I've checked out GIMP before.
I was going to try to run it again to see if this comment held any
water:
There may be a feature or two that are unique to Photoshop but I'll
bet you
can live without them.
…but X11 choked on my 34 activated fonts. From what I recall of
version 2.1.x, it (and I) suffered from its aggravating GUI and
inconsistent tools, and a general lack of features. That being said,
if friends and family members are pining for some way to scan and
modify old photos, I install GIMP for them and show them how to do it.
GIMP works for casual use. I don't see it fitting into a professional
workflow mainly because of the utter awkwardness of the GUI. Maybe if
you're used to the Gnome UI standards or have the mindset of a
programmer, it's less awkward. But that's another story. These are
first year students I'm talking about here. They can barely get the
OSX dock straight, let alone browsing for files in the GIMPs browser,
which reveals the BSD underbelly of OSX, hidden folders and all.
Update: I gave X11 some time (10 minutes on my hermetically
maintained dual 1.25 G4 with 2 gigs of ram) and it finally loaded
GIMP and also GIMPshop. While it seems that the feature sets have
expanded quite a bit, there are still things that I use regularly in
Photoshop missing. Here's a list.
Adjustment layers: non-destructive editing. It can save you whole
minutes if not dozens of them.
CMYK Support: Come on!
Wacom support- I'm sure you can get it working in linux, but we're
not switching.
Semi-automated extraction- a real time saver.
Live filter previews- what's the point without them?
Color profiles (again, come on- how is importing an image into
Scribus just to apply a color profile a productive workflow?)
Limited output options (a.k.a. mostly useless file types)
Vanishing Point (it's actually useful)
No typeface previews
I could go on and on but I feel that I'm wasting breath, so to speak.
Yeah, you can do a lot in the GIMP but it's just not enough. Beyond
its limitations, it's difficult to use, doesn't play well with
others, and would probably curl up in a ball and die if it tried to
interact with our scanners on the intel machines. Photoshop saves
time which saves money in the long run, and thus the software pays
for itself. I'm not trying to say that GIMP isn't a great solution
for Do-It-Yourselfers or Very-Small-Businesses, but if you're
teaching students, there's a certain responsibility to focus on
industry demands. I had a hard enough time getting them (the faculty)
to give up Extensis Suitcase for Font Explorer X.
-Matt
