What software do you guys use for art for your games?

I realy want to make an awesome HUD. Unfortunately I know Lua but not Ruby so I'll be using the HUD on a different type of game making software.

I am willing to put a while into it but people create awesome ones, they can't just spend hours and hours on paint.net or something, is there some proper software for this?

There's no "ART FOR DUMMIES!" software to make everything go super easy for you, but different digital artists use all sorts of different programs as their mediums. I personally use GIMP for most of my graphical needs, while one of my friends uses Photoshop. I think Garygill uses something like Open Canvas, while some of my favorite artists use Paint Tool SAI. And then there's the good old pen and paper, which is done and scanned in and then digitally colored in any sort of image editor.

Draw on Paper. Ink on Photoshop. Colour on SAI.

This is because I have no tablet... And yes, people do slave for days on just one drawing. It takes a lot of time to get it exactly right.

I use Photoshop or SAI. Scanning and optimising is usually done with Photoshop, interface-y things stay in Photoshop, but everything art-wise is all in SAI. It just functions better with my tablet's pressure sensitivity.

I've spent three days on a drawing before. It seriously pays off to put time and effort into something.

...sadly I usually procrastinate, and so a picture that took weeks... might not actually have been worked on for that whole time.

A nice HUD shouldn't have to take long. I could probably plan and make a mock-up in Photoshop over a few hours, which I would simply splice up into separate bits to use in my Ruby coding. Any face graphics might add to the time, but the HUD itself might not. Unless it's got lots of decorative bits, like vines twisting around it. (That'd be kinda neat actually.)

I know it's not going to be super easy, and I will put effort into it, but my current software (Paint.net) just doesn't have the tools for the things I need. Sure, it's fine for glowing text and mmaking transparent PNG's, but I need stuff like shading contours ect.

Thanks, I'll take a look at the free trials of stuff and see if I can make something within the trial time.

Yes towards taylor I want like decorative stuff going around it, not too fancy, just to make it look nicer than a plain square with other squares inside it.

I use Photoshop for everything from pixel art to the user interface.

Downloaded GIMP, extracted the .tar using winzip but it's still .tar and nothing is opening it.

Any solutions?

I do believe that .tar is used primarily in Linux so you might have downloaded the wrong file Nvm, I forgot you can use it in Microshaft's Windows
If you extracted the .tar, then you don't need the .tar. Go to where you extracted it, and thats what you should run

I use Photoshop for everything from pixel art to the user interface.

same.

Paint all the way when it comes to spriting. Photoshop for everything else.

The only thing I don't like about paint and photoshop and all that, is that there's no auto-save feature...

I use paint for everything spritey, and I my comp tends to crash, making me lose progress rather often, due to my lack of common sense when it comes to saving that progress.

But still, I can't help it, I have been using paint for sprites for 9 years...

You should use a Combination of Paint,Photoshop,and Various Online and Downloadable Programs for Good Art related Needs.Or you could request things on other Forums just don't forget Credit.

Still can't get GIMP to work. it downloads so I use winzip to extract the .tar file to my desktop, but it just extracts a .tar file named soemthing like "gimp.tar[2]" with a peice of paper with the folded in corner as the icon. Any solutions?

Paint Tool SAI and Photoshop CS4

What kind of HUD do you want? I can help ya out with the scripting part

Valdred, I'm not making it in RM, I'm making it in other software which uses lua, and I'm realy advanced with lua so I can do the scripting, sorry =(.

Nothing to be sorry about. Well, use photoshop.

paint/photoshop...

MS Paint is for spriting, considering it's super easy to use and it has the Grid Feature. (Ctrl-G) But if you want to get really advanced use Fotoshawp.

I use a whole bunch of different programs. None too fancy but still..
MS Paint
Adobe Fireworks
Adobe Photoshop
Game Maker 8lite

I really only use GM8 for sprite resizing. I try and stick to MS Paint and Fireworks most because I'm most comfortable with them.

paint sucks because of the palette system.

I agree, the default pallete does suck but it is a very simple program to use imo.

Don't look for simplicity when searching for such a software. Search for quality, photoshop is the thing.

Only problem is I don't know much about Photoshop.. =/ So I tend to stay away from it. I only do a few things on it because that's all I know how to do

google "photoshop [insert your version here] tutorial [insert what you are trying to do here]"

for example: "Photoshop cs4 tutorial 3d text"