[oclug]for the mac / linux fans

[gabriel]

On January 12, 2003 06:08 pm, Milan Budimirovic wrote:
> Well, I don't care what you say. Sentences should begin with capital
> letters.
>
> Photoshop is **not** light years ahead of the GIMP. The only thing it
> has that the GIMP lacks is CMYK support, which is really only useful to
> professional photographer for generating hardcopy. The vast majority of
> people who use Photoshop use it for manipulating web graphics, where the
> GIMP has major advantages, especially with its macro powerful languages
> -- one of which is Perl. :=))

after hearing all the support for gimp, i decided to go back and give it 
another try.  it was already installed on my box, so why not?  (i'd kept it 
around in case i needed something quick and simple) and here's what i found:

gimp is pretty damned impressive.  it handles masking, blending types and 
previews for jpeg compression.  it even gzips on-the-fly.  pretty cool.

it's lacking however in some very important areas if it's meant to be a 
photoshop replacement:  (a) no gif preview.  you're saving @256colours 
whether you like it or not, ie. you can save it as a gif, but don't count on 
using it for the web.  (b) no knife tool.  making one really big 6mb image is 
great, but if i can't hack it up into multiple pieces and save each piece 
individually in different formats, it's never going online.  sure, i can 
select, copy paste into a new file, but that's really an excessive amount of 
work when you're talking a full web layout.  (c) lastly, there's some gaps in 
the useability.  the right-click system is pretty cool, but there's no "hand" 
tool, so i'm having to use my scrolling arrows (very slow) and using the move 
tool isn't intuitive.  you can't select a layer and move it about, you have 
to click on it directly, and if it's buried under 5 other layers... good 
luck.

some of what i've posted here may be an easy work around, maybe there's some 
special button i can click to "lock on" to a layer or something, but 
seriously speaking, you just can't compare the two.

-- 
"mr. ghandi, what do you think of western civilization?"
"i think it would be a good idea."
	- reporter to mahatma ghandi