GIMP 2 for Photographers

Jon Allen writes "A glance through any photography magazine will confirm that Adobe Photoshop is the accepted standard image editing software, offering almost unparalleled power and control over your images. However, costing more than many DSLR cameras, for non-professionals it can be a very hard purchase to justify (and of course for Linux users this is a moot point, as Photoshop is not available for their platform). Luckily, the free software community has provided us with an alternative. The GIMP, or Gnu Image Manipulation Program, offers a huge amount of the power of Photoshop but is available at no cost. Additionally GIMP is cross-platform, available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix." Read below for the rest of Jon's review. GIMP 2 for Photographers author Klaus Goelker pages 185 publisher Rocky Nook / O'Reilly rating 9/10 reviewer Jon Allen ISBN 978-1-933952-03-1 summary A great book for anyone with more than a passing interest in improving their photos The one downside to using GIMP is that most magazines and photography books use Photoshop in their articles and tutorials, so if you do choose GIMP there's a bit more of a learning curve. Now once you're used to GIMP you'll find that many of Photoshop's features have equivalents, albeit with a different user interface, but getting that initial level of experience and familiarity with the software can be rather difficult. The GIMP does come with a manual, but it is really more of a reference guide and while very comprehensive it is not particularly friendly for new users. GIMP 2 for Photographers aims to rectify this.

Written clearly from a photographer's point of view (the author is a photographer who also teaches image editing), this book takes a task-oriented approach, looking at the types of editing operations that a photographer would require and then showing how to perform each task in the GIMP.

Rather helpfully, the GIMP software (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) is included on the book's accompanying CD. This means that you can follow each tutorial using the exact same version of software as the author, which really helps to build confidence that you're doing everything right.

I already have GIMP installed on OS X, so to test out the instructions in the book I performed an installation from the CD on a clean Microsoft Windows XP machine.

The exact filenames of the installation packages on the CD differ slightly from those in the accompanying README file, but the instructions in the book do list the correct files and after following this procedure the installation went without a hitch. The setup files do not ask any overly 'techie' questions, so it literally took less than 5 minutes to set up a fully working system.

As well as the GIMP application, the CD also includes all of the sample images used in the book, and for each editing tutorial the "final" image is provided so you can check your own work against the expected result.

Even more usefully, the CD contains an electronic copy of the complete book as a PDF file, so you can keep it on your laptop as a reference guide, invaluable when editing images on location (or on holiday).

I'd have to say that this is without a doubt the most useful CD I've ever received with a book. Providing the applications and example files is good, giving readers instant gratification without needing to deal with downloads and websites (which may well have changed after the book went to press). But including the complete book on the CD as well is nothing short of a masterstroke, and something I'd love to see other publishers adopt.

As for the book itself, the author takes us through basic GIMP operations — opening and saving files, cropping, resizing images, and printing. Once these basics are out of the way, the book moves on to a series of examples based on "real-life" image editing scenarios.

These examples are very well chosen, both in the fact that the vast majority of the techniques shown are genuinely useful, but also in the way that they are ordered. Each example introduces a new feature of the software, building up your knowledge as you work through the book. By the end you can expect to be skilled not only in "standard" editing — adjusting color balance, fixing red-eye, removing dust spots, and so on — but also in compositing, perspective correction, lighting and shadow effects, and building panoramic images.

Between the examples there is a good amount of more "reference" type material, with detailed descriptions of the various menus, tool bars, and dialogs you will encounter while using the software. Combined with lots of well-labelled screenshots this strikes a very good balance, ensuring that even after going through all the tutorials you'll still get value from the book as something to refer back to.

Overall the quality of the writing and general production standard is very high indeed. There are some points where it is noticeable that the book was originally published in German, but this never becomes a stumbling block to the reader's understanding. Most importantly though, the author employs the "show, don't tell" philosophy throughout which is key to successful teaching.

In conclusion, I would have no hesitation in recommending GIMP 2 for Photographers to anyone with more than a passing interest in improving their photos. And even if you already use image editing software, the book is well worth a read — I have been using GIMP for several years and still learned a great deal. The accompanying CD is the icing on the cake, making GIMP 2 for Photographers a simply essential purchase.

You can purchase GIMP 2 for Photographers from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

No 16bit support

[Eugenia Loli]

No 16bit support on Gimp, and so it's NOT a good solution for prosumer or pro photographers. And Cinepaint has forked a long time ago and so many other features are missing from it, so don't even mention it as an alternative. 16bit support on Gimp was first promised in 2002, but it's still not here...

Re:In a lot of ways, Gimp is more intuitive than P

[JeanBaptiste]

You just have to look at it from programmer's point of view.

This is why most linux applications are nowhere near ready for the desktop.

not flaming.

Re:New version of GIMP?

[Asmodai]

The user interface is just horrendous. Every time I keep trying to use it and it just shows that despite all the best of intentions the coders on the project just have no clue whatsoever what constitutes a useful user interface.

Of course, that is my opinion. Your own may differ...

For the love of god, rename it!

[Anonymous Coward]

If appearances, didn't matter, we wouldn't need image manipulation programs! Time and again, I've seen professional photographers reject the GIMP. Why? Not because it lacks patented color spaces or features, though it does. Simply because the name is cringeingly embarrassing. They'll use some awful shareware app if they can't use photoshop, not the GIMP.

Now, as some borderline autist developer, you may not care about such things, and think their embarrassment is stupid and irrational. but arty types - including digital media workers - tend to be emotional and less than entiely rational. They're *all about appearances*. When they're talking shop to their colleagues, they don't want to be saying "I just opened up the gimp".

Re:New version of GIMP?

[blincoln]

The user interface is just horrendous. Every time I keep trying to use it and it just shows that despite all the best of intentions the coders on the project just have no clue whatsoever what constitutes a useful user interface.

Agreed. I have trouble even pinning down one specific aspect of it that is the problem, because so much is wrong with it.
The one that always sticks in my mind is how when I create text, rather than simply creating a new layer with the text in it, the GIMP also sets that new layer to be only just big enough to hold the text, so if I've made text in the center of a larger image, the text layer has a border of null space around it. So if I try to do something like manually create a drop shadow effect, most of it will be clipped at the edges.
Now that I know that this is the case, I can resize the layer to be big enough (although I wish I could just enable a checkbox where this would be the default behavior, because I would have to do it *all* of the time assuming the GIMP were my main image editor). But before then? It took me hours to figure out that that's what was happening, because I had no idea someone would ever design an image editing app that way.
Also, the file dialogues are horrendous (other than being able to pick the file type to save as by typing the appropriate extension, which is clever). Maybe they work better on Linux, but on Windows they are the clunkiest things ever. Would it really be that hard to at least allow the use of the OS's own file dialogues, if not make it the default behavior?
Adobe has gotten a bit sloppy about the quality of the last few revisions of Photoshop (having to delete my preferences file to make Merge To HDR work? Am I suddenly on a Macintosh running OS 8.5 in 1999 again?), so an alternative that worked solidly would be awesome.

Re:What makes Photoshop "better" ?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I'll do my best to answer your question. I'd like to be up-front, though, and tell you that I don't have enough knowledge to give you a vs. comparison of the two. So what I'll do is list off a bunch of the useful features in PS, specifically those I didn't find when I used GIMP about a year ago. Hopefully somebody else can chime in and say "GIMP does this too". (I would VERY MUCH like to be more educated about the GIMP. Since it's free, there's no reason for me to prefer one to the exclusion of the other.)

• Patch Tool: The Patch tool is a bit like the clone tool only it takes a stab at adjusting the colors of the new pattern to match what you're pasting it into. In simpler terms it's a clone tool with auto color-correction that makes it much much easier to remove blemishes and create seamless images.

• Layer Groups and Nested Layers: Photoshop has something called 'Layer Groups' which are a little bit like using Folders. This makes organizing an image with tons of layers very easy. Through this organization, you can use one transparency mode for the entire group. A lot of the tricks I do in Photoshop are centered around organization of the layers. It's difficult to explain without showing you in person, but Layer Groups alone were worth the upgrade many years ago.

• Adjustment Layers: Photoshop has non-destructive layers that do tasks like Levels Adjustment, Invert, Hue/Saturation, Brightness & Contrast, etc. Each of these layers has a B&W Alpha mask you can paint on straight away to limit the area of the image they work on. After you've set them, you can go back and change their values.

• 16-bit Support: I probably don't need to say too much here. Photoshop works in a 16-bit space. Although, just between you and me, I've found this less interestin since I have adjustment layers. I don't have to do a lot of re-fiddling with images in a destructive sense. But that's a personal preference thing.

• Smart Objects: Photoshop will take whatever layers you have selected and create a 'Smart Object'. Basically it collapses those images down into a single layer. However, the original layers are still available. They're stored elsewhere. You can move, rotate, scale, warp, and do all kinds of stuff to a Smart Object without it being destructive. It's sort of like... well, imagine you saved a Photoshop file somewhere else. It has a bunch of layers etc. Then imagine opening a new PS Image and referencing that first one. It's just loading it in as it needs it just like an HTML page references a JPG file. If somebody changes that JPG file and reloads the HTML file, the image in the page changes, right? Well, Smart Objects are sort of like that. The key difference is that they're not external files, they're kept within the .PSD file. They show up as one layer, but when you double click them, they show up as a new document with all the layers in tact.
  
  If you edit that document and save it, you'll see those changes propogated through every instance you used it in your main file. This means you can clone that image around as many times as you like, then change it later. I don't know if I'm explaining this very clearly or not. The simple version is that it's another non-destructive mode Photoshop has. It's relatively new to PS, but man, I cannot live without it.

• Lens Blur: Making an 'out of focus' image isn't as simple as just applying a blur to it. Photoshop has a lens-blur filter that takes into account the shape of the iris, bloom of specular highlights, and so on. It looks pretty darned convincing. (I can easily picture photographers loving this.)

• Text and Shape Layers: I'd be a bit surprised if the GIMP didn't have this, but I do not recall seeing it. Photoshop has vector based layers that are non-destructive. You can put in text or create shapes (stars, etc) or whate