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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)."
On the matter of Text, use FreeType for the GIMP. It produces beautiful scaled, rotated, and angled text output.
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
Photoshop is great, but you CAN run it under Linux. It's a supported application of
Crossover Office.
I use it all the time under Linux with no problems.
And I almost forgot. The Obligatory link for the google impaired. :) Hinted, Kerned, and Anti-Aliased to your hearts content.. fully buzzword compliant!
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
Thank goodness I have a mac. :)
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Isn't that sort of reaction kinda par for the "Mac user tries anything else" course?
You're a troll, but I'll bite. The author of the article is not just some Mac user, he's Joe Gillespie, an established pro in graphic design and typography. By "established", I mean for the past 20 years or so he's been doing this kind of thing. Link 1, link 2. Nothing a little trip to google won't clear up if you're looking for credentials.
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
I think that it just depends on what you are used to using. A GIMP user with a lot of experience with the program, may have the same problems when migrating to Photoshop. I know I do. I'm not very familiar with anything but Photoshop basics, but I'm quite familiar with GIMP.
Many of problems that the author sites in the review are problems that are native to the Mac version. I agree that GIMP does need some help in many areas, but the program isn't ideal for Macs right now, without some work.
A) It requires an X11 server on top of the MacOS.
B) The filesystem issue is related to the fact that GIMP wasn't designed for OSX, even if it can be compiled for it.
C) The font issues are related to the fact that it is using a different font renderer than OSX. There is no sub-pixel hinting going on in his makeshift X-server, and it looks like it is using an inferior render.
Really, I don't disagree with the reviewer. They are legitimate points, but the majority of the problems are simply related to the Mac install.
In regards to other complaints...
Tools *ARE* organized; e.g. first row has selection tools, and fourth row has drawing tools.
I'm not sure what was up with his copy, but JPEG images (over 30 MB) open up within a fraction of a second for me.
The "reviewer" hasn't familiarized himself with how the drawing tools work to get them to function properly. I personally feel that this person is just looking for a Photoshop clone, which GIMP is not. It is similar to Photoshop in the sense that it performs most of the same functions, but it is not a clone by design. The UI seems practical to some of us; even novice users that I know. But hey... To each his own. Again, the GIMP does deserve criticism in some respects, but 3/4 of the problems that the reviewer sited were not the fault of GIMP or its design.
Optical kerning is, as I understand it, a new auto-kerning algorithm in InDesign 3. Rather than kerning based on metrics, it kerns based on actual letter-forms, producing much more pleasing results.
Optical kerning was around at least as of InDesign 2.0. In theory it is a very nice method for kerning; in practice it doesn't seem to make as big of a difference as you might think, at least with fairly typical serif and sans-serif fonts. In the print environment in which I worked, we used optical kerning for our newsprint, with our two dominant fonts being Calisto MT (serif) and Gill Sans (sans-serif); neither of those fonts suffer serious colisions with normal metric kerning, so optical kerning didn't make a night-and-day difference.
Also, optical kerning does add a modicum of additional spacing over the flow of a story or document, as in a 100 line story might end up 102-105 lines after being optically kerned (again, as of InDesign 2).
It's not that easy yet; they are making headway, but the GIMP is still straggling behind somewhat in this area. They have grand plans to move to GEGL (GEneric Graphics Library) http://www.gegl.org/ , which is a graphics processing library that will apparently (among other things) make it easier to use ICM profiles and work in CMYK.
I've heard that GIMP 2.0 has CMYK support, but I've also heard that it's not quite useful enough yet. ICM profiles have been in GIMP for a while though. As far as LAB colour and stuff... haven't seen anything like that yet.
All in good time... for my fairly modest stitching, retouching, and modifying needs, GIMP works great. I'm an RGB man.
Standing at the very edge of my imagination, I peered into the inky void and realised -- I couldn't think up a new sig.