I use Adobe Photoshop to make my images and I was wondering what other people use. I think the images in the MSFT gadgets look cool, but I'm not even close to knowing how to make such good looking images. The code is only part of it right, many of the custom gadgets I see have kind of a crappy look. Ok, this includes mine too.. as I said, I want to learn..
So what's a good site to learn how to make 3d or Vista type images Would someone suggest another tool than Adobe Or, if Adobe is good, then any tips, tricks, links to make cool images
Thanks!
Creating GOOD graphics for gadgets...
bm0061
jsedlak
For my graphics for games I use a range of tools, but Photoshop is the main 2d tool that I use. One of the other tools that I use is Blender and some other 3d modeling apps. You might find that you can draw your images in 3d and put the effects you want on them, for example lights and fog, then render the images and save them as 2D images.
Alanu
Peter Beresford
You might also play around with a vector image editor like Inkscape. It might be easier for you to draw stuff in terms of primitive shapes (circles, squares) rather than pixels. Then render the vectors to a bitmap image of the appropriate size.
So far, I've had decent results with an old copy of Photoshop Elements 2, the shape tool (yay, rounded-corner rectangles!), the gradient tool, and selection stroking (for nice borders). I don't think you need to get much fancier than that, and if you look at many Microsoft gadgets they really do consist mostly of gradients and rounded-corner rectangles.
Rahul Garg
In terms of free, I'd suggest you try Paint.NET. It's nowhere near the complexity level of the GIMP or Photoshop, but should handle some simple gradients and shading just fine. Also, unless the GIMP has made huge improvements on Windows recently, Paint.NET will be more stable and Windows-like.
That said, I really don't think you can go wrong spending $100 on a copy of Photoshop Elements. 95% of the features of the full Photoshop for 1/7th of the price. As a bonus, most Photoshop tutorials online will still apply to you (with maybe a few tweaks for UI differences), and you can also use most Photoshop effects and styles in Elements (there are plenty of free and not-for-free effects and styles out there on the interwebs). I'm not trying to sound like an Adobe shill, but Photoshop is so much a standard in the world of digital media creation that it's hard not to be able to justify the cost of Elements.
bryanedds