Hello All! Well i just downloaded flash and photoCHOP! (photoshop) and am debating, should i get more of the suite? Illustrator/Dreamweaver/After Affects/etc? I want to build iphone art and games art as well as some flash and stuff like that. Is it worth spendind the money for those? And are there any good online tuts available? thanks! FYI, i downloaded a trial version
I would use Illustrator if I were you. We use illustrator for all of our games, and it works better because we can re-scale an image to any size at any time if we really have to. We don't really use photoshop because then we are limited to the adjustments we can make afterwards.
When you say 'downloaded' Photoshop, you mean you bought it, right? You can get into serious trouble if you use pirated software for profit. Inkscape is a freeware vector art program; I think that's what Illustrator is, but I'm not sure. GIMP is a freeware Photoshop clone; works great and we've used it in all of our games to date. Pixen is a good pixel editor for Mac, but it's kinda buggy. It crashes a lot, but has perfect crash-recovery of your files so it's just an annoyance. TBH, I ended up just using GIMP instead for pixel art because Pixen seemed to be messing with the Hex values of the colors I chose. It's absolutely worth having tho; it has some great pixel-y features than make up for it all, like the ability to view an image tiled as you draw it.
Im never going to use these for profit. And no, im currently running a trial but im not a developer, im just looking for some fun
I really like drawing on fireworks. Out of all of adobe's software, it's my favorite. I think it's the best for drawing and art.
creative suite has a trial version, 30 days free. You should download it and find out if you really need it.
Im not a designer by any means so take my advice as a grain of salt. But I absolutely LOVE using Macromedia (adobe now ugh) fireworks, I feel its one of the best image editing software out there. I tried getting into photoshop but I cant stand using the interface for more then 2 minutes.
Dreamweaver or InDesign won't be very useful as they're aimed at print and web designers. I believe you'll get a lot of use from Illustrator (vector drawing) and/or Photoshop. And I do think you can get a lot of use from After Effects too; it'll allow you to make complex and impressive animations and animated graphics that you can use for intro videos in the games, or all sorts of little things. But there are also lots of open source, free, or cheap alternatives out there - just start googling and go from there.
if you do go for it, which i highly recommemd, there are tons of helpful tutorials online and loads of handbooks. http://www.layersmagazine.com/edit-an-ajax-drop-down-menu-in-dreamweaver.html that's a good start out on website creation.