 8 2008, 10:24 am
In response to Lummox JR (#11)
Lummox JR wrote:
Ter13 wrote:
The GIMP is notoriously inconvenient.

The GIMP sucks on toast. Maybe GIMPshop is better because it forces the thing into a Photoshop-like single window environment; I haven't tried it.

GIMPshop is just the regular GIMP reworded to be like Photoshop. It uses the exact same Deweirdifyer [sic] plugin that the regular GIMP does. So if you don't have any Photoshop experience, there's no sense in downloading GIMPshop (unless you want to lie a little and add "Photoshop" to your resumé).

Speaking of Deweirdifyer, it can be unstable. Worse, if GIMP crashes, it often crashes silently, suddenly dropping you back to desktop without so much as an error message or warning, and sucks to be you if you were working on an image at the time. (Good that it doesn't trigger a fault, bad that it doesn't tell you about it or try to parachute out of it.) If GIMP crashes on you when using Deweirdifyer, be sure to locate all instances of "script-fu.exe" in the Processes window of Task Manager and shut them down. Otherwise, GIMP will tend to crash (even more) randomly if you start it back up.

That said, The GIMP is the best free image editing program I've seen, and my limited experience with Photoshop made it a bit easier to swallow.

I haven't tried out Paint.NET yet, though I mean to.


But you can tell it was written by penguin-thumpers. The regular version in Windows is a study in frustration because the menus don't behave as a Windows user has every right to expect. Plus, if you want to use a plugin, you'd better have gcc installed because you have to compile each one.

Yeah, that bugs me. It's one thing to have something as open source. It's another to have something as mandatory source.

Binaries, people, for the love of God, binaries!
#14 Apr 8 2008, 11:20 am
In response to Jtgibson (#13)
Jtgibson wrote:
Binaries, people, for the love of God, binaries!

Gentoo Man says, "Binaries are the Devil's tools!"
#15 Apr 8 2008, 11:41 am
If The GIMP is driving you up a wall but you still really need to do pixel stuff, a pixel artist named Mark Tyler designed his own paint program which is open source now.

http://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/

It's decent - I don't like it a lot, but that's probably because I don't do pixel art. A lot of the stuff in there is geared towards more pixely stuff.

And it's not nearly as weird, or bloated, or complex as The GIMP, so it might be better if those things are bugging you.
#16 Apr 8 2008, 2:48 pm
In response to PirateHead (#15)
Pixel art really isn't even feasible in the GIMP, and only barely so in Photoshop. My preferred tool for that is still PSP 4.1, which handles those things fairly decently (although it's flawed in color handling and such, and more importantly it's hard to find).

Lummox JR
#17 Apr 8 2008, 3:21 pm
In response to Lummox JR (#16)
Lummox JR wrote:
My preferred tool for that is still PSP 4.1, which handles those things fairly decently (although it's flawed in color handling and such, and more importantly it's hard to find).

PSP 4.1? Stop showing everyone your age, Lummox. :)

As for me, when it comes to pixel art I generally use PSP 9 or Graphics Gale. Graphics Gale is nice because it seemingly was built specifically for pixel art, but I greatly prefer PSP 9's UI, the commands that the mouse buttons perform in PSP 9 (it's almost like this in itself gives Graphics Gale a learning curve), and the general ease-of-use of PSP 9.

Hiead
#18 Apr 8 2008, 3:23 pm
In response to Lummox JR (#9)
Lummox JR wrote:
I'm sure they'll figure out how to put some security holes in there between now and release.

The good news is that this takes no figuring out, which saves them time. In the corporate world, time is money, so they can continue to haggle customers for more money as they invest less time in customer security.

Hiead
#19 Apr 8 2008, 8:59 pm
In response to Jtgibson (#13)
Don't even bother with paint.net. It, as Lummox says, "Sucks on toast".

After using paint.net, even I would be thankful to be using the GIMP.