Bring out the GIMP! Open source imaging software that competes with Photoshop and Fireworks.
Written: Mar 02 '05 (Updated Mar 14 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Smooth installation, accessible interface, professional feature set, compact, good documentation, very fast, and money-saving.
Cons: ICC profiles can't be embedded in TIFFs, no 16-bit image support, no built-in EPS support.
The Bottom Line: Highly recommended as a viable alternative to Adobe Photoshop for its powerful feature set and smooth operation. A better application for photographic editing than Macromedia Fireworks MX.
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| jvandegr's Full Review: GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) |
Introduction
I should mention that I'm a photographer who primarily uses image manipulation software for photographic editing purposes. This usually consists of cropping, rotating, levels adjustments, color adjustments, image compression, and file conversions. Occasionally, I also perform retouching and restoration on older slides and negatives scanned with a film scanner.
I should also mention that my test machine for comparison is a Dell Dimension 8400 running at 3.4 GHZ with HT enabled. It has 1 GB of 533mhz RAM, a 128MB ATI video card, and a Maxtor 80 GB hard drive.
For years, Adobe Photoshop has been the industry leader for image manipulation software. Of course, the industry leader's software costs a lot of money, anywhere between $300 (educational discount) and $650. This forces most small businesses and individuals to consider Photoshop as a significant investment of financial resources. Several potential alternatives to Photoshop have emerged over the years, including JASC Paint Shop Pro, Macromedia Fireworks, and Corel Photo Paint. Each of these costs significantly less than Photoshop, but none of them are as powerful and can occasionally leave artists without the tools they need. However, for the average user who doesn't need everything Photoshop has to offer, they are also easier to learn and less bloated. As a photographer, I've been using Photoshop and Fireworks for several years and I've found that I can do at least 95% of what I need to do with Fireworks.
With an upgrade to Windows XP, I discovered a couple bugs in Fireworks MX (6.0) that do not have fixes or work-arounds, so once again I'm in need of an upgrade or alternative software. Just as I was getting ready to go to Fireworks 7.0 (a great deal at $99 with my educational discount), I remembered hearing about an open source project called GIMP. A few minutes of free downloads later, I now have what I consider to be one of the best image manipulation programs available.
GIMP is short for GNU Image Manipulation Program. The current version, 2.2, is available for Unix, Mac, and Windows. Unlike software purchased from private companies, the source code is publicly available and can be easily downloaded from GIMP's website (www.gimp.org). Here, you can also find documentation, bug reports, opportunities for becoming part of the project, and other resources. In many ways, it can be argued that this is a community, not just a piece of software.
Features
From the online GIMP users manual:
The GIMP is suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, and image construction. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.
GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.
One of The GIMP's strengths is its free availability from many sources for many operating systems. Most GNU/Linux distributions include The GIMP as a standard application. The GIMP is also available for other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows™ or Apple's Mac OS X™ (Darwin). The GIMP is not freeware. It is an Open Source Software application covered by the General Public License (GPL license). The GPL provides users with the freedom to access and alter the source code that makes up computer programs.
* Full suite of painting tools including brushes, a pencil, an airbrush, cloning, etc.
* Tile-based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
* Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high-quality anti-aliasing
* Full Alpha channel support
* Layers and channels
* A procedural database for calling internal Gimp functions from external programs, such as Script-Fu
* Advanced scripting capabilities
* Multiple undo/redo (limited only by disk space)
* Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
* File formats supported include GIF, JPEG, PNG, XPM, TIFF, TGA, MPEG, PS, PDF, PCX, BMP and many others
* Load, display, convert and save to many file formats
* Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent
* Plug-ins that allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
Documentation
In the past, I've often found documentation for open source software to be somewhat lacking. Not the case with the GIMP. Both the online users manual and the built-in help guide (just press the F1 key) are thorough and well-written - you certainly don't need to be a computer programmer to understand them. The few times I've needed to use them, I've found the information I needed, and I found it fairly quickly. I've had the same experience with Macromedia Fireworks and I consider these two programs to be similar in terms of their help documentation.
Performance
Installation
Downloading from GIMP's mirror sites is extremely fast. On a stand-alone DSL connection with up to 7 MB/second of bandwidth, I downloaded the zipped GIMP setup file (about 7MB) in just under 20 seconds. Very fast. The GTK 2 runtime environment must be installed before the GIMP software for GIMP to run properly. At just over 3MB, it downloaded from a mirror site in under ten seconds.
Installation was flawless - no problems whatsoever on my Dell Dimension 8400 with Windows XP (Service Pack 2) - for both the runtime environment and GIMP. Installation time, including setting initial preferences, took under two minutes. Definitely the fastest installation time I've seen for any image manipulation software. The really good news is this is a very compact piece of software. After installation, GIMP uses about 30 MB of disk space (only 20 MB without the help guide installed), whereas Fireworks MX uses over 40 MB and Adobe Photoshop CS eats about 180 MB of disk space.
Hardware and OS compatibility
From the GIMP online user manual:
"The GIMP is the most widely supported image manipulation available today. The platforms that The GIMP is known to work on include GNU/Linux™, Apple Mac OS X (Darwin)™, Microsoft Windows 95, 98, Me, XP, NT4, and 2000™, OpenBSD™, NetBSD™, FreeBSD™, Solaris™, SunOS™, AIX™, HP-UX™, Tru64™, Digital UNIX™, OSF/1™, IRIX™, OS/2™, and BeOS™. The GIMP can easily be ported to other operating systems because of its source code availability."
My experience with GIMP on Windows XP has been almost glitch-free. Startup is very fast (about four seconds), but this will depend on the amount of RAM in your computer. Still, it gets going much faster than the bloated Adobe Photoshop and at least as fast as Macromedia Fireworks MX. Quitting the application is even faster and it doesn't hang. Can it crash? In my experience, if you're running something in Windows it certainly can crash. I've only had the GIMP crash once after weeks of use. After opening and closing several images and then adjusting the levels on a 20 MB TIFF file, I rotated the canvas 90 degrees and moved the window before it completed. That was enough to make the GIMP unhappy, but I'm pretty sure this is not entirely the GIMP's fault - Windows should probably share some of the blame, especially since I haven't been able to duplicate the crash.
Acquiring scans via TWAIN from my Nikon Coolscan V ED has been glitch-free. Although I installed GIMP after installing this scanner and its accompanying software (Nikon Scan), I've had no problems with TWAIN or scanner recognition. Indeed, everything has worked smoothly from the beginning. There is no need to leave the GIMP environment when scanning. TWAIN acquire quickly found Nikon Scan the first time I asked it to. Without hesitation it opened Nikon Scan, which captures the images from the Coolscan V and sends them immediately to the GIMP, where GIMP's superior editing tools take over and make quick work of image processing. Speaking of...
Image handling and manipulation
Since I use the GIMP for a particular type of image processing, I'll only review the features here that I have the most experience with.
The first thing that struck me about the interface of GIMP is the very intuitive icons. They are slightly larger than average and very easy to identify. I'm not the first to notice that icon design seems to have take a turn for the worse lately, with programs filled with unidentifiable icons. Adobe and Macromedia seem to have put some serious thought into icon design and I find most of their icons fairly intuitive. Thankfully, the same is true for the GIMP. Very rarely do I need to mouse over an icon and wait for the text box to appear to tell me what it is.
The selection tool is very precise. For me, its appearance and easy of use make this sometimes seemingly trivial tool a joy to use, and I prefer it to both the Fireworks and Photoshop selection tools. Sometimes, it's the little things that make a big difference in graphics applications.
Manipulating images for use on the web has always been the forte of Fireworks. In my opinion, Fireworks is noticeably superior to Photoshop for this task. Since I am often editing photos for web use, Fireworks has been my weapon of choice for several years. The GIMP is the first program that can really compete with Fireworks in the photo-for-web department. Like Fireworks, JPEG compression control is excellent, and superior to Adobe Photoshop. However, I've only been able to preview compression adjustments in one window in GIMP (no side-by-side original and modified windows as in Photoshop). This isn't a huge drawback, but it would be a nice feature for the next update. That being said, adjustments are previewed almost instantly, so I don't sense a significant loss of time in my workflow.
Speaking of time, the GIMP is one fast application. Applying an unsharp mask to an entire 20 MB tiff file took less than 10 seconds, and about 15 seconds for a 70 MB tiff file. Rotating images is nearly instantaneous, regardless of image size. RGB levels adjustment for an entire 20 MB tiff file is also nearly instantaneous, and takes less than 3 seconds with a 70 MB tiff file. I've noticed that the same operations performed on similar sized files in Fireworks can require two to three times as much time. Compared to Adobe Photoshop CS, the GIMP took a few seconds longer to apply the same unsharp mask to my test image. Other operations yielded mixed results in my comparison with Photoshop CS - sometimes Photoshop CS was slightly faster, sometimes the GIMP was slightly faster. As a general statement, the GIMP just feels like a much more efficient program than Macromedia Fireworks MX, and can hold its own against Adobe Photoshop CS, most of the time. (I'll update this review with my comparison to JASC Paint Shop Pro 9 in the near future).
A few shortcomings
More advanced Adobe Photoshop users may notice a few things missing from the current version of GIMP. First, GIMP does not support 16-bit images. For most photographers, this is not a big deal, but those who want to squeeze every last piece of tonal information from their images might be disappointed. Second, GIMP does not support ICC profiling for color management, as far as I can tell. I've heard rumors that there are plans for this in the future, but nothing yet. Of course, this does not mean that GIMP users can't manipulate their color workspace, just that ICC profiles can't currently be embedded in a TIFF file when it is saved. This is based on my experience and what I've read in the online documentation - if I'm wrong about this, please let me know. Finally, GIMP does not have built-in EPS support. Trying to open an EPS file will cause a ghost-script error message to pop-up. This is a little disappointing, especially considering both Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks have support EPS files for some time.
Conclusions
The GIMP community has created a powerful, compact, and full-featured image manipulation program that costs... nothing. The most demanding Photoshop users may find some shortcomings that I haven't mentioned here, but make no mistake - the GIMP is designed to function as a professional image manipulation program and it does just that. In comparison to Macromedia Fireworks MX, GIMP 2.2.3 offers more features, uses less disk space, works faster, runs smoother, and leaves your wallet a bit thicker. For me, the bottom line is that it really works - for any type of photographic editing, this is now the only software I use.
Recommended:
Yes
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