Opinions on the use of GIMP - GNU Image Manipulator

ray*j*gun

ray*j*gun

Veteran
Local time
2:14 PM
Joined
Dec 21, 2007
Messages
2,455
I have only ever used an old stand alone version of Lightroom and an early version of Photoshop Elements. So, anyone have experience with GIMP and is it worth downloading and learning the system? Thank you,
 
Haven’t used gimp.

But I use photoshop. Capture in RAW with camera. Would gimp open my RAW files?

Use ACR - Bridge- for the process stage and photoshop.

I use CS-4 and it works just fine for me.

Photoshop is about layers and blending.

If I upgrade to a new iMac I will buy Photoshop Elements.

Like this from B & H:

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1507328-REG/adobe_65299344_photoshop_elements_2020_dvd.html

I bookmarked the B & H page. Just in case I upgrade.

My old iMac works great. I can still read my gmails using an old html version from google.

Smiles.

My two cents.
 
I did 100% of the images for my photojournalism BA at Temple U. with GIMP. I was using a Linux machine for everything as well and I came up with a suite of programs that worked very well. GIMP is a really powerful tool and I still use it to this day, since I don't like the way Adobe handles things and puts hooks into their customers. I was also on the development team for a program called Darktable which is a Linux versioon of Lightroom. It works with GIMP, UFRAW, and a few others to create libraries like Lightroom does. Darktable is very powerful with tons of useful features.

Phil Forrest
 
GIMP is the only program i use. Import pictures straight from scanner and you can do a lot of things with it. For me it is more than enough, adjust levels and unsharp mask is all i need.

Two things that i would be interested to know if it is done by GIMP (never searched it in depth) is perspective correction and vignetting adjustment. If someone can answer this i would be grateful.
But overall, th answer is; it depends what you are trying to do with it. It can do the basics and very well. It can also do the more advanced 'stuff' but i dont know how.
 
ray*j*gun said:
anyone have experience with GIMP and is it worth downloading and learning the system?
Click to expand...

I've used PS extensvely, and Gimp rather less. As mentioned above, Gimp is very powerful, and since it's free, it is also excellent value-for-money. ;)

I find the PS user interface more intuitive than Gimp. Having said that, I had already been using PS for many years, before my first introduction to Gimp. Therefore, it's probably (for me, at least) simply a question of first familiarity, rather than any failings in the Gimp interface.
 
I used GIPM more than ten years ago. It was heavily destructing image quality.
Hopefully they figured it out.
 
I have recently started using Raw Therapee for handling RAW files and Gimp for spotting and resizing the resulting TIFF files. I find the quality of both programs excellent and the price (free) unbeatable.
John Mc
 
mcfingon said:
I have recently started using Raw Therapee for handling RAW files and Gimp for spotting and resizing the resulting TIFF files. I find the quality of both programs excellent and the price (free) unbeatable.
John Mc
Click to expand...

I use RAWtherapee at times, but just like any software change there is a learning curve. The developers seem to keep up with anything new. I don't use my digital camera's pixel shift much but they have section for that. My only problem with RT was it has so much stuff on it, you are overwhelmed when first using it. But just like PSE or GIMP you settle into just what you need.
 
GIMP has a clunky UI and is in my experience much slower (computationally) to use than comparable software. If you're just doing basic image editing and don't want to spend any money at all I think Darktable is a better option. If you're willing to spend a bit of money but understandably don't want to fork out a monthly fee to Adobe then Affinity is a genuine professional alternative for 50-ish bucks.
 
mcfingon said:
I have recently started using Raw Therapee for handling RAW files and Gimp for spotting and resizing the resulting TIFF files. I find the quality of both programs excellent and the price (free) unbeatable.
John Mc
Click to expand...


Rawtherapee is superb, but - as noted above - does involve a fairly serious learning curve. Having learned to use it some years ago, I find it a very capable program, and (almost) everything works very well. And it is free! :)
 
tbhv55 said:
Rawtherapee is superb, but - as noted above - does involve a fairly serious learning curve. Having learned to use it some years ago, I find it a very capable program, and (almost) everything works very well. And it is free! :)
Click to expand...

If I only shot digital RAW it would be my go to converter, no question. But I need a healing tool and skew for my negatives.
 
It's been years since I last attempted to work with GIMP. When last I went to use it, it did not have raw conversion capability, could not do anything more than an 8bit per component image, and had no notion of color spaces or color-managed-printing. I needed four or five other applications to make using GIMP useful. Never mind that the installation and configuration of GIMP was a multiple hour learning endeavor before you even started to work on the application itself.

For me, that was too limited and inefficient a solution to be worth putting the learning and time investment into.

I hope that subsequent versions of GIMP have improved on this situation, even though I doubt I'm going in that direction any time soon.

G
 
Gimp, and other PS Alternatives

Gimp, and other PS Alternatives

If you're doing lots of RAW processing (DNG files, etc) you might also look at Affinity, which is NOT OpenSource, but is pretty reasonable. I use it for almost everything lately ... but I also work with lots of 16 bit greyscale scans, which Capture One will NOT process because it's now Adobe RGB.
 
Ko.Fe. said:
I used GIPM more than ten years ago. It was heavily destructing image quality.
Hopefully they figured it out.
Click to expand...


Yes, there were a couple of versions a few years ago that when you were resizing images and saving them, it was saving them in poor quality jpgs. The latest they have available for download is sorted.
 
ray*j*gun said:
Thank you all for your help and responses. I will look into Affinity and RawTherapee also.
Click to expand...

Affinity Photo is a good PS alternative. Nice thing for me is that it runs on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS so I can seamlessly move raw or JPEG files between all of my devices and use it on all.

That said, I find it (much like PS) a little more than I need most of the time, and I use it infrequently enough that it seems like I'm always re-learning it.

G
 
I used GIMP in the past and have PS now, and find that unless I need to use layers (which is basically never), anything more feature-heavy than Lightroom (or digiKam or darktable) is overkill.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom