Gimp - Photoshop for free
Time for something for nothing.Those of you who have even the remotest interest in graphic design or manipulating digital photos will have heard of Photoshop. A product of Adobe, I think it's fair to say that Photoshop has been an industry leader, specifically on the Windows platform. It is possible to do the most menial of tasks as well as high end graphic design in Photoshop, and this is the reason for it's popularity, so much so that having something 'photoshopped' has become an accepted colloquialism for digitally manipulating an image. However the cost of this piece of software has become extremely restrictive and this has led to it being a pretty widely pirated package.
There are competitors Photoshop, all of which cost a fair whack, except one that while it still has a way to go offer all that Adobe's resources have done to date, it is great for it's price. It has been christened Gimp, (GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program.) The functionalities offered are more than sufficient for the type of projects I attempt, and for the amateur graphic designer it's a great way of legally achieving the same results you would do with the commercial offerings. It's an open source initiative which means that developers are able to offer add-ons to the core package, so logically over time it should be able to offer some seriously high end functionality.
Oh, so did I mention the price? It's free!!
Check it out @ www.gimp.org. They are gearing up for a new release soon which promises some great enhancements.
Labels: eish, gimp, graphic design
My "GIMP" always wears his "Red Hat"... hehe... Excellent product, I've been using it for years.
There's a bit of a learning curve to start off with, but I think there's enough documentation out there to satisfy most wannabe's like me.
Posted by
Anonymous |
August 1, 2007 at 12:34 PM
If the learning curve is a little hard, what about using the GIMPshop?
Posted by
Anonymous |
August 1, 2007 at 3:19 PM
Oscar & Eish!!! any idea when Gimp will support basic shapes? Thats the one thing that sort of hinders me from digging too deep into Gimp. I'm lazy and no graphics designer, so I neeeed the shapes!
Posted by
Anonymous |
August 1, 2007 at 10:09 PM
Stii, you are right, its something that does irritate me, although I must admit not something I've missed: strangely enough.
I'm not sure if or when this will happen: A bug has been lodged at gnome.org many times: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65197
There are workarounds though:
http://gug.sunsite.dk/tutorials/gunther1/
Charl, I don't think GIMPShop would help me, I've managed to avoid Photoshop thus far, and I plan to continue living my ignorant existance in that regard :-)
Posted by
Anonymous |
August 2, 2007 at 9:09 AM
Release 2.4 is imminent and much anticipated. I haven't seen whether the basic shapes 'bug' is going to be addressed in the release, but given the number of requests, it wouldn't surprise me if it appears in this release. Having said that Oscar's links have workarounds that should suffice. Thanks Oscar.
Posted by
eishman |
August 2, 2007 at 9:40 AM
Nice to see other people are looking to free alternatives. I've been using GIMP since I don't know when and actually found the PS learning curve quite steep when trying it out for a while.
Now it's gone and I'm back to GIMP for all my editing needs. I'm not a graphic artist, so I don't need all the fancy trick PS offers. Most things can be done in GIMP anyway.
Posted by
Anonymous |
August 2, 2007 at 2:54 PM
I use almost solely free stuff on my computer - openoffice & the gimp are core, I've been using them for years.
Posted by
Anonymous |
August 2, 2007 at 8:25 PM