Well, the phrase "whatever works best" admits the possibility of using Photoshop in the situations where it works best. I am not against doing such a thing. At least not in the privacy of your own home or place of employment.

However, I was writing in the context of command-line tools and if this search result is accurate and up to date wrt to Photoshop's capabilities, it doesn't have much in the way of command-line functionality.

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1445540

I'm pretty sure I wasn't implying that you should do all your image manipulation operations from the command line using (Graphics|Image)Magick tools. If somebody thought I was saying that, let me clarify that I only suggest using these tools in addition to what software you already are using.

:b 

http://andreaspapathanasis.blogspot.ca/2015/05/the-tech-arms-race-in-aaa-and-why-im.html 

tl:dr 

May I suggest Krita, free and powerful.

https://spawnhost.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/aluminum_fence_4_300.jpg

Since Krita has bicubic filtering that looks roughly as good as Photoshop's but Krita is free while PS is $$$$$, it might be worth a look. It is also very good for digital painting.

And since Krita has this feature, it'll eventually make its way into Gimp. Open source graphics apps are collaborating quite a lot currently. 

I mean I have PS through work - I couldn't convince the director to cut back on that if I tried, but that's still great news because I can only install CS on two hosts (!) and it would be pretty handy to be able to get good downsampling on GIMP. :D 

A way to do it with GIMP is to apply Gaussian Blur before scaling down, for example when scaling down by 8 apply Gaussian Blur 8 beforehand and so on.

The result looks identical to the Krita one, good enough I would say.

I guess Photoshop does this automatically. 

I just tested the theory. I scaled the image down by a factor of exactly 7.68, I could only gaussian blur to an accuracy of 7.7, I do get slight banding on some of the fence uprights, but its way less noticeable than the vanilla GIMP versions. It makes sense to me why this works, but it's not perfect. 

Yeah, with free software it's always a race to try and implement the functionality of commercial packages.

It's pretty amazing that stuff like GIMP or the newer OSS graphics apps such as Krita, mypaint, or Inkscape even exist. But of course they could always be better.

I've heard the next version of GIMP will finally support 16 bit images! 

has been a free download for awhile now.

http://www.redmondpie.com/download-adobe-photoshop-cs2-for-free-legally-while-you-still-can/

I like gimp and open source stuff like blender but it's not exactly an industry standard 

It's only legal to use if you own a license for it. It is not free. If you don't care about that you could just go ahead and pirate a modern version.

If you have to care about an industry standard it doea not sound like a private hobby and you probably should buy it? 

 

Blender is very, very close to becoming an industry standard, and Krita has become very popular. Take a look at the Blender thread on polycount. 

having spent a decade using max and maya, I switched to blender a year ago just to have a looksie, and ended up sticking with it.

It does everything I need and its free. 

"Blender is very, very close to becoming an industry standard"

That's an interesting statement. In which industries, specifically? I honestly don't see a lot of Blender adoption in the game studios I know. Is it among indies? That would make sense with it being free. 

@spirit I subscribe to creative cloud, however I was able to download cs2 even before I started paying from adobe's site.
They provide keys and everything, take a look, unless it's changed recently.

Really love blender, once you get the hang of the interface it's so quick to model in. I use it @ work in conjunction with max. I know a few people who really like blender that work for studios as well, they tend to be modelers that can code since it's quite easy to write scripts in python for it. 

Nope, but you can file the whole thing under "journalism"... http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2013/01/update-on-cs2-and-acrobat-7-activation-servers.html 

it's also right at the top of the download page:
Adobe strongly advises against running unsupported and outdated software. Only customers who legitimately purchased CS2 or Acrobat 7 and need to maintain their current use of these products may use the serial numbers provided during the download.

I grabbed it anyway, but I don't know if I'll use it since I'm getting pretty comfortable with GIMP these days anyway. 

I was misinformed!
Didn't read the giant fine print.

How's gimp nowadays? I was running it on ubuntu a few years ago, there was some issues with tablets so I never really picked it up. 

it works fine on windows... but I have to redo like 3/4 of the shortcuts to be PS-like to be halfway efficient. :P 

Because I feel like this is a place where I know people, I'll just leave this here .. today is my last day at Epic Games. It feels like the right time to leave and after 15 years I'm definitely itchy to try something new.

I'm not sure what I want to do next, but I'm going to poke around and figure something out. :)

Probably won't be much time for Quake mapping until I get life settled again but ... onwards and upwards! 

 

Best of luck!

And the Shamblers will still be waiting for you here when you get back. 

:) 

Handcuffs, lube, and cactus in hand....

GL, HF, etc.