The Great GIMP Experiment
Among other things, I've spent part of this weekend tinkering with The GIMP, and in the process managed to come up with two scrapbook layouts.
One of Claire and Wyatt for the May technique challenge at GoDigitalScrapbooking which was to use a page template that was inspired to look like a quilt.
Credits:
Helen Ehrenhofer - When Life Gives You Scraps Make Quilts
Claudi Designs - Jenna
Shabby Princess - Two Soon
The other was for the It's Elementary My Dear Scrapper challenge at Elemental Scraps, a challenge where you're given a quick page to work from, and then to add things and make it your own.
Credits:
Aprilmouse - Magic
Anja J - Summer
Peppermint - It's Elementary June QP
Both of which, I used The GIMP for. I have to say... I really am impressed with how far it's come since the last time I tried to seriously use it. I was actually figuring out how to do things on my own that I hadn't figured out how to do in Photoshop!
For example, rotating and resizing layers. I figured out how to do this in The GIMP right off the bat. It was really simple to find... There were buttons in the toolbar for it, as well as being accessible by Layer -> Transform and Layer -> Resize in the menu. It seemed to be a really logical place to put the functionality.. In Photoshop? The same functionality is found in Edit -> Tranform. No wonder I couldn't find it! Every time I'd tried to look for it previously, I'd been looking in Layer... because... uh, you know, when you're rotating or resizing a layer, that's where you'd expect it to be.
There's still some rough edges in The GIMP... The extendability of The GIMP is really freaking confusing... Just take a look in the Xtras menu... There's Module Manager, Plug-in Browser, Script-Fu, Python-Fu.... and that leaves me wondering, what's the goddammned difference between these things? And there's things that I was looking for, like something similar the Custom Shape tool that's in Photoshop. that I couldn't find that probably exist somewhere as a Script-fu but I wasn't sure where that was either... but all in all, I actually caught on rather quick.
The only problem I was having with The GIMP was the fact that the version that's in the Ubuntu package manager seemed to possibly have a memory leak (or at least, that's how I interpret freezing my computer up harder than a Windows box), so I did sadly lose some work... However, I grabbed a Debian package off of GetDeb.net of the latest version that isn't in the package manager, and that seems to work great... Haven't had any of the problems since upgrading it.
Yay GIMP!
I still almost exclusively use GIMP even though I do have Photoshop on my Windows partition since I hate booting up into it. I find it does a lot of things really well and does enough of what I need most of the time.
What I have been wanting to figure out is how to optimize the size of images in GIMP well. I actually prefer using Fireworks over Photoshop for that because it allows you to optimize potions of a photo and I find it to be really user friendly (maybe other things do this, but I never figured out how).
Anyway, a lot of people rave about Gimpshop because it gives you a more Photoshop like feel. It actually ended up just confusing me, though...
If it weren't for work, I'd
If it weren't for work, I'd probably use The GIMP exclusively... Unfortunately, when you're hacking up psds... something gets lost in translation most of the time when you're trying to open it in The GIMP.
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