Sage
Staff Emeritus
- 12,533
- United States
- GTP_Sage
I primarily use Fireworks for graphics creation, and I think I’m pretty good with it. However, I feel that at some point in the future Adobe will take out its gun and give it a straight shot to the head, so it’s probably in my best interest to learn Photoshop and Illustrator.
I’ve been trying to play with them for a while, reading the manuals and the Help thingamob, etc. etc. But despite all of this, I somehow feel that I’m not understanding the basic paradigms that these two programs work under. I feel like when I look at a layer or a vector object, it’s lying to me – how come I can sometimes directly select a vector object, and sometimes I can’t? Why is creating a gradient so seemingly difficult? What basic principles am I misunderstanding?
Just as a meaningless example, let’s take this:
I created that in under 5 minutes in Fireworks (I probably could’ve done it in under two if I weren’t distracted by Penn Radio). I created a circle, gave it a colored radial gradient, added an inner shadow to give it some depth, created the little reflection thingie with two circles and a masked translucent gradient, then made a new circle and squished it a bit to make the floor shadow.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out how to do any of that efficiently in Illustrator or Photoshop – I can actually do each individual step, but it takes way too long, way too many steps, and way too much trial-and-error.
What am I missing? I realize it’s a bit difficult to know without actually watching me interact with the UI, but hopefully somebody here has struggled with the same issues and knows what I’m on about.
[edit]: Hah, I just realized that the graphic looks like my “Ban” button, except the reflection isn’t wavy.
I’ve been trying to play with them for a while, reading the manuals and the Help thingamob, etc. etc. But despite all of this, I somehow feel that I’m not understanding the basic paradigms that these two programs work under. I feel like when I look at a layer or a vector object, it’s lying to me – how come I can sometimes directly select a vector object, and sometimes I can’t? Why is creating a gradient so seemingly difficult? What basic principles am I misunderstanding?
Just as a meaningless example, let’s take this:
I created that in under 5 minutes in Fireworks (I probably could’ve done it in under two if I weren’t distracted by Penn Radio). I created a circle, gave it a colored radial gradient, added an inner shadow to give it some depth, created the little reflection thingie with two circles and a masked translucent gradient, then made a new circle and squished it a bit to make the floor shadow.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out how to do any of that efficiently in Illustrator or Photoshop – I can actually do each individual step, but it takes way too long, way too many steps, and way too much trial-and-error.
What am I missing? I realize it’s a bit difficult to know without actually watching me interact with the UI, but hopefully somebody here has struggled with the same issues and knows what I’m on about.
[edit]: Hah, I just realized that the graphic looks like my “Ban” button, except the reflection isn’t wavy.
