The GIMP - an alternative to Photoshop?

Until the launch of Apple’s Aperture software Photoshop didn’t really have any serious competitors.

Photoshop Elements at £60.00 (Mac and PC) is great if you don’t want to prepare images for print – it can’t handle RGB to CMYK conversions There is also Paint Shop Pro (£50 PC only), but it’s amateur persona means you’re unlikely to find it in a professional designer’s office, although corporates have been known to install it

With Adobe Photoshop CS2 costing more than £400 (Mac or PC) and Aperture at £130 (Mac only) a free image editing like The GIMP sounds too good to be true.

The Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free download from http://www.gimp.org/. It is available in Window, Mac OSX and Linux versions, although the Mac variant isn’t too straightforward as it requires Apple's X11.app. If this is all sounding too complex go and buy Photoshop Elements – you won’t be disappointed.

If you using Windows you will also have to download and install the (free) GTK+ 2 Runtime Environment. This is a one-click install and the installation process for The GIMP is then quite straightforward.

Once you run the program the interface may look a little strange if you have been brought up on Adobe products. But it is quite straightforward and I soon had a 55mb TIFF file open on the PC desktop.

The GIMP uses multiple Windows – one to hold the image, another to hold the tools and a third for layers, brushes, channels and paths. This can be confusing as it possible to “lose” windows behind the main image. This third window, and its uses, gives you some idea of the capabilities of the program. It is up there with Photoshop and Aperture.

Without reading any instructions I was quickly able to pull up a Levels Palette (Tools>> Colour Tools) and adjust the tonal range of the image – a typical task if you use a digital camera.

A Saturation boost was equally easy (Colour Tools >> Hue – Saturation). Cloning to get rid of marks was also straightforward, as was “Undo-ing” my ham-fisted mistakes.

Previews to show what the effect will be for a particular action are not quite updated in real-time, although the large image size didn’t help. It certainly isn’t too slow.

The program comes full of what it calls Script-Fu menu items. These turned out to be scripting extensions and at this point I came unstuck. Applying a Spyrogimp effect (whatever that is) caused the whole thing to lock up and the need to restart the program (Mac users can start laughing now). This is actually a fairly rare occurrence on a PC nowadays.

Once back up and running I reduced the image to 300 pixels width, applied some unsharp masking and bingo – a ready to use JPEG file for web was prepared in less than a minute. The JPEG save button gives you the option of adjusting the quality to reduce the file size, just like Photoshop or Image Ready. Incidentally, The GIMP can also save in a wide range of other file formats.

But what about RGB >>> CMYK conversions? Well, The GIMP falls down as it can’t handle them out of the box. But luckily, others have stepped in to help out, although the plug-in I downloaded from http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/ didn’t work and crashed.

At this point I have to say that if the world of ICC device profiles, colour management and monitor calibration is blank canvas to you, perhaps it is better to leave the final RGB >> CMYK conversion to the printer. That way, if there is a cock-up it is down to them.

In summary then, for the grand sum of absolutely nothing, the GIMP turns out to a be a pretty useful image editing tool that can quite easily tweak your digital images for intranet or internet sites. It also allows you to edit full-blown 300dpi images, but the jury is out on saving press-ready CMYK TIFF files. As a free alternative to Adobe Photoshop Elements and for home use it has a lot to commend it. Try it - you’ve nothing to lose.

Labels: Software

posted by Steve Nichols @ 2:05 PM Comments: 1