Comments on: Fascinating ‘Photoshop’ Freeware: GIMP and more!

By: admin

admin — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:30:42 +0000

You are most welcome, B. Since I haven’t used GIMP, I cannot really answer your specific questions about text manipulation and paths, but I did find some stellar tutorials and explanations (which helped me to understand better where you were coming from). I absolutely love the ease of text manipulation in all of Adobe’s products, but it is a wide world of design programs and I definitely encourage you to weigh the pros and cons of what matters to you most.

In the meantime, take a look at these and see if they help any:
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Bezier_Selections/
http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-using-paths.html
http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/gimp-concepts-text.html
http://gimp-tutorials.net/gimp-text-to-path-tutorial (This is text & paths combo from a GIMP tutorial writer named Gimper. He seems to really know his stuff and has extensively used the program).

As for auto-save, that is one issue I can definitely relate to regardless of the program! I ended up training myself to hit “CTRL” + “S” every 5 minutes whenever I have any of my design programs open. It took some getting used to, but it is just natural and has saved me more than once.

Yours,
N

By: B. Oceander

B. Oceander — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:08:36 +0000

Wow! Thanks for the thoughtful response. My biggest problems are largely with text manipulation and the creation of curves – the “paths” function in GIMP can be a real pain to work with, and both depend on that functionality. The lack of an autosave feature of any sort has also been becoming more and more of a hassle as my projects become more and more involved and complex – losing a half-hour single-layer image is irritating, but livable; losing a three-hour fifteen-layer image that has elements borrowed from three or four original images, that’s not just irritating.

At any rate, I am very appreciative of the time you took to respond to my post. Thanks.

By: admin

admin — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:19:08 +0000

Thank you, Ken, for your insight as a GIMP user. I appreciate you taking a moment to add a user’s perspective to my review. I am very glad to know that you are able to share your work between Mac and Windows (especially Windows 7) with little difference. That is usually a major worry for designers and artists.

By: Yagelski

Yagelski — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:03:00 +0000

Great job on the high-level review Nicole.

I’m a long time GIMP user and can highly recommend it. I believe that 80 percent or more of the typical users will not be limited by the color depth or lack of other PhotoShop specific features. My own use is on both OS X and Windows (XP / Vista / 7) systems. It’s nice to be able to share work product between the systems with little to no difference in the user interface or results.