> I'm just wondering what people think of Gimp as a FREE alternative to

If you search groups.google.com you'll find a history of Photoshop <> Gimp comparisons & spats going back years. You should definitely get all the ammunition you need to develop your views.

I've been using Gimp for years. It's powerful enough for all my needs and being able to write script-fu's is a huge timesaver sometimes.

Lee J. Moore

> I'm just wondering what people think of Gimp as a FREE alternative to

From what I've heard, Photoshop's only real advantage has to do with printing. Better support for CMYK color and I think the proprietary pantone system. (I don't use Photoshop so this is hearsay). The best intro I know of to the Gimp is the book "Grokking the Gimp" which you can buy or download in html format. Find it with a google search.

> And about the only thing GIMP doesn't do that PhotoShop does, is PMS and
> CMYK.

Apparently the latest Gimp now has CYMK support, so I've read.

> an explanation on what a script-fu is and what I can do with it. TIA

It's a scripting interface which is ideal for invoking repetitive procedures in order to gain a particular pattern/effect.

Again, this stuff is best researched (it really has been discussed to death over the years) via google and questions such as this (script-fu, etc.) are all covered by the FAQ.

http://www.gimp.org/user_faq.html

Which links to Miles O'Neil's FAQ IIRC.

There is also a Gimp newsgroup at comp.graphics.apps.gimp.

Lee J. Moore

Lee> my needs and being able to write script-fu's is a huge
Lee> timesaver sometimes.  -- Lee J. Moore Gentoo Linux/Portage
Lee> 1.9.13

That's the coolest part of the GIMP! I've just wrote a small script yesterday for stitching 1000+ images to form a large picture. I spent an hour on writing and debugging the script (because I'm not familiar with the GIMP, but I can Scheme fluently). And I believe that has saved me at least 4 hours if I did it manually (assuming that I wouldn't feel tired and fall asleep during that process and I wouldn't make mistakes). I not only saved time, but also used that hour meaningfully — learn the tool better.

Lee Sau Dan

Victor>  How to read directory listing in the Script-Fu?

Sorry, I can't. I know too little GIMP to do that.

I do have a gimp script for generating thumbnails from JPG files. But I don't use it often enough to have the motivation to write the directory-listing part in GIMP's Scheme. My approach is to pipe the output of 'ls' through an AWK script to generate the appropriate Scheme statements that invoke my Scheme functions.

Victor>  Suppose I have directory hierarchy full of images. I want
Victor> my script to walk these directories, find all the RGB TIFF
Victor> files and convert them into grayscale.

ls *.tiff \
| awk '{print "(my-gimp-function \"" $0 "\" other-parameters)"}}' \
| gimp ...

You can replace ls with 'find' for greater flexibility. You can even "file * | grep TIFF | cut -d: -f1" to select files by type rather than name.

Victor>  I'm not fluent Schemer but want to learn. R5RS doesn't
Victor> say anything about file system traversing, and I can
Victor> understand why - it is very much OS dependent.

If you want to finish a job quickly (but not necessarily most elegantly), use the most appropriate tool. For directory listing, "ls" is the best. So, why bother or struggle with GIMP's Scheme?

Unix is flexible enough for you to use different tools for different sub-tasks and combine the power of these tools exponentially to produce useful work.

Victor>  For the first time I ended up generating Script-Fu script
Victor> via shell script which uses find to traverse directory
Victor> tree, but it makes me feel wrong.

I don't feel it wrong. It's "impure", but not wrong. Use the most appropriate tool for each subtask.

Lee Sau Dan