Whenever I switch Photoshop on and get that ugly grey screen followed by the splash screen, I know I’m going to be sitting and staring at it for a long time. I sit staring at the credits and I feel I actually know Thomas Knoll and the rest of the development team because I’ve been sitting looking at their names for such a huge chunk of my life.
And I recently noticed that I was using this dead time while Photoshop loaded to go and make myself a sandwich. That’s really no good for the waistline. So I’ve decided to go GIMP if it can do everything I need.
A friend recently gave me a dead laptop and the only way to bring it back to life was with an injection of Linux, after that I installed GIMP and now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t play around with it a bit and see what it can do.
I downloaded a pdf snapshot of the GIMP documentation and turned it into a MobiPocket book for reading at my leisure – on the tram mostly – so I could get an idea of what GIMP can do.
The real proof of the pudding will be in the image editing of course, but from what I have already read it looks encouraging. Gimp can work with layers, vectors and seems to have the functions I’m using right now when I add colour and interest to a pencil sketch or add the finishing touches to a render of my latest 3D spaceship mesh.
I do sometimes also use Photoshop for animation, but the animation files are so huge and unwieldy that I’ve even given that up recently. So animation aside I can’t immediately see a reason not to switch and there is a huge advantage to making the jump to GIMP. It loads in about five seconds instead of fifteen minutes (subjective time, I’m sure it’s shorter than that but it does seem like an absolute age).
» Change Inkscape’s interface language the easy way thanks to Rarst.net, and a very nice Photoshop brush for graphics tablets.
