GIMP, anyone? :O

[Glenn Thoreson]

Anybody here use Gimp for their digital photo editing? With my new computer and Windows Vista Home Premium, my old editing software won't work. I hate Vista. Mostly, I just need something to resize and sharpen. I also need something pretty much idiot proof, as I'll have to start from scratch again with junk I don't understand. Help?

[sandeha]

Gimp can run very well on a good machine and it can do wondrous things.  But it's complicated.  Try downloading Google's Picasa - it's much more straightforward.

[wlewisiii]

I tried the Gimp & then went and spent the money for Photoshop Elements. Picsasa may well be enough for your needs but I found I liked PE much better.

William

[martolod]

yep picasa is probably the best for what you are wanting to do.most of my stuff i do with picasa.
occasionally these days i use photoshop.

[Glenn Thoreson]

I looked at Picasa this morning. The info on the web site didn't offer much as to what it can actually do. From what I see, Gimp is pretty much like Photoshop, which I can't grasp at all. Nada.
I think tomorrow I'll download Picasa and see what kind of luck I have with it. If I can't get along with it I guess I can uninstal it. Then I can set fire to the computer. I hate computers.

[titrisol]

YES, Gimp is perfectly powerful for all my needs

If you are used to the PS interface you can use GimpShop (a GUI taht resembles PS)

[Philip]

I use Picasa exclusively for organising my pictures and I've used it for about four years. It's great for that: organising.  It's also good for some final touching of pictures that I want to send by email -- it handles mailed pictures very well, auto-sizing them to manageable sizes for people's mailboxs (though I get to tell it in advance what sizes to use) and automatically opening whichever of your mailers you want to use (I have it set so I can choose between Thunderbird and Gmail).  But Picasa is not a good editor beyond the eight or ten things it does very well.  Its color balance is fine.  I love its "filtered b&w" converter -- it is very sophisticated and works really well.  But its sharpening utility is awful, and there are some other heavy-handed things that most people would not use very often.

So you could probably use Picasa, but you do need an editor beyond it.  Gimp and Photoshop may be fine. I've never used Gimp, but I used early versions of Photoshop for a couple of years (version 4 or 5, I think), and I found it far too unintuitive for me. I never got used to it.

Four or five years ago someone suggested Paint Shop Pro to me and I tried it. That was version 9 which I later upgraded to X and then later to "X2 Ultimate" (or some such name).  Version 9 was excellent and X had some improvements. If you can get one of them, I'd advise it. The so-called X2 Ultimate is no improvement at all -- users everywhere, including me, experience crashes and long stalls. I regret having paid the extra sixty or seventy dollars for it.

But generally PSP is a friendly, more intuitive package than Photoshop.  For my purposes it does everything I need, and I have found that all the plug-ins that are developed for Photoshop can run in PSP.  I regularly use its darkroom-like tools (for local burning & dodging, local saturation, or other changes) plus its more complicate things like layers. I don't think its functionality is very different from Photoshop, just easier to get used to. 

There is one problem with PSP -- it doesn't seem to be developing and Corel may have it on a short leash right now. That may mean it won't have any new editions.  Nonetheless, if you can get a PSP-9 or PSP-X copy now, you'll probably pay very little, and you'll have a very solid piece of editing software.

[Justin Smith]

You might want to try IrfanView, it's freeware. I use it at work for most basic stuff since it loads quickly and handles batch re-sizing well (as well as other jobs). It's not complicated to use, but you do have to take a little time to find of the settings as they not that apparent.

Ain't no PhotoShop, but still has a lot of features for a free program with a small footprint.

[Philip]

I carry IrfanView in my pocket, on a memory stick, for when I need a quick, no-frills viewer.  It's great as a default viewer for quick views of anything.

And it costs nothing.

[Per Bostrom]

I use Gimp under Linux and also PS under Windows. I prefer Gimp. Basically compared to the PS7 I use Gimp is equivalent and my preferred software. GNU is life.

[Glenn Thoreson]

I see Photobucket has added editing tools while I wasn't looking. Since I use Photobucket to host pictures I post here and elsewhere, I can use that. It has about all the tools I normally need. I tried to download Picasa but for some reason was unsuccessful.
Thanks, everyone, for the input.  

[titrisol]

There is also GIMP for windows, same thing same price (zilch)

GIMP is far more powerful than IrfanView or Picasa/photobucket so it is worth a try in these computer photography days

Some nice tutorials @:
gimpguru.org
http://meetthegimp.org/
http://gimpology.com/
or in the flickr GIMP users group

I use Gimp under Linux and also PS under Windows. I prefer Gimp. Basically compared to the PS7 I use Gimp is equivalent and my preferred software. GNU is life.

[BillyBob]

I carry IrfanView in my pocket, on a memory stick, for when I need a quick, no-frills viewer.  It's great as a default viewer for quick views of anything.

And it costs nothing.

Same here; very portable.

I'll add another plug here for Irfanview's batch processing capabilities; I do my resizing/renaming in Irfanview and then edit in other programs.  There's aforementioned batch resize, as well as batch renaming - though you have to be careful which order you 'add' files for renaming, otherwise your newly named files, e.g. oldcar_001.jpg, oldcar_002.jpg, oldcar_003.jpg won't match the original order IMG_4001.jpg, IMG_4002.jpg, IMG_4003.jpg.

The only thing that it doesn't do as well as I'd like is 'aspect ratio crop'.  It does it, but it's a bit pickier than DigiKam and the Windows Photo Gallery editor.

Bill

[LarryD]

I have one of those in my pocket too but it has a virus to find the secrets of NASA. Why did they hid the fact that UFO are real and that there are Aliens that come foom more than South Centeral and Southern America?

[Tom Hildreth]

I'll third the motion for Infranview. Works well for the several things for which I've used it, price was right at free, and what else converts PSD files these days?  I have batch resized and sharpened many groups of images with it very quickly with a nice final product. 

It's alright, Larry.   :rolleyes: They fixed Hubble a while back and will find your home sooner pretty soon now.