Would GIMP work?

I have a small store that has some resale items, and some of my own creations. I'm gradually, little by little, trying to phase out the Resell part of things, and stock entirely my own creations. I've made some things I really like, and I find it fun and very stress-relieving to make clothes. I haven't tried my hand at anything beyond clothes yet, and I have a ton of ideas. However, so far I've been limited to buying textures, and even clothing templates, to make my own designs. I don't have any sort of photoshop or paintshop program on my computer, currently, which would enable me to really get into fulfilling some of my ideas.

I'm not really planning on making a profit as a clothes designer, there are too many other really great artists out there, but I would like to at least meet some of my SL expenses. As such, I just don't have the funds to invest in an expensive photoshop program. My RL husband has Corel, um, not sure if paintshop pro or photoshop pro...whichever, and I can sometimes ask him to make a shirt for me, etc. That is rather cumbersome, though, for both of us. I've read some on here about Gimp, and read some on their website, but haven't delved too deeply into it yet. My question is....would GIMP allow me to custom make some textures, or shirt/pant, etc, textures well enough to create some decent items?

Anyone who uses GIMP, can you let me know if it would suit my needs? If not, is there another inexpensive software I can use? Or should I just start saving my pennies to so that sometime next year I'm able to buy a program that will probably cost twice as much as the computer I'm planning on purchasing in a few weeks? And is it really worth it to spend that money on what I basically consider a hobby? (which is probably a question only I can answer....lol)

I think GIMP can work if you plan on taking things lite and easy...but if you want to get into serious texture creation and manipulation...invest *cough* in Photoshop. That's all I'll say.

I think I'll have to stay lite and easy. It's that word...."invest"....that scares me!....lol I can still go to my hubby, I guess, for the heavier stuff. He's the one with the big expensive computer and complicated software. It's just more fun, and convenient, to be independent of him on something like this. Like when he's playing one of his PC games, and I want to make clothes, right then and there.....lol

I use GIMP exclusively. It is a very good tool to use and given the cost, it has PS beat hands down. It has a bit of a learning curve if you have never used anything besides Microsoft Paint, but is probably not any harder than PS.

I have never seen anything that PS does that GIMP will not do.

C'mon Michael. It's not "that" bad. Is it? "Lite and Easy" indeed. Seems to do it all for me as I can't afford the *cough* $1,500+ price tag.

The only problem with the GIMP is that almost everybody else uses Photoshop, the tutorials are almost always for Photoshop, and the books are all about photoshop.

BTW, be sure to get GIMP 2.4, which is finally out.

I'm actually very excited with these responses! I plan on getting a new PC with income tax refund (doing my part to help the economy and all), and can't wait to download Gimp once I have it. The hard part will be investing the time to learn it (having 2 little people around the house who call me "mom" make it hard to get just about anything done until after 9:00 at night-thank goodness for bedtime), but the challenge of learning it has me excited also.

I wouldn't exactly say I actively use GIMP (by choice), but let me give you my answer to your questions anyway.

Yes, GIMP will do the job. It's more than capable. However, for most people, it's a very difficult program to learn. Also, it instills some relatively strange habits in its users, since it's so non-standard. It works differently in a lot of ways from how most other graphics programs operate. Consider these factors carefully when making your decision.

While the program itself is initially free, there can be a high long term cost from having such an oddball be your first experience with graphics. I'd highly recommend you start with something that lends itself more toward standard practices and techniques than does GIMP.


The hands down best choice would be Photoshop, but if you're truly unable or unwilling to spend the money on it, Paintshop Pro is a very good program which is far less expensive than Photoshop. It's only a hundred bucks, and it will suit your needs very niicely.

While PSP is not quite as powerful as Photoshop or GIMP, it is pretty close, and transitioning from PSP to Photoshop later if you choose to do so will be relatively painless. You won't really have to unlearn anything; you'll just alter and enhance what you already know. However, trying to tackle Photoshop with GIMP habits already firmly established in you could require massive unlearning, which is pretty tough for the brain to do.


If you can find an SL capable computer for $325, more power to ya. You do realize Photoshop is $649, not $6499, right?

Anyway, if it's really going to take you a year to scrape together $649, then I'd say don't wait. Spend $100 on PSP now, and call it a day. However, if it's just a matter of principle, not of actual spending power, then I can promise you PS is worth every penny if you use it.


As you said, only you can answer that. If you want my opinion, I would say it all comes down to how much enjoyment you get out of it. The cost of Photoshop is about equivalent to six or seven dinners for two at a nice upscale restaurant. Do you feel you'd get more enjoyment out of using the best possible graphics program to make your SL items from now on than you would from those six or seven nice evenings out? If the answer is yes, then go for it. If not, then don't bother.

I'd be leery though of assuming any particular thing might not be worth investing a good amount of money into, simply because it's "just a hobby". Work is what we do for a living, but hobbies are what we live for. If this particular one is important to you, don't be afraid to spend whatever you can reasonably afford on it to make it more enjoyable.


If you don't want to invest the time or resources it takes to make your SL business profitable, that's fine. However, if your only reason for not pursuing it is really is that you think too many other people are already doing it, that's terrible. There's simply no way there could ever be too many others. No one else is you. How successful or unsuccessful they guy down the street might be has no bearing whatsoever on how successful or unsuccessful you might be. Don't ever fall into the trap of believing that it would or could.

First, there are just too many customers out there, and it's growing all the time. There's no way to saturate the market.

For a RL analogy, how many restaurants are in your town? Probably hundreds, right? (Can you tell I'm hungry right now, by the way?) Do you think any budding restaurateur would ever say, "Well, gee, there are already so many restaurants in the world, I'm not gonna bother trying to make a profit on mine. I'll just see if I can get it to cover the rent."

I'm pretty sure you'd agree that would be pretty silly. Obviously, anybody with the drive to do all the work it takes to open a restaurant is gonna have enough business awareness to realize it doesn't matter that other restaurants already exist in the world. The simple fact is everyone needs to eat, and no matter how many restaurants there are on this planet, there can never be so many that there wouldn't be enough people to eat in them. All things being equal, the success or failure of any given restaurant is always determined by how well it's run, how good its food is, etc. It never has anything to do with the fact that there happen to be other restaurants in the world too.

For easy proof of this, what's next door to every McDonald's? A Burger King. What's always a few doors down from them? A Wendy's. And what's always somewhere in the vicinity? A Taco Bell, an Arby's, and a Subway. Ever wonder why that is? It's simple. One of them does the research to determine where would be a good spot to open a restaurant, and then the others follow along. The owners of each know that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. If a particular spot is a good for a McDonald's, it will be just as good for a Burger King. Neither takes any business away from the other. There are just too many people for that ever to happen.

I'd encourage you to look at your SL business the same way. The presence of other similar businesses simply means that there are lots of customers out there. If you want your business to be profitable, it can be. If you don't, it won't. Either way, the presence or absence of other businesses won't make a difference.

Second, we're talking about art here. Nobody else is going to be offering precisely what you're offering (not counting IP theft of course, which sadly does happen from time to time). Just as the success of a restaurant is determined by the quality of its food and service more than anything else, the success of your business will be determined by the quality of your work and by your customer service. Again, it won't have anything to do with how many other people are also running SL businesses.



Michael, while I'm certainly no great lover of GIMP, I must say I'm a little bit bothered by this description of it as "lite and easy". Anyone reading, I can assure you GIMP is neither light nor easy. It's arguably the second most powerful raster editor out there (second to Photoshop), so it's not light. And as has been said, it takes a good amount of work to learn it, so it's not easy either.


No offense, Talis, but unless you're really familiar with both programs, which by your own admission, you're not, I'd be very cautious about declaring whether one is "beats" the other, or whether either is any "harder" than the other. It's obviously better to speak from experience than from speculation.

Your statement of "I use GIMP exclusively," which of course means you don't use Photoshop at all, doesn't seem to jive logically with your later imaginings that GIMP "beats PS hands down," and that learning GIMP is "probably not any harder than [learning] PS". Obviously, your comments are just conjecture, but they're almost presented as learned fact. That kind of thing often leads to heated arguments.

In reality, the only thing GIMP definitively "beats" Photoshop on is initial price, which is just one factor among thousands. Price might have been the determining issue for you personally, but you'd do well not to imply that it should be that way for everyone. If it were, no one would ever buy Photoshop and we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place. Clearly, there's a reason so many people feel Photoshop is worth the money.

As for ease of learning, most people who have used both GIMP and PS extensively would agree that GIMP is significantly harder to learn than Photoshop. A few people would disagree with that, of course, but most won't.

Photoshop has been the industry standard for so long that most other 2D graphics programs in existence have copied much of its methodology. That makes transitioning between any two commercial graphics applications is relatively easy. An example I often cite is the fact that I was able to learn enough about Paintshop Pro in about half and hour to be able to teach it quite well, by drawing on my Photoshop experience. It was simply a matter of learning how things were arranged in PSP. The underlying logic was so similar.

Also, within Photoshop itself, the logic is so consistent, you can learn a little corner of it, and let that become your "Rosetta stone" toward learning the rest. Granted, getting started is not exactly intuitive at first, but once the logic clicks in your mind, it's all down hill from there. All it really takes is to be shown the basics. Then you just take off with it. That's how it was for me, and I've seen the same thing happen for countless others whom I've gotten started with it.

GIMP, unfortunately, does not seem to afford the user such fast and easy absorption. Those who are big fans of it will of course swear it makes perfect sense, but all I've ever been able to conclude from that is that it only makes sense to a certain type of person. If you've already got the personality traits to which GIMP appeals, which presumably are similar to those of its authors, then there's probably nothing I can say to convince you that GIMP is indeed uniquely hard to learn. But for most of the rest of us, its interface is practically from another planet. It takes a certain something in you, I think, to be comfortable with it.

My experience with helping people learn Photoshop, on the other hand, has me convinced that its designers hit on something really powerful when they came up with its logic. Practically anyone can absorb it with relative ease, provided they're first shown how to start. I've been looking for a similar "Rosetta stone" in GIMP for years, and I just haven't found it. Every part of it just feels different to me from every other part.

I'm not trying to say GIMP is bad, mind you. I do very much applaud it for delivering so much power for free. However, it's got such significant drawbacks, I really can't say that the $600-1000 it saves in initial cost could ever be worth it for the majority of people.

Photoshop runs circles around GIMP in so many ways, you can easily offset the cost. For professionals, one job more than pays for it. And for hobbyists, well I think most people would have to agree that time is money, even for a hobby. If it takes you twice as long to learn how to do something, it's costing you twice as much. It's doesn't take all that long before an especially steep learning curve can end up costing more than the initial dollar amount it would take to buy a gentler curve. Exactly where that balance point falls is going to be different for each person, obviously. But I think it can't be denied that the long term benefits of getting good with Photoshop so far outweigh the cost of buying it, they can scarcely be measured.

What really kills GIMP for me though is not the learning curve. It's that the work flow habits it encourages do not translate well, if at all, to use in other programs, nor to effective communication with users of other programs. The majority of GIMP users I've ever encountered tend to look upon the standard practices of the industry as unimportant, or even silly, since their experience with GIMP has been along a different path. The GIMP experience doesn't adequately prepare its users at all for embracing an effective mindset toward what pretty much everyone else is doing. This keeps GIMP users relatively isolated from the rest of the rest of the graphics community, which doesn't do anyone any good.

Here are the two criteria by which I measure which program is "better":

1. Which program's methodology is most easily learnable by the largest amount and broadest range of people in the least amount of time?

2. Which program's methodology is most universally applicable to the widest range of potential scenarios, including but not limited to communicating and working with others, and quickly learning other programs besides just the original in question?

On both counts, Photoshop is the clear winner. While GIMP is certainly very powerful, it just doesn't fit either of those descriptions. Combine that with what I've already said about negating GIMP's only major advantage, the upfront cost, by letting Photoshop pay for itself over time, and it's hard to argue in favor of GIMP for any reason. Therefore, I can never confidently recommend it to anyone.

Those who are fans of GIMP will disagree with me all day long, of course, and that's fine. Nobody can be wrong for liking any particular program. I do think it's important though that GIMP fans realize most people's experience with it won't feel the same as their own, and that everyone realize you do absolutely get what you pay for with Photoshop.


Since when did Photoshop cost $1500? It's not even half that. It's only US$649. Even the extended version, which has features GIMP can't even dream of (3D model import for texture editing, motion graphics, advanced animation features, extensive image analysis tools, etc.), is only $999.

What does cost around $1500 are some the Creative Suite collections. CS3 Web Premium, which I'm guessing is what you were thinking of, is $1599. It comes with seven different programs, including the extended version of Photoshop. CS3 Design Premium, which is what I have, is also close to that price, with six programs (again include PS CS3 E) for $1799.

To my knowledge, Adobe does not make any single program that costs $1500. Most are less than half that.

A fair piece, and it is hard to say an awful lot to it apart from "I don't agree". With the parts about the GIMP vs Photoshop, that is; the rest, I agree with.

I don't agree that the GIMP has anything in the procedures that it demands that people behave in an illogical manner, or that it's harder to learn than Photoshop, or that it cripples one's "mindset" or encourages bad "workflow habits" - actually, I haven't a clue what the latter might mean in practice, and would appreciate clarification. PS is, I would say, a horribly irrational program to learn, and the fact that it is the industry standard and thus frequently imitated doesn't mean that it is actually better. I remember my days of learning to use the thing and it was a complete pain; it still doesn't make much sense except in its own context. (By the way, yes, I have used both; I use the GIMP at the moment, I don't consider that paying for PS would be appropriate for what I use it for, and I don't approve of pirating software that I don't absolutely need.)

I use the GIMP exclusively.

Can't beat the price, and the newest versions have pretty much all the features of PS. I've no plans for making a living as a 2D graphics designer, so I'm not really worried about workflow or industry standard processes. But I can make skins, clothes and such without any trouble using it, and I can import and export PS files to use with GIMP if I want.

You have to mess around sometimes when following web tutorials, many of them are written for the PS crowd. The biggest difference between the two seems to be how GIMP's layer masks work.

Ordinal, it's not that I think GIMP requires "illogical behavior". It's just that there doesn't seem, at least to me, to be a singular consistent logic across all of its components. Different parts of it seem to work in different ways, each with their own particular logic.

For example, there's not a whole lot of correlation between, say, how the channels palette works and how the layers palette works. This is in pretty stark contrast to Photoshop, in which both palettes behave exactly the same way (excepting layer-specific and channel-specific specialized functions, of course).

It's a little hard to define what I mean without citing more specific examples, which I'm sorry to say I can't do right now. It's been too long since I've used GIMP to speak in that kind of detail without running a high risk of factual error, and I certainly don't want to confuse anyone. If I find some time to work with it, I'll edit this post and add some more examples.

As far as the mindset handicaps I was referring to, here's an easy example that comes to mind. I'm sure you've noticed the plethora of confused, and sometimes argumentative, discussions that have happened on this forum regarding such a simple thing as alpha channel work flow. While the whole of the graphics industry has been making alpha channels the same way, and using them for all sorts of purposes, for decades, the makers of GIMP have seen fit to have their program approach the whole process so differently as to render its users ignorant at best, and downright belligerent at worst, towards the whole idea. More of its users than I'd care to count have referred to the normal alpha channel work flow with such colorful terms as "a caveman approach", "a convoluted system", "bass ackwards", "silly", "retarded", etc. Because they're not exposed to it from the beginning in the same way as everyone else, the power behind what alpha channels can actually do is, seemingly more often than not, completely lost on them. That's sad.

I'm not saying every GIMP user has that attitude, of course. That would be an unfair generalization. However, a disproportionate amount do, and when you examine GIMP's approach to the process, it's pretty easy to see why. If all you know is GIMP, then many standards, including the most common alpha channel work flows, will seem very foreign.

Anyone who seeks to be well educated on these things can of course be, so perhaps "handicap" was too strong a word. Would "initially disadvantaged" be better? I don't want to be insulting about it, but I do believe it's important to point out that to learn GIMP is not to receive the same general introduction to how a lot of things work in the industry as is to learn Photoshop. I'm not sure the best way to say it.


I find your description of Photoshop as "a horribly irrational program to learn" to be completely inaccurate and unfair. I'm sorry if you personally have struggled with it, but I can honestly say that of all the programs I've ever taught to people, Photoshop has by far been one of the easiest for most to learn. Just last week, my brother called me in a panic, as his boss had demanded he do some work requiring Photoshop, even though he'd never previously used it, or anything like it, before. Within an hour, I'd walked him through enough of it over the phone that he was able to do the work with no problem. While his boss is definitely irrational, nothing about learning the program is.

Perhaps you just had the bad luck of having been given a poor introduction to it. As I said, it's not immediately intuitive when you first look at it. But really, all it takes is a few minutes of the right kind of introductory instruction, and all the basics fall into place. From there, because every part of it uses the same logic as every other part, it's pretty easy to put it all together. The only remaining factor after that is the necessary time to discover all the features, and to practice in order to get good at it, rather than just being familiar with it. The best way to do that is simply to gain experience from doing lots of different kinds of projects.

If you don't want to agree with me as just one person though, I would invite you to ask yourself why you think Photoshop became the industry standard in the first place. Surely if it were so "horribly irrational", that never would have happened. Things become "standard" only once they've been adopted by lots and lots of people. It's not like anybody has the power to say "OK, everyone, this is THE standard. Now live with it." It just doesn't work that way. It's totally the other way around.

It's only because Photoshop did (and still does) make sense to so many that it became "standard", and worthy of imitation by so many of its competitors. Millions of digital artists can't all be wrong, can they?

I would also argue against your notion that it doesn't make sense except in its own context. In 1988, that might have been true, but not today. So many programs have now based their entire layout and work flow around the principles that were invented for Photoshop, it's impossible to interpret Photoshop as existing in isolation. It's arguably done at least as much for graphics as MS Word has for word processing, in terms of interface layout and work flow design. That's huge. Like it, don't like it; that's up to you. But don't deny its place in history.

Again, none of this makes GIMP a bad program. It is different, however, and some of its differences do cause long term disadvantages for people.

I think it's worth noting that you, as a programmer (correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that's what you are, right?), would be very likely to have exactly the personality traits I was talking about that would naturally make you a fan of GIMP. At the risk of over-generalizing, the people who like it the most, from my experience, have mostly been programmers.

This tends to be the case with a lot of open source programs. They're written by programmers, for programmers. That's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, but it does make a lot of sense, since often the motivation behind these things' inception is a dissatisfaction on the part of a programmer, or group of programmers, with what's already available commercially "for the masses". For good or ill, programmers tend to think a little differently than other people. There's nothing good or bad about it, so please don't feel I'm trying to say there is, but it's worth taking that into account when thinking about what works best for the majority of people.




On a side note, I applaud your stated sentiment against piracy. I'll second it. If you're gonna use PS or anything else that costs money, buy it. If not, use a freebie.

I hear ya Alpha...... I had always loved messing around with Photoshop...it was only when I entered SL that I really tried to get to grips with it.. I agree that you can start with one aspect of it and expand one's knowledge so quickly from then on. It just seems so precise and logical, and not 'messy' like a certain free program that shall remain nameless..lol

My RL brother is actually a photoshop teacher and on occasion, I have managed to drag little tidbits of information out of him.. he's an absolute whiz when it comes to all things Adobe. My point being that even from getting a tiny bit of info from him, I was able to expand it into something much bigger. I figured out how to do wrinkles and shading and I don't 'suck' miserably at it anymore, well at least I don't think I do. I even had the nerve to write a mini-tutorial on it....which I'm actually a little embarrassed to even mention in the company of such illustrious PS masters such as Chosen

I actually think I'm in love with Photoshop....can that be possible to adore a graphics program... should I see a therapist or have I just been spending too much time in SL???

My 2 Cents:

For "Bang for the Buck" without spending a cent, GIMP.

I do most of my stuff in Photoshop, but GIMP is #2 for me.

Anything you can do in Photoshop (almost anything), can be done in the GIMP. ITs just a matter of adjustment. Like anything, it takes time.

To the OP. Can you invest about 30 bucks on Amazon.com? If so, get the book, "Beginning GIMP from Novice to Professional" by Akkana Peck. The author writes in a very easy to understand way with plenty of humor and covers from the most basic to the most complex of many imaging editing projects.

I, too, consider my "creative" works for SL nothing more than a hobby. I would never consider paying 650 bucks for what is something I merely do for fun. Work flow is not important to me, nor are those "bad habits" some are so concerned about. I have yet to find something I wanted to do and could not do using GIMP. Sure, if I were a professional like a few are here I probably would go with the industry standard. But, I'm not. And it seems you fall in the same boat as I do.........get the GIMP. Get the book. Start playing around with it and you'll find it is not that difficult..........dispite what some may tell you.

And no one will know which program you used unless you tell them. Not one ounce of difference in the finished product between the two programs. Except one costs $650 more than the other.

Sorry Chosen, I chose my price point in Aussie Dollars from 10 years ago when I used Windows. Thats what PS cost then. I don't think before I post therefore I should not.

There is no doubt that Photoshop is a more polished application than The Gimp. This is something that was addressed to a considerable degree in the 2.4 release of The Gimp but there is still someway to go. The main issue for me as a Gimp user is that not all the filters etc have a preview window, so it does take a little longer to experiment with these than it would in Photoshop. This is something that is being addressed though and the developers working on The Gimp do have adding a preview to all such features as a design goal.

For a hobbyist new to graphics applications, there are no compelling reasons to choose Photoshop over The Gimp. With either one you are going to have some learning to do and as Chosen points out, which you learn will make you think the other has some things backwards.

The truth is neither is backwards, they are just different approaches to the same issues and trying to use those different approaches in the wrong application will make it seem like you are having to jump through hoops. However in the correct application it will seem like the right way, so the differences in workflow are in truth only minor.

Another thing to consider is upgrades, with open source software the latest version and newest features are only a download away. Buying a new PC can end up expensive if you have a lot of commercial software that also needs updating to run on the latest version of Windows. Forced upgrades suck!

You can also supplement The Gimp with other open source tools such as Inkscape and Blender. The power that combination puts at your fingertips far exceeds even the top end version of Photoshop. Though I'm sure some would suggest spending a couple of thousand to get the comparable set of Maya, Illustrator and Photoshop is the better path.

More pragmatic people might look at http://www.elephantsdream.org/ and think that if Blender and The Gimp were good enough to create that, then perhaps they are good enough for creating SL content. They'd be right too

I've used nothing but GIMP in SL for over three years now,,.i always wondered "what i was missing" by not having PS until I got it..and sat there trying to manipulate my "GIMP thinking" into PS's bassackwards way of doing things.

My point is..if you've not worked with either..I really don't think you'll know until you try, If you have worked with one more than the other..stick with it.

I've done clothing....3d builds...mapped textures..alpha bla bla bla. including offset textures and never ever has anyone said ewwww this isn't PS quality. They don't know the diff. The ONLY thing I'm curious to see are skins made in GIMP.

If I see good skins made with GIMP then I will say that GIMP is by far superior for no other reason than price alone(FREE)

~Lana Tomba

That criteria is somewhat subjective. I'm sure there is plenty of "crap" content floating around SL designed exclusively within Photoshop, and on the flip side, plenty of "quality" content created entirely in GIMP. The skill set remains the same no matter whether one uses GIMP or PS. I have never seen a skin advertised as "Created with Photoshop, for superior quality". That would be a false claim. Quality comes from the skill of the artist, not the software.

I've read all of these responses, and I thank everyone for your input. To be honest, if I had the time and money, I would go with photoshop but with two kids, well there's just never much money for us parents to spend on ourselves. I would feel a boatload of guilt for spending that much money on myself when my kids are going to be needing new clothes in a few months for the warm weather. Besides, I plan on purchasing a new PC very soon, but that will benefit my kids also as they need it for schoolwork, so not as much guilt factor with that.

It appears as though no one is "wrong' in this thread, but more of one preference or the other. I might try GIMP and find that I can't figure it out, and then will have to bite the bullet and at least spend the $100 that Chosen talked about for paintshop.

For now, though, I guess I will try GIMP out when I get the new PC. I figure that the worst that can happen is I'm utterly confused and baffled (a normal state of mind for me, anway. lol), and will have to give up my efforts. I'll decide at that time if I want to invest additional funds in another program that might work better for my mind.

Also, buying the book from Amazon will be a good idea for me. I'm a visual learner, so reading it and doing it while I read is probably the best way for me to go. If not....well, at least I tried.

Thanks again, everyone! I really do appreciate the expertise and opinions. These forums rock!

Chosen, you have obviously confused the sentence "I exclusively use GIMP" with "I have never used Photoshop". Let me correct this error. I have used Photoshop in the past, on the company dime. I was never an expert with it as I am an Application Engineer, not a Graphic Artist and only needed it for a few projects. Granted this was a few years ago and probably not the most current release out there. While I have nothing against Photoshop, other than its major cost, I don’t recall anything to recommend it over GIMP.

As for ease of learning, I am self-taught, using freely available tutorials, on both applications. I did not find Photoshop any easier to learn than GIMP, or GIMP any harder to learn than Photoshop. I did learn GIMP after Photoshop, so I had more grounding in the basic concepts (such as what an alpha channel is) for GIMP than Photoshop and allow that may have eased my way into GIMP.

However, Sunny’s main point here is that she is looking for something to use in Second Life to create textures for clothes and is not looking to make a living as a Graphic Artist. With that in mind, price and capability to perform the required tasks are key. GIMP costs nothing and is as capable as Photoshop of creating nice textures for SL.

Your workflow argument means nothing in the context of her needs since she is not asking what tool she should use to pad her resume for her next job

GIMP is freely available, is kept up to date with free upgrades, and has plenty of decent tutorials and users available to help her. There is no reasonable argument for spending $600+ on Photoshop.

Not everything becomes a standard because it was the best product available (VHS vs. BETAMax for example), sometimes marketing and product loyalty win out.

Sorry for misinterpreting you, then.


Bingo. I figured as much. As I said, of all the people I've ever spoken with who have really like GIMP, and who have insisted it's not any harder to learn than anything else, almost all have been programmers.

Artists, on the other hand, who are obviously the primary users of graphics applications, tend to struggle with GIMP. For most of us, our brains are just not wired the way programmers' brains are wired. Many things that make perfect intuitive sense in the mind of a programmer do not make any immediate sense whatsoever in the mind of an artist, and vise versa.

As I said earlier, GIMP is written by programmers, for programmers. It's not very well suited for others.


The way PS works hasn't changed, so in that sense, it doesn't really matter that your experience is a few years out of date. The process of getting started with PS now is pretty much the same experience as getting started a few years ago would have been. There are a whole lot more goodies in the bag now, of course, but learning how to open the bag is the same.

As for "anything to recommend it over GIMP", the most obvious thing there is the interface, but since your engineer's mind likely isn't much bothered by GIMP's interface, if bothered at all, let's talk about features. Photoshop has tons of features and functions that GIMP does not. The most obvious one that comes to mind is the simple ability to paint directly on an alpha channel, the same way you would on any other image element. Photoshop users have been able to do this for at least a decade, maybe almost 2. GIMP users never have.

It doesn't stop there though. As I think I said earlier, feature for feature, GIMP has always seemed to lag a couple of versions behind Photoshop. Many of the new features in GIMP 2.4, for example, are things that were added to Photoshop in versions 8 and 9. Photoshop is up to version 10 now, and is chock full of features GIMP does not have. I'll mention a few of my favorites quickly.

The ability in the extended version to import and display 3D models in PSD files, and directly edit their textures is incredibly useful for SL purposes. Smart objects (added in version 9), which allow you to transform items losslessly and non-destructively over and over again indefinitely, are extremely handy for texturing. The advent of non-destructive smart filters in version 10 has further enhanced the non-destructive work flow, and has made so many tasks so much easier and faster than they used to be. GIMP doesn't have any of these things.

I could spend all day listing more, but my purpose here isn't to beat GIMP up. I just think it is important to point out that those who say "GIMP is just as powerful as Photoshop" are gravely mistaken. While it is certainly powerful, it barely comes close to matching Photoshop.

Often when I point this stuff out, the reaction I get from GIMP users is, "Well I wouldn't use those things anyway, so it doesn't matter to me. I only use the program for ______." But then they lap up every "new" feature when it's added to GIMP like it's liquid gold or something, never minding that those same "new" things are actually the same old features from the Photoshop of yesterday that they said they'd "never use". It's easy to say you'd never use something if you don't know what you're missing. Once you've got it though, it's a different story.


I'd bet any amount that it was most likey a combination of two things. One was your previous Photoshop experience. The other was the fact that you're an engineer, so as I said, your thought processes are more predisposed towards working the way GIMP's authors intend than are those of most other people.


Yes, GIMP is capable. However, I would (and have) argue pretty strongly against the notion that it "costs nothing". I don't want to repeat my entire previous argument, but I will echo quickly what I said about time being money, even for a hobby. If something takes twice as long to learn how to do, it costs twice as much. Again, there is a point where the time cost of a steeper learning curve exceeds the monetary cost of purchasing a gentler curve. Where that point lies will vary from person to person, but years of experience have convinced me beyond the shadow of a doubt that for the vast majority of people, spending the money on Photoshop is more than worth it.


I couldn't disagree more, for multiple reasons.

First, opportunities to be taught the standard, universally applicable work flow abound, while opportunities to learn GIMP's non-standard, specialized one are much harder to come by. There are dozens of great books, thousands of websites, and innumerable easily accessible courses dedicated to instruction in Photoshop. The available resources for learning GIMP are incredibly scarce by comparison. It's gotten better very recently, but you still have to work hard to find what you need for GIMP. You can get a top notch Photoshop education on practically any street corner these days.

Second, because so many people are familiar with the standard ways of doing things, asking for help at any point in the process is easy. Poke your head up on any web forum, including this one, and you'll get tons of detailed answers. To get a detailed answer about how to do something in GIMP, you have to find an actual GIMP user, which is harder.

Third, collaborating with others is easy if you adhere to standard, and can be disastrous if you don't.

Fourth, the reason the standard work flows and techniques became standard in the firs place is because they work well every time. With non-standard stuff, you're rolling the dice. Keep in mind, all things computer related change all the time, but somehow these underlying core principles and practices that I keep talking about have remained virtually unchanged for years or decades. Obviously, that wouldn't be the case if they weren't so vitally important.

Fifth, you never know what the future might bring. While it might seem unlikely now, you never know when the need might arise at work for ability with the prevailing software in any given field. Lots of people are just expected to know how to use Word and Excel, for example. Even if their jobs don't directly involve word processing or spreadsheets on a regular basis, most people are aware that not knowing how to use such standardized software could lead to trouble, so they learn those things at a minimum.

Well, The same thing can and does happen with Photoshop. The story I shared earlier of my brother's experience is a good example. His job has nothing to do with imagery, but an image needed to be made, the job had to fall on someone, and it happened to fall on him. The assignment was basically "Hey you, sit down with Photoshop and do this." It was just assumed that he should know how to do such a standard thing, even though his job doesn't normally involve anything of the kind. Luckily he knew someone he could call to teach him how to do it right away, and now that he's got that knowledge, he's 10 times more valuable to his employer than he previously was (even if the employer doesn't consciously realize it).



I think I've made lots of reasonable arguments, actually. I'm sorry if you can't see that. You're welcome to disagree with the weight or value of each point, of course, but calling them outright "unreasonable" is all kinds of wrong. Clearly they're reasonable to an awful lot of people, or nobody would be buying Photoshop.

Also, if you recall, I did recommend that if the OP is unwilling to spend $650 on Photoshop, she should spend $100 on Paintshop Pro. PSP is dramatically easier to learn than GIMP for most people, and it's way cheap. Certainly anyone on this planet who can afford a computer and a broadband connection for SL can also cough up a hundred bucks for anything that's important to them. Heck, letting one or two decent shirts in SL sit on a shelf and sell themselves for a month or two would pay for that.



Your analogy is flawed. Beta lost out primarily because of licensing problems, not because of anyone felt any "loyalty" to VHS. Also, even though the visual quality of Beta was better, the recording length sucked. 60 minutes for Beta vs. up to 6 hours for VHS. For most people that made VHS the superior choice.

The final blow to Beta was dealt when the movie studios decided to put the majority of their titles on VHS, while only offering a relative few on Beta. So, for the consumer, the major deciding factor was one of availability.

With GIMP vs. Photoshop, it's exactly the opposite situation. As you said, GIMP is freely available to anyone. Yet its design, style, and work flow are not the prevailing standards, and likely never will be. Photoshop, while not freely available, beats all its competitors, including GIMP, in so many ways, it has rightfully earned its place as the best, and will continue to do so for a good long time. Marketing and loyalty have very little to do with it.

I'm afraid I consider this "engineer/programmer's mind" stuff rather insulting; as if it was not the case that people who could do one thing might also be able to do another, that there was some special class of "creatives", and another of mundane "engineers", whose brains work entirely differently, mechanistically, and thus whose opinions can be dismissed when it comes to evaluating any tool relating to creative output. It is all very "two cultures" and I would hope that I am misinterpreting dramatically. I would be extremely pleased to retract.

I am hardly ashamed, myself, of being able to appreciate and manipulate logical structures by training, preference and experience, but neither do I think that that is some sort of hindrance to the function of my artistic mind any more than Da Vinci or Aristotle or Hume would have; nor do I consider that others are at all barred from these skills as if one must have a special brain to understand them.

The concept of a "workflow" here I also believe is being misused. Workflows should not rest on the tools concerned. A workflow is the flow of work, and should be identical whether Photoshop or the GIMP or PSP or MS Paint are used; the _capabilities_ of said tool might affect this, but it is a given that, in the vast majority of cases, reasonably sophisticated packages are quite capable of all desired functions. Photoshop is indeed a more powerful package in terms of available functions than the GIMP - one would hope so given the price! - and were I to need those functions I might invest the money, but I, and I dare say the vast majority of SL creators, are not.

In any case it would not affect the basic way that I carry out work. Any workflow that requires the use of a certain package, when different packages are quite capable of carrying out the same task, is _bad_ and should be rejected, and if one's boss says that this is the way that something must be done, that is is a sign that that is a business run by an incompetent. In these circumstances, if necessary, one works out what _actually_ needs to be done, and how to do it, and then does it, and (if necessary) lies to said boss and says "yes, I did it the way you said uh huh".

the gimp and photosnot are both a pain in the ass to learn

the ONLY thing that makes PS easier is the enormous amount of howto's tutorials and other various amounts of info available, which i find puzzling because this pro software that usually cost more than the computer has all this newbie casual use info associated with it, its a bit of an oxy ... you really dont see this with other software


anyway i have PS7, i sorta like it, but dont really use it unless i have to, which is really rare with SL, and getting more rare with screwball textures for my videogame projects (even less now that the gimp will do r5g5b5a1 16 bit correctly)

Ordinal, I think you're reading way too much into what I was saying. It is a fact that people with certain ways of thinking tend to gravitate toward certain professions. It is also a fact that the sustained act of performing one's profession can have a huge impact on the way one thinks, feels, and views. There's nothing good, bad, insulting, or praiseworthy about that, not in any way, shape, or form. It's simply the way it is.

It is also a fact that GIMP is written by people who appear to think a certain way, and it stands to reason that the people who would have the easiest time learning it would be those who naturally think along similar lines. My own experience, which I don't mind saying is considerable, supports this assumption perfectly.

None of this means people can't do lots of different things. Obviously, every single person in the history of the human race has been naturally good at a lot of things, naturally bad at a lot of other things, and capable of learning to get good at all kinds of things. None of that has anything to do with anything I've bee saying though. You'd do well not to assume so much.

So don't feel insulted. No insults have been aimed at you or anyone else here.


No offense, Ordinal, but that statement borders on ridiculous. Of course the tools involved directly affect the flow of the work. It cannot be otherwise.

If you're going to carve a sculpture out of stone, and your available tools are a set of hammer stones, you're going to work quite differently than if you've got a set of chisels, or a sand blaster, or a laser beam. Your entire approach to the project from start to finish is going to vary drastically, depending on what tool you're using..


Again, not true. For an example, I'll go back to the one that most readers of this forum are all too familar with, the making of alpha channels. GIMP's approach to this is very different from those of practically other programs. Unless you take it into extremely convoluted directions, it offers you no ability whatsoever to simply paint an alpha channel in simple black and white from scratch. Therefore, that particular FLOW OF WORK has to happen differently in GIMP than in almost all other programs.

To go with a more extreme example, since you mentioned MS Paint, let's go with that. Paint does not support layers. Therefore, the entire methodology from start to finish for creating images is entirely different in Paint than it is in Photoshop, GIMP, PSP, or any other image editor that does use layers. The FLOW OF WORK cannot happen in Paint the way it does in any of those other programs.


As I said, it's easy to say you don't need something when you don't know what you're missing. I wouldn't have guessed I'd "need" smart objects until I had them. Now I can't imagine how I ever lived without them. The same is true for just about every feature that ever gets added to any program. As soon as you start using it, and you see how much easier, faster, and better it makes your experience, your sense of "need" for it changes quickly.

Trust me; if the features you say you "don't need" were added to GIMP tomorrow, you'd use them. And if they were then somehow taken away, you'd be pretty upset.


My point, exactly. GIMP forces certain work flow habits that are only applicable to GIMP. Photoshop, PSP, and most other commercial paint programs allow behaviors that are universally applicable to all. GIMP stands pretty much alone as the one that doesn't. By your definition, it would therefore be called "bad".

I don't actually think GIMP is a bad program. But as I said, it's got a lot of drawbacks, and some of those drawbacks cause long term problems for people.


In some cases that might be true. But often, it's not. For example, when a chief neurosurgeon tells an intern, "This is THE way to do brain surgery," that's something that should be listened to. Tell me, if it were you on the operating table with your skull cap sitting in a dish, would you want some hotshot kid performing the surgery, making up his own way to do it because he thinks standards are silly, or would you want someone who knows how to do it right?

Usually, when an art director or project manager says "this is how this must be done", it's for very good reason. Ensuring the ability for works in progress to be interchangeable among workers is often crucial to the successful outcome of the project.

In fact, a project I'm currently working on in Maya has been giving me trouble for about a week now. There was a stumbling block I just couldn't see my way past. So I called up a colleague friend of mine, who I know works the same way I do, to see if he could help. We've worked together countless times, and we were both trained by the same person, so we do a lot of things very similarly. Interestingly, we have very different artistic styles, but our approaches to procedures are usually the same.

I E-mailed the guy the project directory, and he was instantly able to dive into it to see exactly what I was doing. He added a couple of things on his end, told me what they were over the phone (he didn't even have to E-mail the thing back to me), and the problem was solved.

That's the power of following standards. It's all about communication and effective collaboration. Make up your own ways, and you're isolated. Follow common practices, and you can always work well with others.

That doesn't mean you can't innovate or be original. That's not the point. You can certainly employ creative freedom. The key is to be creative and innovative in such a way that everyone else can easily understand why and how you did what you did.


Uh, no. You NEVER lie, ever. Seriously, man, you have no idea how much respect I just lost for you with that statement. Honesty is ALWAYS the best policy. There's never a good reason to lie, ever.



I disagree. While Photoshop does have tons of tutorials and educational information available for it, that's only a very small part of what makes it so easy to pick up. As I've said probably a thousand times already, it's the uniformly consistent logic across all components that makes it so readily understandable. The only hard part is the very beginning introduction. Someone does need to explain to you where to start. After that, it all falls into place.

I have yet to encounter anyone who, given a proper introduction to the fundamentals, was unable to take off with Photoshop right away. Give me a few hours with anyone who knows which end of a computer is which, and a few hours later I'll give you someone with a solid understanding of the basics of how the whole program works. After that, as I said before, it's all a question of practice and discovery.

I've tried hard to find that kind of uniformity in GIMP, but I haven't been successful at all. I really have to conclude that either it's not there at all, or that my brain just doesn't work the way GIMP's authors think it should. Either way, it's a problem.

Again, I don't mean to knock GIMP. It's fantastically powerful, and the fact that it's free is awesome. If someone would come along and do to it what Mozialla did for Firefox, which is to put all that oddball stuff into one nice, uniformly laid out, user friendly package, then GIMP would really be something special. Until that happens, it's only ever going to appeal to a relative few, which is unfortunate.



Anyway, the OP seems already to have been more than satisfied with the answers to her questions. This has been an interesting discussion, but it's getting dangerously close to degrading into an unpleasant argument. At least a couple of us are just paraphrasing and repeating our own selves at this point, which can indicate that frustrations might be building. If someone has something new to add to the discussion, great. But if we're just gonna post to reinforce what we've already said, I'd suggest we resist the temptation to be "right" and let the subject drop. Sound good?

There are certain esoteric things that can be done with GIMP that cannot be done with Photoshop. In particular there's a wonderful (to my eyes...) plugin called MathMap, which allows user defined filters to do whatever kinds of distortion one can write a formula for. Of course this kind of thing links up with GIMP rather than Photoshop precisely because of its open source, more programmery roots.

Oddly enough, I use Photoshop rather than GIMP, but that's more an accident of history than conscious choice.