GIMP vs Painter vs Photoshop

[Jaxilon]

Welcome to the Guild.

I would say start with 300dpi. As far as size goes, take a look at how big it will be in inches by playing around with the scale settings. (I'm a Gimper so I'm not sure how you do that in PS). The reason for 300dpi is that it's a great resolution to print in and that is probably the toughest side when it comes to resolutions. You can always scale down to 50ppi if you want but if you start out low and try to scale up ugly things can happen. How many pixels in hight and width you choose to go with will probably have something to do with the power of your machine. You'll find out quick enough.

A note on why I use Gimp:
Free! fits nicely into my budget. I would probably use Photoshop if I had it, but I don't have the coin for that. Gimp seems to be about as good anyway. If you run into an issue there is a good community to lean on and you never know when someone like RobA will pop out another really cool script or addon. About the only thing I'm not too keen on with Gimp is it's way of doing text on a path. I find it easier to just export into Inkscape (also free) and use that to create a layer of text that I then bring back into Gimp.

[eyenuv]

I have photoshop elements, from what I saw, sometimes I miss the true photoshop.

And I'm curious, what kind of plug-in do you use for GIMP? And how do to you circumvent the lack of circle and rectangle tool?

And I had already download and install Inkscape. I fear a little to scatter myself through too much software, this is why I didn't list it.

[RobA]

And I'm curious, what kind of plug-in do you use for GIMP? And how do to you circumvent the lack of circle and rectangle tool?

To draw circles or rectangles use the selection tools (circular/rectangular) and either stroke the selection (to get an outlined shape) or fill the selection (to get a filled shape). Your results will be even better if turn the selection into a path then stroke that, but that is more advanced.

-Rob A>