I like to use Photoshop to crop stuff and the 'save for web' feature, but I don't really make art with it. Cheezy filters & brushes in Photoshop don't much do it for me, but I LOVE to design my own (possibly cheezy) filters & brushes in Synthetik Software's Studio Artist Graphics Synthesizer 3.5. Among about a millionzillion other features, Studio Artist has a great "supersizer" interpolater resizing feature which actually works pretty nicely. If I had to use only one piece of software, Studio Artist would be it.
Back to Flash, many people say they don't like it because it 'makes everything look the same', I guess they mean the look of vector-drawn shapes and colors. I don't really like that so much myself, and I usually don't use straight Flash vector images in my Flash work (exceptions are narrative animations such as The Adventures of The Christian Pirate Pussies), lately I have been making trippy mandala-flower type animations in Flash and then exporting quicktime movies, taking those into Studio Artist, working with layers & alpha channels, then exporting sequenced PNG images out & back into Flash, which makes it so I can publish it at 40 - 50% quality with no real noticable image degradation, and the file-size for what you get in the end is a lot smaller than if you had just made it a quicktime movie, plus you get interactivity (I know some people don't care for it), audio (even interactive audio), random functions and "intelligent" behaviours of objects with actionscript coding. For some really cool coded-generative-animated type art, check out the book "Flash Math Creativity" published by Friends of Ed (friendsofed.com).
- Thor Johnson 3-31-2006 7:56 pm





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