Reasons why I hate Photoshop:

[dolari]

1a) To fill a color in a black bordered region with Paint Shop Pro: Click in the region you want filled.
1b) To fill a color in a black bordered region with Photoshop: Select the region you want filled. Click Color Select Tool. Deselect all black areas. Go to Quick Mask Mode. Fill in all the areas you don't want colored. Go back to normal mode. Click the region you want filled.

2a) To replace WHITE with BLUE in Paint Shop Pro: choose Blue as your foreground color, White as your background color, and use the Color Replacer brush to paint over all the areas you want changed.
2b) To replace WHITE with BLUE in Photoshop: DO NOT CHOOSE THE TOOL MARKED "COLOR REPLACER." DO NOT CHOOSE THE ADJUSTER MARKED "COLOR REPLACER." Select the area you want replaced. Use the Select Color Tool to select just white within that area. Make a new layer. Flood fill one spot, which will fill all the spots. Merge the layer back.

3) The Magic Wand, The Dodge Tool and Magnifying Glass use nearly the same icon, and often I end up using one for the other

I guess I was just stupid to start using Paint Shop Pro over GIMP or Photoshop, but they're needlessly complex, and counter-intuitive. And it fails for me on so many levels that I'm so close to giving up on it (it's taken me three hours to get almost no work done on the comics).

It prolly doesn't help that I've been using PSP for 10 years, but after seeing what I need to do to get what I think are simple tasks done in PShop, I'm beginning to see why I stuck with it.

Comments

[amw.livejournal.com]

Are you comparing PSP to GIMP or to Photoshop? GIMP is fucking HORRIBLE for drawing in - i only use it because it's free and not nagware. There's so much stuffing around. To draw a frigging square you have to do something like select a rectangle, holding down control, change to border, add border, sacrifice a virgin.... Stupidest interface ever.

[lisalees.livejournal.com]

Select, edit, stroke selection. I don't think virgins are required in the process. Maybe it used to be worse. Gimp 2.2 is a big improvement over some earlier versions for the photo stuff I mainly do.

[amw.livejournal.com]

I've been following GIMP since 1.x because i really don't like pirating software, and i think open source is cool, but much like OpenOffice it's still really painful compared to the commercial alternatives. I only ever use PSP and Word on our office manager's PC when she's not in, but everything just works how you expect it to - click a box, draw a box, click the yellow bar, add a row to a table - it just seems so easy. GIMP have definitely made great strides with 2.x, but i still find it really unintuitive. Perhaps i'm just not a frequent enough user to "get it" :-/

[kitsunekaboom.livejournal.com]

I'm rather fond of PSP, and have the same issues with PShop that you do. (Hate GIMP too, tried it and just gave up on the whole matter).

[robby-bevard.livejournal.com]

*blinks* I work in photoshop 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average. This particular week I've been coloring Marvel Mangaverse day and night all week, and this is kinda a normal week for me, 100 or 120 hour work weeks using photoshop, and its been the case for me for almost 7 years now... So sheer experiance and work time is obviously a factor for photoshop being totally natural to me, but... what you just described as your method...

Makes no sense to me whatsoever. Deselcting areas and using quickmask to get around the black? I think your trying to do stuff the really really hard way.

Don't use layers at all except for effects.

What you do when you VERY FIRST START, is this...

-Start with lineart.
-Make the file RGB file. This will convert the image into 4 channels. Channel 0 which displays them all. 1, 2, and 3 are red, green, and blue respectivley, but you never ever ever deal with those on their own. Just channel 0, for your color.
-Copy the lineart, and make a new, fourth channel, and paste. Label it as lineart.
-Go back to channel 0, the RGB channel, and DELETE what you have there, so that the image is blank.
-Turn the little eyeball on channel 4 on.

Viola, you have lineart that is easy to manipulate, and you can then color *underneath* the lineart in the color channel. At the end when your all done you can apply the lineart back onto the image.

Also, you can just hit the "w" (or "shift +w" dependingon your version) to select the wand, and you can take off the "contiguous option". So whenever you select a color, it will automatically select all of the similar colors.

Also, to some degree, you can set the airbrush to "lighten" or "darken" to avoid going over or through areas you don't want to go over or through.

[jenndolari.livejournal.com]

Alright, let's follow these directions as you give 'em....

For the line art, I took my pencils, made a threshold layer, and then flattened it....

Then set to RGB....(tries to figure out how to make a new channel)...okay I made a new channel (Alpha 1), pasted the line art but it wouldn't let me rename it to Line Art. Wouldn't let me delete channel 0, ended up having to delete channel 1-3 before 0 dissapeared on it's own.

Still didn't work. I get basically another B*W image that fills way past where I need it to, and four blank channels.

Again, this is, in my opinion, WAAAAY too much work to simply color a black enclosed area.

[missratbat.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I was doing it just 'clicking straight onto the area' in Photoshop, but all this talk now makes me wonder if I'm doing it wrong after all! :)

(But then, maybe it's in the scanning or something. Just ask if you're curious and I can tell more if ye like.)

[robby-bevard.livejournal.com]

You don't have to rename Alpha Channel 4 "lineart", it just helps to keep track of it when you first try the method. (And you can't rename it the moment you make it, but go into the bar to change it. Again, not required, just helpful for keeping track.)

You don' t throw away the RGB channel, you merely clear the image with a solid color, so that the old lineart isn't on the RGB channel at all, but only in the 4th channel. The RGB channels is where you do all the coloring. Thats just an old carry over from copy and paste. If you CUT and paste the lineart into channel 4, it'll be cleared out of the RGB anyway.

When you make it RGB, it automatically creates four channels, 0-3, but 0 is the ONLY one you pay attention to and work on.

Hope that explains it a little bit better, tho This might be easier to explain if I hadn't been up for 36 hours at this point...

[robby-bevard.livejournal.com]

I should note, that the reason you clear the old lineart out of the RGB channel is for the pretty straightforward reason that you are then no longer working around it or having to deal with it, because its seperate in channel 4 and your able to color underneath it basically.

You can also do it with layers, with the lineart set on "multiply", but working in channels is really really the way to go, if you can make sense of my explanation.

[jenndolari.livejournal.com]

I'm obviously still not getting it. I now have the line art cleared out of the RGB channel and on it's own channel, but merging the layers makes the line art pink. And the copy and pasting the line art back into the RGB channel completely overruns any color work on the RGB channel with Black and White.

::Scratches head::

[jandanadur.livejournal.com]

I use PSP and it works for me, so I have never really needed to use Photoshop ot G.I.M.P. and I am somewhat grateful. My experiences with GIMP were confusing, embarassing and somwhat awkward; my experiences with Photoshop were that it had some pretty-looking functions that I would never need.

[frankie23.livejournal.com]

I agree. I used PSP for years before finally forcing myself to use Photoshop; I still have troubles with it.

[tygerlander.livejournal.com]

I am quite happy with PSP5. I do have one of those limited editon PS but ecckk.. too much trouble