http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=51pest%24mv5%40bcrkh13.bnr.ca
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy Date: 1996/09/18
Hello, Linux folks:
I have been playing with that GIMP program and all I can say is that it rocks.
We no longer “need” an Adobe Photoshop port to Linux. GIMP has it all.
Photoshop beats GIMP basically in just the paintbox functions; there are more tools for creating original images in Photoshop. In GIMP one cannot draw lines, circles, etc. Once can only select regions of an image that will be affected by a brush. Also, Photoshop has some goodies like the creation of tesselated texture patterns, for those decadent WWW page backdrops.
That aside, GIMP matches or beats Photoshop in every respect. It has an architecture that supports external filters. A great airbrush and paint brush with a ton of useful modes, and a variable transparency level. For example, one can draw in such a way that the hue of the image is affected only, making it simple to change the color of someone's clothing, for instance.
The intelligent scissors feature is quite excellent: the operator guides the scissors by laying down control points. In between the control points, the scissors will find a path that follows a natural contour in the image. This combination of operator intervention with a sophisticated algorithm lets you easily pick out complex shapes, and either cut them out or apply filters or to them without affecting the rest of the image.
GIMP can combine images and decompose them into HSV or RGB separations, and apply a variety of standard filters to a whole image or just a selection. Easy keyboard shortcuts are provided to access the most common filters---for example to do gamma correction on an image or selection, one hits Alt-G. In fact, the entire Motif GUI is intuitive---more so than that of Photoshop.
The “clone” feature is nicely done, like in photoshop. In this mode, the user's paintbrush, rather than applying color or some other transformation, instead copies another area of the same image or another image, like a mimeograph.
One useful Photoshop feature not found in GIMP, as far as I can tell, is the ability to “lift” a selected region such that the image which remains behind is blended together to hide the hole, but given the excellence of the current release, I'm sure that this trivial addition will be found in a future version, along with a fuzzy paste. In any case, the effect can be simulated with careful blending---and GIMP does have a nice convolution tool which is used like a paintbrush. It's like a filter that you paint with. If you don't like the presets, you can enter your own convolution mask into a 5x5 grid of numbers. The filter seems to be cumulatively applied as you paint, making it intuitive to do more or less blending. In this way, it works like the airbrush rather than the regular brush, though it might be nice if the cumulative nature could be turned off, so that the filter would be applied only once per discrete stroke, like the brush.
I should also mention the multiple undo function, which is configurable in terms of how many undo operations can be done, and how much memory is used for undo. Speaking of memory, GIMP performs really well, which has a lot to do with Linux's devastatingly aggressive memory management, and also with GIMP's use of auxiliary processes which communicate image data via shared memory. This is a good idea, because the resources of a process are completely disposed of when it exists, thus the memory clean-up after a complex operation is completely assured. I checked the footprint of GIMP while editing a handful of small images (about 320x480). It was only about six megabytes. On the other hand, I recall the painfully atrocious performance of running Photoshop on a Power Macintosh 7100 with the recommended 16 megabytes of RAM with no other programs running. Constant jerkiness and spurious disk accesses spoiled that experience; GIMP is as smooth as a mug of good dark beer.
All in all, GIMP is a very excellent piece of software which adequately replaces Photoshop. The ways brush-style painting is combined with various kinds of filtering and color space constraints truly stimulates the creativity, and the intelligent selection tools make complex editing easy!
The program is freeware (except for the Motif libraries that are required to build it---but since Motif is an open standard, it may be possible, in the future, to use a freeware implementation of Motif to build programs that require the toolkit).
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Date: 2002-06-08 06:41:34 PST
> I'm just wondering what people think of Gimp as a FREE alternative to > Photoshop. Any input would be seriously reviewed......Thank you
i don't know what you expect. but for all my picture editing needs the gimp was always sufficent. there is of course some professional features missing from it and the range of available plugins is not as big, butit is one good program.
> 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