The Gimp?

[Blind Willie]

Greetings all, My brother found this program while surfing about looking for free software, and thought I might be interested. It is suppost to do almost everything PS does, but with a easier learning curve, use less resourses then PS and is totaly free. I was wondering if anyone has heard of it or has any experience with it? Any input will be useful since I hesitate to download it with my horse & buggy 56K Modem ( it took me almost 10 hours to download the free trial version of PS Elements).
Thanks in advance.
BlindWillie

[Andrew B.]

I used Gimp for several months. It is a full-featured photo editor with lots of power. And if I had to chose between Gimp and Elements, I'd pick Gimp because it has more power. But Elements has more conveniences for the beginner, like the recipes that teach you how to do things, redeye removal, and some other things I forget about now.

BTW, Gimp is a Linux program ported to Windows. So the menus are a bit different than Windows menus. I had trouble getting used to this. But it is a good editor and a free way to get started.

[d_kendal]

Hey Willie,

I used the program a lot for about half a year when I was getting started with this stuff. It has almost all of the main features that Photoshop has, but I wouldn't say it's an easier learning curve, but it's not harder to learn. I'd definitely recommend trying it out, it's a nice program.

- David

[Blind Willie]

The Gimp

Andrew and David, Thanks for the input, I'm downloading now and will give it a try. Glad to here that it's a viable alternative to elements although I was hoping for a easier learn, but hey-thats 1/2 of the fun of new processes. Does any know of any Tuts on it or is it hit and miss?
Thanks again.
Willie

[Andrew B.]

There are plenty of resources to help people with Gimp. Just go to http://www.google.com and type the words "gimp tutorials" (without the quotes). You will be lead to things like the free manual, sites with tutorials, sites with links to info, user groups, etc. You can also use the retouchpro search mechanism and find threads here. I think I started one here about a Gimp tutorial site that I used for techniques in Photoshop.

Also, once you learn the basics of Gimp, a lot of photo work becomes generic. For example, when I first tried Gimp I didn't have any trouble getting up to speed because there is so much overlap with other photo editors. So feel free to ask questions here as you are working on photos.

[Blind Willie]

The Gimp

Andrew, Thanks alot, I never thought of "Googling" for infor (Ah-Duh) but great idea. I just spent about an hour checking it out, looks very interesting. Thanks again.
Blind Willie

[Andrew B.]

It's hard to go wrong with Gimp. You can test drive it as long as you want because it's free. If you don't like it, you haven't lost anything. And along the way you learn photo editing.

The drawback on the low end is this is not as much hand-holding as some of the consumer applications. And I'm not sure about color profiles. But this can come later.