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The Artist's Guide to the Gimp (AGG) is a good start. However, it is a step below what I was looking for. If you're familiar with Photoshop, you'll find the book a really light, fluffy intro. On the down side, you won't learn the equivalents of all of your favorite Photoshoppy goodness (and almost everything has equivalents these days), but on the up side, you'll quickly chew through the book and be productive in the Gimp (as opposed to guessing what the buttons do. :-)

The biggest problem is that the book is seriously out of date. I've found the latest builds of the development tree relatively stable, and the huge number of new features makes it hard to consider going back to the practically ancient 1.0x series the book describes. Still, it's nice to have large portions of the software's basic use described, making the newer shinier portions easier to get a handle on. Oh, and the information on using X and installing fonts seemed out of place. Either you're relatively unix clueful, and can manage them, or you're not and you have a sysadmin who does it for you. Either way it's not real valuable in my eyes.

How diffrent is this book from the HTML user manual that's downloadable from the gimp site? My wife is trying to learn GIMP, and she thinks the User Manual sucks... (I learned to use it by just messing with it for over a year now, haven't read a single thing from either).

Samael asks:

Why should [Adobe] care about Open Source?

Because if they don't care enough to at least understand it, they're going to have trouble making money. I don't think all companies need to drop everything and switch to Free Software immediately, but I think the companies who keep blinders on, who show as little comprehension of the issues as Adobe, are doomed to failure.

Adobe has two cash cows, PhotoShop and PageMaker (to a lesser extent, Illustrator). There's already serious Free Software competition for one of them, and various people are starting up projects to compete with the other.

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Ummmm, not to be a prude, but why do you want Photoshop for Linux when you've got the GIMP for free?

Gimp
X-Accountant (Quicken Clone)
Quicken for linux?
Flight Gear

One educational program:
Nightfall

look before you speak, this took my 3 minutes to find. :)

From what I've heard, correct me if I'm wrong, development of Gimp has really fallen off since the original developers graduated college.

OK, you're wrong :-) Take a peek at the Gimp-Devel summary page ( http://www.kt.opensrc.org/KC/gimp-devel / ). It summarizes a lot of the activity on the gimp-devel list.

In addition, the May issue of TheGimp.com has an article about some of the new features ( http://www.thegimp.com/articles/1999 05.html ).

If I understand the history correctly, frustration at the lack of 1.1 releases (since all work was being done in CVS) resulted in a semi-fork and the series of 1.1. A reasonably comprehensive guide to the changes can be found at http://sven.gimp.org/1.1/ . Pay particular attention to the feature list.

Development isn't stalled, and it is moving forward, but it's not being shouted from the treetops. Personally, I noted a marked difference when I tried one of the 1.1.x released, at least as compared with 1.0.x. There's a lot of exciting new stuff in there.

From what I've heard, correct me if I'm wrong, development of Gimp has really fallen off since the original developers graduated college.

OK, you're wrong :-) Take a peek at the Gimp-Devel summary page ( http://www.kt.opensrc.org/KC/gimp-devel / ). It summarizes a lot of the activity on the gimp-devel list.

In addition, the May issue of TheGimp.com has an article about some of the new features ( http://www.thegimp.com/articles/1999 05.html ).

If I understand the history correctly, frustration at the lack of 1.1 releases (since all work was being done in CVS) resulted in a semi-fork and the series of 1.1. A reasonably comprehensive guide to the changes can be found at http://sven.gimp.org/1.1/ . Pay particular attention to the feature list.

Development isn't stalled, and it is moving forward, but it's not being shouted from the treetops. Personally, I noted a marked difference when I tried one of the 1.1.x released, at least as compared with 1.0.x. There's a lot of exciting new stuff in there.

Yeah, here's the URL:

http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32

It's buggier than the X version, though.

How about tigert making icons? He's made some beautiful ones for Gnome and I believe he made the freshmeat icons as well.

For this and more facinanating early history tidbits, see my gimp history page. I should probably update that some day :)

Seth
sjburges@gimp.org

I haven't tried it yet but it's here.

Happy GIMPing,
Seth

David Greenman, the Co-founder/Principal Architect of the FreeBSD Project just posted a new picture of the new wcarchive, it is now available here.

Updated hardware description is also available here.

It would be amazing if someone could pull some nice effects with The Gimp and make a cool looking "ftp.cdrom.com theme" for Windowmaker or something...

I must admit that I've stretched myself out on a limb with this thread. I really can't support the position that Linux has equivalent tools. I can't even support the position that the average designer is capable of getting Linux running well enough to get anything done.

I don't really know about all of these issues; when I jumped onto this thread, it was in annoyance about somebody complaining about not having everything handed to him on a silver platter. I never wanted to start arguing over the presence, absence, or utility of certain features (though I ended up doing just that).

I still disagree that the GIMP should try to match something like Photoshop exactly feature-for-feature and identical interface. It's really not that hard to learn a new interface, and things like scripting really change all the rules when it comes to features. The GIMP isn't supposed to be Photoshop, it's supposed to be the best tool they can make for image processing, which just happens to mean that it will share a lot of features with Photoshop. If they come up with a better way of doing something, they shouldn't throw it away because it isn't the same way Photoshop does it.

BTW, I certainly wouldn't call the switch to computers an evolutionary change in printing or graphic design! Switching platforms isn't a revolution for the whole printing industry, but it would be for the graphic designers. My working definition of evolutionary vs. revolutionary is: it's evolutionary if your skills retain their value, it's revolutionary if your skills lose their value. Switching from Photoshop to the GIMP necessarily means learning a new interface and losing some of your old files; I'd rate this as more evolutionary, though, really. But switching to Linux and tools like TeX means learning a whole new mode of operation; that is a revolutionary change.

As for "relatively well informed" and all that, I wasn't arguing that a person needed to know about every tool on the market to be qualified for their job, I was arguing that a person needs to have thorough knowledge of both tools before making a critical comparison. A competent, or brilliant for that matter, graphic designer is not automatically qualified to dismiss the GIMP after a 2 minute glance at the web-site. That is the point I was originally trying to make.

As for CYMK support, what I had said is that it is not trivial to use in any current program. You can obviously still do CYMK stuff in the GIMP, it's just not supported with nice things like preview. You have to eyeball images and understand what colours are too bright to show up and know how things look different under different lighting conditions. Much of this guesswork can be taken out by certain features which GIMP doesn't have, but not all of it.

All that said, I still think the GIMP is pretty cool. The CYMK stuff I was referring to is here. It basically says that if you correctly calibrate your system and your printer takes EPS files, it shouldn't be a problem.

I'm not involved in graphic design at all (except minor dabbling), and I don't really understand the problems of moving to a CMYK colour model. To my uninformed mind, it sounds like it should be a pretty trivial problem (though I am assured it isn't): for each piece of printing hardware, establish a gamut and produce software for transforming from RGB to CMYK for that device (this should easily be automated with appropriate software and scanning devices), informing the operator of any illegal colours. Each paint program should be able to take gamut information and exclude the use of illegal colours. Calibration should be simple as well: an inexpensive light-pen type device should measure the colour of blocks of light on the screen (or special monitors could auto-calibrate), and a similar device should read the output-pattern of the printer.

A quick look at the GIMP manual suggests that something vaguely similar is in place already, minus the simple calibration schemes (which all seem to be ridiculously expensive and reliant on eye-balling). CYMK-preview & illegal colour detection should be easy to add with script-fu (if someone hasn't done it already)... Of course, no CYMK stuff is worth a damn if everything isn't perfectly calibrated. Is there an industry standard gamut format in which a g.d. can expect to have the necessary data for a job he is going to do? (perhaps we should continue this by email, I'm at variedinterests@hotmail.com)

Why do we have the GIMP but no GPL'ed office suite?

This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm curious.

Hrm.. I just wonder how many of you have actually
tried to use E past the 'hey this key doesnt work! suck!' -phase? It is not your afterstep. it is not windowmaker. it is not fvwm2. I have used all of those, and I have enjoyed most of them.

I recently switched to use Gnome and Enlightenment. Try the E-mac theme from e.themes.org, it is very nice and clean. also make sure you install e-conf so you can configure your familiar keyboard shortcuts to work in E.

I am surprized, since E is not that bloat anymore.
The amount of bloat is very nuch dependendt of the theme used.

I mean it has been much slower and it crashed quite often before. But I have used it for about one and a half weeks in _real work_ stuff and it hasnt crashed. (No, I dont restart X every morning)

Also, I think E and icewm have the most gnome support implemented so I can really drag urls from my netscape to the desktop and thus save bookmarks.. whee!

Like someone mentioned above, we need to remember E is raster's freetime project. He is paid by redhat to work on gnome, but E is his private game.

Since you bothered to read this far, check out my screenshot too. :)

My $1..

• This is referring to the Win32 version of the GIMP.
• There is some filter format (Filter Factory, maybe?) that can be converted both to Photoshop and GIMP filters. Seems like I read something to this effect a while back.

And keep in mind this is work in progress.

tigert