I am ABOUT to THROW a computer through the WINDOW!!!!
So I'm trying to create a background image for a poster and I want white binary code on a dark blue background and then I can warp it or play with it, whatever. How hard can that be? And I feel slightly guilty that my employer bought me Photoshop for exactly this kind of thing and I still use the free program that came with my scanner, which doesn't handle text terribly well and would take forever to do what I want, so I open up Photoshop.
How in the name of all that is holy do you create a freakin' blue background?!!!! You can select shades of blue on the nice little square that says "BACKGROUND" until the cows come home, but the blank document stays obstinately white. You can go into the help file and search "color" and learn all about color management tools and web colors and channels, which I already know thankyouverymuch, but how to color a damn piece of white "paper" blue? Not so much. Finally it told me to use the Paint Brush Tool, which is only available in full screen mode, on alternate Tuesdays when it's raining - since the sun is shining, I'm out of luck.
So I cheated - went into my other program and made a big blue bitmap with three clicks - and then opened it with Photoshop. Of course, then I couldn't add layers because bitmaps suck, which I had forgotten, so I made a jpg the size I wanted and copied the blue onto that, except Photoshop had resized the bitmap without my permission by changing the freaking resolution... um, anyway, I got around that and added the first line of text and it was beautimous. Then I went to add some more text and it decided it needed to create another layer, whereupon I HOWLED at the screen, "No! Add this to the previous layer! You don't NEED another layer! It's just more of the same!" and I swear it LAUGHED at me. And it wouldn't give me a bounding box so I could just paste in the whole damn block of text from the Word document. (I had tried earlier to import the text directly by converting the Word document to a .pdf and opening the .pdf with Photoshop, but Photoshop treated it as a picture file, not as text - which is only to be expected - so I couldn't do it that way. So close and yet so far.)
Meanwhile, the automatic anti-virus screening, which is controlled from a central server and can't be shut off, began running, so not only was Photoshop being viciously uncooperative, it was doing it i-n S-L-O-W M-O-T-I-O-N. Aaaaarrrrgggghhhh. But hey, I have that one line of text; I can use my old stupid free program to duplicate it and move it around so that's really all I need.
I'm gonna have to go through the stupid tutorials or something because I need to be able to use this supposedly cool and awesome program without having to fight the urge to batter my poor computer into a sproingy pulp.
*sigh* So how is YOUR day going?