GIMP (originally General Image Manipulation Program) is an open-source image editing program. It is a project worked on by many people and is available, free of charge to download, for any operating system. You can find out more about and download it here. I used it exclusively until I bought Photoshop a few years ago. If you want to try GIMP for Mac, you can download it at GIMP on OS. If you want to try GIMP for Windoze, you need a new operating system. ;)
I like to use both Photoshop and GIMP for different purposes. So far, for me, nothing beats Photoshop for photo editing but for editing images for the web, GIMP is perfectly comparable and has much to recommend it.
Below are two images, the left is my original photo, staged with natural light and a China ball with a 100w bulb in my dining room. It looks pretty well crap and is a testament to my total lack of skills with a camera back in 2007. The image on the right was edited in GIMP to illustrate an article featuring a St David's Day dinner menu.
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To produce the edited image on the right:
- I first duplicated, locked and hid the original layer, applying "no pixel shall be harmed," so that I have that layer inviolate if I need it later.
- I edited out the contents of the window by outlining it with a path made with the pen tool and deleted it. You could also mask, if you wanted.
- I made a new layer under the duplicate original layer and pasted in a properly sized, public domain image of St David's Cathedral in Wales from Wikimedia commons.
- Next, I adjusted the hue and brightness and lowered the saturation on the original layer until I got that soft, ivory tint to the curtains, linens and dishes.
- I selected and copied foods and the daffodils, each to their own layer, and increased their saturation and and adjusted hue until they stood out well, although the peas were too much and I should have softened those and probably the bread in the pot a bit, too.
We've since used this to illustrate this article and for St David's Day e-cards, it's worked well and I got a fantastic compliment on it from a professional photographer I admire very much, so that was awesome. Unfortunately, it doesn't look good in print.
I did another plate of food for this year's St David's Day menu in Photoshop and explained how that was edited in an earlier post, and those before and after photos are here for comparison:
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The user interface for GIMP is very similar to Photoshop and if you've used Photoshop, you really shouldn't have any trouble with it. I've seen a few articles where reviewers were complaining about how "technical" GIMP was and how they couldn't figure it out but I find that extremely hard to believe because it just isn't true at all. When my mother, who's in her 70s, wanted a program to learn to edit her digital photos in, GIMP is what I gave her and if she can learn it, so can you. Of course, like any new program, you're going to have to play with it, experiment with it and learn it.
Two areas I absolutely prefer Photoshop are editing RAW images and editing images for print and these things make Photoshop the best photo editor for me.
I haven't found an open source RAW editor that doesn't make my images come out grainy and horrible at full resolution although, before I go any further, this is probably due to my not having put in the time and effort to find a good one and learn to use it properly. I've tried UFRAW and RAWStudio and the results were awful. The best thing about open source, however, is that so many people are using it and improving it that you can find tutorials and assistance everywhere and I intend to do an article on open-source RAW editors after I've looked well at enough of them.
Photoshop has RAW editing built in. You can easily open your images in the RAW editor and adjust the white balance, temperature, tint, exposure, fill light, blacks, brightness, contrast, clarity, vibrance and saturation as though the RAW editor were your darkroom, and then open the image in Photoshop proper to make graphic edits.
Once I've edited a photo in Photoshop and want to work some graphics with it, a lot of times I use GIMP. Both programs use layers, have filters and a lot of the same tools but they each have tools and filters the other program doesn't have. I prefer making paths with the pen tool in GIMP to Photoshop's and masking is also simpler and more straight foward. Where GIMP, like other open source tools, shines is your add ons. Because it's open source, people have access to the code and can make things for it. There are constantly new brushes, filters, templates and plugins for GIMP and they're free, free, free and that makes GIMP a very fun tool.
If you're just starting out or money is a concern, I recommend starting with GIMP. You can add Photoshop later, when you're moving into RAW or become more advanced in what you want from your photos.
Try them both and see what you think.
