I'm pretty sure there's many mainly-brush plugins to be found on those sites such as pixel2life.com, but it's been 2 years since I really cared about it.

internet or no internet, real people have to spend a lot of time creating a program or making a good font.

the reason free fonts are shittier than paid fonts is because someone has to feed that person the education & trainining it takes to make a quality product. you can probably find a way to steal them, but there was still a cost attached to creating them.

yeh....but..free stuff

yeah i use free fonts mostly, but if i have to do something commercial where free fonts can't provide what i need, i'm happy to pay for a good font. i would not pay if i only didi this to kill time obviously. but paying... well, pays.

yes, sir
ill post some tutorials on it when i get back home

True.
No matter how much you try to adjust them, some free fonts can't be kerned very well, and sometimes the whole alphabet looks slick, except for certain letters (usually m's & w's). Designing a perfect font is difficult.
It takes a lot of time to get the proportions, style and spacing right.

I have CS3, and I find the filters are pretty much all I need.

It's not a stupid idea at all. I've done that before, when I wanted to get a certain look. You can make a layer of it, but another option is to select a specific area, in this case a letter, and create a stamp. It depends on what you're more comfortable with.


Agreed. There are about 100 standard filters that come with photoshop, and they can be combined to create endless new ones. That's one of the many reasons why PS is such a powerful program.

On the other hand, if you want to create a chrome look (example), you'll have to take certain steps to get the right effect. That can be time consuming if you have a deadline, and it's easier to just download a second party filter that applies it with one click.

Hmm yeah that's actually a good point.