rob s Loc: La Mesa, CA

:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:

aflundi Loc: Albuquerque, NM

It's always good to ask, but frankly, I figure since you have absolutely nothing to loose, why wouldn't you try GIMP? I don't like saying GIMP is as good as Photoshop, because there's always people that will say GIMP doesn't have everything Photoshop has. That is true -- it doesn't. What you don't hear though is that Photoshop doesn't have everything GIMP has.

A lot of people say GIMP is hard to use, but I can't for the life of me understand why they'd say that. I know one person that had a difficult time with it, but then needed to start using it because of some of its strengths. Now he's completely baffled why he thought at one time it was hard. He probably just heard others repeat it so much, he just became convinced.

GIMP's single biggest weakness is that up to the current version -- 2.8 -- is still using 8-bits for most of its work. However, the GEGL graphics engine and BABL conversion engine is written and partially used in 2.8 and should be completely used in the next version -- 2.10. GEGL and BABL are very powerful, and can use pretty much any representation known. Like I say, why not just give it a try?

You may find that you don't need to use GIMP much though. As others have mentioned, 'darktable' has become a very nice program for picture management, RAW conversion and global editting/adjustments.

An alternative to 'darktable' is 'rawtherapee'. A year or two ago, rawtherapee was buggy, at least on my OS (FreeBSD), so I didn't use it. However, the current version is a completely different story. It's very powerful, using 32-bit floating point for all internal calculations and has a very nice set of advanced operations available. It's become my most used photo converter/editor as I can do almost everything I want in it. If I need local editing, I'll use rawtherapee to do as much global editing and adjustments as possible, then feed it to GIMP.

GIMP, darktable and rawtherapee are all free. Just download and use them.

[ Another GIMP/Photoshop/PaintshopPro-like editor that is free and worth looking at is 'krita'. Unfortunately, it may not yet be available for your OS as its primary platform is Linux. ]

rob s Loc: La Mesa, CA

I'm interested in looking more closely at the Gimp. Are you using it under Windows or Linux, and are there any differences? I can go either way since I have both a Win 7 and a Ubuntu 12.04 machine I can use.
I use Lightroom and PSE at the moment and am considering trying the Gimp as an alternative to PSE.

Any thoughts or suggestions will be appreciated.

aflundi Loc: Albuquerque, NM

I use it on FreeBSD, but it's the same on Windows, OS-X, Linux, etc. as long as you are talking about the same version (2.8 is current). It'll be different from Lightroom and PSE of course -- which is why I think a lot of people don't like it as they want it to be an exact Photoshop clone, but you can customize it to have similar behavior to the Adobe products. As long as you understand that it attacks and optimizes problems a little different than Adobe does, you shouldn't have any problems.

rob s Loc: La Mesa, CA

I do understand that it has some differences since I've tinkered with it a few times over the years.
I have visited Abe Books site and ordered a couple of books to give me the basic methods used and if I like it I'll continue my studies with tutorials on YouTube ( and possibly from advice via UHH ;-) ).
Thanks for the input. Your comments have been a timely nudge to revisit open source. I'm always surprised by the size of the improvements to the various open source offerings in between my visits.

marki3rd Loc: Columbus, Indiana

Since Darktable doesn't work with Windows (at least directly) and while Ufraw will run on Windows it doesn't communicate with Gimp (at least very easily) under Windows, I was resigned to having to run some sort of file format conversion program on my Raw files in order to obtain a format that would work with Gimp. Then I discovered Rawtherapee. This program has some nice editing capability on it's own but will also directly export your Raw file as a Tiff to the external editor of your choice, including Gimp.

rob s Loc: La Mesa, CA

From what little I've gleaned since I posted my original query.
1) UFRaw can be used as a plugin.
2) I will need to find an icc (?) file for my Canon 6D for this to make the appropriate corrections. Any suggestions?
3) Regarding Darktable. One of the + of Lightroom is that it makes no edits to the files until you export (save). Thus no matter how much you work on a file there is no image degradation resulting from this. Only the final set of changes is used for the save. Is this true in Darktable?
4) I'm quite happy to work on a Linux machine so maybe I should now be looking at Darktable as well!

Michael66 Loc: Queens, New York

What do you hope to do with GIMP or PS? If it is just for cleanup, then stay away from both and try one of the many free ones out there; Picasa, Paint.Net and Pinta, among others.