Hack turns GIMP into Photoshop Look-alike

Mr_Silver writes "One of the many complaints about the GIMP is that of its user interface and how it should be more like Photoshop. If you feel that this is true then Scott Moschella has hacked together GimpShop which turns GIMP's user interface into something more akin to Photoshop for OSX. However, if you're not running that operating system, fret not, because there is a version for Linux too."

Comments

the only gimp upgrade i want

[soupdevil]

is cmyk. My boss is ready to buy 5 licenses for Adobe CS2, and I'd love to save him a few grand.

Impressive

[Auckerman]

Certainly a step in the right direction, only in the sense from what the page says, it's a vast improvement in the interface over gimp. That being said, it does fall into the same trap as other OSS project like to be in, mimicking. If a developer wants his/her project to be noticed not only does it have to do what the competition does, it has to have some added value over the competition. Price isn't necessarily a good way to standout, people are more than willing to pay for something they perceive as better. It would be nice if there were more publicly done research into interface design, OSS projects would benefit greatly from it.

As a OS X user, I would also say anything that requires X11 is not a native OS X application. With no core OS X technology support (little things like colorsync, quicktime, etc), Gimp will really never take off on OS X. I personally will stick to using photoshop.

For better or worse

[Frumious Wombat]

This should help the GIMP gain greater acceptance. Rather than getting a Photoshop-oriented book, and then translating the lessons into Gimpese, users can go directly. Hopefully this will encourage more people to try, use, and promote The GIMP, while producing better photos in the process.

Ob. Disclaimer: I've used the GIMP since 0.54 on SGI, and think it hit a peak of usability somewhere around 1.1. The newer features are nice, but I'm glad someone took a stand and wrote an alternative. With this interface, it's a great alternative to Elements, and will hopefully cause Free Software to be used in more environments than before.

Windows?

[Jozer99]

What about us poor Windows users? There are quite a lot of us, and I'm sure you would want to educate us heathens to the benifits of open source software. Somebody please port it!

Re:Does...

[Artifakt]

Sometimes those reasons are economic, rather than technical. I can't answer for why the OP has switched back and forth, but I've sometimes used photoshop because a client specifically wanted me to - they wanted not just complete illustrations but some of the seperate layers and intermediate work files to pass on to others, plus assurance these would look right/work in photoshop. In the end, a requirement such as that means it's simply easier to do the whole project start to finish there.
Also, there are lots of often pricy special filters that are not part of photoshop itself, but were made by third party developers specifically as add ons for it, and if you want to use one of these, it pretty much dictates using photoshop. Most of this can be avoided by writing your own filter params for freeware programs, but a.) you have to know how, b.) it can take a little time, and deadlines don't care, and c.) some shops' legal types are actually worried this skirts too close to violating a EULA clause against reverse engineering.
(I also started doing illustrations using a bunch of small, limited freeware tools, and often had to switch twenty times between three or four of em to finish a single small project, so I've gotten strongly biased against swapping partially completed files around, probably more than most - maybe this colors my opinions above).

Hey.

[ta bu shi da yu]

I agree. I find the irony of Windows users screaming for ports of Linux software quite amusing, considering that it was only a few years ago that the situation was quite different (Linux users were screaming for Windows ports of software).

Payback sucks, huh?