When I ordered my new Dell laptop, I made a concerted effort to always try an open source option whenever available. After reading a lot of personal commentaries on Gimp vs. Photoshop, I decided to give the Gimp a try.

I’ve been a power user of Photoshop for about the last 10 years. Starting in advertising and moving into interactive media, I’ve had a license since v3. 

Gimp is a great piece of software. For the novice to intermediate user, or for minor editing tasks, it’s the only editor most people will ever need. I do most of the resizing/cropping/sharpening of images on my blog with Gimp.

I have had a few problems. The toolbars and palettes all seem to launch as separate application windows, so they’re never all onscreen at the the same time. As soon as you click to the image window, the toolbar or layers palette disappear.

I also live and die by shortcut keys, especially in Photoshop. I know so many of them that I can turn myself into a human batch program. Unfortunately, many of them are slightly different in Gimp, or at least the tools behave differently.

All in all, Gimp is solid. It’s incredible robust, and as someone who understands graphic compression and filter algorithms, I can tell you it was no small task to get all of the tools and filters working as well as they do. It’s a great photo editor for novice, and even expert graphic designers would choose to use it for many tasks. It loads so much quicker than photoshop, so when you just want the basics, there’s a lot less wait.

That being said, it often ends up taking me far longer to do the basic tasks. Some of this is getting used to different tool behaviors, but a lot of it is also the palettes and toolbars disappearing on me. Editing text is difficult, and Gimp lacks kerning and tracking adjustment. Many fonts (TrueType and PostScript) do not appear correctly in Gimp. It also doesn’t remember the settings I use. Everytime I export a JPEG, I have to reset the JPEG formats as well as adjust the compression setting. It also doesn’t remember my filter settings.

It appears that the layer options and gridlines allow for some way to slice page images when putting together a website.  I haven’t figured it out, but I think that anyone who already knows how to do it in another tool (Photoshop, ImageReady, or Fireworks) won’t want to learn how to do it in Gimp.

All in all, it’s hard to believe that there is a free tool this powerful and easy. I’m old enough to remember the days when you had to design in one application, like Photoshop, and then compress in another, like DeBabelizer. We were compressing GIFs to a web palette, for 640×480 256 color monitors, for 28.8 modems, all the while worried that Unisys was going to make us pay royalties on each GIF… Ok, now I’m starting to sound like your grandpa.