I'm thinking of switching to gimp instead of PS CS4, whats the pros and cons of that? Anyone who use both?
Eh? Gimp and Photoshop are both raster editors. Feature-wise, they're very similar, but each has a few little tricks the other does not. For instance, I really wish Photoshop had an image hose feature like the Gimp's, and the standard cloud filter in Photoshop lacks some functionality.
Gimp, on the other hand, has a non-Windows-standard interface (naturally, since it was developed for Linux), which is off-putting for many users. I don't use it much, so I don't know what features PS has that I'd want if I were using Gimp all the time.
They're both very useful, even if you're primarily using CC. I use Photoshop to label my CC maps because text looks nicer that way.
edit: By the way, if you're looking for an affordable vector tool, take a look at Inkscape, which is an open-source project. It's still a bit rudimentary, but it's got the basics. Serif DrawPlus, Xara, and CorelDRAW are good commercial vector tools for much less than the Illustrator price tag.
Last edited by Midgardsormr; 01-11-2009 at 08:29 PM.
Bryan Ray, visual effects artist
http://www.bryanray.name
I'm thinking of switching to gimp instead of PS CS4, whats the pros and cons of that? Anyone who use both?
I've used both, though I primarily use PS now - here's a couple of things I've noticed.
- GIMP doesn't have the lighting effects filters that PS does (unless someone's come out with one recently)
- GIMP's interface takes a bit of getting used to - not difficult, just different
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Photoshop has a bunch of add-on plug-ins, some free, some not, some good, most not. I use the Eye Candy and Xenofex ones the most, but never found them all that useful for mapping except for the astronomical amounts of cloud variations.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
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And many photoshop plugins can work with gimp (on windows - not sure on mac) using the PSPI plugin to interface them...
That includes most all of the filter factory .8bf style, as well as (for example) executable plugins like Eye Candy.
-Rob A>
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