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)."

Comments

One thing about photoshop!

[rkz]

Alot of people have animosity towards Adobe, myself included over various issues, but there is one thing that Adobe has that nobody else can hold a candle to:

Photoshop.

This one software package is single-handedly keeping me from migrating to Linux. For those who say "But what about Gimp? It's just as good..."

Those people have also never done professional graphics for print, video or even the web. The toolset within Photoshop is unrivaled, it's color acuity precise, and it's workflow caters to multiple mind sets. For every one way to do something there is a handfull of other, equally successful methods to achieve exactly the same result. It is an artist's tool.

Mature? Nope. There are dozens of features that the community has been begging to have integrated for years, and slowly but surely Adobe has listened. I can understand not implementing every little widget and gizmo that has been suggested by crackpot users over the years into their flagship product line, and each new upgrade offers something useful that can either save me time or opens up a new realm of creative flexibility. Photoshop has many years to grow, become better and more refined. Most people just don't see it because a histogram is this wierd spikey deal that screws up an image, filters are normally reserved for creating 'L3nZ FL4r3s', and the layer effects were the perfect time saving device for all those bubbly drop shadowed graphics with glowy mouse-overs your client is begging for.

There is no alternative, and by glancing at the top 10 new features, it seems that Adobe has not forgot that Photoshop is not a toy program. I didn't see any "Improved Applesque Button Creation" feature.

(yet)