FOR the longest time, Adobe Photoshop was the biggest deal breaker for many people who considered moving from Windows to Linux. The most popular commercial image editing program was simply unavailable on Linux, and the free and open source Gimp—short for GNU Image Manipulation Program—was often regarded as a poor man’s substitute.
This was unfortunate because unlike Photoshop, Gimp is truly a cross-platform approach to image editing, with versions for Windows (2000, XP and Vista) and Mac OS X as well. This means you could stay on either platform if you wanted, and still get a powerful image editing application completely free.
Like Photoshop, Gimp offers the ability to break up a photograph into layers, stack them one over the other, and manipulate each one—making it a versatile tool for a variety of graphics design needs.
But my first experiments with Gimp on Linux two years ago left me frustrated. It could accomplish some of the tasks I did with Photoshop, but the system of mutiple windows seemed to make these much harder to do.
Putting text onto an image, for example, was nowhere as easy as it is on Photoshop, where you simply click on the text tool, click on where you want the words to appear and start typing. On Gimp, doing this opens a separate box where you must enter the text and click OK before it appears on the image.
Brushes, too, were extremely limited and not scalable like they are on Photoshop and font choices on Linux systems were awfully limited.
Of course, some of this was just a matter of getting used to doing things in a different way.
Having grown accustomed to where Photoshop kept its tools, I struggled with Gimp’s system of menus, much like a driver used to driving an automatic might have a hard time driving a car with manual transmission.
Cryptic terms like “Script-Fu” and “Python-Fu” (Gimp’s scripting extensions used to automate certain procedures) did not help.
For all these reasons and plain resistance to change, I stuck it out with Photoshop, running it first under Wine, a program that interprets Windows commands, and then in Virtual Box, which ran Windows in a virtual machine inside Linux. Both approaches will do the trick, if you don’t mind a fair amount of tweaking and experimentation—and some crashing.
But this month, I decided to give Gimp another try, since a new version, 2.4.3, had just been released in December. What I found was both surprisng and encouraging.
The multiple windows are still there, but the new version makes full-screen editing more convenient by enabling you to show and hide the docks by pressing the Tab key.
Brushes, too, have been made scalable, though not to the same extent as they are in Photoshop.
The ability to select part of an image for manipulation—a crucial function in any bitmap editing program—has been vastly improved with Gimp 2.4. Existing selections can be resized, and a new tool, Foreground Select automates the process of dropping out irregularly shaped objects on a page.
Other improvements include the ability to align layers, a streamlined menu system, a filter that automatically corrects red-eye in flash photos, and a new clone tool that maintains the perspective of an image while copying parts of it onto another area.
Some layer effects like adding a drop shadow are easier to find (Filters > Light and Shadow > Drop Shadow), while others, such as adding a beveled effect to text, can be added by installing scripts (http://www.gimphelp.org/script24.shtml).
Without support for CMYK and Pantone and the RAW digital camera format, Gimp will not win any converts among commercial users who need to create output for print. But the significant improvements in the latest version make Gimp an excellent tool for most home users, digital photographers and Web designers, many of whom will be able to break free of the Photoshop trap.
