psychotick
Auror
Hi Guys,
Thought since I have time on my hands that I'd start a new thread about the various bits of software I and others use to design our covers. (One program at a time.) I use about half a dozen different programs, all with their own strengths and weaknesses. My thought is that others might chip in with their own posts about different pieces of software.
So to begin I thought I'd start with Photoscape. (Note this is not Photoshop - which I don't use.)
PhotoScape : Free Photo Editing Software (Photo Editor) Download
Photoscape is pound for pound the best photo imaging piece of software out there in my view - and it's free. It's fully featured and has an amazing array of filters and effects you can add to your images, all of them very simple to use even without a manual. And it'll do things on the fly so you can see the changes you're making in an image as you make them instead of having to undo changes after. It also has some spot fixing tools - badly named for some reason as the Region (out of focus) filter. But want to simply darken, blur, decolour or sharpen one tiny bit of an image - this will do it for you. It also has an image pasting / overlay system which is a little cubersome but allows for variable transparency of the entire image. So you can put ghostly eyes etc over an image.
One thing I particularly like is that it can build covers for you. So for a full cover I want three panels - front, back and spine. Photoscape will allow me to make three seperate images, size them exactly to the nearest pixel, and then connect them up into one full sized image.
It does have some weaknesses. The text for blurbs doesn't allow for justification - which means if you want a justified blurb you either have to fiddle with the spaces / kearning yourself or import a text file. It can't do a ingle colour to transparent as can other programs - but it can handle images with transparent colours. So simply import a png file with transparent colour embedded and Photoscape will handle it like any other image. And its choice of fonts is essentially that which comes with Word etc. It's not a full text graphics suite so you'll want to create those in another program and insert them. It doesn't do layering either. Lastly it won't do a pdf which may be an issue with some publisher requirements - however I find JPEG's are just as good and a quarter of the size.
All in all this is my workhorse graphics design program.
Cheers, Greg.
Thought since I have time on my hands that I'd start a new thread about the various bits of software I and others use to design our covers. (One program at a time.) I use about half a dozen different programs, all with their own strengths and weaknesses. My thought is that others might chip in with their own posts about different pieces of software.
So to begin I thought I'd start with Photoscape. (Note this is not Photoshop - which I don't use.)
PhotoScape : Free Photo Editing Software (Photo Editor) Download
Photoscape is pound for pound the best photo imaging piece of software out there in my view - and it's free. It's fully featured and has an amazing array of filters and effects you can add to your images, all of them very simple to use even without a manual. And it'll do things on the fly so you can see the changes you're making in an image as you make them instead of having to undo changes after. It also has some spot fixing tools - badly named for some reason as the Region (out of focus) filter. But want to simply darken, blur, decolour or sharpen one tiny bit of an image - this will do it for you. It also has an image pasting / overlay system which is a little cubersome but allows for variable transparency of the entire image. So you can put ghostly eyes etc over an image.
One thing I particularly like is that it can build covers for you. So for a full cover I want three panels - front, back and spine. Photoscape will allow me to make three seperate images, size them exactly to the nearest pixel, and then connect them up into one full sized image.
It does have some weaknesses. The text for blurbs doesn't allow for justification - which means if you want a justified blurb you either have to fiddle with the spaces / kearning yourself or import a text file. It can't do a ingle colour to transparent as can other programs - but it can handle images with transparent colours. So simply import a png file with transparent colour embedded and Photoscape will handle it like any other image. And its choice of fonts is essentially that which comes with Word etc. It's not a full text graphics suite so you'll want to create those in another program and insert them. It doesn't do layering either. Lastly it won't do a pdf which may be an issue with some publisher requirements - however I find JPEG's are just as good and a quarter of the size.
All in all this is my workhorse graphics design program.
Cheers, Greg.