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Well, that certainly is the question isn’t it? Sometimes these kinds of questions very easily and sometimes not as easy. Take me for instance, I fell in love with the Adobe CS2 suite some years ago, and I spent many hours hovering over GoLive pouring through code, creating ’support’ documents for instructors and students with InDesign, and I can’t even count how many hours I put into Photoshop creating and altering graphics for my web pages. In the beginning phases with Photoshop, I spent alot of time in help forums, just figuring out how to use the thing, so I have an enormous amount of time invested in the technology. For the longest time (and still am to this day) a huge fan of Adobe. Adobe pretty much lost me at the introduction of their new shiny CS3. Just like alot of companies out there, I personally have a budget I have to work by, and incidentally it did not include a huge $2300 hit for software. Interestingly enough, this price tag was DOUBLED from their CS2 offering. There are really two questions that one has to ask at this juncture. Is CS3 really TWICE as good as CS2? Well, in all honesty not having used CS3 I couldn’t really say, however I do know this, as impressed as I was at the unveiling, I wasn’t $2300 impressed. So I faced a crossroads.
I could,

1. Try to come up with $2300 for the new shiny product. (not going to happen)
2. Continue with the CS2 that I had already owned. Which is actually a very real, and very good decision. In fact, many companies do not jump right in and purchase software right off the shelf. They will tend to wait, until their licenses expire, or when the price has come down enough to justify the purchase.
3. Live on the bleeding edge. I have really wanted to try this but lacked the sufficient pressure to actually do it. With the advent of Windows Vista (which I am highly convinced is a virus you pay for) and the rising cost of Adobe’s sweet, sweet interfaces I decided to jump off the cliff and go with a full open source solution.

This led me to writing this blog and a series I have entitled ‘Crossing Over’. The journey of breaking ones reliance on proprietary software. But I digress, GIMP is what we want to talk about today. Is GIMP as good as PS? Very good question. However in relation to the price tag of CS3 how good does GIMP really have to be to make it worthwhile? Technically any old free ware could work, but once you get used to the way PS (Photoshop) works its hard to switch, in fact Adobe is counting on it. For those of you who are interested in switching there is really only one way to do it. Un-install PS and install GIMP, and force yourself to use it. Why did I switch? I had a number of reasons. And they were not all based on price.

1. I wanted to use a Linux system. Particularly the Ubuntu system. I love it, and after spending about 3 months with it, I never want to go back to Windows. Unfortuneatly, the Adobe products do not work with Linux, which should be enough to give one pause to buy it. If I am spending $2300 a pop on a software, I want some flexibility. The thing is that I am suspect that Adobe built for Windows reluctantly. In fact I really think that if Adobe had its way, it would only build for MAC, but the Windows market is just too huge to ignore, and proof in the pudding was the success of the worst suite of web-development tools ever, Macromedia. Dreamweaver was quite possibly the worst thing to hit college campuses. But I don’t want to globalize my opinions too much.
2. I wanted a full open source web development solution. I wanted to see if it was possible to get ALL your software for free, but have the backing of a strong open source community. One of the things really pushed me in this direction was the advent of Ubuntu, and the first (again my opinion) fully user-friendly Linux Operating system. Now in saying that, I need to aquiesce a bit, that Ubuntu is not 100% yet. I have had a few problems with external hard-drives, and since I am completely mobile, this is important. The problem lies in Ubu’s support for NTFS, however, I have reformatted my drive with FAT32 which although slower than NTFS is much more stable and secure. So I’m glad I did it.
3. I wanted to be fully versed in alternative ways of getting to the same point. I figure that the world and the market is constantly changing, and one day, I might be given the opportunity to go and write for a large Web Development firm, and they will be completely open source. So, I really wanted to be as versatile as I could be. At the time of coming to this conclusion, I really didn’t know how to export jpg’s, gifs, or png’s in a GIMP environment. So, I basically had to start over from scratch. However, I knew I was going to have to do this if I wanted to stay somewhat current and flexible with a knowledge many ways of doing the exact same thing.

All this said and done, there are alot of folks who would appeal to the fact that GIMP won’t support more than 8 bit color. But web graphics won’t support the 16 bit anyway. In addition, I can do without CMYK, seeing that the only browser out there that will support this is Safari. After about a month of using GIMP, I have to say, I am very impressed with it. In many ways I like it much better than Photoshop. Namely, the hogging of resources is much lower with GIMP, and the versatility is absolutely amazing. The installation of modules, plugins, textures and brushes is infinite and I really like the way it exports files. It was a bit rough at first, but now I feel like I can get around the interface quite well, if not better than PS.
I would like to post some about the brushes I have found for GIMP, but I feel like I need to save that for a separate post. But if you don’t want to wait for the next post, here is a teaser. I was actually looking at my brush set the other day in GIMP, and was kind of disappointed because there just wasn’t that many. I was then thinking about Adobe, and I had remembered that I downloaded some brushes for PS because it was scathingly skimpy as well. Enter ‘Live Journal’. Here you will find some absolutely amazing brush sets. In fact you will find around a gigs worth. One of the more talented young ladies does a series of brushes called ‘TinyText’. This adds the perfect effect to some of your more creative work.
Above you will see a picture of my son getting hit over the head with a bottle in the play, Cole Porters ‘As Good As It Gets’. Add some torn paper brushes, and the really cool ‘Tiny Text’ effects and you have a cool looking aged effect. Like a card that has been passed around the world a few times. The TinyText comes from a lady in Live Journal who goes by the alias, ibelonginnarnia, ya, took me a couple of minutes to figure that out. In any case, browse around her Journal, she has some really amazing stuff.

One last thing, when you download tools like this please be sure to read the ‘Read Me’ file that is pre-packaged with the tools. ibelonginnarnia particularly has a really good conscientious message about using tools others have created and making sure you credit the creators.

Have fun, and Happy Gimping!