On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 06:56:43PM +0100, Nuno Miguel dos Santos Baeta scripsit: [snip] > As far as I know, Photoshop is _the_ image manipulation program. It > seems to be "easy" (compared to GIMP) to use and is on the expensive > side. On the other hand, GIMP is GPLed software but its interface is, > to be nice, awkward.
There's the GIMPshop project, that is intended to make the GIMP UI act as much as possible like photoshop. http://www.gimpshop.com/ Personally, I find the default GIMP interface entirely unobjectionable; I'm also typing this using vi. There are several books out on using the GIMP for photographers, and a great deal of information on-line. It may be a matter of familiarity and practise. > None of the differences above are technical - I mean differences that > can change the outcome of an image after manipulation. Are there any > technical differences between Photoshop and GIMP? Tons, but generally at a level you're not going to care about unless you heavily rely on Photoshop's automated correction mechanisms or want to retain greater than 8 bits per colour for printing purposes. (That 8 bits limitation is the major problem with the GIMP, but JPEGs are 8 bits so for web images it doesn't matter.) Free 16 bit colour-depth capable alternatives include CinePaint, which started as a long-ago fork of the GIMP and which is used in the movie industry. In terms of quality of output, you're getting into some issues of operator skill; how much sharpening is the right amount of sharpening is an artistic judgement, rather than a function of the program, and so on. If you're taking raw images rather than JPEGs, you can do almost everything you want (except colour balance tweaking) to process the raw images in ufraw; I use ufraw for everything except scaling, level setting, and colour balance, which I do using the GIMP. -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
