The GIMP

[rab3rd]

Anyone here using "The GIMP" for their PP work? Is it as good or close to as good as PS?


http://www.gimp.org/

[Scottes]

It's very very good, especially for free, but it's not Photoshop and it's missing a lot of filters and the fancier stuff. I'd lean towards Elements for $100, but that's me.

[Radtech1]

I used it for a bit, but it never fit into my needs. I found it to be too complicated and cryptic to cut my teeth on, so I really started with MS Picture It (a lot of hand-holding and difficult to ruin what you are working on). Then on to Elements which came with my 10d. By the time I was comfortable around a photo-editing package the features (filters, etc as mentioned above) that were missing from the GIMP limited it's appeal. I went to P$C$ and never regretted ponying up the dough.

Rad

[PhotosGuy]

PS is the industry standard & you will never go wrong if you learn it. It does have a lot of features that you will probably never use though.
If you don't have PS or Elements, try it. It has layers, lots of excellent .doc, tutorials, & forum help, too. It has plugins to let it open Canon-RAW files directly, much like Photoshop (although not quite as slick).
There's also a gimp-fork called "Gimp-video" for video-editing, which is used quite a bit in hollywood.
There's some things you'll miss from photoshop, but none of the "important" ones. Layer effects, filter-previews on most (if not all) filters, a good filebrowser are some of them. These may have been added since I used it last.

[SSquared2000]

I have been using The Gimp for several months. It is usually my first recommendation to those who do not use PhotoShop. Keep in mind, I do not use PhotoShop, so I don't have firsthand experience.

The Gimp offers you many of the same features of PhotoShop (layers, masks, decompose colors, loads of filters from sharpening to blurring and everything in-between). There are also many, many plug-ins available. For example, I use some nice scripts for creating frames.

There is also a special download allowing you to use PhotoShop 8BF filters.

I have yet to find a tutorial or book for PhotoShop which I could not handle in The Gimp. This is one of my favorite reasons for using The Gimp. I can read PhotoShop articles and understand them and make use of them. I've done layers, masks, cloning, transforms, and much more. I recently read a Gimp tutorial on sharpening by only using Luminosity, something I knew PhotoShop could do, but didn't think I could do it in The Gimp. It was based on an article by Bruce Fraser for PhotoShop.

I believe Elements is fairly limited in some of these areas.

The Gimp is also confusing, difficult, and often not very intuitive. I find myself having to relearn things more than once. Even seemingly simple tasks. From what I've seen with PhotoShop, PS is MUCH easier and intuitive.

The Gimp is also WAY behind in color management. In fact, it doesn't exist in the currently available release. But even that is beginning to change. The next major release will contain CM. You can even download the latest developer release containing the beginnings of CM. This is the current version I use at home. I believe most things are in place, but it may not be 100% complete yet. I've set up my working space and monitor profile and now get the exact same looking image from both The Gimp and Raw Shooter Professional (RSP).

The Gimp also does not support 16-bit.

That may be a lot to digest. I'd still really like PS due to the simplicity and also the ENORMOUS amount of powerful filters/actions out there which are only compatible with PS. But for now, I'm using The Gimp.

[rab3rd]

Thanks everyone for your reviews. I have been using the 30 day trial version of PSCS2. I think it is going to be hard to use anything else at this point.

[brian_jackson]

Been using The GIMP exclusively for over 3 years. While it is lacking a bit in colorspace items and IPTC editors; I don't do a lot of pre-press work, so CMYK isn't that big of an issue for me right now. And as for IPTC editing, I have only been doing the odd editorial job here and there in the past 4 years, and I just wrote my own IPTC editor in Perl/Tk. Most of my work is in providing prints and collages to customers and no one has complained about color since I've been using The GIMP

I'm a photographer and owner of a photography company, so a lot of the extra stuff that PS can do doesn't really apply to me. I'm not creating art with my image manipulation program, I'm editing photos and creating collages, flyers, ads, and postcards.

I never really found the interface in PhotoShop to be very intuitive, so all the arguments that the Gimp is awkward to use, I find true for Photoshop. I find The GIMP just makes more sense to me, but what do I know, I've only been using PC apps for 25 years BTW, I'm a 100% Linux shop, hmm, maybe that has something to do with it?

Here are a few links to some sites for help with The GIMP:
http://www.gimpguru.org/
http://www.pixel2life.com/tutorials/Gimp/All/
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/
http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/index.html

good luck,
brian

BTW, all the collages that I produce are done in The GIMP:
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/...d.php?t=119865
http://www.ActionAthletics.com/aa_examples/collages/

[SSquared2000]

Wow! Nice collages.

Thanks for the links. I had not been to pixel2life before. I will need to look it over a bit.

Are you using the latest developer release? I am currently running developer release 2.3.5 for Windows. Looks like there is a 2.3.6 version avaialable.

[gregpphoto]

Originally Posted by PhotosGuy

PS is the industry standard & you will never go wrong if you learn it. It does have a lot of features that you will probably never use though.

For sure. I've been using Photoshop for going on six years, which in comparison to some on here I'm sure is not a long time, but I've learned maybe 40% of the program thoroughly and another 20% I might have a slight idea about. I've never read a single book or (seriously) article about the processes of PS, so that knowledge is from trial and error, in my opinion the best way to learn.

What I always try to keep in mind is that there's almost always more than one way to do the same thing in Photoshop, so knowing enough to accomplish what you want is all you need to know sometimes.

[bieber]

Originally Posted by Scottes

It's very very good, especially for free, but it's not Photoshop and it's missing a lot of filters and the fancier stuff. I'd lean towards Elements for $100, but that's me.

Why would you pay more for software that does less?

In any case, GIMP is going to work fine for just about anything you could need to do with a photograph. The only things really missing are 16 bit editing and seamless CMYK, both of which should be coming soon (the newest release integrated a new imaging core, and by the next one they should be using it to its full potential). And if you really must have 16 bit color, Cinepaint, a fork of the Gimp (used to be called film GIMP) will do it.

[WesDigi]

I'm now using Gimp for the majority of my post processing, excluding RAW conversion obviously. I tried it several years ago and found it had a lot of bugs, but now it is a super photo editor. If you starting image editing as a raw beginner it will take some time to understand basic usage, but then that would also apply to Photoshop CS3 etc. Many people wish they could afford CS3/4 but even if they could afford it they would discover it is too complicated for them to use. Don't waste you money buying an expensive program that you can only use in a very limited way. Try the Gimp. If you master it you may never have to buy another editor, and if you need to upgrade you will have learned valuable skills which will enable you to get most from your purchase.

[dlpasco]

I recently built a new desktop system and am running Ubuntu. I love the new environment and am happy that it isn't Windows. For pieces that require Windows, I'm running WinXP on Sun's VirtualBox.

I have Lightroom 1 and CS2. Rather than upgrading, I'm considering a move to F-Spot and Gimp.

Anyone else using Ubuntu/Gimp?

[luigis]

I only use Gimp for all my photography related editing jobs, and I do edit a lot.
I think that with a little work and the right plugins and practice Gimp can do what PS does without much trouble.

Gimp can go from the standard user that does very little to their photos (sharpen, levels, etc) to a fairly advanced user that knows about convolution matrixes and things like that.

Luigi

[bieber]

Originally Posted by dlpasco

Anyone else using Ubuntu/Gimp?

Yep, it's a great combo with F-Spot.

Just as a sidenote, if you want to sync your library between multiple comps with F-Spot (I don't know why this isn't an included feature yet, I may have to work on a plugin for it sometime), you need to transfer the photos themselves, and a file called photos.db, which you'll find in your home directory under .gnome2/f-spot