Be Excellent To Each Other

I may download Gimp to a portable apps type memory stick type thing.. (http://www.portableapps.com) so that I can use it at work and at home.

What I would like to know..

Is it any good?

I don't use photoshop as it confuses the hell out of me. Is it worth learning how to do things on Gimp? I'd like someone to shed some light on it before I spend hours getting annoyed with all the features of it. Does anyone use it? Do you think it's any good?

I use it, it's quite good. I mainly use it for retouching photographs, fiddling with exposures, yadda yadda. ("Exposure? Fiddling?" - Dimrill's Mental Joke Cogs)

It's quite good, has most of the features of Adobe Wallet-rape Elements and with the same quality. The only thing is that it isn't overly user friendly, and it takes some experimentation to get into. I'm happy with it though. I only use about ten functions on it, and it gets good results. There's some decent online tutorials too.

http://www.getpaint.net

Photoshop, without the abhorrent price tag, and without the gimped (haha, see what I did there?) GTK-based user "interface" that The GIMP has.

For 99% of people, paint.net does everything they need and is about 9 million times easier to use than either photoshop or the gimp.

The Gimp usually pisses me off, but it's faster to load it for a silly picture than to boot into XP for Photoshop.

It does most of the same stuff as tattieshop but lacks the user friendliness (you can get a plugin that changes the menus and icons to help with this), doesn't support RAW images (can probably download something for this too), and doesn't seem to like my graphics tablet.

they speaketh the truth!

Having never heard of Paint.net I've downloaded it. Blimey, the interface looks far better than the GIMP. I'll see how long it is before I remove it.

Paint.NET for me, too.

I have no artistic talent AT ALL but it lets me do what I want, quickly.

That's because The GIMP's interface is based on GTK, which is an abomination and shouldn't be allowed to live.

I'm looking at Paint.net... I'm impressed. For nowt, I may uninstall that (Trial Copy - Ed) of Paintshop Pro now.

It's alright, if you've never used Photoshop. I find it considerably less powerful and difficult to use because I'm so familiar with PS. It is good for free, though.

On my OSX machine I use a combination of GIMP and Acorn for my image-editing stuff.

+

Er. Photoshop Elements is about 50 quid, which is a long way from the realm of 'wallet rape'. Now, standard Photoshop CS4, on the other hand...