[olug] Graphics

[Christopher Cashell]

At Sat, 19 Jul 03, Unidentified Flying Banana Nathan Brown, said:
> I'm amazed at 'The Gimp'.  What does 'The Gimp' not do that Photoshop does 
> do?  I'm having a bit of a problem though cause I dont' know what I'm doing 
> with graphics.  I have been resizing pictures (rescaling) putting them at 
> 640X480.  Most tally up to 25 or 30 KB.  But this one I have is already at 
> 640X480 and is over 400 KB.   What do I do to get the size down?

There are a number features that Photoshop has that the Gimp still
doesn't, particularly some things related to color mode support (such as
CMYK), and some things that are used extensively for "pre-press" and
publishing.  However, in my opinion, the biggest thing that Photoshop
has that Gimp doesn't is an enormous library of third party plug-ins.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of companies who's sole products
revolve around Photoshop plug-ins, filters, and add-ons.  And there are
thousands of computer graphics artists that rely on those plug-ins to do
their jobs.  Photoshop has been around a long time, and there are simply
so many third party add-ons that it will take many years before the Gimp
can catch up on them.  Some of them, like Kai Power Tools and Eye Candy
are almost standard tools.

Don't get me wrong, though.  While Photoshop may have features that the
Gimp lacks, there are also some areas where the Gimp can out-do
Photoshop.  Scriptability is one of them, in my opinion.  The Gimp's
Script-Fu is simply amazing.  Literally anything you can do manually,
you can script.  There are actually a couple of websites out there that
let you create buttons and logo banners in real-time, using parameters
that you enter, and Gimp scripts.  Script-Fu rocks[1].

> Nate

  [1] I should admit, just for the sake of being honest, that I also
      love the fact that the Gimp's default scripting language is
      Scheme.  I'm a huge fan of Scheme, and I love seeing it well used,
      as it is with the Gimp.

-- 
| Christopher
+------------------------------------------------+
| A: No.                                         |
| Q: Should I include quotations after my reply? |
+------------------------------------------------+