Art Banner Program

[Legato284]

I need help in finding a good Banner Program but I dont know what would be a prefered kind to use to make banner's and avatar's? If you have any suggestions please reply to this thread.

~Legato284

[OtakuSennen]

[color=navy]There are a lot of programs out there, I suppose (I even found one designed specifically for colorizing manga and anime-based fanart one time), but most people tend to use either Paint Shop Pro or PhotoShop.

When we got our scanner, I invested in a copy of Paint Shop Pro 8. It is certainly a wonderful program, and it was very user friendly. The only experience I had with digital editing on the computer before I got PSP8 was MSPaint, and it didn't take me long to learn the basics of this much better program. It has a lot of nice textures for the fill option that, when properly used, make a good substitute for screentones if you are into making manga. Plus, it's only 99 dollars at Best Buy, and you get a $20 rebate via mail. It's worth the investment, considering that it's almost equivalent to PhotoShop, which is a $300 program, if I remember correctly.

PhotoShop is a lot more professional, however, but it isn't as user-friendly. I remember first using it and being so frustrated without the "Paste As A New Image" option that PSP had. I think I am getting the hang of it, though. I really haven't done too much in PhotoShop yet, but I think I have the basics. If you just toy around with it, you eventually start to understand stuff. The text features on PS are much better than PSP, though. I'm not sure why, but Paint Shop Pro really is not good with text. Anything under 24-point font looks awful and near impossible to read, but PhotoShop doesn't have that problem as much.

Those are the two programs that most people use, but there are a lot of others out there. I think Baron Samedi uses something that I've never really heard of other than from him, but he works wonders with it. I say that you should just start with Paint Shop Pro 8 once you have the money, and eventually work your way up.[/color]

[Semjaza]

Just get Gimp. It's free and pretty much just as poweful as Photoshop or PSP... that and you don't have to do what amounts to stealing to get it heh.

If you get used to Photoshop, doing things like pasting something into a new file take nothing more than a few keyboard shortcuts. I probably do half of my work in Photoshop on the actual keyboard lol.

[Psychotik]

Theres loads of programs out there, the most commonly used are photoshop paint shop pro and fireworks, although these are quiet costly ecspeciallyif all you want to make with them is the old banner once in a while. Try the graphics section of downloads.com theres usually loads of free progs you can get there. Admittedly most of them aren't that good, but you never know you may find one you like.