Burningbird

The "tax" does not necessarily originate from Adobe. There are dozens of important standards in the graphics industry, even basics like Pantone inks are patented and licensed technology, Adobe licenses and supports all important proprietary standards, the costs are passed on to the end user. Even if open source users would pay for this support, no open source software project can license and support proprietary standards due to the GPL. Thus, Gimp is a total non-starter in the graphics industry.

Adobe tax — having to buy unnecessary or unwanted tools to get Photoshop. Difficulty with installation, that sort of thing.

I wouldn't expect professionals, especially in the print world, to replace PhotoShop with GIMP. But I'm not a professional photographer or graphics artist. I create graphics for web sites, only, and simple stuff at that; I do photography for story annotation and as a hobby.

I don't have the training to see that I'm missing anything. If that's so, why pay the extra cost?

Well let me take a different tack. I assert there is not a single thing you can do in Photoshop that can't be done with analog technology, using a combination of the darkroom and a paintbrush. Sure it might be incredibly tedious and so incredibly difficult that you would never attempt such a thing, but it is obvious that digital imaging technology in and of itself is completely unnecessary. So real question is, how hard do you want to work? Are there ideas you could not execute due to technical constraints? The tools in Photoshop are almost inexhaustible, I routinely get tech support calls from artists who have ideas they think can't be done in PS and I have never found a limit yet. I don't consider it a tax, I consider it a surplus. But I can easily find limits in every open source imaging program (especially Gimp).

Charles, is this becoming a Photoshop vs. GIMP?

If I had my choice, I'd probably stay with Photoshop. But I also want to encourage open source alternatives, so we're not trapped with one tool, and one vendor.

I didn't even say GIMP was better, just that it is an alternative. And I think it is needed, because each new version of Photoshop is buried with yet more software we don't need.

Hmm.. I remember when the battle was PixelPaint vs. Photoshop. Then it was ColorStudio vs. Photoshop. Many contenders have come and gone, and are now forgotten.

Sure, alternatives are great, but in a sense, a pencil is an alternative to a word processor. I guess the keyword here is "technomorphia." I remember when I first heard that word from my art history professor, I thought he made it up, so I asked him to define it, he said "the tools define the results…in other words, when all you've got is a hammer, every job looks like a nail." I personally think you should have professional quality tools, that way you aren't limited by the tools, the only limit is your skills.

A year or so ago i tried GIMP and was disappointed by a couple of things. First, I wasn't geek enough to just start using it. Big drawback for a klutz like me. Second, it wanted to own all my graphics file. I probably made a mistake by accepting a default question. I dug up an old Photoshop Elements disk and had all I needed.

There are some tools, like CS3 and MS Office that it is good to know as much as possible about just because in the world of work those skills are sought after.

Not wanting to turn this into a GIMP vs Photoshop fight but how about a fight about whats a reasonable priced solution for someone who's not doing prepress type work. GIMP would work for most folks and the more that people find out about it the better. Hopefully Adobe will get wise.

Charles:

• PixelPaint (payware) vs. Photoshop (payware)
• ColorStudio (payware) vs. Photoshop (payware)
• GIMP (libre) vs. Photoshop (payware)

One of these is not like the others.

Oh, I doubt it’s going to be a roaring success, and even if it were to be, it certainly wouldn’t be for that reason alone. However, it’s just not going to wink out of existence – and that is for that reason alone.

Personally, I never liked Photoshop, which is probably because my needs have always been modest and completely screen-centric. Image manipulation software that thinks in terms of DPI instead of pure pixels: utterly confusing.

The best image manipulation app I used was Paint Shop Pro, ca. 5.0/6.0 (I don’t remember which, but I gather that the feature set grew significantly since, aside from the fact that JASC was absorbed by Corel). It was far and away the easiest to figure out of any, much better than both GIMP and Photoshop.

Btw, Shelley: you may want to use your shiny DarwinPorts install to pull down the Clearlooks theme for gtk+ (and my gtk-chtheme tool, which will let you select it without installing half of GNOME). That will give the GIMP GUI a much more tolerable look than the “battleship grey” default.

Shelley, there is GIMPShop which modifies GIMP to be more familiar to PhotoShop users.

There is a website called Gimparoo, where (common) tutorials for photoshop are kind of "translated" to gimp…
BTW: Color Management is coming to gimp with the next major version, as far as I know…

So: http://gimparoo.blogspot.com/

Greetings, Albin

I must confess I'm a webdesigner and I use Photoshop CS daily on my iMac. Never found the need to upgrade to CS2…
I've tried GIMP for bitmap work but found it lacking, so I've kept my old Photoshop that serves me well. The only improvement that would make me switch to CS3 would be if Photoshop was more Unix-like when it crashes, i.e. would reopen with the files you were editing in the state just before the crash. I hate apps that waste my time, so here's where my dislike for Photoshop comes from.

Shelley, have you ever tried Inkscape ? For vector editing, I've never found a need for Illustrator but I love working with Inkscape.
< joke > Of course I'm not a real graphic artist, I only work for the web and not for dead-tree format. < / joke >

Slightly off-topic, but: That Rainy Day photo has certainly stuck in my mind since I first saw it, what, a couple of months ago. The whole series in fact. Upload more photos to your FaceBook? Before your two-week trial is up….

Thanks for the suggestions of software and other downloads. I'd seen GIMPShop, previously, but not Gimparoo or Clearlooks. Sophie, yeah I rather like Inkscape for SVG editing.

Tools I need to know for work would not include Photoshop and Office, Frank. More like PHP or Ajax.

madame, I might put up a set for the Botanical statues. I'm still trying to figure out the Facebook interface.

You could always create vector graphics in pic and write your books in troff. It would only be slightly more painful than using The GIMP. (I know; back when I was a fresh young tech writer, this was how we wrote our books. Hundreds of pages worth.)

I agree with Chuq that Adobe needs to be taken down a peg or two. But I've tried using The GIMP, and I'd rather write pic code in vi. The GIMP is not going to be the Photoshop slayer.

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Not an Adobe bash or a plug. Works on Vista, open source
One of the "dozens of interesting single and multipurpose tools and utilities that allow us to create all sorts of interesting work; all open, all free except for what you can spare by way of donation." Paint.NET

Paint.NET is free image editing and photo manipulation software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins

Have used Mayura Draw for SVG

"I don't consider it a tax, I consider it a surplus. But I can easily find limits in every open source imaging program (especially Gimp)."

Charles, are you saying you don't see a problem (for the consumer) with Adobe forcing the purchase of Illustrator when all you want is Photoshop?

Lawrence, you can buy Photoshop separately from CS3, nobody's forcing you to buy Illustrator too.