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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

like yes i obviously know why this philosophy exists and why people say it so much, and yes, there is validity to it. but it only makes sense as a way to confront one specific situation: the neophyte artist who first put paint on canvas two weeks to a year ago, finds their work unsatisfying (insert entire ira glass "killer taste" quote here) and has come to people they consider Better Artists to ask "am I using the wrong brushes?"

yes, it's valid to reply to that person by saying that, you know, da vinky could still have painted the mona lisa with a house painting brush dipped in cowshit. that's true and poignant, but people love to throw this phrase around the same way forum nerds use "RTFM", as a shutdown to any and all questioning about technique and tools, and that's where it becomes insulting, dismissive, and often just wrong.

i cannot tell you how many times i've seen someone reply "RTFM" to a question that is not answered in the manual. and I cannot tell you how many times i've seen someone ask about technique or tools and get told "just try harder sweety :)" tools matter beyond an objective measure of quality.

yes, two paintbrushes may be "basically the same", two pencils might be "basically the same", and a skilled artist can notionally produce anything they like with dollar store versions of either one. but a brush with a particular texture lends itself to specific kinds of results, and even as an extremely inexperienced artist I can tell you that there is a massive difference between shading with a #2 Ticonderoga and doing the same thing with a Blackwing. they are "the same", but they aren't the same.

but that's not even the sort of thing i'm talking about. i'm talking about people insisting that DSLRs and smartphones can readily take the same pictures, or acting like "what guitar do i need to make speed metal" is somehow not a valid question (it's an ibanez RG, you want an ibanez RG.) or even worse, people suggesting that music or art software is all interchangeable.

christ. christ almighty

an artist COULD make the same picture in photoshop and krita, but if they aren't straining as hard as they can to consciously make that specific image, the software is going to heavily influence the result. a musician COULD make the same song in ableton or FL studio or reason, but if they are starting from scratch and working organically it is very likely that that won't happen. and that's only considering the physical structure of the various UIs and how they push the creator towards specific ways of making and using patterns and automation, not even considering the likelihood that they're using a completely different set of tone generator plugins. nobody would say that a trumpeter would still be a trumpeter if they bought a clarinet instead of a trumpet.

my videos wouldn't even look the way they do if I was still using goddamn Adobe Premiere, because while they're both notionally NLEs, the visual effects that are readily craftable in Resolve are very different than in Premiere. and like... canon cameras shoot redder than nikon. yeah, you're gonna swim against that current, you're going to recolor everything in lightroom anyway, but the fact that every one of your pictures is just warmer than the same picture shot on another brand of camera, and in ways that are not fully and automatically corrected by dragging the color temp slider, fucking matters. don't get me started on film stock. art is inseparable from the tools used to make it.

and i mean... all of this is also ignoring the simple fact that it's often nicer to use better tools, and if someone asks "what's the best tool," you could just... tell them? and let them waste their money on it and learn a valuable lesson in the process? answering a question with a brand and model is literally easier than replying with a scolding, every single time. it's free.


wikispittingace
@wikispittingace

Kinda repeating what I've said in a previous post, but YES. I have firsthand experience seeing people nearly give up being photographers because no matter how much they learned the tools, the tools sucked.

At least in my experience, I think some of the idea of "Artist > Tool" comes from disgracing those who jump directly to the "best tool" without prior experience. The type of people can buy a Sony a7Sii on a whim because the example photos looked good, but never had any experience or prior training and end up with subpar results. This also goes into the cognitive bias were people who have gained better tools from perseverance have the knowledge to get good results from lesser tools. Meaning they think someone with lesser experience should be capable of doing the same.


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

i struggled with taking satisfying photos on canons for ten years and then i bought a nikon and instantly i was getting better shots. i shot thousands and thousands and thousands of pictures in the time i was a still photog, but every single one that i remember, every one i'm proud of, was shot on my nikon. it doesn't matter why it happened, it doesn't matter if it was psychological in some way, the proof is in the fucking pudding.

i bought the nikon, i instantly liked my photos better, and I wanted to be a photographer more. i went places and did things i never would have attempted with the canon. the nikon improved my art, QED, and if someone asked me for advice on how to improve their photos, i would say "switch to nikon" and stand by it. if spending money is an option, i say why not give it a shot.

oh, and i should mention, the above is about DSLRs. and this matters particularly with photography, because a lot of the "it's just a tool :)" shit comes from the pre-digital era where the camera was literally just an empty space between the lens and film, and the lenses didn't affect color and tone at all. digital is not like that, digital changes how your pictures look on a fundamental level. switching from nikon to canon is like switching from ibanez to gibson, they are not the same thing.


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

this always annoyed me when i just wanted to like. find out what someone used to make something. no, i don't think that using it will make me better. i literally just want to try making a drawing with that visual quality and i don't know what the tool is called. god

i have been watching videos by youtube musicians and artists for ten years now and every single one of them not-infrequently starts a video with "Last week I did [x], and I got a lot of comments asking what software/instruments I used," and inevitably they make a big exasperated implication (or outright statement) that this kind of question is invalid

it's like. my dude. you make EDM and they want to know what fucking plugin you used. they aren't asking james hetfield what strings are on his guitar. even if you think it doesn't matter what strings are on his guitar, this is more like someone asking whether you used a guitar or a harpsichord

Half the reason I bounce off most audio software that isn't FL Studio is because FL has an extremely easy-to-use piano roll, and other music software doesn't. Ableton and Reaper both pissed me off to try. This shit matters lol

an artist COULD make the same picture in photoshop and krita, but if they aren't straining as hard as they can to consciously make that specific image, the software is going to heavily influence the result.

Its not even interchangeable with the same software. My software development and music development workflows are radically different if I am using my Windows workstation vs my Linux one, and I am using the exact same software on both of them to make them (VS code and LMMS, respectively). Its why I get annoyed by people recommending a full switch to Linux, it can be the exact same software and you are still radically changing your workflow. Likewise, I get equally annoyed every time I see somebody push open source software that isn't quite as fully cooked to be a drop in replacement for industry standard software. Not every OSS is modern Blender. And don't even get me started on trying to draw in Linux vs Windows or OSX.

no joke!
i had no idea how much i rely on things working a certain way in bash on a relatively non-personalized installation of ubuntu server running in a wsl container via microsoft terminal, until i tried to do a damn thing on OSX.

my "IDE" is two windows of firefox with 2327895489302 tabs, two terminal windows with another hojillion tabs, and notepad++ with a few dozen files open on the second monitor.

try to make that two windows of firefox, two windows of iterm2, and bbedit and... i still couldn't get anything done for a week.

WAIT now that i think of it...
SYSTEM KEYBINDINGS ARE A TOOL.
the amount of frustration i could've saved if someone had told me how badly i would hate life on a mac without pgup/pgdown/home/end working The Objectively Correct Way when a text-editing field has focus (i.e. not how they work on a mac by default) qualifies as "using the correct tools".

of course in that case, i didn't even know to ask.
all out of analogies now. thanks for your insights anyway!

It always bugged the shit out of me how weird people got about questions like this. It'd be insane to say it about carpentry, or sculpting, or so forth but with drawing everyone acts like it's normal to pretend that a square brush with no aliasing and a customized size modifier based on how fast the stroke is is completely identical to a basic circle brush and will let you do the same kind of linework and weighting. I can't even imagine how infuriating the photog equivalent is lmao

frankly, speaking from experience, it's just very annoying to have people disappointed or accuse you of hiding something else when they can't achieve any of the same results even when they know exactly what i used to make anything at all. i will still try to answer the best way i can but i can see why someone would stop altogether

yes!
because... oftentimes i can answer the "what tools?" question, but i can't answer the "how?" question that is basically inevitable.

and because my brain is garbage, i literally have to remind myself every time that they aren't trying to steal my few precious remaining spoons and it's okay to just answer the question that was asked, and not get terrified of the questions that may or may not follow behind it.

and i'm not a sham or a fraud for not being able to explain the "how did you learn to do X" part, and to say so.

i tried to write the documentation for doing a thing that i wish had existed when i started doing a thing. then nobody wanted to read it, but wanted to make me answer questions over & over again instead. that's why i have a hard time NOT replying with "RTFM", even though i am 100% on board with "it's not cool to just reply 'RTFM' to newbies for asking a simple, perfectly-reasonable question".
but then, i also try to make sure i update the manual if the thing isn't in the manual; which is apparently uncommon?

It would not surprise me at all if many people who would otherwise have been good at a particular trade gave up on it because they did in fact need a different tool, but all they got was this "advice," so they gave up on the entire endeavor because they thought they just weren't good enough to do it. And thus the myth of innate talent over practice continued unabated.

As a software engineer, the tool you use doesn't matter because they're all dogshit. There has been no useful innovation in tooling in decades. It's miserable, and in a unique world where one can create your own tools to make your tools better, it is tragic

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

I honestly always get so pissed off when people tell me I should simply abandon all the tools I've been using for over a decade now so I can switch to linux because it has Alternatives for Everything.

Even if some of the alternatives to Ableton (for example) might be good (I really don't think any of them are, and let's not even speak of commercial plugins which never have linux versions and certain industry standard software you gotta be compatible with when working with/for anyone else), it's just not that fucking simple! And it really doesn't help that most of the people touting this (and also Artist > Tools) literally haven't touched any of these tools before. They just know it's FOSS and that's all they need to feel superior when recommending them.

i have spent tens of hours forcing myself to use capture one (w/ a perpetual license) to get off of lightroom and i still occasionally reach for an organization tool or filter shortcut and something completely wonky happens before i realize. and i like to think i gave darkroom a fair shot but when it come to certain workflows i have like 0 tolerance for bugs, mostly in any visually creative type process.

making microelectronics? totally in the mindset for tools to go awry.

editing photos? something not doing what i expect can make me lose my entire concept if i forgot to narrate or note it down.

the camera thing is SO REAL. i felt like a shit photographer for sooooo long shooting on used canons i got on deep discount from my professional photographer cousin and when i got my first sony mirrorless it felt like it just clicked and all of a sudden pictures looked how i wanted.

it feels silly and i like never told anyone that because i don’t know what about the sonys made them so much more natural to use (looking back it was probably something to do with industry leading af speed and ois on sensor with oss on even cheaper lenses). i recommended them and the lenses i liked but like those features i mentioned weren’t everything cause even nice nikons just felt like the picture was off.

i highly highly recommend people rent a different camera for a day or two now but god it felt silly and like i was just being a sony fangirl. that changed when my bff got a fujifilm x-t1 (?) and he commented how it was the first camera that took pictures like he wanted. i think the same is true of knives (though to a lesser extent).

the best part is that the color science differences in cameras are usually things that apply to an entire manufacturer, going back decades, so if you're curious if your canon is killing your photos, it's an option to pick up a nikon d70 for like $35! we're far enough in to this technology that there are "old, but mature" versions of every product line. plus nikons just feel different than canons, and that feel was a huge thing for me, but it too applies to their older stuff also. it's easier now more than ever to step on the other side of the fence, people should be encouraged!

cameras are weird beasts bc sometimes seemingly irrelevant things can throw you off hard. I remember picking up a 5D for the first time after being a years long Nikon user and being absolutely disgusted by how cheap and flimsy the shutter sounded in comparison lol

i jumped from a 5dmkii to a d810 and my immediate reaction was "oh my god this thing is so much more Pro" because EVERYTHING about it felt better, all the grip surfaces were actually textured, the controls were snappier, the shutter sounded and FELT better. of course it's like 6 years newer

then i went and tried a d70 that predated the 5dmkii by five years and all those things still applied. canon just makes rickety shit and i'm sad and mad that i got tricked into using them for so long.

yeah for sure, i ended up dual wielding a gr and a fuji and every time i try something else it just feels kinda lackluster (although i do gotta say i haven't tried any nikon z stuff yet). definitely still miss my d7000 sometimes though, that thing felt like a brick (positive)