Good GIMP Book?

[Net Llama!]

On Wed, 31 Dec 2003, Joel Hammer wrote:
> There used to be a Gimp book at the Gimp home page. I have used it and
> grokking the Gimp. Both are helpful but....
>
> I am sorry to say that the Gimp is not very intuitive. The biggest problem
> I have had is that everything you want to do is buried in some menu,
> dialog, tool, script, whatever. Some simple things like drawing arrows
> are hard, or used to be.
>
> I now use photoshop at work. I have never had to read anything to use
> photoshop, in large part because Gimp is set up a lot like photoshop,
> and in large part because photoshop is much more intuitive. The common
> tasks are easy to find and perform.

I dunno, i tried to use Photoshop about 2 years ago, and gave up after an
hour of complete frustration attempting to do the most simple tasks.  I
can't say that using the Gimp was any better, but I think this comes down
to which you have more familiarity with.  Neither are intuitive in my
opinion.  Only one is free.

> 1. If you want to edit a second file while editing a file, clicking
> on the second file in the file explorer in windows opens that file in
> the current copy of photoshop. In linux, doing that same action opens
> a second copy of the Gimp. This is unacceptable.

That's cause windoze doesn't usually let you run multiple instances of
the same binary.  What you see as a feature is really a limitation, but to
each his own, i guess.

> 2. I never got the hang of layers in the Gimp, and after a while tried
> to avoid them! I picked up layers almost immediately in photoshop and
> find them invaluable. Just a matter of laying out the menus so they are
> easy to use.

Thanks for reminding me what i couldn't ever figure out in photoshop. An
hour of my life wasted.

> I could go on, but basically  I find I get much more done in photoshop
> than Gimp.

Most likely because you had been using photoshop for a while before using
the gimp.

> Now, these are all problems with the Gimp found by fairly casual use. I
> just use Gimp/photoshop to touch up photographs. I am no graphic artist.
> Perhaps the numerous options and scripts in Gimp might be of great value
> to a professional graphic artist.
>
> IMHO, if you are just fooling around with Xmas cards this year, Gimp
> will not make your life easy. If you are doing this in any serious
> (professional) way, your time is too valuable to spend with the
> Gimp. Maybe a hardcore professional graphic artist might benefit from
> the Gimp.

I really wonder if any "professional graphic artist" would use either.
Surely there have to be far better applications out there for
professionals.

BTW, you can run photoshop 7 in Linux using wine:
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?appId=17&versionId=1336
http://frankscorner.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=94&page=1

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lonni J Friedman				netllama at linux-sxs.org
Linux Step-by-step & TyGeMo		     http://netllama.ipfox.com