I am not a hateful kind of person. But I am very passionate, and my goal in life is to help people out. So without further ado, here is why you might benefit from quitting Photoshop.
Let me tell you a story. I was watching a video about how this one guy makes his comic books, as I do when I am stranded on the island of un-creativity (aka artist's block; more on that in a future post.)
Now, this man liked to sketch and ink traditionally, as a lot of people do. After he was done with that, he would go through the hassle of scanning and then add in the mid tones, borders, and text inside photoshop. That is all. A simple scratch on the surface of what Photoshop is capable of.
This is perfectly reasonable. In fact, many artists use that very work flow.
But is it the best?
This man, overwhelmed with very sight of this program, managed to learn a way to do what he needed and go. You wanna know how he made his borders? He filled in a very slim rectangle with black, then copy and pasted that, then flipped it by 90 degrees, then did it all over again until he had four sides. He proceeded to do this for ALL HIS BORDERS. This process took so long that he had to fast forward the video!Well, you say, he obviously could have looked it up on the web and- voila! Problem solved. You can easily just add a stroke to a selection to get the same result. Except how would he look that up without knowing what 'stroke' meant? This is bad design, in my personal opinion. It's ironic, since so many people who use it are professional designers.
The funny thing was that he knew the keyboard shortcut to rotate the one side of the border by 90 degrees, so my guess is that he did look it up on the internet, but that was the only thing he could find.
The problem is that photoshop has so many options and tools, that the ones that satisfy a particular artist's needs are bound to be hard to access.
In fact, the majority of digital artists who use photoshop could easily move their workflow to a much simpler app and not miss a thing. So why don't they?Well, I'm not completely sure, but I know it has something to do with psychology. Artists love the flexibility of photoshop, or -at the very least- the idea of it. You can do literally anything in photoshop, and that is a very provocative thought.
And yet, just because you can do anything, doesn't mean you will.
Obviously certain artists really do use a lot of photoshop's features in their normal workflow, and hurray to them for taking the time to learn this monster of a program. But let's face it- these artists aren't even close to a majority.But, if you have the program and know how to use it, why switch? Maybe you will use those features someday. I'm not saying you won't. Maybe you have made a workflow for yourself that you like. By all means, stay if you want to. But if you are just getting started with digital art, or if you aren't completely happy with the program, all I'm saying is that you shouldn't feel like you are chained to photoshop because you think that it is what the professionals use.
Photoshop was way ahead of its time when it first came out, and people can do some crazy stuff with it. But there are so many different programs now that may just work better for your needs. Experiment to see what works best for you! Good luck!