Giving The GIMP a second chance

I’m a longtime Photoshop user. I first used it in the early ‘90s—v. 1.0, if I remember correctly. Our lab’s Macs were monochromatic and Photoshop was still a couple of versions shy from having layers. It still blew my pants off! I remember playing a puerile prank on an innocent TA by grafting her head onto a nude female torso and wallpapering the architecture school’s gallery with the laser printout. You mean I can do this to PHOTOGRAPHS? I am GOD!!! ... Six versions later, we have layers, 24-bit color, editable text and heaven knows what else.

Photoshop changed my world. I will never again see a photographic image without wondering: “What’s been changed in this one?”, or: “Boy, I bet someone had a lot of fun with the cropping paths in that one!” However, due to changing responsibilities (moving up the managerial food chain, ha!), I now use graphics apps much less than I used to. In fact, 80% of my day is now spent between Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. So I’ve lapsed on renewing my Photoshop license. It’s damned expensive for personal use, isn’t it?

Being cozy with the open source movement, I’ve committed to giving The GIMP a chance. The problem is: every time I decide that it will become my “official” bitmap editor, I try using it for a while and I always end up breaking something in utter frustration. Why? It’s user interface is too similar to Photoshop’s, yet not similar enough.

It sounds stupid, but it’s a real problem. Contrast it with my experience with Fireworks: I picked up Fireworks fairly easily because I was forced to go through the tutorial. Fireworks lives in a very different world than Photoshop. Filters are different. Layers are different. And then there’s that whole vectors thing. Funky stuff. I’d better go back to read the instructions!

With The GIMP, however, you get as close to a clone of Photoshop as you can have without someone getting sued. (To be fair, it’s probably equivalent to Photoshop 5 or earlier. I miss not being able to edit text layers like you can on more recent versions of Photoshop. Or maybe you can and I haven’t figured out how to do it yet.) The GIMP is close enough to Photoshop for me to be able to do all of the basic things with it (resizing, changing color balances, etc.) but different enough for advanced things to require quite a bit of research.

Today I was building a PowerPoint presentation that required a lot of graphics work. So I decided to chuck the canoe and give The GIMP a fifth chance. And I think I got it! I even started getting into the zen flow of the thing. I was using masks and layers and gradients and alpha channels and blur tools and (a big thing for me) using the keyboard for most of it. (No, the key mappings are not the same as they are in Photoshop, and, yes, this is incredibly annoying.) When I was done, I was going to save my image and The GIMP presented a dialog box as part of the saving process that asked what message I wanted to include in the image’s encoding. The default was “Created with The GIMP”, or something similar. I proudly left it like that.

April 11, 2003 | Archived in Software