Wednesday, July 10, 2024

Curtis Hsiang #6.



The shadow.

Curtis floats a frontside ollie in the Cancer Bowl. He was affiliated with the Deluxe crew and would pop up in ads or articles from time to time. Sadly, Curtis passed away in 2000.

Has anybody used the Affinity photo software? It's supposedly good and a way better value than Abode's subscription scam. I took a quick look at it over the weekend and it appeared about the same as Photoshop.

The photograph is Bryce Kanights.

Thrasher - January 1997 Volume 17 Number 1

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I’m switching to Affinity as well after 29 years and 10 of those teaching Adobe. There’s enough differences to have a bit of a learning curve but I think once enough of us get on the boat the community will come through and make it a viable alternative. (I talked to a guy that sells PSD layer effects and such that he’ll be porting over, so promising) Feels a little wandering in the wilderness-core for job stuff atm but Affinity just bumped their trials to 6 mo to cover that.

Anonymous said...

Curtis was a local legend and sooo damn good. I used to skate the cancer bowl (and a slew of others) after the Oakland Hills fire & whenever Curtis was there, it was time to sit down & just enjoy the show.
Rest in Power, you incredible ripper, you.

Anonymous said...

I jumped in and bought the full Affinity Suite because I really needed something not cloud based. So far it's been fine but the work flow is different enough that I've had to look things up a bunch. There's some quirks to learn for sure but it reminds of when I moved from whatever I was using pre-2004 to Adobe stuff so it shouldn't be a big deal. I was able to arrange all my toolbars and such to match my Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign set ups for muscle memory.

Having the ipad apps is great because I can actually do some quick edits when I'm not near my laptop but so far that's mostly done for cleaning up goofy stuff to text my friends.

also, to build off the other anonymous commenter, a bunch of swatches, effects, brushes, etc from PS will load fine

Justin said...

Thanks for the information. I think I'm going to give Affinity a test toast over the weekend.

I mostly do simple stuff in Photoshop, nothing overly fancy. It's adjusting the color levels for printing and cleaning up photos. Even for work, I don't really use most of the stuff you can do with Photoshop.

I'm curious about their other programs, too. I survived the switch from Quark to InDesign fine so I imagine I'll be able to get the hang of this, too.

I've been piecing the scans for here at work this week and it isn't fun. It feels like it takes way longer than it did at home. It's bad enough I waste time doing the updates at the office, but doing the photo editing feels like abusing my position.

Anonymous said...

it will work very well out of the box if you're just doing simple stuff. I haven't done a lot of photo editing yet outside of basic clean up (cropping, white balance, some adjustment layers, etc) and haven't done any of the color levels for printing yet. Mainly I'm slacking on some of the zine stuff I keep saying I'm working on which is why I haven't gotten to their InDesign competitor yet. overall, it's much much better than using other alternatives like Gimp. I also have Krita on my non work laptop and it's basically Photoshop geared towards digital painters which is an interesting tool to have around since I figured out how to use my ipad as a tablet (I haven't painted since I was a sophmore so I don't have much use for it). since Affinity is free for a few months I'd definitely check it out

Justin said...

That's cool to hear another story about Curtis. He's one of my favorites.

Pete said...

I got to skate with Curtis a couple of times in the late 90s. And by "skate with Curtis" I mean that I got to sit back and witness it. One time a friend and I were skating the San Pablo Coffin pool, just trying get to the tile and maybe scratch the coping, and Curtis and his friends showed up. Not only did they destroy the spot, but they were all very encouraging to us lesser-skilled kids to get in on the session. It is a great memory.

The sequence of deaths of Rubin, Matt Neely, and the Curtis was devastating to the East Bay scene at the time. Not to mention Phil Shao a few years earlier.

Curtis was also a master woodworker.

Justin said...

That's awesome.