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Programs for Costuming
Oct. 17th, 2010 03:54 pmLast post got me thinking about some of the programs I use for costuming or posting costume stuffs. Here's a catalog of what I use, feel free to comment your own yays or nays!
Irfanview - free
Irfanview is a small photo editing utility. It's a great, great program for little things like flipping, resizing, cropping, and color correction/messing up colors to bring out details in stock pictures. It's also small, like I said, so it loads quickly and works fast, unlike the next monster. I use this most often to crop and resize pics for documentation and things like LJ icons.
Adobe Photoshop - $700
For all the stuff that Irfanview can't do. For me that's adding text to images and masking off costume pictures. Here's an example of the later: because the original image was so busy and it was so hard to see all the separate layers and follow what might be attached, I color-filled each separate layer so that I could tell better what I was thinking for layers/pieces on the skirt.
Comic Life - $25-$30, can come installed on Macs
This is what I use for my documentation, like my Dracula Dress and my Chevalier D'Eon. I like this program because it's very easy to use. Pulling up the program is fast, and once you start a new project it's pretty easy to get started, either by using templates (although most are for comic book-looking things, so I don't ever use them) or just by using your brain a bit and looking at stuff. Essentially you click-and-drag a text-box here, or a picture there, you can put a picture in a box and then resize the picture or resize the box around the picture to "crop" the area showing (good if your text is a little big and you need to shave some neutral space from a picture to make it fit, you can do it in the program and you don't need to open another program then reload the pic). Fonts are limited, though, and text choices even more limited.
Amazon - charge depends on choice
I use Amazon exclusively to get .mp3s for costume presentations. I'm past the point where I can pretend that stealing music is a good thing, but on Amazon I can get an .mp3 (iTunes has their own file system that is hard to break for editing) for a dollar or two a song, and additionally I can buy a single song without a whole cd.
Audacity - free
This is what I use to edit the .mp3s from Amazon. I wouldn't exactly call the software intuitive, it took me a bit to get used to using it, but it works really well. It's easy to cut music down, there are simple effects to transition if you need, and I love how it has a visual representation of the sound. Since I'm a very visual person following the beats/peaks in the visual makes it easier to match the rhythm in cuts and seamlessly blend things than it would if I had to do it by ear alone. Here's something I did with it: Original, and Early Edit. Also, a recent thing I learned: after you make any audio editing the last thing you should do before changing file format is "equalize". It makes the sound techs happy.
Irfanview - free
Irfanview is a small photo editing utility. It's a great, great program for little things like flipping, resizing, cropping, and color correction/messing up colors to bring out details in stock pictures. It's also small, like I said, so it loads quickly and works fast, unlike the next monster. I use this most often to crop and resize pics for documentation and things like LJ icons.
Adobe Photoshop - $700
For all the stuff that Irfanview can't do. For me that's adding text to images and masking off costume pictures. Here's an example of the later: because the original image was so busy and it was so hard to see all the separate layers and follow what might be attached, I color-filled each separate layer so that I could tell better what I was thinking for layers/pieces on the skirt.
Comic Life - $25-$30, can come installed on Macs
This is what I use for my documentation, like my Dracula Dress and my Chevalier D'Eon. I like this program because it's very easy to use. Pulling up the program is fast, and once you start a new project it's pretty easy to get started, either by using templates (although most are for comic book-looking things, so I don't ever use them) or just by using your brain a bit and looking at stuff. Essentially you click-and-drag a text-box here, or a picture there, you can put a picture in a box and then resize the picture or resize the box around the picture to "crop" the area showing (good if your text is a little big and you need to shave some neutral space from a picture to make it fit, you can do it in the program and you don't need to open another program then reload the pic). Fonts are limited, though, and text choices even more limited.
Amazon - charge depends on choice
I use Amazon exclusively to get .mp3s for costume presentations. I'm past the point where I can pretend that stealing music is a good thing, but on Amazon I can get an .mp3 (iTunes has their own file system that is hard to break for editing) for a dollar or two a song, and additionally I can buy a single song without a whole cd.
Audacity - free
This is what I use to edit the .mp3s from Amazon. I wouldn't exactly call the software intuitive, it took me a bit to get used to using it, but it works really well. It's easy to cut music down, there are simple effects to transition if you need, and I love how it has a visual representation of the sound. Since I'm a very visual person following the beats/peaks in the visual makes it easier to match the rhythm in cuts and seamlessly blend things than it would if I had to do it by ear alone. Here's something I did with it: Original, and Early Edit. Also, a recent thing I learned: after you make any audio editing the last thing you should do before changing file format is "equalize". It makes the sound techs happy.
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