Another New Guy

[arsheesh]

Welcome to the Guild acrsome! It's great to here that you are thrilled with the results of working through some of the tutorials here. Might I recommend displaying some of your work here, whether in a work-in-progress stage or in the finished stage (in which case it should be displayed in the "Finished Maps" section). This is a good way to glean advice from more experienced guildies.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[acrosome]

Brother, I'm still very much in the "Learning How to Use Gradients, Masks, Etc. in GIMP" stage. I spent two days just getting a gradient seascape that looked decent. And then another attempt last night that utterly sucked- though admittedly part of that was the monstrously huge file I was working with (36" x 92" at 300ppi). And I'm convinced my the Cloud Noise in my GIMP works differently than everyone else's or something...

So, I have yet to produce anything that is:

1) Remotely finished. Most still have large transparent or black-and-white areas.
2) Capable of being viewed by anyone here without causing them physical pain.

I'm still very much getting my legs under me, by playing around in my limited free time. Heck, I did my first Gaussian blur last week, and didn't know that masks existed. Thrilled with results so far, yes, but still learning basics. I have a dysfunctional need to understand what is going on when I'm going through tutorials, rather than just following a list of instructions. This leads me off into the weeds a lot, and slows me down. Frankly, it would help if the tutorials including basic premises like "we will now create an image where the sea is black and the land is white" or "select the land and remove it from the image, leaving the land area transparent" or "we will now blur the image, and convert the black part into a blue sea gradient that will be lighter close to shore and darker out to sea" and then explain how to do that rather than just listing cookbook instructions as many do. If you miss one thing while following follow cookbook instructions and keep driving on you get a mess. Cutting/pasting/filling I grok- I just like to know what the goal is supposed to be. A truly exceptional tutorial author might include a brief discussion of how overlays work and such, with worked examples, but when it comes down to it I guess I can RTFM. Or search around on this site. But as I said, this slows me down.

Soon, though.

[BrandF]

Hey acrsome, sounds like we are in about the same place in getting started! I also just started out but I do have some background in Photoshop and like tools. Not professionally but from just dabbling and from when I had a side gig as a photographer. I'm looking forward to seeing what you have created!