Dion Moult Seriously who ever reads this description.

GIMPup A Webdesign

On 23 July 2008 with 3 comments

Seem as though The GIMP has finally gotten on my list of “Awesome Applications”. That list is basically all the stuff on the computer which I know I cannot live without. They already include Vim, Blender, Apache, MySQL, PHP …. etc – but I’ll save that for another post. All of the applications I use are open-source and completely free. Except for Adobe Photoshop.

But Photoshop rules! Why switch to The GIMP?

You’re right. No way saying The GIMP is more powerful than Photoshop. Not saying the switch over to learning The GIMP wasn’t filled with “argh! Where did my other kabillion windows disappear to“. Also not saying that all the industry professionals should switch over to The GIMP right now.

However, I like to place my faith in open-source software (Blender being an excellent example) – the main reason being that open-source development is crazy fast, and the community in general is great. So I wouldn’t be too surprised if 5-10 years later The GIMP is the ultimate graphics tool.

So, how to learn The GIMP? Simply by using it to do what I would otherwise do in Photoshop. Some methods of working I have developed is that my two panels are always set to “Always On Top”, and my window manager set that a double click on the windows title bar will shade the window. One of the external window contains the toolbox, and nothing else, and the other contains everything else that I use frequently in tabs. This way I get quite a lot of screen space for what I’m working on. I’d also like to mention that learning the hotkeys for the tools in The GIMP is definitely something really useful to do for a beginner.

Here’s a design I churned out after 4 hours of working out how stuff is done in The GIMP. I hope you like it. Click the image to get a full size picture.

Of course, comments welcome.

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