Is GIMP as good as Photoshop?

greenspun.com : LUSENET : GIMP : One Thread

On Windoze platforms, Corel PhotoPaint is the only mainstream competitor to Adobe Photoshop. JASC PaintShopPro lacks separate color balance controls for highlights/midtones/shadows, making it useless for correcting film crossover. Also, PSP 5 tried to mimic the user interface of Photoshop, even the silly parts. Micrografx Picture Publisher has a better user interface, but lacks AutoLevels (histogram stretch), in my opinion the single best thing you can do to improve most digital photographs. I've tried many other Windoze photo applications, but they aren't in the same league. Perhaps I missed some; if so my apologies to the developers.

As far as I can tell, Pantone color matching is the only (?) important feature missing from GIMP. I'm running a downrev version of FreeBSD and only have GIMP 1.0.2, but like it better than either Photoshop 3 and Photoshop 4, from a user interface standpoint. I can do my work (dust spot cloneout, color balancing, blue sky grain blur, JPEG write) more efficiently with GIMP than with Photoshop.

I think Photoshop is crippled by its Macintosh heritage. I've always liked multiple mouse buttons, and early versions of Photoshop have very inconsistent button click requirements. Is this improved in Photoshop 5? For example, xv (by John Bradley) picks color with a simple middle-click. In Photoshop, you've got to set the dropper, pick a color point, and go back to the previous tool... yucko!

After searching Dejanews for "GIMP Photoshop" I'm somewhat surprised that people are talking about the Windows port of GIMP. For me the main attraction of GIMP is that I no longer have to run Win95/98/NT!

-- Bill Tuthill (tut@altavista.net), August 28, 1999


Moderation questions? read the FAQ