On Sun, 29 Aug 2004 16:46:09 -0700 (PDT), Asif Lodhi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi All > > I always read posts regarding GIMP vs. Photoshop.
Just a couple of comments here, from slightly on the other side. First of all, I'm a linux user and linux lover and have been a gimp user since the pre-1.0 days, heck, from back when you had to either have motif or mootif (free version) because GTK didn't exist yet. Anyway, I used to say that the gimp was just as good as photoshop and had everything it had, and laughed at the users who didn't even have an 'undo' command (back in the ps5 or 6 days when the history dialoge was just a sparkle in some Adobe developers eyes). Well, lately I've found I'm wrong. I recently got into digital photography and because at the time I didn't know that dcraw existed to read my Pentax RAW files, started using photoshop to do importing and manipulation of the images. Later on I borrowed a color spyder to match up my monitor colors to image colors so that I knew that what I saw on my screen was as close as possible to the "right" colors. I also purchased "photoshop CS for photographers" (an excellent book btw). Anyway, the point of this is that as I went along I started to learn more about photoshop, which I didn't really know much about before, compared to the gimp. Because I was actually *using* it, instead of jumping in and out I began learning some of the locations of tools, shortcut keys, etc, and found that they were superior to the GIMP in many ways. Sorry, but it's true. I was disturbed by this as well actually :) It's of course MHO, but let me justify it and bring this all back around. Like Asif and others said, the gimp provides building blocks, which is great, but what PS does, among other things, is refine the tools to make the VERY user friendly and helpful. Just a couple of examples, both pretty easy to do in the GIMP, but just haven't been done yet. - crop tool greys out cropped areas, giving you a bit of a better idea of what the finished image would look like - a shortcut for 'fit in view', meaning I can hit ctrl-0 and have my image resized so it fits fully on the screen, instead of hitting '-' and '+' until it fit as well as it could - the zoom key has a shortcut (this is missing in the latest version of gimp 2.1.x that I have) - LAB color, which allows some nifty stuff with luminesence layers to allow some cool black and white conversion stuff - effects and manipulation layers, which means that you can adjust colors, layers, levels, and just about everything in a layer, so that the original image is untouched. - no auto thumbnailing of images - the filter menu structure is better (IMHO) than the GIMPs in some ways. IE: no separate menus for script-fu, perl-fu, python-fu, and filters; unsharp mask is in filter->sharpen which makes more sense than filter->enhance That's just a few. Of course the GIMP is a mostly volunteer effort, and a lot of the PS features have limited appeal to people outside printing press users (CMYK type stuff). However, my point is that while the gimp is awsome, it can definately learn from PS (as you noted). Actually, I have yet to find one "perfect" image tool. Even Microsoft's "picture it" has a feature that I have yet to find as easy to use as the 'straighten picture' function. You click on one point (on the horizon say) and then draw a line that is a straight line on the image. The program then automatically rotates and crops the image to those specifications. Of course you can do this using the transform tool in corrective mode, and crop by hand, but it's making the boring jobs non-existant to the user which makes a tool powerful. Not sure why I got off on a long rant, but I just wanted to give some perspective from the other side. BTW, this too is not a flame, honest! alan _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
