For professional use, how does modern GIMP compare to modern PS?
On paper they may look similar, but GIMP in no way touches the amount of options and features available to a designer out of the box in a pro software. Even just manipulating a single asset seems to take twice the work in GIMP. Imagine a PS file that is hundreds of layers deep.
And last I used it, support for anything print related was abysmal in GIMP. I don't even have to think about color profiles in Photoshop, but GIMP gave me the sense I had to build everything myself.
GIMP is kind of in this ugly duckling space where I feel the feature set is not acceptable for a professional designer, but the UI is too overwhelming for a non-designer. And you can tell by the quality of work that the average user is either pretty amateurish, or who design is the second thought.
GIMP is more like Paint.NET than Photoshop.
First impressions was that PS was a somewhat faster (about 25%) for certain operations like duplicating layers and it's interface was intuitive after using GIMP for so long, but the advantages I saw aren't enough to convince me to switch on OSX.
GIMP is missing some rather powerful tools that PS has, one being content-awareness. In PS, you can remove a section from a bitmap, and have the space filled automatically based on the surrounding image. It works incredibly well, and the technique is used in a number of tools.
PS also works much better for shapes/paths than gimp, given its superior set of effects that can be added to shapes.
There's also a few not-so-important bells and whistles, like the photomerge script in PS, which makes it really easy to generate a panoramic image.
Overall, GIMP works great for simple projects, but it's missing so much of the functionality of PS that I honestly never use it if I have the option to use PS.
That's false, GIMP had that before PS itself.
I liked Macromedia approach with Fireworks, which didn't require the software in order to preview what a project looked like since it used PNG format. All Macromedia tools have since then been flushed down the toilets by Adobe. There is something Macromedia achieve with the notion of "community" that Adobe was never able to do.
PSD shares this preview functionality. You can open a PSD just fine in Preview on OS X, or with ImageMagick you can do: convert my-psd.psd[0] out.png
I'm pretty sure you can, and you can see all the layers and stuff. Editing though, if I remember correctly, is either extremely limited or non-existent.
Still, when someone gave me a psd I had little hope of opening it at all, yet GIMP displayed it perfectly. That exceeded expectations already, just too bad that I couldn't edit. But then again, it's better than buying an expensive product line just to view a file.
> The graphic design industry is one of these industries that have been completely monopolized by a single vendor.
Exactly, which is one which is one of the reasons I'm a big fan of GIMP and Paint.NET for when people simply don't need photoshop. They often don't, but ask for it anyway, get used to it and then want to keep using it. This is about adults as well as teens who are still in high school and who might later go on to work as designers, and then can only work with photoshop.
Every time I try to use Photoshop or GIMP, it feels like it is just too complicated for what I'm trying to do, and I don't have the time to invest in learning where they've hidden my cheese.
3 Single row Marquee tool 4 Single coloumn marquee tool -Draw a rectangle selection across the canvas from end to end where you want the 1px selection. -In the rectangle select dialogue, scroll down to the "size" and enter "1" for the width or height
5 Polygonal lasso tool -The default mode for the lasso tool in GIMP is polygon. Click and drag for mouse mode. -Moreover notice you can move points you have already put down simply by dragging them where you want them (better than Photoshop in this way).
6 Magenetic lasso tool - Try the Scissors Select tool.
7 Quick Selection tool - Try the Foreground Selection Tool
11 Perspective crop tool - Select area to be cropped with lasso tool - Image > Crop to Selection - Use Perspective Tool to adjust
13 Color Sampler tool - Windows > Dockable Dialogues > Colors
14 Ruler tool - Try the Measure tool.
15 Spot healing brush tool - Try the Heal Tool.
13 Patch tool - Filters > Enhance > Heal Selection
14 Content aware move tool - make selection - Copy selection - Filters > Enhance > Heal Selection - Paste selection ... (I have no idea why you'd need a separate tool for this. ;P)
15 Red Eye tool - Filters > Enhance > Red Eye Removal
18 Color replacement tool - Use "Select by Color Tool" - Colors > Color Balance / Hue Saturation / Etc. - Additionally: Colors > Map > Color Exchange
19 Mixer Brush tool - GIMP will acquire brushes that include background color mixing in the 2.9/3.0 release - Check out Krita.org for an illustration program to rival Photoshop or Painter X
21 Pattern stamp tool - Select Clone tool - Scroll down in tool settings to "Source", and choose "pattern"
22 History Brush tool - Open another copy of your current working document from your last save point - select the Clone Tool - In your save point document, ctrl-click on the area to paint from - Switch back to your current document and paint as you like
23 Art History Brush tool - Not implemented, feel free. :) - Check out GMIC. It contains a wealth of interesting painting effects for GIMP.
25 Background eraser tool - Can be achieved with resynthesize as above, but if you must have it in an eraser tool form, feel free to implement.
26 Magic eraser tool - Fuzzy Select tool (Wand icon) - Layer > Mask > Add Layer Mask (check the "Selection" radio button and the "Invert Mask" checkbox and Click "Add")
32 Dodge tool 33 Burn tool - Try the Dodge/Burn Tool. ;P
34 Sponge tool - Try the Blur/Sharpen Tool
36 Free form pen tool - Try the Ink Tool
37 Add anchor point tool 38 Delete anchor point tool 39 Convert point tool
- All Integrated into the Paths Tool.
- Check out my 30 second runthrough of the Paths Tool and related functions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sgI8rCRLbQ
44 Path selection tool 45 Direct Selection tool - Windows > Dockable Dialogues > Paths - Click on the first empty box beside your path to show it. It's now selectable with the Paths Tool.
46 Rectangle Tool - Feel free to impliment. This would be useful. - See Inkscape.org for a current solution that works great.
47 Rounded Rectangle tool - If you impliment this, please make it part of the rectangle tool. There is no point at all to having separate tools. :P - Inkscape.org again :) It's like Adobe Illustrator.
48 Ellipse tool - Feel free to impliment 49 Polygon tool - Paths tool already does this. I don't know why Adobe made a separate tool for this. It's unnecessary clutter. :)
50 Line tool - Paths tool... (hit b to end your line and start a new separate one)
51 Custom shape tool - Would be cool to see in GIMP - Check out the Polygon and Star Tool (Inkscape.org)
53 Rotate view tool - View > Rotate (also Ctrl + Shift + Middle Mouse Button)
58 Masking - Really? Gimp has more Masking options than the Carnival of Venice. ;P - Check out Quick Mask and Layer > Mask > Add Layer Mask - Also check out Mask to Selection, and Selction to Path.
59 Mode change in to CMYK - Feel free to try to impliment, but read this first: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CMYK_support_in_The_GIM... - Check out Scribus for conversion into CMYK (FOGRA 27 is the default, but you can add your own color profiles if that's not working for you)
Hope it helps. :)
-C
For example, Figma (non-open source) is doing stuff that myself as a designer, I find very subtly innovative for a browser-based graphics program. Sure, they are actual company which can devote more resources to the product, but I think it helps that some very talented designers are using it and thus, can give feedback and suggest new features with engineers to support the effort.
Similarly, I'm sure a lot of open source projects have thrived because the contributors are active users whose skillsets (coding) overlap with the project.
and I use Gimp a couple of times a week.