Slashdot Mirror
Beginning GIMP
Ravi writes "Any one who has had the opportunity to manipulate images would be aware of Adobe's Photoshop - considered to be the market leader in image manipulation software. But with its high price tag, buying Photoshop is akin to putting strain on your bank balance. What is interesting is that there is a very popular free alternative to Photoshop in GIMP. For those in the dark, GIMP is a state of the art image manipulation software which runs on multiple architectures and OSes and which is released under the GNU free License (GPL). I have been using GIMP exclusively for touching up images for many years now and it has met all my graphics manipulation needs." Read the rest of Ravi's review
Beginning GIMP - From Novice to Professional
author
Akkana Peck
pages
550
publisher
APress
rating
9
reviewer
Ravi
ISBN
1-59059-587-4
summary
A great book to learn Gimp
Unfortunately, for a beginner who is taking his first baby steps in GIMP, the interface might feel a bit kludgy and he/she might need some hand holding. This is where a book related to Gimp gains prominence. I recently came across this book called "Beginning GIMP - From Novice to Professional" authored by Akkana Peck. Divided into 12 chapters and 6 appendices, this book aims to cover the whole gamut of features found in Gimp.
In the first chapter, the author takes the reader through an in-depth tour of Gimp interface. This chapter introduces various dialogs,windows and configuration options that play an important part while working on ones images in Gimp. Even though I was conversant with most of the features of Gimp, I found this chapter impart a very good understanding of Gimp interface which is imperative for putting this software to productive use.
But it is not enough if one jumps right into editing images. It is important to have a good understanding of the various image formats used, their pros and cons as well as situations where different formats are ideal to use. The second chapter of this book titled "Improving Digital Photos" explains just that. The author further shows the image settings in Gimp which helps one to optimize the image while saving to disk as well as tips which could be very useful for photography buffs such as color correction, viewing the histogram to aid in bringing clarity to an image, rotating the image, fixing red eye and so on.
One of the most useful features of any graphics suite worth its name is its support for Layers. In Gimp, it is possible to save different images in layers. The third chapter of this book deals exclusively in giving an introduction to the concept of Layers and how it can be put to use in Gimp. At the end of the chapter, the author also explains how to create simple Gif animations.
Gimp has a great collection of tools at par with any other graphics suite in the market. These tools form the life line of any graphics artist in aiding his creations. In the subsequent three chapters , the author provides a detailed explanation of all these tools and how they could be put to use. Almost all the tools are covered in these three chapters and the author even provides the steps in creating images using these tools which gives it a practical touch to the whole narration.
In the seventh chapter titled Filters and Effects, one gets to know about the rich set of filters and scripts which are bundled with Gimp. There are hundreds of filters and effects categorized into three sections of Filters, Python-Fu and Script-Fu and most of them are described in this chapter with the aid of relevant examples.
From the 8th chapter onwards, the author turns to explain the more advanced concepts which pertain to graphics editing, knowing which, differentiates an expert from a beginner. Concepts such as color manipulation, compositing, masking and the different layer modes are described in detail with the aid of examples.
One of the biggest advantages a Gimp user has is the capability to create his own scripts in Gimp which allow him to accomplish complex tasks with the click of a button. Gimp scripts and plug-ins can be created using various languages like python, perl or C. But it also has its own scripting language called Script-Fu which also simplifies the process of creating scripts. And not surprisingly, there are hundreds of scripts bundled with the default installation of Gimp which makes it a viable option for creating complex graphical effects with ease. The 11th chapter of this book titled "Plug-ins and Scripting" gives an introduction to creating ones own scripts using different languages including script-fu. But I found this chapter to be more useful for a person who is interested in creating plug-ins than the normal users.
The final chapter of this well illustrated book deals with topics which couldn't fit in any other chapters such as tips on configuring Gimp to use the scanner and printer. There is a section which gives details of various resources found on the web which could be used to further enrich ones knowledge on using Gimp.
All along, the author gives interesting tit-bits on various aspects of image creation and modification which would be eye openers for most people who are getting introduced to the art of graphics manipulation. Reading the book, I was able to get valuable insights into different aspects of image editing such as antialiazing, hinting text and such, which plays an important part in creating good graphics.
In relevant sections, the author has provided important details which are highlighted in a bright vibrant color which makes reading this book a pleasant experience.
Many might wonder why some one would take time and efforts to write a book on Gimp when Adobe's Photoshop is considered the dominant leader in the graphics market. But the truth is Gimp enjoys a wider user base than all the other non-free graphics manipulation products combined as it is bundled by default on all Linux/Unix distributions worth their name. Considering that Gimp has also been ported to Windows and Mac OSX coupled with its hard to beat price (it is a free software released under GPL) and excellent features at par with any other professional graphics suite, this software has become a viable option for any one interested in developing graphics for the Web. And I found this book to contain relevant information which could be invaluable in ones journey into the fascinating world of image manipulation using GIMP.
You can purchase Beginning GIMP - From Novice to Professional from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Unfortunately, for a beginner who is taking his first baby steps in GIMP, the interface might feel a bit kludgy and he/she might need some hand holding. This is where a book related to Gimp gains prominence. I recently came across this book called "Beginning GIMP - From Novice to Professional" authored by Akkana Peck. Divided into 12 chapters and 6 appendices, this book aims to cover the whole gamut of features found in Gimp.
In the first chapter, the author takes the reader through an in-depth tour of Gimp interface. This chapter introduces various dialogs,windows and configuration options that play an important part while working on ones images in Gimp. Even though I was conversant with most of the features of Gimp, I found this chapter impart a very good understanding of Gimp interface which is imperative for putting this software to productive use.
But it is not enough if one jumps right into editing images. It is important to have a good understanding of the various image formats used, their pros and cons as well as situations where different formats are ideal to use. The second chapter of this book titled "Improving Digital Photos" explains just that. The author further shows the image settings in Gimp which helps one to optimize the image while saving to disk as well as tips which could be very useful for photography buffs such as color correction, viewing the histogram to aid in bringing clarity to an image, rotating the image, fixing red eye and so on.
One of the most useful features of any graphics suite worth its name is its support for Layers. In Gimp, it is possible to save different images in layers. The third chapter of this book deals exclusively in giving an introduction to the concept of Layers and how it can be put to use in Gimp. At the end of the chapter, the author also explains how to create simple Gif animations.
Gimp has a great collection of tools at par with any other graphics suite in the market. These tools form the life line of any graphics artist in aiding his creations. In the subsequent three chapters , the author provides a detailed explanation of all these tools and how they could be put to use. Almost all the tools are covered in these three chapters and the author even provides the steps in creating images using these tools which gives it a practical touch to the whole narration.
In the seventh chapter titled Filters and Effects, one gets to know about the rich set of filters and scripts which are bundled with Gimp. There are hundreds of filters and effects categorized into three sections of Filters, Python-Fu and Script-Fu and most of them are described in this chapter with the aid of relevant examples.
From the 8th chapter onwards, the author turns to explain the more advanced concepts which pertain to graphics editing, knowing which, differentiates an expert from a beginner. Concepts such as color manipulation, compositing, masking and the different layer modes are described in detail with the aid of examples.
One of the biggest advantages a Gimp user has is the capability to create his own scripts in Gimp which allow him to accomplish complex tasks with the click of a button. Gimp scripts and plug-ins can be created using various languages like python, perl or C. But it also has its own scripting language called Script-Fu which also simplifies the process of creating scripts. And not surprisingly, there are hundreds of scripts bundled with the default installation of Gimp which makes it a viable option for creating complex graphical effects with ease. The 11th chapter of this book titled "Plug-ins and Scripting" gives an introduction to creating ones own scripts using different languages including script-fu. But I found this chapter to be more useful for a person who is interested in creating plug-ins than the normal users.
The final chapter of this well illustrated book deals with topics which couldn't fit in any other chapters such as tips on configuring Gimp to use the scanner and printer. There is a section which gives details of various resources found on the web which could be used to further enrich ones knowledge on using Gimp.
All along, the author gives interesting tit-bits on various aspects of image creation and modification which would be eye openers for most people who are getting introduced to the art of graphics manipulation. Reading the book, I was able to get valuable insights into different aspects of image editing such as antialiazing, hinting text and such, which plays an important part in creating good graphics.
In relevant sections, the author has provided important details which are highlighted in a bright vibrant color which makes reading this book a pleasant experience.
Many might wonder why some one would take time and efforts to write a book on Gimp when Adobe's Photoshop is considered the dominant leader in the graphics market. But the truth is Gimp enjoys a wider user base than all the other non-free graphics manipulation products combined as it is bundled by default on all Linux/Unix distributions worth their name. Considering that Gimp has also been ported to Windows and Mac OSX coupled with its hard to beat price (it is a free software released under GPL) and excellent features at par with any other professional graphics suite, this software has become a viable option for any one interested in developing graphics for the Web. And I found this book to contain relevant information which could be invaluable in ones journey into the fascinating world of image manipulation using GIMP.
You can purchase Beginning GIMP - From Novice to Professional from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
;D
Next you'll say that people buy windows (lollerskates).
Oh slashdot, you slay me.
Does it have a "healing brush"? That's really the only neat feature I can think of that photoshop offers that the gimp doesn't/didn't. The "healing brush" basically makes retouching a picture to remove, say, a zit a fool-proof 5 second job. Which is nice.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
While I can buy the notion that The GIMP is suitable for many tasks that programmers might require, does anyone on here who considers him/herself first and foremost a designer use The GIMP as their daily composition tool?
I've always seen it (rightly or wrongly) as a tool made by programmers for programmers who want to make/modify and image here and there, but I'd like to be shown to be wrong about this.
I tried and failed a few times to get into GIMP, but the interface just wasn't doing it for me. I recently discovered Gimpshop, an elegant hack of GIMP which emulates the Photoshop interface. It's fantastic, I find it much more intuitive than plain GIMP, and I've even managed to use it to get a Photoshop-trained graphic design guru to explore FOSS with it.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
See review, then see subject.
One thing that will save you tons of cash when buying PS is to get a used/old stock PS 5.5 and just buy the upgrade. At aprox $275 CDN you'd have to be stupid not to take this route.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
If you are looking to see if it has similar power to Photoshop without having to learn a new interface, try GimpShop, which is the GIMP with a Photoshop interface.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Unfortunately, for a beginner who is taking his first baby steps in GIMP, the interface might feel a bit kludgy
Photoshop has a really great interface. When I want to get work done I could care less if there is an "open source" alternative. I want the best tool for the job that's the easiest/quickest route to completeing that job. Not the tool that best suites my techno ideology.
Something the open source community needs to understand.
Gadget News at Gizmo.com
Hmm, well, for those who think GIMP is too hard and Photoshop too expensive, there does exist an $80 version of Photoshop called Photoshop Elements.
Sometimes you can get a good discount with bundles for scanners or cameras or printers, too.
I figure the GIMP isn't the only player in the "low end" space. Of course if you are dedicated to free/OSS, you can feel free to ignore PE.
GPL Deconstructed
I love Gimp. Even animations are relatively easy with it.
One thing I'd like to do with it is similar to the way VirtualDub or AviSynth works: saving a script of all the actions I performed on an image/video, that I can then use on other images. You can save curves, but you can't save HSV adjustments that I can tell.
Is there a way to do this with Gimp?
Put lipstick on a pig and you've still got a pig.
It's not perfect, and not quite yet a complete replacement for The GIMP, but it's close enough that I've started testing it on a regular basis. If you simply can't wrap your brain around GIMP, then it's probably worth your time to check out Krita.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I'm sure that there will be the usual discussion of GIMP's shortcomings, etc., etc., but I for one am happy to see any book that makes using the GIMP easier. Go to any bookstore and it is pretty obvious that most of the other books concerning image creation and editing have been written for Photoshop. So if you can't afford Photoshop and are using something else like the GIMP, you have to use a lot of time translating techniques described for Photoshop into their GIMP equivalents. So anything GIMP specific is very very welcome. That said, I generally use Fireworks MX for my work in Windows, but I may pick a copy of the book anyway, since I use the GIMP when booted into Ubuntu.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Just for those who are interested in Photoshop's interface, but would like to use The GIMP, there is GIMPshop: http://www.gimpshop.com/
Ah, you've still got a pig, but is it now a PILF?
I've used it to do professional compositing work and with three books in front of me I managed to make it do the job.
I would love to recommend it as a free tool to my friends that do this sort of work 45 hours a week. But I can't. Not due to any single missing feature but because Artists are not inherently computer-people. It's not just a list manipulators to them, it's a set of tools like pencils or brushes-in-the-hand that they have invested their thinking in. Until GIMP does a great emulation of an existing popular UI it would be a crime to put someone through that painful learning curve to save a couple days wages on a toolset that they don't already "think in."
"But the truth is Gimp enjoys a wider user base than all the other non-free graphics manipulation products combined as it is bundled by default on all Linux/Unix distributions worth their name." Bundled with OS distro != used by every end user Size of *nix distro != size of Gimp user base
I've used the GIMP for almost *everything* related to raster images for several years now. I'm not a designer, but I do work with web technologies. It is my opinion that certain aspects of the interface are annoying (as hell), but overall, it gets the job done.
Photoshop Elements sells for well under $100.
And Photoshop is typically free to all the people I know who have warezed a copy.
If you're trying to sell GIMP based on pricing, you're not going to win -- certainly not with the lack of polish in GIMP's UI compared to Photoshop's.
Plus, the other big advantage to Photoshop is all the filters and plug-ins that work on it. Unless GIMP supports all of the same filter and plug-ins that work with the latest Photoshop, most professional graphic designers or artists won't find it useful.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Good information, thank you!
[%] Cingular Ringtones
"State of the art"? For web graphics, perhaps. In fact, for web graphics GIMP has quite a few nifty tricks up its sleeves.
But please don't pretend it's anything like a Photoshop competitor. It doesn't even compete with low-end professional tools like Corel Photopaint. Far from being "at a par with any other graphics suite in the market", for print work GIMP is no more "state of the art" than MS Paintbrush is. It can't even do trivial, bottom-of-the-range, entry-level stuff like simply working with CMYK images (no, the Seperate plugin is not a solution, or even the beginnings of a solution).
Let's not deceive ourselves here. GIMP is a great amateur tool for anyone whose needs begin and end with websites and cheap inkjet printers. But show me a professional who uses it, and I'll show you a professional who someone else has to clean up after before his work is any use to anyone.
I use it for my sketches on windows with a wacom tablet and it's nice enough. Working with the paths to "ink" is pretty straightforward and only took me a few days to figure out fully. Part of my problem was thinking that I didn't need to use the tutorials on gimp.org. They're basic, but very helpful (like for drawing a straight line). The layers are nice and intuitive, but sometimes when I undo after switching layers I forget that I'm on the wrong one. Also, it's crashed once or twice so badly that it seems to be able to destroy my work despite pressing save often.
The options for working with a tablet are great as far as being able to make my eraser another pen (just wish I could get it to initialize as an eraser instead of the default brush), and having the pressure control different things (thickness/opacity/whatever) is super easy. One annoying point is that you have to have your pen/eraser active to change the brush for that pen/eraser. So I have to hold the tip close (but not close enough to draw) and use my mouse to change brush, since just using the mouse won't change the brush for the pen.
I also have tried to make some cartoons with the gimp animation package, but it made almost no sense to me. I just didn't understand the GUI at all.
gimp is an excellent tool, especially when used in tandem with inkscape. there is very little that gimp can't do for most non-professionals and even most pros alike. for non-pros, it will handle every photo problem, while not handling colors well enough for pros is a killer for it. however, for web development, used intandem with inkscape, it is an awesome tool. my wife, who is a professional photographer and needs photoshop, is asked all the time about using it. if you aren't a photographer, photoshop will be of little help to you. and neither will gimp for that matter. photoshop can't help you take better pictures, nor will it magically turn you into a good photographer. and she can't really explain how, or why, to do x, y, or z, if you don't understand photography. (i don't.) but I can use gimp and inkscape for web design. i think the real push should be after web software like fireworks. there, gimp/inkscape can do everything and alot more. perhaps that is free software's biggest problem, that there are many good products, but nothing commerically packaged into a suite. i mean, wouldn't a gimp/inkscape/quanta+ suite be a killer design suite? I think so.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
It seems that people who started on Photoshop tend to love Photoshop and hate GIMP (or at least have a general dislike for it)
It seems that people who started on GIMP tend to love GIMP and hate Photoshop (or at least have a general dislike for it)
Personally, I started on Photoshop, but didn't really use it, then switched to GIMP. Now, I have a general dislike for Photoshop (some of this can be attributed to my OSS love).
I hear (and can kind of see) that GIMP has a "kludgy" interface a lot. Personally, I navigate it 20x easier than Photoshop, but that's because I've used GIMP more. It's all in your experience.
noobcake or noobmuffin? It is the same price...
The Gimp has a really great interface. When I want to get work done I could care less if there is an "intuitive" alternative. I want the best tool for the job that's the easiest/quickest route to completing that job and all future jobs in the same area. Not the tool that best suits my need to learn quickly, so I can get that first job done faster.
Something the people who pay $500 for a graphics editing program need to understand.
Unless you really think it will take $500 worth of your time to learn the better tool...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
When claiming to have features "on par" with Photoshop for working with digital photos, one question that remains unanswered in the review is "Does the GIMP work with RAW format images?"
The GIMP has a very bad interface. I know there are many people who love its interface, but as someone who has used every graphics suite in a professional setting, the GIMP's interface is by far the worst. It's inconsistent, confusing, and almost nothing behaves in the expected way. There are plenty of good open source apps with decent interfaces (Inkscape is great for instance), but the gimp is a program you have to aggressively memorize every bizarre thing it does. It's not a program where you get used to a few early eccentricities and then everything else makes sense once you understand how it works. Every single app and control works in its own way that has nothing to do with the way anything else works.
However, even if you can get past that, it's missing a lot of basic features. The brush system is years behind Photoshop (making a new brush everytime I want to change brush size is not acceptable). You can't rotate a canvas easily, directly work in a CMYK color space, all sorts of basic things.
Now the next response is, it's free. And that's right. There are a lot of tools in this for free software and if you were comparing it to photoshop you could say that ends the debate right there. But that only works if you don't need the power of photoshop, and if you don't, then you should spend 50 bucks on Ulead Photoimpact or Jasc Paint Shop Pro, since each is much better than the GIMP for under 100 dollars. Granted they don't have every single tool photoshop does, but neither does the gimp, and they at least are usable as professional tools.
I am an avid Linux user, but I stopped using Gimp because I couldn't find the hand feature. In Photoshop, if you hold down the space bar, the cursor becomes a hand and you can drag the image around. Without this feature, I have to use the scrollbars, which is RSI-including and just plain annoying.
PS - I recently started editing my images in Picasa and their UI is even better than Photoshop. Thank goodness for Google UI.
This "review" reads more like an advertisement for GIMP than a review of a book. While the reviewer touches on what the various chapters contain, he really doesn't provide much critique (or when he does, it's usually very superficial, e.g. "I found this chapter impart a very good understanding of Gimp interface"). Is the book in fact good for a beginner to pick up and try to learn the tool? What are it's strengths and weaknesses (again the book, not GIMP itself). Does it make sense to purchase a $50 (list) for a $0 software package (i.e. is something like PS Elements which is just a bit more something to also look at). The reviewer starts off by saying that he has been using the tool for many years, is he really qualified to talk about a book geared for beginners?
Sorry, it is not feature-wise but most people do not like the GUI of GIMP and how the features are accessed. I think that GIMP works less productive than most other tools while having the same features. It was, despite the GimpShop hack, impossible to implement changes.
This is well understood and no problem per se. However, 4 years ago interfaces were far more chaotic than today. But GIMP remains.
My hope is that Krita continues to make progress. It looks good and is easy and powerful to use.
The advantage of Linux/open source lies where you apply the good old shell funactionality to image editing, think of Imagemagick. Commandline tools which just work.
In the GUI-world it makes no sense to create new interface schemes which are worse than what is offered by the big players.
I love GIMP, but I am still waiting for GEGL and/or 48 bits per pixel (16 bits per channel per pixel) support. I conduct scientific research and the thought of trowing away extra data to work in the 24 bits per pixel space is unnerving. I mean most digital cameras support 48bpp pictures now using the RAW format which is supported by linux.
No, you get Pigshop!
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
And BTW I am an experienced developer, one time on MS, then Perl/Apache, then Linux sysadmin, network admin, and now full time security bod running Linux at work and OpenBSD at home and Windows as rarely as possible (mandatory monthly reboot at work to apply latest patches.) I love free software and use it as much as possible, I will usually go without rather than use proprietary software. IAnd I can't stand Gimp. Yes, I eventually worked out how to draw a circle the one time I had enough similar drawings to do, I just googled for "nightmare draw gimp circle". (Try it! :)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Actually, it is quite useful. My girlfriend uses it for doing her own basic image editing. I pointed her to GIMP because I know that it could do everything she needed, and didn't feel she should buy or pirate something she didn't have to. Once you realize that it isn't photoshop, and that not everything will be done exactly the same way, it becomes easy to use. She has no problems using it, and really likes all the cool effects that GIMP has built in. I realize it's just anecdotal evidence, but for me it shows that non-geeks are capable of using GIMP.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
"But with its high price tag, buying Photoshop is akin to putting strain on your bank balance."
:)
Which leaves me asking if this could be one of the most warezed applications ever. Photoshop is a must have for a lot of teenagers nowadays and since no one gives a shit about Photoshop Elements, I wonder how many actually buy it. Sure, I bought my own copy but even I started out with a cracked version because I simply couldn't afford it. Adobe knows it: it is better for them to let pirates copy their software rather than funding competitors like Paint Shop Pro and Gimp, which ultimately results in more competition. They might even turn out to buy Photoshop in the end when they can actually afford it - like I did.
The price of Photoshop is so steep that most people who get it don't even know if they want to use it as a serious tool or not. When I first got it, I only manipulated a few images. When I discovered that I had skills, I purchased the copy. Before that, if there was no pirated version whatsoever, I would NEVER consider buying Photoshop simply because it would seem like buying something I don't have enough time to evaluate.
All in all, Photoshop requires a year of evaluation. Amusing but true
Full Tilt
No. Most visual professionals do not use GIMP for many reasons. It falls into the "no there yet" category on most counts.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Also, it's impossible to recommend a program called "GIMP" to anybody without sounding like a complete tool.
Honestly... Isn't it time somebody came up with a name for this app which can be spoken out loud in polite society???
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Let's face facts. Photoshop is easy to use. Paint Shop Pro is easy to use. Even MS Paint is easy to use. Why can't GIMP be easy to use? It has nothing to do with familiarity and eventhing to do with yet another open source project with a user-hostile interface.
Gimpshop does a lot to improve things but it can only do so much.
Street prices:
Beginning Gimp (book) - $40
Photoshop Elements 4.0 (software) - $80
Note that Photoshop Elements includes a printed manual with tutorials, and extensive help files. Gimp does not.
Cheers for the link, I too have tried and failed with the GIMP. After hearing rave reviews about it, I recently downloaded a copy to give it a whirl.
My first task was to crop a bitmap image, and do some minor touching up. Pretty simple, it would have taken about 1 minute in even Paint, or some other hateful program.
However, in trying to figure out the GIMP's godawful interface, it took me over half an hour, and then I gave up. It goes well beyond kludgy, it's plain counter-intuitive.
Instead I downloaded a copy of Paint.NET, which is also free, and a damn sight more straightforward. Problem solved!
1729 = 9^3 + 10^3 = 1^3 + 12^3
Modded Troll? stubear speaks from experience!
Don't get me wrong, I like the GIMP and its flexibility makes drawing specific things extremely convenient and intuitive for me compared to Photoshop. But the one thing that annoys me about GIMP is its interface in that, in both the Windows and Linux versions, each window takes up a program slot on the taskbar. Not only that, but when you start it up, you can see your desktop. Maximizing the main window doesn't help because it spreads all of its icons across. And maximizing the image window, basically obscures the other GIMP windows. To me, this is bad interface design.
I find it a bit irritating to work like this. If I want to see my tools while working on an image, I have to keep the windows at normal size, which leaves parts of my desktop exposed, and I occasionally accidentally click the icons with my pen and execute programs I don't want to execute (nothing to interrupt your concentration like loading Doom 3 inadvertently while practicing your landscape painting). I DO NOT WANT TO SEE MY DESKTOP OR DESKTOP ICONS WHEN WORKING ON AN IMAGE. Is there a way to get GIMP's interface to behave like or mimic Photoshop's interface more closely in this respect? Yes, I'm aware of peoples' complaints with how Photoshop's interface behaves and the pros and cons and yada yada, but I just so happen to prefer it that way -- I just "flow" better with it.
Unfortunately there's nothing in GIMP's configuration menus that indicate I can do this, but maybe there's some trick I don't know about?
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
I bought "Grokking the GIMP" some time ago
http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/
I found it to be very good indeed. It perhaps isn't an absolute beginners book. I learnt a huge amount about making better selections and adjusting colors. These tips would probably work just as well in Ph*toshop but I've never tried it!
It looks like it is now available online too so you can see if you like it first!
Every man for himself, all in favour say "I"
I've been reading and using this book for a few weeks. It's great!
One thing not mentioned in the review is how badly the open source community needed an updated gimp book. Gimp is already a mature open source project, and two books that came out a few years ago were long outdated.
The best thing about the book is the generous use of images to illustrate her points.. A Press did a fantastic job with layout and making it easy to find things.
I appreciate how the book reviewed a few basic points with general information. In short, this book has a little bit for everybody.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Gimp is for chumps. Here's a nickel... now go get yourself a real image editor.
I've been upgraded to "bad"!
... because my interest is in *ending* GIMP, so there'd be more people implementing an alternative that doesn't suck so badly.
Certainly. Your problem is that you're only thinking of consumer desktop software. IIS sucks compared to Apache. Windows CE sucks compared to embedded Linux. CMD.EXE sucks compared to Bash. ASP sucks compared to Perl or PHP. Windows Terminal Server sucks compared to Openssh.
Speaking of Gimp, this prof has a scheme to squash software bugs, including those found in Gimp.n et-bugs.html
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/071006wider
While I can buy the notion that The GIMP is suitable for many tasks that programmers might require, does anyone on here who considers him/herself first and foremost a designer use
Really? I tried to create myself a simple test image in GIMP and needed 5 tutorials to do anything. Sure I can do "burn marks" with a single button, but drawing a straight line requires a tutorial. It may be powerful, but it is so unintuitive, and made me long for MSpaint.
Downloaded and tried it for 5 minutes. It kinda worked until I wanted to change the size of the roundbrush a bit. It didn't seem to have a simple slider like in other apps. So I poked around trying to edit the brush and must accidentally found the crash instantly button(great feature!). Then I uninstalled it as fast as I could and started photoshop were the brush controls make sense.
Is it so hard to make simple slider that makes a bigger brush? I'm guessing it's there somewhere hidden under a bunch of "script fu"(what) or something.
Sure, such a name already exists: call it the "GNU Image Manipulation Program."
Glad I could help clear that up for you!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This comes up in any discussion of GIMP, and has been answered many times. RAW isn't one image format, it is any proprietary unprocessed image data from a scanner or camera. Proprietary, that's the key word. GIMP, being free, can not afford to license the necessary file conversion software from the scanner and camera manufacturers, but every scanner and camera out there comes with software to convert its proprietary RAW format to TIFF or JPEG. Why would GIMP need to do this?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I agree, I prefer not to reveal that I've been touching up things with the gimp.. It makes people uncomfortable.
Go home and shave your giant head of smell with your bad self
To a lot of people creative individuals Gimp is lacking one major feature(last time I checked): Pressure sensitivity
You can't go into a studio these days without seeing a tablet of some sort that is pressure sensitive, yet Gimp doesn't support this. Even many photography nuts use Wacom tablets to manipulate their works. I have a tablet PC and my comic (Sig) is exclusively digital. You want more, look at my art gallery. I couldn't have drawn any of that crap without pressure sensitivity. I would have sooner inked it on paper and scanned it in.
So to me, GIMP lives up to it's name. It is missing it's parts that, to me, make it utterly useless.
That said, if anyone can tell me different about pressure sensitivity support than I'd love to hear it. I personally think Photoshop is ridiculously overpriced.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
Does it work for you with the tablet?. One of the things that got me back in photoshop last time I tried the gimp was that for some reason it doesn't work too well with my tablet, basically when I use it it draws a bit to the left of where the cursor actually is. Once I started to make the trace I had no problems by looking at where it was drawing instead of where the cursor was, but anytime I had to start a new trace it was mostly try and error. Granted, I don't have a wacom (couldn't find one here in Venezuela, got a Genius instead that's very basic but works for what I use it for, texture drawing for 3D models), not sure if that has something to do with it, but that and the lack of layer folders was what sent me back to photoshop.
The interface itself I didn't mind much, though I would have most likely started to hunt and add/change keyboard shortcuts to it if I had been using it longer (specially the Z for zoom that I'm more used to), but one thing that annoyed me of it was that there was no way (that I could find in the short time I used it) to get all the different GIMP windows to get focus at once, I had to keep hunting them back up one by one when I alt-tabbed to something else (which I'm constantly doing to see how the texture I'm drawing looks on the model in Maya). I do know it's a different way to do it than the "everything in one window" that photoshop does in windows, but it did annoy me. I use photoshop in mac that basically does it like gimp in windows (as do most mac apps), but it has the difference that if I click on the app icon in the dock, all the windows and toolbars of that specific app get focus.
amarok http://amarok.kde.org/ beats the pants off of iTunes
Suckinesh factor is relative. When a project is sufficiently advanced and has the right features, it stops sucking. Firefox doesn't suck for me, Linux doesn't suck for me, OO.org is cool and so are hundreds or thousands of other open source projects. Sure, each of them has their problems and I bet they all have their comercial competitors, but that doesn't make them bad.
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
This is a very good book, especially for people who want to learn about using the Gimp instead of bitching that it's not exactly the same as Photoshop. The Gimp is a powerhouse image editor and it's not that hard to learn, especially with the aid of an excellent book like this one.
we will end no whine before its time
First off let me just say that I've never used Adobe Photoshop so I can't speak to its features as compared to Gimp, but I can say that my wife uses Gimp for all of her photo editing needs. My wife is not a pro, yet. She does do some cool things with our photos, and I would say that Gimp is very competative with Photoshop Elements. (I have used this once.) My wife feels that the Gimp is superior to elements.
Just to point out a few things that make the Gimp great for your average user with a digital camera.
1) Most consumer digital cameras, including mine, use RGB color space and usually JPEG as storage. The Gimp does RGB so you can edit your photos. You are not creating original art for commercial printing as much as a derivative work based on your photos, as such my wife doesn't need CMYK.
2) The Gimp, in its attempt to lure creative types, has features that PS elements will not have for fear of poaching on full Photoshop teritory.
3) The Gimp is free. Let me just stress this. I am a student. My wife enjoys digital photo manipulation and digital scrapbooking. The Gimp meets all of our needs. My wife also is somewhat of a Gimp evangelist now on some of the digital scrapbooking forums where PS elements reigns supreme. I don't know how many converts she has, but she has received inquiries and is very outspoken on the economic advantages of a free program that gets the job done well.
That said, there are a few "rich ladies" (my wife's term) on the message boards who have the full Photoshop and expensive DSLR cameras. Some produce, by my wife's admission, spectacular photos and pages, but some others produce the highest resolution garbage you've ever seen. Often money cannot buy results.
I am very happy with the Gimp. It provides a creative outlet for my wife and doesn't break the bank. For editing your personal digital photo collection, I and my wife think it is a first rate piece of software.
Right, because saying "Guh-Noo" doesn't make you sound like a total loser at all.
I have to ask. Is 79 dollars (Elements) really too high a price tag? Seems more like a bargain to me. And Elements gives you way more functions than the Gimp ever will. Plus: it all works, copying/pasting works like it should, it reads and writes all common formats... I could go on. Foss has it's place, but I would not wish the Gimp on my worst enemy.
You're right that there ought to be a slider, but you're wrong about the current menu being hard to find
You can use the tools that work for you without acting like a total jackass about it, you know. A lot of people are not graphics professionals, and GIMP is just fine for them. I work as a 3d programmer and use Maya, but I don't go around telling the amateurs that they're fucking retards for using Blender or whatever. So just chill out and cut the holier-than-thou attitude.
How to use Gimp ... use Pixel Image Editor and help support alternatives to the overprice PS.
\
You could pronounce it 'jimp'. To hell with however the idiot who gave it this shitty name wanted it pronounced. Problem is, it still sucks even like that.
Perhaps someone should create a seperate project consisting of rebranded versions of all the source and binary releases past and present, identical except for a better name. Then just follow the releases and continue rebranding it until the owners change its name to something acceptable.
If you're talking print, you'll probably find very few designers who use GIMP. But if you're talking artists and web designers, there are plenty. GIMP might lag on some features and tools that Photoshop has, but it's every bit as useful as Photoshop. I dropped Photoshop from my DTP business some years back when the costs were too much to justify and I don't believe in piracy. I haven't looked back since. GIMP can do everything that Photoshop can but in some cases might require the workaround skills you learned in Photoshop 3.x and up. Most of the timesaving features of the newest versions of Photoshop might be missing, but that doesn't mean you can't get the same output. The only issue remaining is print...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I will refer you to a sibling post slightly above yours in the thread:
15733037
"having the pressure control different things (thickness/opacity/whatever) is super easy."
I don't have a tablet, so I do not know how robust this is, but I notice that most of the tools have pressure support. For instance, the paintbrush allows the pressure to adjust opacity, color, hardness and size, individually or in any combination. The same holds true (multiple parameters) for the other tools.
I would say that you should check it out and try it before making such an obviously wrong claim.
You were using the wrong tool (Paintbrush Tool). All the paintbrushes are images that you can paint with and therefore aren't sizeable. There is a wide selection of paintbrushes available by default, by clicking on the Brush setting either on the Gimp Tool window or in the Paintbrush tool preferences.
What you wanted was the ink tool (quill pen icon). It allows several settings including brush shape and a simple slider for size.
Don't assume that just because you can't figure it out that The Gimp is missing the feature or The Gimp sucks.
cat sig >
Check out http://www.bn.com/apress/ -- it's 40% off. And if you are one of their members, you get the additional 10% discount. For once, BN is cheaper than amazon! Pretty good deal if you want to buy the book.
Save yourself some money by buying the book here: Beginning GIMP. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!
I've used GIMP for several years now for professional compositing work, and the thing I have to wonder about is this: Why do so many people think that this tool is so different from Photoshop? You mention pencils and brushes, these concepts both exist in GIMP.
Besides, for those whoe REALLY want something that is less of a learning curve, there's always GimpShop. Honestly, I can work with either, but I think I actually prefer the native GIMP interface. I think it's easier.
My blog
Try Paint.Net - a great free alternative to Photoshop. I use it alongside Photoshop CS because it saves Jpegs much more accurately with a smaller filesize than photoshop. http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/index.html
www.wildpad.com
another gimp book... boy, i even dont know where to start...
(0). 16-bit support
(1). adjustment layers
(2). cmyk support
(3). lab color space
(4). (duo|tri)tones
(5). adjustment layers
(6). nikon/canon raw import
(7). 16-bit support
(8). actions (*simple* commmand recording/playback... yes, i can handle scheme scripts, but not when i need to get work done, thanks)
(9). did i mention adjustment layers?
ps. im a pro photog... u can flame now...
It's much the same as the kid whose parents didn't buy him a car and can't afford one for himself stating firmly that, "No, really, my bicycle does everything I need. I don't really need a car."
Potentially, he really doesn't need a car nor would benefit in any way from it. As far as everyone else is concerned, maybe he's even convince himself of it but no one else actually believes him.
GIMP, like a bicycle, may be capable of getting you from A to B. It won't get you there as quickly, you'll be sweatier for it, the results will likely look less polished, you're not going to impress anyone other than nerds and, sadly (except for a few specialized jobs) you're not going to find much decent work by relying on it.
Of course, similar to owning a bicycle rather than a car, you will be many hundreds of dollars better off at time of acquisition.
Does anyone know if the GIMP has anything similar to the adjustment layer feature which photoshop has? Its the one feature that i really miss when trying to use the GIMP.
Everyone is whining about The Gimp's interface, and I can't see why. I like the interface. Could someone please tell me what is so horrible about it, 'cause I feel like I'm missing something here.
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Ask david attenborough. He managed to say Gnu (and wilderbeest) without sounding like a tool.
If so many things make you sound a tool, maybe you are a tool and just trying to blame something else?
By the same token, don't assume that because The Gimp does something differently than Photoshop that it's a better way. Traditionally in image editors (and not just Photoshop), the brush icon does the bitmap painting and the pen does the vector drawing.
Without claiming that "the Gimp sucks" just because it's unfamiliar, I do think there's PLENTY of room for improvement in its interface (my opinion, based on screenshots and descriptions and admittedly never having used it).
Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS.
- Supports only 8 bits. My scanner has 16 bits/channel. I have been using cinepaint, which now is going through a transition period, but Photoshop is definitely nicer than cinepaint for photo editing.
- No support for color profiles. This is a killer if you want to do any kind of digital darkroom with some accuracy.
- No decent support for stitching photos to make panoramics. Before you say that you can twiddle with layers to do this, go see how Photoshop handles this, there is a huge difference. Photoshop can detect similar areas and distorts the photos (to make up for perspective change and lens distortion) to stitch them together properly. In GIMP it's hopeless.
Aside from this, GIMP has more than its share of bugs. Just yesterday I was doing a complicated selection from an image, and trying to bucket-fill it with solid color. For unknown reasons the filling would alter also non-selected areas. Go figure. In Photoshop this worked fine.I use linux for everything else, but for photo editing, Photoshop IS much better. Also, the GIMP code is an undocumented mess. At some point in time, I wanted to hack into it to add some functionality, and I spent 2-3 hours staring at the code without being able to figure out how to access the image pixels. At that point, open or closed source, what's the difference to me?
One of the biggest reasons to like the Gimp is the Gimp devs won't have you jailed and arrested, while Adobe just might. http://www.freesklyarov.org/
we will end no whine before its time
Ooookay - we have a choice between:
Sorry, but I recall a time when I ran Photoshop 7 and an earlier version of GIMP on the same Mac (and old G4 Cube)... I eventually gravitated to GIMP on performance alone (guess which one is lighter on resources?) Why? Because PShop is not only bloated code-wise (not as bad as, say, FrameMaker, but pretty bad all the same), but it's bloated features-wise. I don't need/want half of what's lurking in PShop (I play w/ photography, and keep any modifcations I make to a photograph down to as few as absolutely possible), and it seems a waste to dedicate that much RAM and HDD space to something I don't use half of.
'course, I'm not a professional graphics designer or anysuch, but seriously - you don't need an industrial concrete saw just to open a can of peaches. (I know, I know - geek license hereby revoked, etc etc :) ). /P
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
By why not do things in a similar way, if not exactly the same way? It sounds to me from what I've read, and I could be way off base here, like lots of the interface choices were made specifically to be different than Photoshop. Granted, maybe this had something to do with patents or some such reasoning I'm not aware of (and I haven't looked very deep into it) but the typical Gimp articles I see on /. all devolve into "It sucks because it's not Photoshop" vs "Screw Photoshop, Gimp works just fine for ME!". All I'm saying is, why can't there have been some compromise to make it more accessible to new users AND Photoshop veterans?
Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS.
well shit, i want to be a CEO
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Am I the only one who gets annoyed when non-novices review a book intended for novices? There's a world of difference between being able to understand somebodys explanation of something you already know and being able to learn how to use it from just an explanation. You'd think that somebody who hasn't "been using GIMP exclusively for touching up images for many years now and it has met all my graphics manipulation needs" would be a much better reviewer of a book intended for novices to GIMP.
I've always pictured the color of OS zealotry as a sort of bright flamingo pinkish hue
It seems as though everyone here decides whether a tool is good in the first five minutes. The GIMP really isn't hard to learn. I took at least as long learning Photoshop than I did the GIMP. I still prefer the GIMP, but maybe that's because I started with it.
And the GIMP is not just a tool for code-monkeys. Neither is blender.
The 1999 version of the Google logo was created using GIMP. You can even download the XFC file.
Paid Q&A/Research
But what sort of car does he want? Truck? sport? 4x4?
GIMP is a custom-job, using standard parts with the body panels changed.
Photoshop is an MPV.
There are things you can do with an MPV you can't get done in your custom job. But your custom job is better at other things.
The differences aren't bike/car.
"Sure, such a name already exists: call it the "GNU Image Manipulation Program."
Thank you Captain Obvious.
One fumble fingered boss filling out a requisition for a "GIMP Suite" and it's all over, baby.
Need Mercedes parts ?
For the record, it's under Tools-->Transform Tools, as Crop & Resize. You then drag a box across the area you wish to crop and press ENTER. As such, I'm led to believe you didn't spend even as much as five minutes looking around, as you would have found it. GIMP's got some interface issues, but the people who typically complain about things like this are the folks who expect each and every interface to be the same. Remember: at some point, you had to learn the interface model with which you've since become most comfortable.
Linux sucks compared to OS X.
I use Linux as my desktop OS at home and at work. I have also used OS X... there are two modern Macs in my house and while they're shiny and pretty, the interface bugs the hell out of me... and there are very few ways of making that better.
OS X is about choice... Apple's choice. It's a one-size fits all environment and if you don't like it, the Mac zealots out there will rip you a new one.
But I can't stand OS X for even basic day-to-day stuff.
So I run KDE on Slackware. It does everything it's told and I can do literally anything I want with it and no one can tell me otherwise. And it doesn't fight with me, it just does it.
And it's free.
GIMP sucks compared to Photoshop.
I'll give you that one. I hate GIMP. But that's one app.
OpenOffice sucks compared to Microsoft Office.
Not. Have you used OpenOffice.org? Even on my Windows boxes I don't bother installing MS Office anymore, and I have Office 2003, the "latest and greatest".
Firefox sucks compared to Opera.
I'll give you that one too, but that's my subjective opinion. I have been using Opera since version 6.x or so and in my opinion Firefox has a long way to go before it's a viable alternative. But it's still better than IE.
The only honest conclusion one has to come to is that the open source development model is an extremely poor way to develop software.
Right. Like proprietary software development models don't put out absolute steaming piles of CRAP and charge money for them?
I work for an application service provider... we host Windows terminal servers for clients who log in via RDP and do everything on our servers... email, web surfing, productivity apps, you name it.
As a result of this arrangement, we have to load scads of 3rd party applications, most of which are proprietary and cost a bundle of cash.
And you know what? 99% of those apps are complete shit. Buggy, poorly documented, poorly supported (if at all), incredibly difficult to implement and manage, and essentially impossible to troubleshoot when you have inexplicable and cryptic errors.
And on top of all that, some of these "software" companies (and I use the term loosely) have the gall to throw byzantine and oppressive licensing schemes into the mix as well (can anyone say "Intuit"? Gooooood, I knew you could)... so not only do you pay a pile of money per user for awful software that barely works, once or twice a day you get to call your system administrator and kill rogue processes from it from users who aren't even logged in anymore because the shitty program thinks you have "too many users" running it for the license you paid for.
My point here in this rant?
You have encountered some FOSS that wasn't very good in your opinion. So have I. But you know what? There is a lot of shit software out there, and just as much of it if not more is proprietary in nature.
That's a fact of life in the software world. The majority of applications out there suck... the nice thing about Free and Open Source Software is that if you get something that sucks at least you didn't pay through the nose for it or get locked into some archaic format or platform in the process.
And the circle of life continues to spin, occasionally wobbling on its axis thanks to the weighty presence of dumb.
Seconded. And it's nothing to do with the fact that the GIMP's UI isn't Photoshop's.
I had no trouble picking up Corel PhotoPaint and Corel Draw and using them.
I had no trouble picking up Inkscape and using it.
I had no trouble picking up PhotoStudio and using it.
I had no trouble picking up Fireworks and using it.
Yet every time I try to do something significant with the GIMP, it seems to get into some weird state where the entire canvas is shown as selected with animated "marching ant" rectangle, I can't deselect it using the selection tab, and none of the tools will do anything because the canvas area with the selection around it somehow doesn't count as selected as far as the tools are concerned.
The GIMP's UI is simply confusing and user-hostile. Sadly, the developers are deeply in denial about it. I'd try and find a way to report the sequence of operations I go through to get into the confusing state, but I have no confidence they'd do anything about it; they'd just say that I was expecting the GIMP's selection mechanisms to behave like every other piece of graphics software, and it's therefore my expectation that's at fault.
Inkscape, on the other hand, is freakin' awesome. One of the best UIs I've seen on any piece of vector art software.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Gimp lets me down every time. Since it is off the market now, I don't mind advocating a little skullduggery and using P2P to get Micrografx Picture Publisher 10 on Windows. It has infinite undos and did since well before Photoshop, it isn't scattered and counterintuitive like Gimp, and with a little time to get used to where everything is, you can be a real editing speed demon quickly. I wish they'd never been sold out, but since I can't stand Corel and Paint Shop Pro doesn't quite do everything I need as easy as I want... Yeah, I shelled out cash for it originally when it was still in production. Big shiny arse box and everything.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
The GIMP shouldn't be compared to Photoshop, because it's not in the same marketspace. It should be compared to Photoshop Elements and PaintShopPro.
$0.01: I'm not quite sure I qualify as "primarily a designer" -- I'm a sys admin who does quite a bit of scripting and a fair amount of web development for fun -- but yes, I almost exclusively use the Gimp for my web graphics. From what I've seen, Photoshop is no more (or less) "intuitive" than the Gimp. Just because that's what you learned first doesn't mean it's "easier to learn" or more intuitive :) IMO, the Gimp is a fantastic program that does almost everything I need, and does it extremely well. The only thing I ever do that makes me gravitate towards another program is creating animated GIF's. The Gimp will do animated GIF's, but I prefer Paint Shop Pro's method of creating animations. Other than that, I can usually figure out what I need to know in any of the three programs within a few minutes, since all three programs seem very similar to me.
$0.02: At the company where I work, we use a *lot* of OSS, since we are a small company with relatively tight margins, and therefore the Gimp is the image processing program available to our employees, in most cases. While we will purchase closed source software (like Photoshop) if an employee has a compelling reason to use something else, most (all?) of our employees are using the Gimp for their work. From what I've seen, once they've used it for a little while, they have little trouble editing, enhancing or otherwise manipulating images with the Gimp.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
It wasn't obvious to Golias, apparently!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
unfortunately it's useless with anything larger then 50 MB. Even in dual core intel system.
Please focus on better algorithms and GUI.
If it's your job to manipulate images, then why wouldn't you want to have the best (in my opinion) image editing software? I mean it pays itself after some time. If you are a student you get a big discount; Why not then? If you are a teacher you still get a discount + it's your job right? If you don't fit in the above categories, why would you buy it then?
I tried a few versions of gimp just for fun a while back. My problem was I could not get it to recognize the pressure sensitivity from my tablet, turning my tablet into a very expensive mouse. That problem alone makes the gimp pretty worthless to me. It should be noted I'm not a professional, art is just my hobby.
I have the GIMP installed on my system at home and I am always impressed by the range of features on offer, however there are several problems with the GIMP which would prevent me from using it at work, where I use Photoshop instead.
Minor problems:
The interface is a bit odd, but I can live with it.
I miss Photoshops sophisticated handling of brushes.
Dealbreakers:
NO CMYK colour. This is essential for anybody who has images printed professionally
No colour management (ICC profiles and all that jazz).
I hear that GIMP 2.4 will have at least basic support for CMYK etc. so I really ought to have a look at the development releases sometime.
Your link might be fruity, it's not to the developer's site but rather to a "fan" site, whatever that means. The exe wouldn't load and gave a suspect error message, also it is a different size than the one from the real site.
http://plasticbugs.com/?page_id=294
Zed: Bring out the Gimp.
Maynard: But the Gimp's sleeping.
Zed: Well, I guess you're gonna have to go wake him up now, won't you?
Obvious, but not helpful. "GNU Image Manipulation Program" might *briefly* fly in a corporate environment, but if asked by a graphic designer what a good alternative to Photoshop is, it still comes around to the fact that this app is saddled by a HORRIBLE name, which is an acronym for a string of words which most people are not likely to remember. If you say "GNU Image Manipulation Program", most people will think they've never heard of that, even if it's already loaded on their drives.
"Photoshop" is a terrific example of a program name. Easy to remember, describes what it's for, and isn't an offensive slang reference for an S&M slave and/or crippled person.
Whoever came up with "GIMP" probably thought it was hilariously funny and that somebody else would have come up with "the real" name for it sometime before it became even slightly popular. That person was wrong on both counts.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I'm not a graphic artist, so be gentle... AFAIK, GIMP lacks a lot of Photoshop's features, though you'll probably have to be doing production work (we do product packaging here, among other things) to miss them. The biggest issue I'm thinking of is the color support. Does GIMP do Pantone?
Somehow I doubt you can call GIMP state-of-the-art. Now don't get me wrong. I use GIMP all the time and I have mostly learned it's quirky interface. But certain things I just cannot get over. For one thing, it has file size limitations. It also does wierd things like stripping EXIF data even when you ask it not to. And the interface. I have used tens of different image manipulation programs including several version of Photoshop, several versions of Macromedia Fireworks, and a myriad of other options. Still the interface in GIMP is the most confusing. It is the "information architechture" or the way they decided to place options under various menues that confuses me most. Sometimes I spend up to 5 minutes searching for what should be an obvious command.
The conclusion? GIMP is a great program on it's way to becoming state-of-the-art. It hasn't quite got there though. Thanks to everyone who works on the project and here is to hoping the major issues are fixed.
I did, but it was about a year ago. I did mention in my post that this may have changed, and welcomed correction.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
Also, using a tool on the image should not cause the tool menu to lose focus. WTF?
Akana Peck's Gimp book is mainly a how-to-do it guide for the most common graphics editing tasks.
As the other comments indicate, Gimp has an awkward interface and for the present, the best way to use Gimp is to buy a how-to-do it guide.
I intend to buy the Akana Peck Gimp book the next time I have a graphics editing project.
I attended a Linux user group talk by Akana Peck. Besides being a writer, she is active in the refinement of Gimp.
My experience with Gimp is I get lost in the sea of choices. I don't really have a sense of "order of work" in Gimp.
The user interface problem is so chronic, so classic. It is a real opportunity to do what open source does best: build on what has been done and innovate. Move ahead toward what really ought to come into existence.
What I think Gimp needs is:
1. Gimp should get a top layer added. A user interface menu system built to guide and record. Record what menu texts, and what the user expects, what the user does (right step, trials, and errors). And send this menu dialogue for analysis and improvement. Uhh, as Marshall Kirk McKusick said regarding filesystems: another layer of abstraction.
2. A way to write backup files automatically with menu step names stuffed into the filename so you can backup to a named "step".
3. For the forest of variations situations like logo shading where there are dozens of choices, have a way to run 8, 16 or 32 trials with a single run choice such as "show me thumbnails of my data file processed by every logo routine in Gimp". And then a favorites checkbox to bubble the user's favorites to the top.
4. A process of analyzing user interface menu reports to improve the menuing system. Eleminate unnecessary steps, automate switching to special type of cursor, post messages to a dialogue box etc.
5. Design the user interface menu log files to be capable of becoming custom semi-automatic batch execution files. For example, I want to automate the process of subtracting images of sand patterns for my sand pattern investigations. Once I do it, I'd like to automate the process.
It seems to me that the usability problems of Gimp are a classic dilemma. Gimp can do many graphics processes. It is hard for a beginner to mentally organize an order of work and sequence of tasks. The problem at hand is to design a User Interface. One approach is to parallel Photoshop. How about doing even better: Collect information about user expectations, actons and errors. Use that information to converge on an interface that statistically results in the fewest errors.
Hey, you only asked for a name that "can be spoken out loud in polite society," not one that is actually good or anything!
Of course, I've gotten used to the name -- whenever I hear the word "GIMP" I always think of the program, not whatever else the word means.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
People need to learn to think of the meaning of the words that they use. "I could care less" means that you do care.
There was quite a few interface changes done when GIMP Ver 2 was released. It got a lot easier to use. It's not as if GIMP has never had any UI improvements. I haven't actually seen any reason why the GIMP interface isn't good beyond "it's not exactly like photoshop". If there is no other reason that it isn't good, then it probably isn't that bad of a UI. And it's not that the GIMP doesn't want to change just because they hate photoshop, it's just that being exactly like photoshop doesn't really solve any UI problems either. Not only would the entire UI have to be changed, but all the help docs, and all the previous tutorials written by users would be useless. That's a lot of trouble to go through just to make it look like photoshop. If I had to choose spending $150 on photoshop elements, or much more Photoshop professional, then I'd choose learning GIMP's UI anyday. Because it really isn't that hard. You just have to stop expecting it to be exactly like photoshop.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Hi, I've had exactly the same problem with myself, then I remembered that Gimp stands for GNU image manipulation program, not GNU image making program. Now, if I want to make an icon, logo or graphical button, I use MS-paint to create the basic image and then prettify it with Gimp.
Then again, I could be wrong.
But I don't think that's what GIMP is useful for anyway.
I think you need to take your document preparation process and split it into a few steps. In the design phase you work up your rasters in GIMP and produce intermediary images.
Then you bring the artifacts into a tool for creating press-ready documents. This will allow you to do last minute adjustments and such.
So rather than just asking for a Pantone color in GIMP, you find a color close to the one you want, and then build some grayscale layer masks in each process color. Once you are satisfied with the overall composition, bring the layers as seperate entites into the press tool (discarding whatever mockup color you were using) and at that point "color" them by the "real" pantone color, saving it into the native press-ready format.
I think trying to make GIMP anything but a tool that lets you interactively manipulate screen-rasters is too large of a target to cover.
Someone should create an open compositing tool for import artifacts from like the GIMP and InkScape and allowing you to create entities that are press-ready.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Um, yeah... like names have no marketing value with the public.
Applying that logic to car names, I'm sure the Jetta diesel would equally be as popular as the "VW Frugalnerd", or the Tahoe as the "GMC Fuelswine". Who cares if David Attenborough can say these names without sounding like a tool.
I like using GIMP. When I suggest the program to others who are not familiar with the software alternative, the name "turns their nose" from the start. People seem to loose interest, left with the impression the software must be flawed to to sport that name, even after demonstrating the functionality.
Paint.Net requires that ridiculous .NET framework to be installed.
A serious waste of time, memory and resources.
After doing all that, you get an inferior drawing program.
Easy to see that MS mentored the development at Washout State.
The Ink tool wasn't what I wanted, just a simple resizable roundbrush like in PS. Those presets are way too small, why isn't there a slider so retards like me can get a big brush to paint happy little trees with. Also the crashing and errors about disks not being inserted were quite annoying.
So I'll assume anything I want. GIMP is gimpy compared to photoshop. Shock!
Disclaimer: I'm a fan of the GIMP and am extremely glad for it's existance.
I've used GIMP for some years and on the odd occassion have used it to do professional 2D work. While it is extremely powerful when used with knowledge, the core developers are a guarded and decidedly stubborn bunch with a penchant for ignoring basic feature requests from users that they feel might somehow 'threaten' their political differentiation against Photoshop. Of course they care very little to admit this overtly apparent and often discussed tendency.
As a result we are still stuck with an insane GUI windowing model whereby all palettes, brushes, dialogues, and main toolbar need to be *managed* as separate windows. This makes GIMP a very click-intensive application to use, and this is something that no RSI-fearing designer worth their weight in pixels would want to dance with.
Is it really such a demoralizing design concession that GIMP adopts the 1 parent window, many-child-window model that nearly every graphical application (including 3D modelers) use? Providing a toggleable full screen option (tricky in X I know) and the ability to quickly define which of your child-windows are visible would boost productivity with the GIMP (for most) a great deal (currently GIMP is really only as productive as Photoshop with a dual-screen setup - a luxury not all have). It would also aid those that want to transition from Photoshop - and there are many, believe it or not.
Frankly, although Inkscape is a vector graphics application, it's general interface model is light years ahead and GIMP should really take note. If you haven't tried it, you should. Inkscape is one very sensibly designed graphics application and is an absolute pleasure to use.
Furthermore, GIMP has bizarre and difficult keybinds in place for the most common operations. SHIFT-CTRL-A (note not the easier CTRL-SHIFT-A) to select nothing, and then depending on what window is in focus, it may simply not take at all. There is also counter-productive persistence in the tool-states. Should you have cropped an image with the crop tool and then click somewhere on the image, the crop tool dialogue will pop up again (very likely and annoyingly *on top* of the to-be-cropped area). Why not just go back to a default pointer tool after a tool operation? What are the chances I'm going to want to crop an image twice instead of do something else with it? This persistence leads to all sorts of back-tracking and I for one have never quite got used to it. There are several other gripes but one line more would qualify as a rant.
If I've spoken wrongly about GIMP, or am missing some fundamentals on it's use, please let me know about it.
Every person I ever showed the GIMP to, I told them one thing up front:
If you're not trying to use a tool or a brust, right-click on the thing you want to do something to, and all the relevant things will be there.
And that's it. That's how the GIMP works.
You have a tool palette. This is how you do stuff on the active layer with your left mouse button or a tablet. If you hold down CTRL, ALT or SHIFT, you expose common tools modes (selection add/union/subtract, angled lines, path operations, clone brush modes, etc.)
You have dockable status windows. This is how you get feedback on things, or manipulate whole image attributes (like layers, an undo history, the color palette for indexed color images, etc.)
Finally, you have the right-click context menu. If you right click on the tool palette, you get additional tool options. If you right click on the image, all of the image operations are shown. This includes "save this image as...", filters, and the like.
I'm not sure what the problem with this is? How the hell are people who can't manipulate a pointing device (the disabled) supposed to use photo manipulation software anyway?
I mean, the could just do everything with a braille input device and Script-Fu, which is very possible, BTW. Try that in Photoshop.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Yes you can select the ink tool, but I don't understand why you can't also have a slider tool along with the choice of brushes, indeed not having a slider for size on the eraser tool makes no sense to me whatsoever.
Here is a good reason why the GIMP is not going to replace photoshop for serious designers. Because we are technicaly minded artists. We think defferent and photoshop is perfect no matter what OS or look. Some people just pick up linux. No sweat. They see it, they get it, they do it. It's as natual as can be for them. Others see a painfully unducumented nightmare, they know would work if they just knew the little quarks and tricks, but they dont. So no switching for them. Same with PS vs GIMP. I know every little inch of photoshop, its built to go effortlessly from hi-end print to web design, and its advanced features blow away GIMP. Now, I am a BIG supporter of OS movement, but GIMP is not a contender, but it IS a viable solution for millions of people who want to do basic photo manipulation with a strong set of tools. GIMP wont be unlocking any creative brained designers anytime soon, besides there are whole industries built on adobe systems, and those arn't going away anytime soon.
Well, we could call it imp, the Image Manipulation Program.
Stop your snickering.
People do that already with other GPL'd software on eBay. I don't know if it's there at present, but there used to be an ebay seller hawking 'Luxuriousity Office' which was OpenOffice rebranded and packaged under a different name. I am assuming they did it in a legal fashion, but never 'bought' a copy to find out.
I'm surprised at how much of a forced 'either/or' proposition people try to make it. Photoshop is the expensive 'professional standard' bitmap editing tool, and the GIMP is the free open source one, but there are many alternatives that are servicible and in many ways a better choice for many people. Personally I use Picture Publisher like yourself on Windows and the GIMP on freenixes. I've never, ever, used Photoshop and haven't really felt like I was missing out on much. If I were a graphics professional it would be different, but instead I'm a casual user whose most common photoediting task is scanning in xrays at work and casual editing of photographs at home of stuff I'm selling on eBay.
Paint Shop Pro is another viable and powerful alternative that is MUCH more user friendly than the GIMP. I don't say this as someone who has never used the GIMP, mind you. I remember it and used it before it spawned off the GTK back in the old days.
I also like XV and have used that particular image manipulation program since before Linux even existed.
There seems to be this notion that the GIMP should evolve into the be-all and end-all of everything.
Um, that goes against the whole UNIX philosphy, dudes.
Pressure support's been in for more than a year - I've been using GIMP with pressure support for at least two or three.
im in ur
You got scored as a troll, unfairly.
The truth is your comment is spot on.
Quoting the original posting:
"Beginning GIMP - From Novice to Professional" authored by Akkana Peck. Divided into 12 chapters and 6 appendices, this book aims to cover the whole gamut of features found in Gimp. "
I submit that any software that takes a 12 chapter book before any kind of comparitive prodictivity can be obtained needs more than a glue on interface change. I've never read a book on photoshop, (I don't doubt that they exist), its never been necessary. Its interface is transparently intuitive compared to GIMP.
GIMP has been a most appropriate name since day one, and the product is so maddening and obtuse that I keep a copy of Photoshop Elements installed under wine on my linux computers just because any trip into gimp will result in a huge waste of time learning what was immediatly obvious in Photoshop.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
So basically you admit that for the vast majority of popular software, open source is completely useless.
>Don't assume that just because you can't figure it out that The Gimp is missing the feature or The Gimp sucks.
Actually, not being able to figure it out is a perfect definition of SUCK.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I have GIMP installed, but only because Photoshop 5 can't open PSDs made with Photoshop 7.
That, to my mind, is still the dumbest thing EVER - and I'll never buy Photoshop again.
Because I spent so much time learning Photoshop though, I take the time to open all incoming PSDs is The GIMP, then save them, just so I can open them in Photoshop 5 and work with them.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
In PS, Ctrl-T while clicking on an object will select that object's layer. In GS, this does not work, exactly as in Gimp. But the Gimp method of PgUp/PgDn to select next/previous layer works.
In PS, while moving, both the outer edges and the center of the object will snap to guides. In GS, only outer edges will snap, exactly as in Gimp. I quite often want to make the center snap, so this one is really annoying.
In PS, while scaling, holding down Shift will preserve the aspect ratio, and holding down Alt will scale around center. In GS, none of these works, exactly as in Gimp. Also quite annoying.
I am not saying that the interface of GimpShop is bad, but it is not a PS interface. I would call it a Gimp interface with rearranged menus.
By the way, not related to the UI: Crashing this application is as easy as File | New | Cancel. Instant crash for me everytime. The Gimp (2.2.11) is able to survive that.
This might be useful to you to put all windows together in one grand window?
I agree. It was annoying as hell until I found this plug in.
I do use Gimp and have some experiance with Photoshop and PSE. The only complaints I hear about Gimp from full time PS users is the Gimp's interfwce is "different". Not worse just "different". From my viewpoint they are about equivalent although Gimp lacks some high-end features like 16-bit color depth and a CMYK color model.
If you want ease of use look at "Capture NX" by Nikon (Yes Nikon the camera maker) they have added some new ease of use features that are "new" ideas www.nikonimaging.com/global/products/software/capt urenx/index.htm
Did you really need to read through that whole tutorial to figure out how to draw a line? I hope not, since it went something like:
I. Explain what a line is
1. Explain what the shift key and mouse are
2. Create a new image
3. Select the paintbrush
4. Make a dot
5. Shift-click somewhere else (there's your line)
F. Let go of the shift key
If you needed any of that besides steps 4 and 5, you have do business drawing anything as complex as a line.
It's a lot faster to draw in the Gimp than in MS Paint. It does everything Paint does but more easily, since it actually has hotkeys and fuzzy brushes.
whilst it may not take tutorials to do a straight line, photoshop also requires quite an investment to learn how to do anything interesting. I remember being quite frustrated for many hours before i got it to start doing what i wanted.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
You're exaggerating. I've never read a GIMP tutorial. To draw a straight line the online help ("Draw a straight line") gives the key piece of information (use the Shift key) in seconds. Once you know that it's easy, extends intuitively to the other paint tools and is a heads up that GIMP uses the modifier keys with the mouse. A few seconds experimenting and I know how to bring up the context menu, how to pan the image, how to move the window and a way to get a new pen color. A few seconds more experimenting and I know how to draw patterns and fill. I haven't bothered with doing more but I'm sure I could via the online help.
I've never used any of the GIMP paint tools before (I've mainly used it for photo cropping and resizing) however getting up to speed on the basic drawing functions takes a minute or two only. For something you're likely to be using for hours that's a reasonable investment in time.
There's always room for improvement but most of the complaints here are by people who are just hand waving.
I have no connection with the GIMP project other than as a satisfied user.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
I've spent quite a bit of time in the gimp, cinepaint and Photoshop. I work exclusively in large (16M pixels and up) images at 16 bit depth. As far as the current offerings go, frankly, I can't stand any of them. Photoshop will get the job done, but I'm convinced that there has to be something better. Cinepaint is usable and sufficient for simple retouching, but it is very buggy. The gimp was great 5-10 years ago and is probably fine use with consumer grade images. It seems it's time for something different. Cinepaint Glasgow looks interesting, but the release keeps slipping. The Gimp people seem to point to Gegl, but that is a complete mystery to me. Time to write some code. There are a lot of good, but incomplete ideas floating around out there. It seems like a merge might produce something truly usable.
They're not much different. Problem is crotchety people who refuse to learn anything new.
For instance, I have a girlfriend that demanded I leave IE on her computer because she couldn't understand how to use Firefox. Christ, what does it take? 30 minutes tops to find your way around a new browser?
#6495ED - cornflower blue
I've always seen it (rightly or wrongly) as a tool made by programmers for programmers who want to make/modify and image here and there, but I'd like to be shown to be wrong about this.
What do you have to lose by downloading The GIMP for yourself and posting a followup answer to your own question? Yes, it's a copout answer, on the other hand, I can't directly answer your question without asking the opposite question first: What can Photoshop do that GIMP supposedly can't, and is it really worth spending around a paycheck on it when the GIMP is free?
Help us build a better map!
*Ahem* "Gimp" means "beautiful." The sarcastic slang usage for crippled/deformed people notwithstanding.
So, if something exists which cannot be figured out by someone, that something must suck?
;)
I fix computers for a living, and every day I meet people who can't figure out how to use Windows properly. I guess that means Windows sucks. Also, if I were to try to get them to use any Linux distro, I'm confident they would be even more helpless. Linux, therefore, must suck even worse than Windows! And to top it off, I've even encountered poor benighted souls who pretty much are clueless as to the proper use of computers in general! Ergo, computers suck! I would say that the only thing that doesn't suck is breathing, except there are comatose patients who could not do so without the help of artificial respirators, so breathing must also suck! This has convinced me to stop breathing, and I recommend that you do the same! I better finish this reply up quickly, though, since I'm starting to feel lightheaded...
In case you hadn't figured it out (which, of course, would mean that I myself suck), I was pointing out the logical fallacy in your statement. Although Windows kinda does suck
Just because my truck was built by KIA doesn't stop the fact it hasn't been killed in action yet in it's 11 years of existence, and that the only shop time it's seen is for routine stuff like oil changes and when some fucktard Californian fails to comprehend that it's physically impossible proceed past a wall of stopped traffic and rear ended it (twice in Oregon, once in New York, once in Alberta, every time by a Californian driver with Cali plates).
Spending time on making up cute marketing names is a total, 100% waste of time. Good products sell and prove themselves. Bad products can give a good name a bad reputation, anyway. Just look at Californians and what they've done to California's reputation.
Help us build a better map!
Is Krita ported to Microsoft Windows? This page seems to have "windows" marked unavailable in the list of supported platforms. Or should I re-buy peripherals such as my flatbed scanner, which still has a big red "unsupported" on the SANE compatibility list? In that case, I would have to wait until I build my next computer against the Ubuntu hardware compatibility list.
Some of the difference is that they have to use full-featured hardware in the Linux machines, not "winhardware" where half of the functionality is in a proprietary driver compatible only with Microsoft Windows. Remember winmodems?
If Microsoft can claim a larger user-base due to bundling, why can't we?
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
Put a middle button on my laptop and I'll accept your workaround.
Hotkeys are not intuitive since they are not graphically represented.
The way to draw a line in GIMP (using only a mouse) is to use the
"Create and Edit Paths" tool, click on the two end points, click
Edit->Stroke Path, select your options and you are done.
SHIFT-CTRL-A (note not the easier CTRL-SHIFT-A) to select nothing
Um, those are the same thing... It doesn't matter what order the "modifiers" are in, all that matters is that all the specified modifiers are pressed before pressing A. I know because I just tried it.
Is it really such a demoralizing design concession that GIMP adopts the 1 parent window, many-child-window model that nearly every graphical application (including 3D modelers) use? Providing a toggleable full screen option (tricky in X I know) and the ability to quickly define which of your child-windows are visible would boost productivity with the GIMP (for most) a great deal (currently GIMP is really only as productive as Photoshop with a dual-screen setup - a luxury not all have). It would also aid those that want to transition from Photoshop - and there are many, believe it or not.
Do you even use a desktop environment? Put GIMP on its own workspace and there you have it; all in one place. I have 8 workspaces and one monitor (at 1280x1024), and I can use GIMP just fine... Perhaps the MDI you want could be the worst thing to add to GIMP because every major desktop environment allows multiple workspaces. Working on multiple images? Span them across your workspaces, set the main dialogs to appear on all workspaces (and perhaps set them to always on top) and with the click of a mouse button, you're switching between your images. Done!
The term "Hari Kari" means "eat spinach."
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
> Furthermore, GIMP has bizarre and difficult keybinds in place for the most common operations. SHIFT-CTRL-A (note not the easier CTRL-SHIFT-A) to select nothing, and then depending on what window is in focus, it may simply not take at all.
You can change the gimp menurc to psmenurc and get photoshop keybindings but you should not need to, the defaults should be better and there should be a GUI to use different sets of keybindings.
The menu lists SHIFT-CTRL-A but both it and CTRL-SHIFT-A works for me
The focus issue has been fixed since gimp 2.x, keybindings are global.
To summarize in two words: unfullfilled potential.
Any suggestions for open source vector graphics manipulation? If GIMP does it, I haven't seen it. I find myself doing a lot of stuff these days that requires me to submit .eps or .ai files for banners, pad printing, and that sort of thing. I can't find anything inexpensive that'll do it.
That is exactly what it is. Even though it shares the failings of WinGIMP, it offers a good way for Photoshop users to gradually acclimate themselves to the quirks of this application.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Jeezus, just buy a ball gag, some leather, and find someone to dominate you.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Hmmm.
Images of ER diagrams? Wouldn't something like SVG be more appropriate? Diagrams that are "FEET" across.
And you get a "full blown copy of Acrobat" at a student discount?
9 hour runs from your case tool?
Something seems seriously wrong here. If you're too cheap to buy a full copy of Acrobat when you're working with ER diagrams that are "FEET" across you're doing something seriously wrong.
I can't decide if you're a liar or a fool, or most probably a liar AND a fool. Perhaps neither, though I think that is far less likely. Whatever you are, you need to learn a bit more about choosing appropriate tools and, just maybe, about building ER diagrams that are actually usable, instead of time/money wasting pretty wallpaper.
The GIMP is ok if you are looking for a decent photo editor. But if you are a person that does pre-press would not be interested in this product. It has no CMYK support. Yes, there is a plugin; but it is nothing more than a CMYK band-aid.
I would love to be able to say I did this or that design using only GIMP and Inkscape, but the truth is I rely too much on Photoshop and Fireworks features that are still missing in GIMP. Especially dynamic object and layer effects. I found a GIMP plugin that applies layer effects emulating Photoshop's, but it has no preview and isn't dynamic - more of a macro than a layer effect. (By "dynamic", I mean that after applying the "stroke" layer effect to a bitmap in Photoshop, my modifications of that layer will affect the shape of that "stroke"). It may sound piffling, but when I had to delete several layers and reapply the macro because a client wanted a couple of effects tweaked, I found myself reaching for Fireworks again.
Having said that, thanks to UFRaw GIMP has better support for my digital camera than Photoshop CS (I'm waiting for a Universal release before upgrading). Since my digital camera is the Fujifilm S5200, by "better support", I mean "support period".
Someone made a start on a "Cocoa GIMP". They called it "Seashore".
http://seashore.sourceforge.net/
Doesn't really have enough of GIMP's features to make it a viable alternative, though.
When did you decide this?
I mentioned this in a comment elsewhere in this thread, but I wonder if you might have a solution: one of the things holding me back from switching from Photoshop/Fireworks to GIMP is the latter's lack of layer effects. I found a GIMP plugin that emulates Photoshop-style layer effects, but they aren't very good, aren't dynamic, can't be easily tweaked, and there's no preview.
Does GIMP actually have identical functionality hidden somewhere?
17:15
ilgaz: hi people. Is there a single sentence explanation why GIMP doesn't have 48bit image editing capability? Or it is common thing in Photoshop too?
some_gimp_guy: ilgaz: yes : you haven't coded yet.
(nick changed to protect wise asses anonymity)
This is plain wrong, at least on Linux where I can test it. The two orders are equivalent.
You do raise many other good points, however.
you, sir, are a lying cunt. gimp has had this feature for years. astroturfing micro$hit troll/adobe FUD shrill is what you are.
Yup. My wife is a web worker and she won't touch the GIMP. And she uses OO.org (and Bluefish -- likes it!) all the time.
Normally, I'm prone to scratch my head at people who think OpenOffice.org is so different from Office they are afraid to touch it. But the GIMP really is off-puttingly different from Photoshop without compensating features or market share. Not appreciating that is a blind spot.
I totally agree with this. It's almost worth starting a sourceforge project which is identical to GIMP in all but name. That way, it should be trivial to keep it fully up-to-date with the original.
> Script-Fu which also simplifies the process of creating scripts
There speaks someone who has never used it. Here's a hint: no debugger.
Ade_
/
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
"Do you even use a desktop environment? Put GIMP on its own workspace and there you have it; all in one place. "
:)
Don't be an insensible clod, some poor saps still use an OS which hasn't got more then 1 workspace.
Trust me I'm posting from one (only because I have to here)and it's supposed to be "Professional" and for "eXPerienced" users...tsss
Yes I do use a 'desktop environment' of sorts, WMII to be precise. On my Ubuntu box (Gnome DE) it is no better. Frankly the idea of moving from workspace to workspace to access individual images (at times I have 10 or 15 open) or to select new tools and change brushes, sounds dizzying and far too management intensive for daily use. I'd probably lose complete track of where everything is after a few hours of work.
The point is to reduce the amount of key-presses to access functions and editable assets, not increase them. Even if you are correct, and spreading out a project over multiple desktops is the way to go, it's a very bad sign that GIMP relies on this to be useful whereas other graphic suites/applications do not. I've used and appreciated multiple workspaces for close to 8 years, and this does not seem like a good application for them. I think the fact still stands, having individual, user managed X windows for each component of an image editing application is madness. Part of a sensible desktop environment is having 'windows' and/or focusable elements grouped by task. GIMP goes in the other direction and as such demands alot from the user.
I 100% agree. It's a crummy name and it drives people away.
I use inkscape for vector work. Don't know if it has the features real designers use. I just use it to pass long nights stoned out of my head and drunk on beer. I think The Gimp is nice too, but agree with the comments re: interface.
I strongly disagree with the comments re: name. Whoever said that does not understand geeks and their self-deprecating, self-referential hacker humour. I guess if you are still wrapped up in ego and somehow imagine that the name of the graphics manipulation program you use has some reflection on the size of your penis, then the name could be a problem.
GIMP doesn't do it, well, doesn't focus on it, similar to how PS doesn't focus on vector graphics.
There is a good little open source vector graphics app though, inkscape, that you can find here: http://www.inkscape.org/
No Comment.
I use Inkscape for this, and I'm pretty happy with it. It's not as feature-rich as recent versions of Corel Draw, for example, but it does what I need, and it's free.
"Are you being weird, or sarcastic?" said Emma. I said I didn't know because I get the two feelings mixed up.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Sure, such a name already exists: call it the "GNU Image Manipulation Program."
Are you being serious? We know the acronym and its meaning, thank you. The problem is, neither "The GIMP" nor "GNU Image Manipulation Program" sounds attractive. The first isn't serious and the latter makes you feel like it's some scientific application.
The problem with Linux and many OSS apps is the names being used, the way websites are built (either plain-text or just plain ugly) and the support (google any problem, and you'll end up with an endless list of newsgroup posts). These things make open source stay in the dark. They make Linux less crdible. They make the OSS comunity look like a bunch of 80's geeks. You can't blame the average Joe for liking Windows better.
Sure, your website can be read with an old dumb terminal; sure, "deamons", "gnome" and "satan" sound cool; sure, your app can do just like the close-source equivalent -- the problem is the image. People are not going to switch to OSS. It's not gonna happen until some things are fixed. Sure, most developpers are not GUI fans but not everyone is a developper. And The GIMP is a good example of what keeps OSS in the dark. A stupid name, a boring website for an image editing software and a GUI made by people who are most likely used to drawing with their C64.
I know the advantages of OSS software and The GIMP *MIGHT* be interesting for some people. But damn, if OSS developpers keep thinking Windows users are just retarded bastards, they're just missing the boat. The marketing and the image, though heavily despised by many OSS people, still play a major role in the success of an operating system or a program. Maybe The GIMP does what Photoshop does but, somehow, some people still pay hundreds of dollars and stick with Photoshop. Sometimes, being free, whether as in beer or speech, just isn't enough.
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
Don't be an insensible clod, some poor saps still use an OS which hasn't got more then 1 workspace. Trust me I'm posting from one (only because I have to here)and it's supposed to be "Professional" and for "eXPerienced" users...tsss :)
It's funny you mention that, actually. Windows 2000 and probably XP does in fact have support for multiple workspaces. I stumbled across an undocumented (what a surprise there) Windows API called CreateDesktop. I later discovered that the dialog you see on Windows 2000 when you press Ctrl+Alt+Del appears on it's own desktop, but only the system has access to change the desktop to that particular one. I suspect that is why it is usually quite responsive when you pull the three finger salute on Windows 2000.
I played around with it for a while but I had found that only certain Windows apps (like Task Manager) would respond and actually place themselves on the currently active desktop, while all other apps would simply launch on the default desktop. I thought about making a workspace switcher, but because of the way it works (and the way it was undocumented), you'd need to run a seperate explorer.exe process on each desktop, and somehow find a way to get new processes to place their windows on the active desktop.
But yes, you're right, I shouldn't be so insensitive. I can still remember those days of single-workspaceness. Of couse IE doesn't have tabs either, and having a few explorer windows, five or six IE windows, Microsoft Visual Studio, SQL-Server Enterprise Manager, Access, Outlook and Word open all at once... makes me wonder how I ever got on without multiple workspaces (and also how much proprietary crap I was running)!
I've been using Photoshop since 1989 so, yes, I'm ofcourse used to it and partial. But, I've tried a little bit with GIMP and even when installing the replacement GIMP with the GUI looking like Photoshop it's still lacking too much for a serious amateur or a professional. GIMP is a good alternative to Photoshop for simpler work and for the beginner but it's not even close to compete with Photoshop, at least not for a serious amateur photographer or pro, or any other professional needing a tool like Photoshop. I need a NEF (Nikon raw format) viewer and editor and forget GIMP providing that. Even RAW, which I can get some old RAW editor (outdated) for GIMP, is still light years from being able to do what Adboe RAW plugin allows you to do, not to say what all other RAW editors out there can do and almost all of them support NEF since a long time back. Since I'm not that good at GIMP, and since I can't use it if it won't provide me with NEF support, I can't be sure of the following so pls do correct me if I'm wrong, but what I've heard is that GIMP lacks such important features as 16-bit support, the majorly important IPTC support for us serious photographers, independent color adjustments, sharpening tools?, noise reduction tools?, and more tools, important to many of us but not me.
As did I and you're right. My point however is that the keybind itself is unweildy. It's simply ridiculous to require 3 keys to 'Select None', let alone 3 keys so close together. Why not use ESC (increasingly predominant in graphical suite UI's) or Ctrl-A (select all) Mod1-A (select none), for instance?
I'm using GIMP 2.2.6, and if you go into the File menu, select Preferences, go to Interface, you can configure keyboard shortcuts right there. Personally though, my fingers comfortably press Ctrl+Shift+A (little finger on Ctrl, ring finger on Shift and middle finger on A, and it even works well on Dvorak, since the A is in the same place.), though I can understand how uncomfortable it could be for some people.
Frankly the idea of moving from workspace to workspace to access individual images (at times I have 10 or 15 open) or to select new tools and change brushes, sounds dizzying and far too management intensive for daily use. I'd probably lose complete track of where everything is after a few hours of work.
On the contrary I'd find it too difficult to navigate my way through 15 images all in the same workspace (even with a window list). I guess my memory works different to yours, as I have no trouble remembering what desktops my images are on (or any of my programs running for that matter), even when I disappear for lunch for an hour or two and come back.
The point is to reduce the amount of key-presses to access functions and editable assets, not increase them. Even if you are correct, and spreading out a project over multiple desktops is the way to go, it's a very bad sign that GIMP relies on this to be useful whereas other graphic suites/applications do not. I've used and appreciated multiple workspaces for close to 8 years, and this does not seem like a good application for them. I think the fact still stands, having individual, user managed X windows for each component of an image editing application is madness. Part of a sensible desktop environment is having 'windows' and/or focusable elements grouped by task. GIMP goes in the other direction and as such demands alot from the user.
Other graphic suites/applications? You mean for Windows? Well that would explain why they aren't oriented around multiple workspaces. Besides, with a multimedia keyboard with lots of buttons, you can program Gnome to switch to specific workspaces with just one keyboard button, but you cannot program graphics suites this way because the images you work on differ each session. In fact, with Screen Actions for Gnome, you can have the mouse cursor wrap to the next workspace and even drag and drop over multiple workspaces. It feels just like having multiple monitors (to me)! Even with dual monitor setups you cannot look at both screens simultaneously.
I agree somewhat. Having lots of user-managed windows can get messy, but I would much rather have the ability to span my work across workspaces than to have it kaleidescoped all in one, especially with 10-15 images. Screen Actions and a multimedia keyboard with lots of buttons certainly make multiple workspaces more of an asset.
Just check out Lightroom. http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/ This will, probably, be the ultimate tool for serious amateur and pro photographers and any other pros in the imaging field. If you got Mac then you can test it already now. Think it's in beta3 atm. The Win version is at same beta stage but is not released for test to the public. Been waiting for this to come out as a test version for PC users since end of last year. Seems I have to wait until beginning of next year tho. Long time to wait for something I long for and need. Starting over with a large DB is hell.
The only issue remaining is print...
No. That's not the only issue. "GIMP might lag on some features and tools that Photoshop has", "in some cases might require the workaround skills you learned in Photoshop 3.x and up" and "[m]ost of the timesaving features of the newest versions of Photoshop might be missing". There's more than just the printing issue here.
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
Well most of the machines I've installed it on have already had .net framework installed (since other programs require it as well). The program itself isn't bloated or a memory hog. I show it as taking up 30 megs when running. By contrast - Photoshop registers at 60 megs (without a picture loaded) and Outlook registers at 90 megs - and Thunderbird registers at 24 megs. So for about the same footprint as a typical email program you get a reasonable paint program for free - unless you have a better free suggestion.
www.wildpad.com
I personally have never liked the parent window with child windows model, to me the child windows get in the way and I'd rather have my image over top of them or only have the tool box I'm using viewable. Now I know that some like the other way and ther is nothing wrong with that. I remember when (back in my windows days) I used Dreamweaver 4 and I loved its multi-window free floating interface, then with dreamweaver mx came the parent window. I hated it, with a passion. What ever I was working on always seemed to end up under some damn child window, lucky for my that they still gave you the option of switching to the multi-window mode of Dreamweaver 4. The same is true between GIMP and Photoshop, I can't stand Photoshops interface. I am used to working in windows, and my windows are very rarly ever full screen (I liked to keep an eye on other things at the same time), when I work on one of my photos I view it in a window no bigger then 25% of it size. I zoom in when I need to but I certainly don't need to see the whole image in order to work on the bottom corner or what not.
Anyway, like I said it something that the GIMP devs could look at adding as an option to be turned on or off but I wouldn't want them to out right switch. And sorry for the incoharency of this comment, I haven't even finished my first cup of coffee yet.
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
Uhh bub, you use Apache every day whether you realize it or not.
Man, you said it. ;)
I used to use it, but eventually gave up when I realised that they were never going to fix the UI problems.
My pet hate is open file dialog, which always hardcoded to the home directory (rather than the last directory used).
When I tried to suggest that they improve this in the GIMP forum, I was told bruntly "That's the way the GIMP works and if you don't like use Photoshop". So I took them up on that advise
Gimp is a usually derogatory term used to refer to a (normally male) sexual submissive, typically dressed in black leather (or rubber) and wearing a mask of the same material. This apparel emphasises sexuality by drawing attention to the crotch and chest. Sadomasochistic practice often features in the notion of the gimp, with a partnership between gimp and dominatrix (or dominant).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimp_(sadomasochism)
AH !! AH !!
Come on, people, face the reality. GIMP needs some serious loving put into it if you want anybody other than the most hardened geeks using it.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
I think it just depends on your working style. Most of the time saving features in Photoshop tend to have very inflexible parameters that make assumptions about what you want to do. This is a bad thing. So in the end even a seasoned Photoshop user is STILL going to have to work around the limitations of Photoshop. This is not to say that Photoshop is bad. It's more that Photoshop provides some shortcuts that those who know better won't use. I mean, honestly when was the last time you used a wizard in MS Office to write a document? Anyone who does is shortchanging themselves. The same with Photoshop.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I use it to make stupid images like this: Waitor
For cut and paste and basic photo manipulation, GIMP is fine. I prefer Photoshop but with GIMP, the price is right.
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
I use Photoshop daily, from creating graphics to photo manipulation. On a daily basis, I probably never use more than 5% of Photoshop's capability, so I'm not really interested in any new features, or tools. And while I don't use those other tools that often, I do know pretty much exactly where they are. Which is great, because it means that I know where to find those tools when I'm working in inDesign or Illustrator. I also use Flash quite a bit, and for me, Adobe as the new owner/developer is a good thing.
Yes, I'm aware of GIMP's stellar batch processing capabilities, but Photoshop's limited functionality there has served me fine.
damaged by dogma
Speaking of Photoshop Elements, is there anything like it in the FOSS world? A graphical editor that's not supposed to be fancy, just offer a lot of image altering functions, something novice users can use intuitively to play with their photos: cropping, resizing, rotation, flip, red eye reduction, converting to another format, some effects, batch processing, perhaps integration with camera/scanner import?
Is there any?
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
No, it's like bitching that Word 97 can't save documents in Word 6 format without losing editability. The problem comes when the application developer doesn't provide tools to convert data in new formats into old formats (in this case a missing or broken Save as Word 6), effectively holding your data hostage in the new version of the application. The problem is also when your clients have a newer version of an application than you have. The problem is file formats that don't gracefully degrade the way well-written HTML does. But in general, the problem is proprietary data formats. (period)
In a perfect world, my friend. In a perfect world....
And the comments by propellor heads against such reasoning just goes to show you that book learning don't mean a feller's all that smart. :)
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
Yep. Betamax proved that for sure.
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
*reads tutorial*
Oh, is that how you do it? I've just ended up using the Path tool and then Stroke Path.
GIMP isn't for the average user.
And you're right.
I mean, we go out and buy a scroll mouse for easier HCI. We figure out how to use a tablet AND a mouse in X, or we learn shortcut keys.
We use all the interface devices we have at our fullest potential. I don't want GIMP to start catering to the lowest common denominator because then its going to become MORE cumbersome to use.
I don't want it cluttering up my windowing environment with a space-reducing MDI and toolbar. I'm just fine letting WM hints take care of it.
I don't want it to add an extra menubar that I have to move my mouse to when I can just keep it where it is and right click.
You know what I mean? Let the lazy/artist types keep their photoshop. I'm one who actually appreciate that GIMP tries to create a different interface for people with more advanced ways of using their computer.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
For most users all they need is to adjust the overall exposure and crop. Doing that with Gimp is dead easy but Gimp is also overkill. Apple's iPhoto would be set for that.
Those things aren't dead easy in the GIMP. There's no "adjust overall exposure" button; it's buried in some layer.
When you hit crop, you don't get a tool to select what to crop, and then crop it; you have to use the selection tool to select, and *then* use the crop tool to crop. You can select non-rectangular regions, but it's unclear whether you can crop them (I don't know how).
A good UI would make the most commonly used features the simplest to use, and keep the exotic features out of the way until they are needed.
With the GIMP, I can apply a wierd little flare lens effect with just a click of a mouse; but I need to use both hands (each on two different input devices) to draw a straight line.
GIMP has a good set of features; but they need a more carefully thought out design. A good UI minimizes the amount of work required to do the simple, commonly used tasks; keeps exotic features out of the way until you need to learn how to use them, and keeps things laid out in a concise, well laid out fashion.
All along, the author gives interesting tit-bits. . .
So, this satisfies my RDA of pr0n?
I'm interested in a replacement for Illustrator. Any suggestions? Can the new GIMP handle .ai files?
This is one of the most useful times for those fluxbox tabs. of course it's not a solution but it does help if you can use fluxbox (I use fluxbox with X on my powerbook for that reason - which leads to my main gimp gripe - no native os x version! I'm tired of using X just to run gimp)
Chaos is Divine *
While not a designer, I am a photographer and own another photography company and use The GIMP every single day. Photo editing, upsizing(better than photoshop and it's 110% method), composites, everything. If you're a designer, you might be better off using Inkscape for your projects. That's what I used to design one of my logos. It always confused me why people wanting to do random original graphic work want to use a Photo Editing package. On a side note, Akkana is a member of my local LUG and did a little presentation a few months ago when the book came out. I think the book might disuade regular users of The GIMP from picking it up, but there's lots of good stuff in there even for experienced users. Now, everyone has complaints about some software package and being a photographer my biggest is the lack of IPTC editing in The GIMP. Filed a bug a while ago... the powers that be seem to think that IPTC is the same as EXIF!! Got around it by writing my own ITPC editing tool :)
There are lots of poeple who had issues with the interface, I'm not one of them. In fact, I find the photoshop interface to be very awkward to use and am much more efficient in The GIMP.
Just because my truck was built by KIA doesn't stop the fact it hasn't been killed in action yet in it's 11 years of existence
Okay, I'm trying to figure out what that point could possibly have to do with the issue we are discussing: That "GIMP" as a noun is a vulgar slang for "a crippled person" or "an S&M slave", and therefore a horrible name for a software program which people want taken seriously.
Is there something wrong with the name "KIA" which I'm not kinky enough to be aware of?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
GIMP includes the 'core' layer effects in the layers dialog under the dubiously-labelled 'Mode:' selection. All the standard ones, Multiply, divide, dissolve, colors, etc. are there. With the 'Opacity' slider, you can control alpha blending.
If you need to use some of the third party plugins for Photoshop, there's a GIMP plugin that will let you use Photoshop plugins in gimp called pspi that will let you use just about any third-party Photoshop plugins, even on Linux.
My blog
I didn't "decide" anything, smartass. If you had done a bit of research before posting that snotty quip on /., you'd have found out that it's an adjective for something well-formed and pleasing to the eye. Its pejorative use for the crippled or handicapped inverts its meaning, originally for humorous effect.
No batch processing that I could see, but it does look like a reasonable graphics editor, FOSS style called Paint.NET
http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/
Other options include Inkscape for some very cool ideas, and perhaps starting with Gimp. It's not necessarily counter-intuitive to everyone. Gimp does things more towards the X style, instead of Windows, which does make it different.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't "mode" just control transparency modes? By "layer effects", I meant effects like stroke, emboss, bevel, drop shadow, glow, texture, etc. that can be applied and altered dynamically to objects and layers in Photoshop and Fireworks. Not filters, either; rather than being applied permanently to an image like GIMP filters, they are rendered without altering the original bitmap so they can easily be removed or tweaked. For that reason they're sometimes called "non-destructive filters" or "non-destructive effects". Hopefully that's a better explanation of what I'm looking for. I use them a lot for web design and would hate to work in an app that only supported permanent/destructive filters.
Thanks all the same for your response. And thanks for the PSPI tip, too!
Okay, I've just had another quick play around with the GIMP, and maybe it's not quite as screwy as I'd previously thought. I did genuinely spend a long time fannying about with it last time, but perhaps I was just having a bad day.
1729 = 9^3 + 10^3 = 1^3 + 12^3
Again, when did you decide this? To elaborate: that's interesting, my dictionary doesn't list that definition, which dictionary do you use, where can I read more about this definition of "gimp"?
It's acceptable to decide things, by the way. In fact, it's quite preferable to defending things you haven't decided. I'm not sure what definition of "decide" you think I'm using that would cause you to get your knickers so twisted.
KIA is the military abbreviation for a soldier Killed In Action.
Help us build a better map!
In other words, no.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Oh, and I just googled it. The car company is not "KIA", it's "Kia."
Military term for killed in action: "KIA", pronounced "Kay - I - Ay"
Car company: "Kia", pronounced "Kee - ah"
Open-source Photoshop alternative: "GIMP", pronounced "gimp"
Offensive term for a handicapped person: "gimp", pronounced "gimp"
Dude in a full-body leather suit on a leash: "gimp", pronounced "gimp"
See why it's a problem now?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Hyundai mixed-cased it when they bought out KIA. It still has the old (all-caps) spelling on the nameplates found on Hyundai and Daimler built Kias.
Help us build a better map!
some fsck*tard Californian fails to comprehend that it's physically impossible proceed past a wall of stopped traffic and rear ended it (twice in Oregon, once in New York, once in Alberta, every time by a Californian driver with Cali plates).
Of course, the problem is that driving through a wall of stopped traffic is impossible in Oregon, New York, and Canadia. In California, the opposite — sensible — solution is practiced.
* man fsck for details
I never said it was easy to guess, but I keep seeing people post about this tutorial like that's proof that drawing lines in the Gimp is a monumental task. If you actually read the tutorial you see that it's simple, and doesn't even require switching tools. Honestly, I don't care much if people too hardheaded to just google for something can guess how to accomplish their task or not. I care about how easy it is after you know how.
Just because my truck was built by KIA [ursine.ca] doesn't stop the fact it hasn't been killed in action yet in it's 11 years of existence.
Maybe not, but if I was driving an 11 year old Kia, I'd want someone to kill me.
Beta wasn't a good product. That's why it lost. There's more to a product than whether it has 4% better theoretical resolution than its competitor.
I'm a digital artist. I use gimp.app on a G4 Mac mini running OS X Tiger. The current download of gimp.app is universal, so it should work on an Intel Mac. Apple X11 is required. Install it from the Tiger installation DVD. Easily done.
I launch Apple X11 and then launch Gimp. This never fails.
There are tutorials and a discussion forum at the Gimp User Group. That said, I plan to buy the book.
Gimp's inscrutability is half the fun for me. I experiment with the controls. Things happen.
Gimp isn't the only art software in my toolchest. Corel Painter IX.5 is the best paint program that I use. There's also an old academic version of Photoshop 6 on the Classic layer.
It's silly to limit oneself as an artist to just one program.
There is no simple batch processing system in GIMP like it is in Adobe Photoshop. You can't even record macros but have to use a specific scripting language.
They are the original 'layer effects' and that's where the plugins that let you do stroke, emboss, bevel, etc. get their functionality from. PSPI will let you use any Photoshop plugins that do these layer effects, whether included with Photoshop/Fireworks, or from a third party plugin. Of course, all this assumes you know how to get PSPI up and running with the plugins in the first place, but it's not really all that difficult if you follow the instructions provided.
My blog
Not to mention that the tutorial makes me want to punch someone. I know what the hell a mouse is, thanks. Just tell me to press the shift key and be done with it!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I guess it's technically true to say that general blending is a type of layer effect (insofar as it's an effect that can be applied to layers!), but unfortunately it doesn't cover all of the layer effects I use. Blending options aside (of which the 'general blending' that GIMP lists under 'mode' is only part), Photoshop has 10 dynamic layer effects built into it (stroke, bevel, etc.) There are no filter files or other external files to support these effects, they are part of the application. I just double checked in Windows.
Rather than using destructive filters, I always turn to layer effects because they're dynamically rendered (change with layer changes), non-destructive, and can easily be tweaked. The closest GIMP plugin I found, which is missing the essential dynamic rendering, was this: http://registry.gimp.org/plugin?id=6988
PSPI says it is for 3rd party filters. Photoshop's layer effects are built right into the app. They aren't the same as filters (which are destructive and most of which GIMP already supports). "Styles" (grouped layer effects) can be saved to downloadable files, but unless GIMP supports the underlying layer effect enging, the style files will be useless.
I tried using GIMP with Inkscape for a while, but gave up out of frustration when I realized how much it was disturbing my workflow because of this one missing feature! When I was asked to "make this box a little smaller and shift its drop shadow to the left", I had to delete several layers generated by the above plugin, select the remaining effect layers and the one containing the box, move and resize them all, then reapply the plugin with a different angle on the drop shadow. All I had to do in Photoshop was move and resize the box and change the drop-shadow angle - dynamic rendering took care of the rest for me.
It's a fantastic feature, and I'm sure GIMP's developers will adopt it when they get around to it. When they do, I'll give serious thought to switching my main development environment to Linux.
tried using GIMP with Inkscape for a while, but gave up out of frustration when I realized how much it was disturbing my workflow because of this one missing feature! When I was asked to "make this box a little smaller and shift its drop shadow to the left", I had to delete several layers generated by the above plugin, select the remaining effect layers and the one containing the box, move and resize them all, then reapply the plugin with a different angle on the drop shadow. All I had to do in Photoshop was move and resize the box and change the drop-shadow angle - dynamic rendering took care of the rest for me.
;), it's not that that bad. In fact, it's a lot easier than it could have been had you not used the script-fu.
The script-fu plugin you mention...I downloaded it and installed it into GIMP's scripts directory, and I see what you're saying. The script makes certain things easier, yes, and it does so by copying layers and then linking them to the original and so forth. Nothing you couldn't have done by hand -- I've used these same techniques for years, but it is nice and convenient to have it all one in package.
I will say, though, that while, yes, you have to basically start over with the effects if you change or resize the box (or text, which makes you have to re-apply ALL the effects
Sure it's easier in Photoshop, but what did you save? 30 seconds or so? It's not like you had to start over and redo the whole thing just because you didn't have Photoshop's layer effects...it was more of a minor inconvenience.
But that's what it boils down to -- What are your priorities? If you want a stable and secure platform, an OS and application set that you have the freedom to change yourself, and the piece of mind that you aren't putting money into Microsoft's swindling coffers, use GIMP and Linux. If, OTOH, that extra 30 seconds to one minute or so to change the drop shadow really bugs you that much, use Photoshop on Windows. Or better yet, on Mac OS X -- I guess 2 outta 3 ain't bad!
My blog