GIMP: As Useful As You Want It to Be

This week's topic happens to be one for the most well-known open source image editing programs: The GIMP. Surprisingly, the software's name (an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program, by the way) doesn't garner nearly as much negative attention as GIMP's constant comparison, or contrast rather, to one of the leading commercial image editing programs Adobe Photoshop. A quick overview of these comparisons will give you phrases that range from GIMP's being "just as good as" to "nearly as good as" to "a poor man's" Photoshop.

Obviously, a person's opinion is just that. My opinion would probably sit me in the "just as good as" field and possibly a teetering position on the fence of the rarely seen "even better than Photoshop" field. I personally enjoy the lighter feel and less resource-grabbing GIMP does when running in comparison to my past Photoshop experiences. I cannot, however, speak for the average user. Coming off of Photoshop, I actually had no problem switching to the interface of GIMP. I thought it was pretty easy to grasp. However, some people find previous Photoshop experience not helpful at all. Of course, there's that extra camp that finds the whole versus debate just plain silly.

The general consensus is that GIMP isn't the most user-friendly program. I'd probably agree with that. GIMP itself agrees with that: it has previously stated that it intends to serve experienced users.

Cosmetic features aside, GIMP's functions are rather extensive. I have, again personally, never come across a task that I couldn't do in GIMP that I could do in Photoshop. A great grasp of just exactly what GIMP's capabilities are can be found in both its Introduction and Feature Overview pages. For the novice GIMP-ite, you can even read plenty of tutorials housed on the official GIMP page.

For those up for customization, you can get a wide-range of free plug-ins for the program. The program also comes with a built-in scripting feature known as "Script Fu." Of course, for novice users most concerned with the ease of the program, Script Fu is not something you want to mess with. I tried building my own from scratch, but I ended up using someone else's script as a skeleton to model mine on. (Credit was of course given.) The vast availability and creation of plug-ins and scripts solidifies GIMP as a useful open source program: communities of users use access to the program's source and coding to make constant improvements and tools for other users.

For those wishing to view more vivid examples of what a user can do with GIMP and how to do them, various tutorial videos may be found on YouTube with simple searches. The below, which discusses basic functions, is one of the more popular examples: