Art Apps with a small footprint...??

[Another World]

I want to make some skins for my flash kits. Mostly right now my AK which has a skin editor. So what I am interested in is making images for that editor by taking from other sources and building something that I want to look at each time I boot up my NDS. I do not want to reinstall CS3 because of the huge amount of HDD space it takes. Also I suck at art, I'm a programmer by trade and not an artist or designer. I am looking for recommendations of art apps (free or pay) which would work well for me. Something that is small to install, has a small footprint (uses little ram), and will allow me the basic manipulation of images. I do not require all of the fancy options found in photoshop and I know i will never use them. I just want to be able to edit up an image, cut out the part i want, and drop that into a different image. Some filters might be useful as well.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
-Another World

 

[damole]

iunno, try gimp

 

[Psyfira]

Paint.net will do the job. It's free, but it does need the .net framework installed as well (which IIRC takes a while to install if you don't have it already). And I'm pretty sure a lot of the extra features are plugins, so if you want extra filters and so on you can add them later.

Otherwise, don't rule out looking into older versions of Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. They were designed to run on computers with fewer resources than what we have now, don't have some of those extra features you'll never use, and still had support for layers and the kind of copy-paste operations you're looking for. (The main program I use is PSP7, and that was made 8 years ago. Say what you want about CS3, but I love having a graphics program that loads in 3 seconds flat

).

 

[BiscuitBee]

Otherwise, don't rule out looking into older versions of Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. They were designed to run on computers with fewer resources than what we have now, don't have some of those extra features you'll never use, and still had support for layers and the kind of copy-paste operations you're looking for. (The main program I use is PSP7, and that was made 8 years ago. Say what you want about CS3, but I love having a graphics program that loads in 3 seconds flat

).

I fully support this message. I had been using PSP7 for the longest time then switched to PSP8 for some reason. I'd still use PSP8 at home but at work I'm using PSPX because that's what they bought for me.

One of the things that I enjoy about PSP7 and PSP8 (might work on other versions) is that they are (sort of) portable apps. Sure, when you run the first time it'll write some registry keys (thus not making it an actual portable app), but you don't have to reinstall it!

 

[Penguin]

An older version of Photoshop Elements? It is a really basic version of PhotoShop, just cut down to smaller size, heaps cheaper in price than the original PhotoShop. But I just use normal PhotoShop

 

[Myke]

there is also a portable version of gimp that installs on a USB stick. no registry entries or no footprint at all.

http://portableapps.com/apps/graphics_pictures/gimp_portable

installer is 16 megs, and once installed in the usb stick it takes between 20-65 megs depending on the options you choose during install