Anyone use GIMP?

[Djarum]

Anyone use this for image manipulation? I've been using it for several years for small touch ups and what not. It doesn't have the pluggins that many of the other for pay products have, but it is free, and there are several tutorials out there and other pluggins available.

Dj

 

[pxpaulx]

I tried the GIMP briefly on my dell mini9 netbook, but find Picasa more user friendly for basic editing (as well as quick upload to the net). I probably didn't give it much of a chance though! Does it work reasonably well as a full featured editor, or just some basic color and slider adjustments?

 

[Djarum]

I tried the GIMP briefly on my dell mini9 netbook, but find Picasa more user friendly for basic editing (as well as quick upload to the net). I probably didn't give it much of a chance though! Does it work reasonably well as a full featured editor, or just some basic color and slider adjustments?

It has just about everything photoshop has except the plugins. It does layering, has noise reduction filters, blur effects, I could go on.

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/

This link has been my gimp bible on doing some things:

http://www.gimpguru.org/Tutorials/


If you take a look at the B&W image I submitted in the challenges thread, I used GIMP to make it B&W and also add some grain to the picture.

Dj

 

[sebastel]

i use it (GIMP) for everything except printing. no colour management makes acceptable results a lottery. ah, and a known but yet unfixed bug in exiv2 64bit linux keeps me from using ufraw. what a mess.

 

[Djarum]

i use it (GIMP) for everything except printing. no colour management makes acceptable results a lottery. ah, and a known but yet unfixed bug in exiv2 64bit linux keeps me from using ufraw. what a mess.

I've been having some trouble with gimp on my 64bit vista as well. Works great on 32bit.

 

[hohoho]

I'm using it, but I'm still at the mostly-ignoramus level.

sebastel, do you handle RAW files in Linux, and if so then how?

(This message typed on a dirt-cheap Ubuntu "netbook".)

 

[cosinaphile]

i use it but , not very well, i find it difficult

 

[hohoho]

i use it but , not very well, i find it difficult

I have to say that I too found the very start forbidding. For me, a copy of Beginning Gimp: From Novice to Professional (Apress) was worth the money. List price is an optimistic $50 but discounts are available.

(You may ask: Why "free" software when you then have to shell out for a book? Well, you don't have to buy any; some people happily get by with web tutorials. And as for me, if I were to buy Photoshop I'd probably want to buy a book for that too.)

 

[mabelsound]

Use it occasionally on Ubuntu...it is very powerful but the GUI is maddening, for someone accustomed to Adobe products.

 

[Djarum]

Use it occasionally on Ubuntu...it is very powerful but the GUI is maddening, for someone accustomed to Adobe products.

I think thats the jist of it. Kinda like how some panasonic users hate the PEN menues. I personally find it fairly intuitive, however, I don't know enough about what can be done in layers. But Layers in general apply to many photo manipulation products.

If I was a professional, or semi professional, I'd bone up the money for a better product. Just like OpenOffice.org. I use it at home all the time. But I'd get MS Office if I felt my job or business depended on it.

I don't do a ton of stuff, other than adjusting curves..etc.

I am finding the Olympus software pretty easy, especially for batch jobs. I used it to scale the pictures I've been posting as a batch.

Dj

 

[squeegee]

I love gimp. I use it all the time for image manipulation as well as just regular graphics. There's actually a ton of plugins for it, they're not always "user friendly" but hey... for the price you can't complain.

I've previously used ufraw and it's gimp plugin to muck with raw images... but admittedly I never really did a better job than the out-of-camera olympus jpgs. I did notice though I got more picture width from converting the raw images myself than the camera jpegs (on my previous e-410).

I've also used it before to adjust the colour levels from underwater pictures (nothing that photoshop can't do).

 

[sebastel]

sebastel, do you handle RAW files in Linux, and if so then how?

yes.
as mentioned, i use 'ufraw' and the ufraw plugin for gimp for this task. it works quite well - only this stupid exiv2 bug "bugs" me on 64bit. on 32bit or in windows, no issue with opening the E-P1 raw files ...

 

[PeterB666]

I used GIMP on my Pentium Dual Core 1.8 GHz processer PC with Windows Vista and for full sized images it was a dog.

Picasa is heaps better for the free software user although it lacks many of the advanced photo editing tools. That does me for 95% of my play time.

I also use Paint Shop Pro XI at home and it is OK. I paid next to nothing for it. I just got Paint Shop Pro XII at work and it looks like a good upgrade but if you cannot get it cheap, then possibly Photoshop Elements would be better.

 

[Bullfrog]

I've used GIMP occasionally in the past. Badly, it must be said.

 

[Djarum]

http://registry.gimp.org/

This website seems to have lots of different plugins for GIMP. I'm sure that they are try at your own risk kinda thing. The good thing about open source is anyone can make plugins. The bad thing about open source is anyone can make plugins. You never know what you are going to get.

I work with open source quite a bit at the code level, and there is some great stuff out there, and there is is also some real bad stuff too.

Dj

 

[andyw]

I use it on the odd occasion and if you don't want/need the swish features that Photoshop has then it can't be beat! Seeing as it's free!!

 

[Cosimo Matteini]

I use gimp and I find it good. Certainly the best and most complete of the free software I tried.

I mostly use curves and levels. Occasionally I overlay layers to increase contrast that way. I also use to touch up on the perspective too sometimes.

I find it much better than an old version of Elements I have. I understand that the main thing lacking in gimp is adjustment layers.

But altogether it's very good for a completely free product

 

[Djarum]

Well, layers can be done in Gimp. It just takes practice and understanding of whats going on. The other problem is that I know in photoshop, there are basically scripts that do a certain procedure in layers to achieve some result, that has to be done step by step in GIMP unless there is a script someone has written for Gimp to perform the task.

I downloaded their latest new version a week or so ago. It seems more stable on 64 bit platforms vs the previous version.

 

[mauve]

I use plain old dcraw and mostly cinepaint (cinepaint is a gimp 1.x fork). Decent colour handling capabilities, especially cinepaint (8-6-32 bits, HDR, cms, everything and the kitchen sink). I don't usually tweak much my pictures, but I appreciate the colours to be accurate and to preserve as much shades as possible, for we don't know what technological feat is coming in the future and we might be happy to have kept those - at the moment - invisible details, to reprocess.

 

[hanzo]

Diorama effect using GIMP

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