Ok, I'm suing you for $609 USD which is the retail cost of Adobe Photoshop 6/Image Ready 3 package...
I have to admit that Adobe Photoshop isn't for everyone who is an Image editing hobbiest. The price is just waaaay to high for home users. However, Adobe Photoshop is an application that cannot be avoided when you enter the field of Computer Graphics. The reason for this is that all companies use it! Another great thing about Adobe Image editing applications is that they all have very similar GUI and intergrates very smoothly with other Adobe products such as Go Live, Illustrator, InDesign, Page Maker, Streamline, etc... One of the other reasons is that there countless numbers of plug-ins available for Adobe Photoshop which further enhances its power...
Yes, of course you don't need an application such as Adobe Image Editing applications to make professional looking artwork. There are freebies such as GIMP for Linux as CMonster has mentioned above. You can also download GIMP for Windows.
Ok, I'm suing you for $609 USD which is the retail cost of Adobe Photoshop 6/Image Ready 3 package...
Ha..ha..ha..ha! Sometimes you are so funny NDC -I like that one
AMD Athlon MP with enhanced 3D-Now (has SSE) -I'm wondering how much improvement there will be in PS6.
BTW -I now have PS6 and just about every plugin imaginable ... but I can't install it something about having to legally license the software ... why do people keep giving me these copies ~sigh~
One more thing, thanks for linking to GIMP for the bebefit of our readers. The latest Windows version of GIMP is much improved. The only thing is that support for gif and a couple other formats should be licensed separately, though you can download the additional functionality at the GIMP home site.
Unless you are using the downloaded version of Mandrake it probably came with GIMP already included in the boxed set.
There are several ways to create an animated gif in GIMP, the one I used as an avatar is perhapst the easiest, simply by creating/opening an image in GIMP >right-click the image > choose "Script-Fu" > Animators >Spinning Globe
Once you have made the initial adjustments in size, set layer/frame speeds, and image mode (e.g. changed from RGB to indexed color) etc. you can save the image as a gif.
To check your animation in GIMP you choose >Filters >Animation >Animation Playback
Starting from scratch you would right click > choose > Layers >Layers, Channels&Paths, you can make duplicates of the background or layers -adding/removing changes, putting the frames in numbered sequence, changing their properties and so on, then the animation is saved -to save as gif you must convert to indexed mode, and don't forget to optimize the animation >Filters >Animation >Animation Optimize -this is where you are going to greatly reduce the size of the image in KB.
It's actually pretty easy, but you really should read a tutorial and do a practice excercise. A commercial book is a good idea -you could borrow mine.