Should i get pse 10 or just stick with gimp?

[9ballprodigy]

I was pretty set on the idea of just using gimp for the rest of time because I don't think I can justify spending the kind of money ps cs5 is commanding. However, I realized that most of my post processing just involve dodging, burning, raw conversion, exposure adjustments, cloning, sharpening, and maybe a few effects like blurring and vignetting.
While I love gimp for its free-ness, its not the most user friendly program on earth, and also, I just see a lot more tutorials on pse than I do on gimp, which is really nice if I ever need to learn another technique or how to use another tool.

Is it worth switching over to pse 10?

 

[jaomul]

I got PSE8 some time back for exactly the reason your stating, user friendlyness and loads of tutorials everywhere. I think gimp has a lot of stuff on you tube and places now, but I think photoshop has the edge

 

[480sparky]

I'm a GIMPer too, and will probably stay that way until it just won't do what I need it to do. And so far, that hasn't happened.

Howevern everything you listing, GIMP can do. So there must be something that PS can do that GIMP can't, or else it wouldn't be an issue.

 

[MLeeK]

Download the trial and play with it. Go to youtube and view some great video tut's on PSE.
Yes, it's worth the upgrade.

 

[KmH]

Ps CS5 cost me $199, the upgrade price.

Once you get a version of Ps CS Adobe offers upgrade pricing.

Another way to get discounted pricing from Adobe is by being a student and taking advantage of Adobe's Education pricing - Adobe Education Store

If you qualify for and take advantage of Educational pricing, you also get plugged into Adobe's upgrade pricing policy.

You can also buy older releases of Elements on places like eBay - Photoshop Elements 9 | eBay

 

[davesnothere11]

I'm a GIMPer too, and will probably stay that way until it just won't do what I need it to do. And so far, that hasn't happened.

Howevern everything you listing, GIMP can do. So there must be something that PS can do that GIMP can't, or else it wouldn't be an issue.

+1

Gimp does all the things listed by the op well except IMO raw conversion. The ufraw plugin has too many glitches to be functional for me. Does pse10 work with raw files or is Lightroom needed too?

A google search for gimp tips and tutorials will find tons of info.

The major difference between adobe's products and gimp other than price is gimp for the most part only uses 8 bit colors for now.

Personally I like gimp's customizable interface best and the wide availability of brushes, color palettes, and plugins that can be added as needed for free.

 

[Orrin]

The major difference between adobe's products and gimp other than price is gimp for the most part only uses 8 bit colors for now.

This is changing..... from the 2.6 release notes:

Important progress towards high bit-depth and non-destructive editing in GIMP has been made. Most color operations in GIMP are now ported to the powerful graph based image processing framework GEGL, meaning that the internal processing is being done in 32bit floating point linear light RGBA. By default the legacy 8bit code paths are still used, but a curious user can turn on the use of GEGL for the color operations with Colors / Use GEGL.

 

[KmH]

Uh, it's been about 6 years now, and everyone is still waiting................

And it doesn't actually have all that much to do with the bit-depth.

GEGL - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Some of GIMP's tools have already been converted to GEGL operations; mostly tools which modify colors, brightness or contrast have been converted.

 

[9ballprodigy]

The issue is also that a lot of magazine offer some great tutorials on using pse and I just can't seem to translate it to gimp. I also configured gimp to look like photoshop, but I see screenshots of pse and it just looks so much more streamlined and user friendly.
I also like the creative effects that are on pse. I tried to do a fake vignette on Gimp and I just ended up scratching my head. I supplement gimp with photoscape when I want to do effects. In short, photoscape is too simple and gimp seems too comprehensive, not novice friendly, but I'm mainly looking at adobe because There are soooooo many tutorials in my magazine subscriptions and in training videos.

Although most of those tutorials I mentioned are geared towards photoshop cs, I think most of those techniques would translate into pse. Or it would mention how pse is different.

I'm not looking to create graphics or paint on my comp, just tweak photos.