Photoshop vs gimp

[photog4life]

ok well i looked at it and truthfully am not hooked on it so im going to wait to look at it since this is not my computer... and is photoline web based?

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[unpopular]

Sparky, I agree completely and I am not at all a big fan of Photoshop at all, it's bloated and overpriced. But Gimp is often touted as an alternative to photoshop, which it just isn't - and I got this impression from you when you made the PS aficionado (fanboi) statement. There is a lot Photoshop can do that gimp cannot, but very little the other way around.

Photoline is something like 80€, about the price of PSE.

[photog4life]

is it web based?

o and sparky got a question

whenever i open files and just in general when i do stuff gimp seems to freeze could it be because im offline or do i not have enough memory? if you could help it would be much appreciated.

[unpopular]

You are not going to find much that will be a suitable image editor that is web-based, so no, Photoline is not web based.

You would buy it at http://www.pl32.com/

Give it a chance, the UI is pretty odd, but it is very good once you get passed that.

and I had the price wrong, its 59€, not 80. I think it used to be 80?

[480sparky]

...........o and sparky got a question

whenever i open files and just in general when i do stuff gimp seems to freeze could it be because im offline or do i not have enough memory? if you could help it would be much appreciated.

You may have a memory issue, or too much is running at the same time on your computer so everything is fighting for resources. If it eventually unfreezes, it sounds like a memory issue. GIMP is not an on-line editor, so being online might be part of the memory problem as well.

[photog4life]

yeah i will i just am not sure im ready to spend ANY money on ANY program right now since i literally got my first camera yesterday... btw i know what cmyk is but what is the big deal about it not being in gimp if i dont plan on printing any photos...

[O|||||||O]

Check your settings in GIMP.


Workspace 1_001 by J E, on Flickr

Tile cache size (plus anything else you have running while you're editing) should be less than the RAM you have.


GIMP can be slow on my laptop, but I have never had an issue with it on this computer (8GB RAM, 3.2GHz i3).

[unpopular]

btw i know what cmyk is but what is the big deal about it not being in gimp if i dont plan on printing any photos...

More specifically it's not a big deal unless you're printing to offset. It really isn't. I was just explaining all of my issues with gimp, and for photography the other issues are much much more significant. For someone in your position, GIMP will do just fine. The only thing I think you'd be missing out on is 16-bit, which in my opinion is pretty significant. Once GIMP supports 16 bit, it will be a pretty decent editor but without adjustment layers. Though I think that feature is also planned with full GEGL support.

Most photo printers use more than four colors, anyway and conversion into these spaces is done from RGB within the printer driver.

[unpopular]

I did not realize which camera you had. Your camera will not support 16-bit images in the first place, so 16-bit support is moot. The only feature you'll be missing is adjustment layers, which can be worked around.

At this point spending money on software would not be a good idea, and GIMP will do just fine.

[photog4life]

yeah see thats what i thought haha so yeah ill deffinitly just wait i was more wondering about like the tools that each program has...

[photog4life]

thanks dude with the wierd name haha

[O|||||||O]

The tools will be pretty much the same. They might have a different icon, or a different name, but they do the same thing.

[photog4life]

ok cool thats pretty much what i needed to know...

[unpopular]

eughhh.

[AfroKen]

Well, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this. PS aficionados may look down their noses at GIMP, but that's not because PS is 'better' than GIMP, it's because they think they're better because they use PS.

I don't like Gimp primarily because I don't like the way it's configured, but you can't beat the price, and it has a fair amount of features. I agree with much of Unpopular's post regarding GIMP. That said, it's pretty amazing for free.

I use PS CS4. To answer (I think) someone's question about whether PS is easy to use...I didn't find out that way. I didn't find it to be intuitive. I've learned slowly, and have gotten used to it. It's very very powerful, but I would never describe it as intuitive. Or cheap. Thankfully I get educator discounts (one of the few perks of being a teacher), which takes the sting out of it. I'm glad Nik Software makes plugins for it. I started using this a year or two ago, and fortunately find Nik to be intuitive and effective. Whew!!! Anybody who has ever found PS to be intuitive, what can I say, you brain is wired differently than mine, and my hat's off to you!!

If I had to use another software besides Photoshop, I'd probably use either Elements or Lightroom maybe.

Oh, and I don't think I'm better that I use something over something else. I doubt very many people do. We all know that one of us might be struggling along with Photoshop CS5, and there will be someone else who has no money running a twelve year old computer held together by rubber bands and Elmer's Glue, and they're using whatever horrible program that came with Windows 98, getting better results than the rest of us, so I never cop an attitude with equipment (or for any other reason, for that matter).

BTW, there's people taking better photos with iPhones than some people running around with Hasseblads. Sure, I'd rather have a Hasselblad, but the fact remains that some people are getting phenomenal shots with iPhones.

Thanks for listening.