Tag Sales, Adobe CS5, and Why Do These Come In Threes?

Lots of random bullshit to talk about this week. I'll start with the computer stuff: CS5 has been released, and I've been toying around with it quite a bit. I'm almost certainly going to get the entire design package, which will set me back a pretty penny, but I think it'll be a good investment.

However, it's not all rainbows and kittens and happy sunshine stuff. There are some issues, and things I'm not pleased with, but the overall result is positive.

Photoshop CS5 is the big dog out of the deisgn package I'll be using most of all, followed by Indesign and Flash, and hopefully Dreamweaver to make site updates smoother and less stressful. Pretty much everything on this site was built using Drupal and edited the hard way with notepad and tearful prayers to the pantheon of web computer gods known as Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE5, IE6, IE7, and IE8 that they'll all take a liking to my work and see fit to display it properly. 99.99% of the time one of these fickle asshole deities decides he's on the rag and scorns my pathetic mortal attempts to please all of them at once, and I curl up in the fetal position and wish for a quick death.

So, anyway, I'm hoping the fact that Dreamweaver integrates with common CMS's (like Drupal) will help.

Anyway, back on Photoshop CS5: It's good. It's got really slick features, severalof which I'll probably never use. Content aware fill is some sort of fickle black magic that looks to be awesome for photographers, but rarely useful for us digital painter types.

Puppet Warp is cool and I'm fairly certain that there will be good uses for it, I'm just not quite certain what yet... at least as far as my work goes.

The Blender Brush is my new Photoshop crush, as it were. I like it, although I recognize that it's got some peculiar behaviors and limitations. Even so, after playing around with it quite a bit (and using it on the girl in the pic above) I think it might be perfect for my personal workflow style. It behaves oddly with multiple layers, but I think as long as you're aware of it it'll be good. The old school blur and smudge tools were about as useless as tits on a bull, as the saying goes, so this is a good improvement. People coming from a Painter 11 or Paint Tool SAI background will probably dislike it (and my internet research seems to bear that out), but for those of us who got started in Photoshop it's a good addition to add to the arsenal.

The last bit is the Bristle Brushes. This is where my disappointment mainly lies. The Bristle Brushes map each brush bristle as a 3D object that dynamically moves and shifts based on pressure, tilt, rotation, and interaction with adjacent bristles. It's the best 'real' bristle simulator available; light-years ahead of other similar products from Painter. However, they're obscene CPU hogs. They lag terribly, even on a current higher end system like my desktop (Phenom 2 black Quad core). The only solution so far is to make the bristles short and stubby and work close so that you don't overtax the CPU and GPU on the redraw. I actually made the girl's hair above using one of the new bristle brushes. I like them, but I feel that they can't possibly be that processor intensive. I'm hoping Adobe will patch them or do something to tame these hungry bastards, because they're quite fun to use.

Ok, enough tech talk stuff. My next topic is my garage: It's full of shit. Not literal shit, but donations for a charity tag sale that's going to be held on my front lawn. See, I work with local animal rescue groups, and our biggest fund raiser is tag sales that we run a couple times a year. Lots of people donate stuff left over from their own tag sales or that's just laying around in their garage and get a nice tax write off.

The problem is that some people have an over inflated sense of how much their cast off junk is worth. This is tough, because you don't really want to alienate people making a charitable donation of any type.

But, god damn, some of this stuff is incredible. I mean, really, I can't sell a dirty crushed plastic child's Easter egg basket. Also, no one wants your old skis. I don't care that you paid hundreds of dollars for them so you could tear up the slopes back in the day; they damn things do not sell. Also, keep your old printers. I've got boxes of printers that I'm going to wind up dumping off at an electronics recycling center. Seriously now.

I also don't need a broken golf putter, dismembered GI Joes, or a lone baby shoe with no match. Also, no one really wants a hundred pounds of worn out Spongebob Squarepants memorabilia or Teddy Ruxpin tapes.

And if you do feel compelled to drop this stuff off, please do a rough inventory ahead of time, rather than opening every box at our place and photographing and cataloging it while we wait around for your distracting sense of nostalgia to wear off.

Also, no, you can't have my riding mower or snow blower when tag sale time comes. They ain't for sale, which is why they're hidden inside the garage behind a closed door.

Anyway, I notice that I tend to do these entries with three topics merged together. I have no idea why, I just sort of like combining three ridiculous and generally unrelated topics together. So there, take that.