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Two and a half weeks in
New Computer was delivered on the 12th, and by this week I’ve finally got enough transferred/installed to do most of my work on it.
Old Computer never actually got a real name (Windows called it ERIN-PC by default, 9 years later and I didn’t change it), so it seemed like a good opportunity to name both of them together.
…the bigger, sturdier, older solid-black computer is Gideon, and the skinnier, more-powerful, younger solid-black computer that’s been busily absorbing Gideon’s settings/data is Harrow.
(Apparently not enough people in my internet circles have read the Gideon the Ninth series, but (a) you should do that, it’s great and (b) this is very funny on multiple levels that you will appreciate after reading.)
Had a brief scare with Paint Shop Pro not functioning — it installed, and seemed like it was running, but once I started trying to work on comics it became clear that a bunch of the tools weren’t working. Like…the brush. And the eraser. And the text creator.
Did a general uninstall/reinstall. It didn’t help. Did an uninstall, then a Google-assisted hunt through the registry to find all the places where Jasc would’ve put keys and delete them, then a reboot, then a reinstall. That worked!
Comparative screenshots:
(Gideon’s screen is physically larger, but Harrow’s is more pixel-dense, so it comes out to the same width and a tiny bit taller.)
There’s some minor display differences — e.g. the narrower bezels around the frame of each open file — and function differences — you can see the disappearing “expand/contract” button next to the “close” button on the Layer and Tool Options menus. (Haven’t actually used that for years, so no big loss…) And there are changes in “this window/option won’t be active unless the mouse cursor is Right Here” that are gonna take some getting used to.
But it works! I can brush and/or erase things again! The only remaining hangup was that it wasn’t registering “drag a file into the program window means open it” — and that comes back when it’s run on compatibility settings for Windows 7.
Really wish I could find the details of the specific coders who put together this release of Paint Shop Pro. You folks wrote a program so clear and solid that a machine from 20 years in the future, multiple generations of operating systems later, still understands how to pick it up and get it running. That deserves a shoutout by name.
Other little updates:
- Having to switch every device between 1 USB port is annoying as expected — definitely gonna get some new converters — but in the meantime, it’s manageable
- The power cord is USB-C, which means it can plug into any of the 4 existing ports; turns out it was easy to make my Executive Assistant lose interest, I just had to move it away from His Side
- Forgot that World Community Grid doesn’t install with default limits; the poor fans on this machine went nuts a few times before I tracked down the problem and told it that no, it is not allowed to use 99% of the CPU when it has the chance
- Used to be stuck in a 7-day trial window to give different filetypes more aesthetically-pleasing icons, but this time I did it with the freeware FileTypesManager
- I have switched to making art over here, and ohhhh yeah, Harrow is noticeably faster
- Photoshop opens in seconds, instead of minutes. Batch actions now get whipped through in the blink of an eye. PSP only took a couple seconds to save a file anyway, but now it’s half a second.
- I am so looking forward to the most resource-intensive task in Harrow’s immediate future: Exporting A 192-Page PDF From InDesign
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But yeah, I'm gonna keep running pre-buyout PSP for as long as it still functions! (...alongside Photoshop and Clip, for the things they do better.) A little googling found a small-but-determined diaspora of people with the same plan.
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- Opens real fast. Not as much of a bonus since I got CSP, but even that is a little slower, and obviously Photoshop has to load a million settings and assets every time it runs.
- Lets you paste on the layer you're working on. I do a bunch of minor art corrections via "copy this bit of the image over to that other part," and if they generated a new layer every time, I'd be constantly stopping to merge them all. Same with adding text (which I write in another program, so it can be insta-copied as text into a transcript after it's been copied as a bitmap into the comic).
- Lets you paste a selection with a one color erased to transparency. Lots of white backgrounds I get to auto-erase.
- Color/pattern settings don't have to be universal, they can be different for every tool. So toggling between "drawing with 1-2 lineart colors" and "flood-filling with 1-2 unrelated flat colors" is one click, all those colors are on deck without having to keep referring back to a palette, and there's no "losing track of where you are and drawing with a flood-fill color" because they're paired with the tool.
- Keyboard-shortcut instant toggle between layers. Based on their order, with the most-background layer being #1, so it doesn't depend on having certain layer names. Working on one layer when you notice something needs fixing on another -- toggle over, fix it, toggle back, without your eyes/cursor/attention being pulled away to go through the layer window.
- Switching between "view all layers" and "view current layer", that's not quite an instant keyboard shortcut...you also have to click one menu first.
- This isn't about PSP working better, Clip and Photoshop both have much more powerful vector tools...but PSP draws 99.9% of the lines I need that for, and it's the one I already know, which saves me the effort of getting used to a whole new "click these points and drag those handles to generate this curve you have in mind" system.
- I could make a whole list of features where Clip and/or Photoshop have a fancier version, which is useful when I need to get fancy, but PSP can do whatever I need for the average daily strip. Clip has all these sophisticated content-aware fills -- you don't need any of them to handle black-and-white lineart. Photoshop will let you do all this precise warping and twisting of vector text -- great, but you aren't going to put a Fisheye Perspective Skew on the "click" of a door opening, you're probably just gonna tilt it to the side a bit. Both of them have amazing brushes; my basic cel-shading is all covered by "freehand selection" and "multiply fill."
...and that actually got longer than I thought, huh!
I can see Clip adding/compensating for some of these in the future, but they weren't there last time I checked. Top of my wishlist is that it'll get an "export a plaintext transcript generated from all your text layers" function -- they're so valuable for comics accessibility! -- but no luck yet.
And, well, I have a pre-subscription legacy version of Photoshop, because I don't want to be sending Adobe money every month for the rest of my life. So what it does right now is what I get.
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And I hear ya RE: Adobe. I've never used Photoshop, because I've just never really had the opportunity, and I sure as hell won't now!
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Gods, the USB thing sounds super annoying. Maybe if you get one of those USB hubs to attach to it? That way you wouldn't need converters for all the other things, and it'd give you some more ports besides. I'm glad you ended up not having too many issues with running your programs though!
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The annoying thing about the converter hubs is, now instead of a single cord plugging neatly into the side of the machine, you get a cord plugged into an unwieldy lump of plastic that hangs off the side of the machine. (I'll be getting one anyway, I'm just annoyed about it...)
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I feel that. Doesn't seem like there's one good solution, unfortunately: it's the same thing as the DVD drive. Either adapters or clumsy add-ons you have to worry about carrying and/or breaking separately from the computer. It's always an extra risk since they're plugged into the motherboard, too, so a hard bump into it might ruin the laptop ports as well :/ I really wish they allowed us to customize the ports we want, but alas, we don't live on such a time yet.
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At this rate, I think we'll hit "nothing has a cord anymore at all, everything uses a wireless Bluetooth connection" before we get our choice of ports.
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