People who’ve listened often enough to my rantings about digital art tools will know that I’ve been a Corel user for a couple of decades now —maybe even a few?—and that I’ve routinely only used Adobe PS (in one manifestation or another) when it’s unavoidable—meaning, when it has a tool the effects of which I can’t duplicate in some other way without spending a ton of time trying.
I’ve always loathed PS’s bloat and (seemingly unnecessary) complications. Now, though, with the most recent distasteful corporate shenanigans and the unwelcome encroachment of AI, I’ve been moving to find ways to get rid of it entirely. This has required taking a good hard look at what I actually use it for, and actively seeking out ways to do those things using other tools.
Here’s one I like which I’ve now worked with often enough to safely recommend it to other people.
One of the main things I was using PS for was the creation of bump maps and normal maps to overlay digital objects I was going to be rendering. Adobe has now mostly moved that function, along with most of its 3D tools, into other apps (for which they naturally expect you to spend even more money…). So I can no longer do this job in PS—possibly something to do with my video card (which PS insists is not set correctly, though it always was before…), possibly not.
So, my hand having been forced on this issue before Adobe started to get really loathesome, I went looking for a different tool that would do this job: and after some digging around, I found it. Let me introduce you to Crazybump.
This standalone program runs happily under Windows 10 and Windows 11, and there’s a public beta for the Mac. It has the same kind of straightforward ease of use that you get from, say, EZGif, and what it does, it does really well. Better, I’m pretty sure, than Adobe PS does/did.
It is seriously configurable in terms of the quality of normal maps (in particular) that it turns out. (Check out this screenshot: the sliders will indicate what I mean.)
It will cheerfully create all the major map types—normals, displacement, occlusion, specularity, and diffuse—with one click; and the created maps come out clearly and logically labeled in the filenames. You can also do extremely useful things like combine already existing normal maps—and if you’ve ever tried to square that particular circle by hand, you’ll welcome this feature like a long-lost friend.
Anyway, if you do work that calls for these filetypes, I highly recommend Crazybump. I’m running on an evaluation version right now, but intend to license it as soon as I’ve got a little cash to spare.
More than this, deponent saith not. 🙂