In reply to SteveF.

Oh, I got quite good with P-shop, having snagged my first bootleg copy of PS2, I believe it was, back in 1998, from a close friend of mine who worked for Ted Turner at CNN. The old iMac has the entire Creative Suite on it, a legit licensed copy my boss at A&I got me. Version 6, that is.

After working with it for many years for everything under the sun, including some spoof-up pics of friends and relatives I did for laughs, I’ve learned my around P-shop pretty danged thoroughly.

Illy, eh, not so much. I just don’t get the vector-art stuff, although I can at least functionally minimally in it, since it was an absolutely non-negotiable requirement for producing the camera-ready cover artwork for Skin Art, Tattoo Review, Outlaw Biker, and all the other mags put up by A&I until the owner killed off the whole danged company.

But yeah, even at the GIMPs website they have a section dedicated to explaining why they aren’t P-shop, and really have no interest in trying to be.

That said, I did some poking around last night and found a few tutorials explaining how to put a stroke around text (one of the tricks I’ve relied heavily on over the years), how to create a much more P-shop-looking drop shadow, how to manipulate layer masks properly, &c. I’ll get there with the GIMP, maybe, provided I live long enough.

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