1 Oh, come on. You think that's bad, try "learning while doing" Flash! (Someday I got to go back and wade through the tutorials. I'm sure I'll learn all kinds of useful things.)

2

Oh, I've read your epic struggles attempting to wrangle some functionality out of Flash. It allows me to marvel at people who can put together stuff like this.

I wish I'd been blogging back when I was teaching myself how to use the editor for the Unreal franchise of games. It would have made for an interesting case-study of a decent into madness.

3 I have a lot of the same problems with Photoshop. I can use it to do most of what I need to do, no sweat; that's because most of what I need to do is "paste a layer over another layer and line them up".

But some things are just impenetrable in the interface. Today, for example - I was working on Lucky Star, a caption where Akira's holding a sign upside-down humorously. Naturally, the client has requested that this sign be subtitled upside-down, which is fine as that's how I was doing it anyway... But for whatever reason, I -cannot- find the function that says "take the selection and flip it upside down". I ended up just rotating the entire canvas instead and dragging the sign to where I wanted it...

I get the feeling that if I knew enough to write some basic scripts in Photoshop, I could save myself a significant amount of carpal wear (that volume of Lucky Star meant, literally, hundreds of subtitles copy/pasted over each other). But I have no idea where to start...

4

You maybe be aggravated to know that Microsoft Paint does exactly what you're asking for.

1) Select Region (if no region specified, it does the whole image)

2) Image>Flip/Rotate - select your mutation of choice

3)Profit

 

5

I use MS Paint and MS Digital Editor 2006 for most basic things... most of my screenshots are resized, cropped, and color-fiddled using Digital Editor, Paint is used if I have to scribble on the pic.

I use them because I know how to use them.  P'Shop is a great program, very useful for a lot of things, but there are times where having your head run over by a main battle tank would hurt less.

But if you really want to learn the meaning of 'pain', try to teach yourself how to use Adobe AfterEffects.  I've been trying to do just that for the past six months or so, and I've barely gotten to the point where I can get the main editing screen set up the way I like it.

That might be one reason why I haven't gotten much done, editing-wise recently.

6 Photoshop: Edit -> Transform -> Rotate 180

-j

7 No, I knew Paint had that capability. But the reason I'm using Photoshop is that the files have to be maintained to a very certain image specification or they won't work on the DVDs; part of that is "absolutely no alpha layer". Photoshop won't put one in there if it doesn't start with one; practically everything else will... ;_;

J, I'll give that a whirl when I get home, see how it works.