You may have noted pRetend “pResident” Pedo Joe’s mangling of Thomas Jefferson’s famed “Tree of Liberty” quote in this post from last night. Or maybe you didn’t, I dunno. But either way, it inspired me to try my hand at making a meme out of it—which didn’t turn out as well as I would’ve hoped, thanks to my complete lack of any real GIMP-fu.
In fact, it was such a struggle and took so long to produce even the sub-par result below that I very nearly went into my daughter’s room to do the thing on the now-retired iMac, which still has a working copy of P-shop on it from my days working for the magazines (the new-to-me iMac won’t run any Adobe products at all thanks to some legacy 32-bit code tucked away in ‘em somewheres, a fact that still astounds me no end).
Understand: GIMP is good software, don’t get me wrong, and Lord knows the price (free) is right. But the learning curve for someone that’s been using P-Shop and Illy since, oh, about 1998 or so has turned out to be steep indeed. The nomenclature describing various tools and their functions is very different, and some things—like, say, the “Stroke” option, among others—just aren’t there at all; they don’t exist in GIMP, near as I’ve been able to determine. Others, such as “Drop Shadow,” “Bevel and Emboss,” “Find Edges,” and various text effects work in quite unexpected ways.
So y’all will just have to cut me some slack with this piss-poor meme, if you can find it in your hearts to do so. I’ve definitely come a long way from where I was when I first tried GIMP out, but I still have a long, long way to go with it yet. On the other hand, if I was the kind of guy who could pass up a chance this good to poke fun at senile Grampy Gropey just because my GIMP skills fall far, far short of the ideal, then hey, you probably wouldn’t be reading this damned blog in the first place, now wouldja?
A sleazy, two-bit con artist like Bribem really ought to keep the immortal Jefferson’s words out of his lying mouth anyhow. Funny, don’tchathink, how he left the word “tyrants” out, ain’t it?
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Dude! Superimposing Biden over Thomas Jefferson’s face? What were you thinking??
On the other hand, you did a better job photoshopping than I would have, so there’s that.
He should find a modern footies pajama boy with the cocoa and superimpose the Biteme clueless face on that.
Caption:
The Tree of Woke is Water That Floats My Marshmallows in Cocoa, Comrade.
Looks fine to me, but I’m no expert on graphic design and such. (As can be deduced from the images that I create. Some have a good concept but the execution rarely rises above meh.)
re Photoshop v The GIMP, I’ve been told that they’re pretty well equivalent in terms of capability but that they are so different in implementation — not only menu arrangement and terms for things but the fundamental concept of how images are built — that it’s almost impossible for one person to know and use them both well. I wouldn’t know; I can use the GIMP well enough to do what I need but have never used PS.
Oh, I got quite good with P-shop, having snagged my first bootleg copy of PS2, I believe it was, back in 1998, from a close friend of mine who worked for Ted Turner at CNN. The old iMac has the entire Creative Suite on it, a legit licensed copy my boss at A&I got me. Version 6, that is.
After working with it for many years for everything under the sun, including some spoof-up pics of friends and relatives I did for laughs, I’ve learned my around P-shop pretty danged thoroughly.
Illy, eh, not so much. I just don’t get the vector-art stuff, although I can at least functionally minimally in it, since it was an absolutely non-negotiable requirement for producing the camera-ready cover artwork for Skin Art, Tattoo Review, Outlaw Biker, and all the other mags put up by A&I until the owner killed off the whole danged company.
But yeah, even at the GIMPs website they have a section dedicated to explaining why they aren’t P-shop, and really have no interest in trying to be.
That said, I did some poking around last night and found a few tutorials explaining how to put a stroke around text (one of the tricks I’ve relied heavily on over the years), how to create a much more P-shop-looking drop shadow, how to manipulate layer masks properly, &c. I’ll get there with the GIMP, maybe, provided I live long enough.
Climate Change has made The Tree of Liberty Uprooted, Corn Pop.