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The Gimp from the Eyes of a Photoshop User
Eugenia writes "Many in the F/OSS community are raving about the Gimp, however pros who have actually used Photoshop think differently: This Mac professional designer goes through the steps of getting Gimp 2.0 up and running on his Mac, only to get baffled by the chaotic interface in general and its non-standard UI compared to other Mac apps, its slowness to open large files and to apply filters, the unintuitive tools that accompany it and its very visible bad quality of text and lines/shapes. That designer even bought a 'supported' version of MacGimp by an OSS-Mac company, Archei, but he never heard back for his support requests (free Gimp for Macs here). I think that's one of the best-written articles I've ever read about the reality of most open-source geek-driven projects vs their equivelant professional/proprietary ones. Personally, before I get persuaded to use Gimp again for my photography projects, I would need --in addition to the author's peeves -- full 16-bit per channel support, high-quality scanning/printing drivers with integrated GUI (a'la SilverFast), and a 'crop and rotate' feature (as seen in PS/PSE). Besides, both Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop Elements cost bellow $100 (with PS Elements getting bundled with most scanners/printers/digital cameras, albeit without the much needed 16bit support either)."
I loathe The Gimp. Why? The interface is one of the worst I have ever seen. Ever. Including MS Word for DOS!
That being said, I find the interface for Photoshop to be a complete pain in the ass as well. If it wasn't for the fact that there isn't a Mac version of PaintShopPro, I wouldn't be using Photoshop (okay, Photoshop Elements, but it's still the same interface) at all.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
This is a great point. I use firefox for all browsing other than testing. I use wings 3d for modeling quite frequently (and I actually use Maya professionally). I use and enjoy apache and PHP. But I can find no use for the gimp. Photoshop is the only game in town.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
UI in OS world? no sir! VM, Scheduler, etc don't need UI. The only UI in 'OS world' as make menuconfig and friends (at least in 'Linux OS world'). It's the end-user apps that need good UI. So if you s/OS/Linux apps/g, then your post is correct.
A lot of people who think photoshop is great forget that they didn't pay for their copy BECAUSE IT IS EXPENSIVE.
First; if you need and use all the advanced features of Photoshop, it's not that expensive.
Second; if you don't need all the advanced features of Photoshop, you can get Photoshop Elements for under a hundred dollars, which is Photoshop minus the CMYK, Pantone, and other prepress functionality that Adobe has to license from third parties, which is a contributing factor in making the full version of Photoshop cost what it does.
Photoshop Elements is very reasonably priced software, and considering you get the wonderful Photoshop UI with it, it actually gets better bang-for-the-buck than The GIMP, and considering The GIMP is free, that's an impressive feat. I wouldn't use any current version of The GIMP even if you paid me what Photoshop Elements costs.
NO CARRIER