Rob, I just emailed you something else of use…

Good news!

I’ve just checked Kirklees College website and a new Photoshop course is starting next week for £95 for 10 weeks. We kept missing it – hopefully enough people enrol so they actually run it……

Thanks for all the help so far, I’ve learnt more on this thread than in the last 6 months banging my head against a brick wall….

No you don’t – most designers I know use iMacs or even MacBook Pros. For high-end colour critical work using 100s of Photoshop layers then may-be you need 4k’s worth of kit, but not for run-of the mill design work.

depends how big the files are, i use a maxed out 15in retina MBP and i’m starting to get into kettle boiling/tea making waits for saves on 8-10gb files. i work in 16 bit with multiple image layers and now camera sensors are 36-80 megapixels the files are massive, plus i render even bigger backgrounds for what i have shot so images are ending up around 10’000×7000 pixels. if the OP’s wife is creating multi layered images/artwork in photoshop/illustrator for repro at large sizes a low end computer will struggle.

the peachpit press visual guides are good for photoshop, give you a good grounding in the basics for people who dont geek-out on I.T. projects and hacking pc’s i’m sure they do an illustrator book.

do you have a wacom tablet? personally i would have invested in one of those rather than an iPad for drawing, the pen is so much better to use especially with brushing strokes and the varying pressure sensitivity.

is there a website of her work? that’s the most useful way of getting out there, i have custom hand made suede and leather A3 bound portfolios that were several hundred pounds each and an iPad but hardly ever get to see people with them as its mostly word of mouth or seeing my work out there that brings in more work.

Good news!
I’ve just checked Kirklees College website and a new Photoshop course is starting next week for £95 for 10 weeks. We kept missing it – hopefully enough people enrol so they actually run it……

Fantastic. Illustrator is going to be more useful in the long run but PS menu’s, docks etc are similar. If you get your head around one the other will be much easier to pick up.

MrSmith has good advice on a Wacom tablet, they are ideal coming from traditional media. The better models are pressure sensitive etc but I have an old bamboo (which isn’t) you welcome to borrow as a start. It can then be replaced as funds allow.

If you have an iPad try out Autodesk sketchbook pro and get a decent stylus to go with it. I use a basic wacom Bamboo, (you can now get bluetooth ones that mimic pressure sensitivity but they are still not as good as using a proper tablet and stylus) and it’s very good for sketching and quick graphics. IMHO Sketchbook Pro is far more intuitive than a lot of other programmes out there as it’s for sketching/painting rather than purely photo manipulation or vector graphics which is a bit of a black art.

However, for the real deal you will need to go to a Wacom Tablet that is at least A4 sized ( preferably bigger), a half decent PC or Mac, a good graphics card, fast HD or SSD and a stack of RAM, the biggest hi res screen you can afford and sketchbook pro/any other decent sketching software plus photoshop and illustrator.

All expensive but a good investment if you are aiming to do any work professionally or at least half seriously.

Just a warning, a lot of the online tutorials for Photoshop and illustrator range from mediocre to useless due to the complexity of the software, face to face tutorials are much better providing you can get a good teacher. Oddly enough though some of the “for Dummies” books and “illustrator/photoshop in east steps ” are actually very good indeed if you are starting with the software.

And for a Mac capable of doing high end design work, with software, you’re looking at a minimum of 4k

Only if you’re doing work involving absolutely huge files, video in 4-8k, or 3D CAD rendering enormous files.
In the real world of regular Photoshop/Illustrator, a well-specced iMac with lots of RAM installed along with really good backup.
I used to retouch scanned photos from a Crosfield drum scanner for high quality repro, for the likes of Titleist golf equipment, on a Mac tower with 1Gb of RAM, twin 486 KHz processors, and a 500Mb HDD*. Backup was onto DAT tape with Retrospect software.
Anything that’s going for print won’t be much bigger than 40Mb for a single illustration at 300dpi, which is standard litho resolution.
That Mac was around £2500, with another £2000 for its 21″ CRT monitor, around 1996-7.*
A 27″ iMac with the top spec would be perfectly adequate; anything more would require a MacPro cylinder, and I just don’t see a requirement here for anything of that scale, we only use iMacs in our studio.
*As far as I can remember, it’s been nearly twenty years!

Aaaah, the G4 Digital Audio or Gigabit Ethernet, I suspect. My favorite Apple tower design ever.

You are doing it down a little, though, I think you’ll find it had 2x450MHz 7400 series G4’s or perhaps a single 466MHz 7410. MHz, not KHz 🙂

After updating flash player I got an adobe advert that I thought might be useful to the OP:

Bundle up
Photoshop and Lightroom together
£8.57/month

I know we’d come to the conclusion that buying the whole creative cloud suite of products was both overkill and prohibitively expensive but access to photoshop for under a tenner a month to get going doesn’t seem too bad.

Huddersfield media centre (by the market) used to have some kind of open access Mac design suite.

🙂 the idea that you need a Mac is ridiculous (never mind a £4k one)- I worked as an art director/flash designer/multimedia developer for several years on a £600 dell laptop plugged into a cheap 21″ monitor (until melted, but that was due to relocating to sunnier climes).

And as for software, if you’re learning then there are cheap/free ways to get hold of it

Yeah, but if you’re designing for screen only, then file sizes are small. Flash files are tiny! I produce hi resolution multi-layered photoshop renders for print. File sizes are effing huge!!! You wouldn’t be doing that on a PC laptop.

The OP is going to need to do high resolution illustrations for print. So a cheap PC. Laptop won’t cut it

My kids still use my old one of these, for web browsing….

😀

The OP is going to need to do high resolution illustrations for print. So a cheap PC. Laptop won’t cut it

If they were purely vector based illustrations maybe a laptop would be ok. But were talking scanning, manipulating, editing, illustrating, lots of layers. Big files needing to be print ready. Very different to a flash file. An example I have just done is 4 gig, it’s huge both in physical size and file size, this isn’t an abnormal file size for some projects. I expect the OPs files to be much smaller than that in the first instance but they can easily get bigger as they want more from the software.

A cheap 21″ monitor? Was this on old tube style monitor? Things are very different now.

It you’re looking at illustration software for the Mac check out Affinity Designer

I’ve recently moved over to Designer after using Illustator nearly 20 years. So far I’m very impressed. It does nearly everything I need ( missing a few typography features, but they’re supposed to be on the way). I believe Designer is a credible alternative to Adobe Illustrator at a sensible price.

On the iPad i use Pixelmator.

I produce hi resolution multi-layered photoshop renders for print. File sizes are effing huge!!! You wouldn’t be doing that on a PC laptop.

this^ i just supplied a well known high st retailer with some still life images for an email campaign that were 11300×7500 pixel dimensions and 257meg flattened tiff (layered files were 8-10gb) it may only be seen on a phone/laptop screen but a lot of clients need the option to print big if their needs change, it’s easy to make things smaller but uprezzing non vector images can only be taken so far.

Sorry – Can’t help it:

“
How do you titillate an Ocelot?
Oscillate it’s tits-a lot!
“

IGMC

As you were asking about the ipad, 53 is pretty cool. A couple of in app purchases and I bought ” the pencil” for 20 ish on Amazon.

It you’re looking at illustration software for the Mac check out Affinity Designer
I’ve recently moved over to Designer after using Illustator nearly 20 years. So far I’m very impressed. It does nearly everything I need ( missing a few typography features, but they’re supposed to be on the way). I believe Designer is a credible alternative to Adobe Illustrator at a sensible price.
On the iPad i use Pixelmator.

I am going to give this a try out if curiosity. What made you switch from illustrator?

What made you switch from illustrator?

I couldn’t justify the expense of Adobe’s Creative Cloud.

I tried the demo and I think it’s ok for someone wanting to get into design but not have the means for CC. I would still advise to use a free copy of CS2 though .

Update: The course my wife booked onto has been cancelled due to lack of take up. Arrrrgghh!!! Got to wait to at least April for another one. Also the woman who is in the business who helped her sell some work last year has moved away from Hudds so will be unable to help her any more.

1 step forwards and 2 steps back. 🙁

Why is it so damn difficult to penetrate this business????

It’s such a shame. Her work has other professionals really impressed but as my wife can’t use (and hasn’t got) the tech needed it seems like her skills are wasted. We can’t afford for her to go back to Uni but that seems like the only option.

You are doing it down a little, though, I think you’ll find it had 2x450MHz 7400 series G4’s or perhaps a single 466MHz 7410. MHz, not KHz

Sorry, you’re right, it’s a long time since I used one, and I didn’t think to check the specs. Lovely machine, always looked impressive sat on the desk with a 21″ monitor when clients came around, much better than the grubby, dusty beige boxes that used to accumulate dust kitties and scuff-marks inter the desk. Mine was a twin processor, the 2x450MHz version, with 1Gb RAM. 😀
There’s still one in use at work from my previous place, as an email server, but that one’s a single processor. Mine got chucked in a skip, along with most of the other machines, by the administrators when the company went tits-up.
Heartbreaking. 😐