GIMP stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program. I’ve come to depend on it, first because I couldn’t justify paying for a Photoshop upgrade when I moved to an Intel Mac. Now, it’s one of a very few choices that work on Linux – and it’s the best by far.
GIMP is a very full-featured image manipulation program. Just about all of what Photoshop does, it does. I’m not a designer or photographic expert, but it’s a pretty amazing program. If you want good info, there is a great book by a fellow Linuxchix, called “Beginning GIMP” by Akkana Peck.
If you are a serious designer, GIMP has its drawbacks, specifically it’s lack of CMYK and Pantone color spaces, which, I understand, is pretty much a requirement for serious printing (but who prints, nowadays? Just joking.) There are some other things that GIMP lacks that Photoshop has, but 90% of users probably won’t notice.
I would say if there is one really major complaint about GIMP, and it’s one that I harbor, is that the UI, well, leaves much to be desired. It’s not just that it doesn’t look like Photoshop (you can check out gimpshop – it has a Photoshop UI on top of the GIMP libraries.) It just isn’t intuitive to use (Photoshop isn’t either, really.)
I think because of this, GIMP is missing out on the chance to become a much more popular program. If you’re a geek, you are used to getting to know new UIs, and putting up controls that are difficult to understand or get used to. But if you’re not a geek, GIMPs UI is a major hurdle. And if you’ve been used to the Photoshop workflow, it will take a lot to get used to the very different GIMP workflow.
Oh, and one more thing. The name has to go.
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I think everyone agrees about the GIMP interface. Interestingly, Inkscape (the SVG editor) is built with the same toolkit, but achieves a *much* more usable interface. I used Inkscape to draft a poster a while ago — a total of probably 30 hours’ work — and about halfway in I really hit my stride with the software. The key combos are natural, the bezier editing pretty much does what you want it to. If you haven’t played with Inkscape, I highly recommend it.
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