November 20, 2005

• I think we are all pirating Photoshop on Macs aren't we?
• Once again on a more serious note: what level is your band at? If you are looking at an animated gif then Fireworks or Imageready is what you need. If you want better animating for the bytes then Flash is the go. To be brutally honest - either you've got to hand over the cash for a decent bit of software or pay a designer to make one for you. Of course this depends on what level your band is operating at. If you are looking at doing this at an indie business level then you should be archiving expenses for tax purposes anyway whether it be software purchases or paying a designer to do it. If you are at only playing-for-fun band level then my post is not going to be much use. Sorry!
• gosh...i used to have a GREAT program for os9 for building gifs...it was called gifbuilder...you can still get it here....you just throw in your stack of images, set the time between frames, preview it and you're done...the learning curve is about ten minutes and the whole program is 279k...maaybe it will run in classic...i'm gonna get it and find out.... on another note, animation can be a bitch... if you're using photoshop to create your frames, you can use a layer to hold a bunch of guidelines (or paths for objects) that you just turn off (with the little eyeball on the layers pallette) every time you save a new frame...i did this once with an oval shape cut with lines like a pizza to know where to place the lens flare effect so that it appeared to orbit the logo (i know, sounds cheesy, but it actually looked really sharp) PLUS, with gifbuilder you can import any animated gif off the web that you like, hack it apart, change the images and put it back together...i could see something funny done with one of those 'shoot the president, win an iPod' ads you see around...
• we're just playing for fun, not serious at all. I can't believe I forgot to pimp the website, please excuse my lack of link-embedding: http://www.myspace.com/treestheband
• Try giffun, for making animatied gifs, (freeware, check versiontracker), and gimp for editing (also free, but uses X11 when used with os X, which is not too bad).
• not to HiJack this thread but does anyone know of a good irc channel or chatroom for CS2 help?
• gimp app is probably the way to go. It's the only free software out there competitive with photoshop. The GUI is clumsy in some ways but not nearly as bad as alternatives I've tried. My experience with Gimp.app is that it's easy to install, detects all Mac OS X fonts with no configuration, and does the job. Like photoshop, however, it does not animate gifs.
• Just downloaded that GIMP program. Maybe it's my obtuse brain, but I'm having trouble with the official manual. Does anyone know of a site that offers a more user-friendly tutorial for just getting started? I don't have any experience in this area.