Slashdot Mirror

I have to agree with you there - for me, the difference between Photoshop and Gimp are huge, tho for the last couple of years I've used Paintshop Pro, which I found a nice package and I prefer it to either for photo editing (yes photoshop is more powerful overall, but everything I use is in PSP and it's much easier to use, IMO). I think Gimp is improving - the UI changes from 1.x to 2.x were necessary, but some stuff like red eye removal are still painful (I prefer the channel select method, in GIMP, but try to teach that to a newbie).

Oddly enough, I do most of my programming on mac and linux these days, but all of my texture editing in Windows... maybe that's just weird to me because I also own a mac and have photoshop on it, albeit now a very old version - 3.x. I got screwed by Adobe's version-to-next-version only upgrade policy since I had a menial job over 4.x's lifetime and the (specifically the academic to professional) upgrade was no longer available after 5.0's release. I still have limited Photoshop access at work (version 6, not the new one - CS or whatever).

OTOH, my preference to Photoshop and PSP may be me - I liken this to my wife's dependence on Excel - I installed OpenOffice on her machine but it got kicked off for a full (professional) version of Office a month later because of her dependence on VB Scripting, menu layouts, OLE (or whatever MS calls it now) links into MS-Word docs, and Access database. I'm sure many of the things she does also exist in OpenOffice (she's huge on Pivot tables, which I've done in OO and even exported to Excel), but learning a new tool wasn't worth the time for her, doubly so when she can just get her office to pay for it (for that matter, I can too, but I refuse ;)

Uh, unless this page is more than 10 years old, you're wrong: http://www.gimpguru.org/Tutorials/FilmGrain/ I suggest you take note of the layers part of his comment, not just the "levels, curves, colour, contrast etc..." part.

Yeah, digikam has some pretty good tools for photo management and touch ups. I saw a tutorial for removing red eye in gimp, And it was way too complicated. Complaining about how difficult it is to use a high level professional tool is a little short sighted. Most people couldn't start up autocad and start drawing out a house. Most people couldn't start up visual studio, and program their own operating system. Why would anybody expect to be able to start up photoshop and instantly be transformed into a graphical genius.

.. please tell gimp developers to fix Curves dialog and use splines instead of Bezier, just like photoshop does...

Thanks for the information--actually from the article. There is a detailed review of the epson r800 at the luminous landscape, a good place to find tutorials on photoshop by the way. Some of these tutorials have been translated to GIMP by the GIMP Guru.

Ack, so many flames... Let me tell you what I use to process photos under Linux (not professionally).

First, either buy a better flatbed or get a film scanner. Even the low end film scanners are decent for 35mm (e.g. Minolta, Benq); try eBay for secondhand.

Second, buy VueScan - it's worth the money.

Third, blast your slides with compressed air and wipe with an antistatic cloth prior to scanning; this should remove most of the dust.

If you're going to scan at 2700dpi or higher, reckon on 512Mb RAM and at least an Athlon XP or equivalent Intel CPU, otherwise doing anything with the output files will take aeons. On a lower spec, try halving the output file resolution in VueScan, which gives a better 1350dpi image than one natively scanned at that res. With some cleaning up, you can get away with 10x8" prints from this.

Colour management problems: this isn't going to help you but - shoot black and white. :-) Or stop obsessing over it. A decent scan gets you close anyway.

The GIMP works fine for the minimal set of manipulations you need, namely cloning out dust, levels adjustment, maybe some minor tweaks in curves and finally some unsharp mask. Read the GIMP Guru tutorials or GIMP FAQ to learn how to use it better (grab John Hall's scripts from the latter site too - the smart sharpening one is excellent).

Where the GIMP falls down is the lack of 16 bit image handling. Without this, extreme curves manipulations tend to produce evident posterisation. If you're desperate, you can try doing the contrast adjustments in CinePaint (flaky and limited but it just about works) and then writing out an 8 bit file to finish off with the GIMP.

Alternatively, forget the GIMP and install the Crossover product to use Windows Photoshop under Linux.

On the printing side, most people talk about Epson but I've had good results out of the box from a recent HP Photosmart (particularly for B/W with their grey ink cartridge).

Summary: you can do this stuff under Linux if you learn to make the best of what's available and stop caring about what it doesn't support (the "don't worry, be happy" approach). Whether the results meet "professional" standards is arguable (but in my experience, most amateurs have no real clue what that requires, myself included).

Cheers,
Ade_
/

Could anyone recommend a good tutorial for photo touch-up using the GIMP?

Try gimpguru and the gimp.org tutorials.