I rarely use Gimp, the free image editing program, as I prefer to use Photoshop. However, Smashing Magazine has a nice tutorial on techniques to supercharge Gimp so that it has more Photoshop-like features. In fact their tutorial is titled Handy Tweaks To Make GIMP Replace Photoshop.

You can view the article by clicking here.


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We all like freebies, and we have decided to make a list of free Photoshop and Gimp brush sets. Photoshop brush sets are compatible with Gimp 2.4 and higher, so you can use these in both or either program.

If you have more that you would like to add to this list, leave a comment with the location of the brush set and we will add them to the list. Here's the list, enjoy:

Grunge Brush Set Click Here

Clouds Brush Set Click Here

Snowflakes Brushes Set Click Here


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The new version of Gimp, the free open source image editing software package, has been released to the public. The big question about Gimp is whether or not it is ready to compete with Adobe Photoshop for high end applications. The answer to that question is getting closer to being positive, although there are still many things that Photoshop can do at the high end that are not yet in the Gimp toolbox, e.g. Content Aware Scaling.

That said, Gimp 2.6 adds a number of feature which make it quite acceptable for the vast majority of users for photo and image editing. Certainly when considering the price differential between Gimp and Photoshop CS4, one really should give Gimp 2.6 a close look before deciding to buy Photoshop.

Here are some of the new features in Gimp 2.6:

Ability to Pan Beyond Image Border Scroll Beyond Border illustration

It is now possible to pan beyond the image border, making image window navigation much less constrained. It is no longer a problem to use the edge of a brush on the edge of an image while being zoomed in, and one can adapt the canvas to any utility windows covering parts of the image window.

Improved Free Select Tool

The freehand select tool has been enhanced to support polygonal selections. It also allows mixing free hand segments with polygonal segments, editing of existing segments, applying angle-constraints to segments, and of course the normal selection tool operations like add and subtract. Altoghether this ends up making the Free Select Tool a very versatile, powerful and easy-to-use selection tool.

Brush Dynamics

Brush dynamics let you map different brush parameters, commonly at least size and opacity, to one or more of three input dynamics: pressure, velocity and random. Velocity and random are usable with a mouse. The Ink tool, that supported velocity before, has been overhauled and now handles velocity-dependent painting much better.

Brush dynamics have enabled a new feature in stroking paths. There is now a check box under the "paint tool" option, for emulating brush dynamics if you stroke using a paint tool. What this means is that when your stroke is being painted by GIMP, it tells the brush that its pressure and velocity are varying along the length of the stroke. Pressure starts with zero, ramps up to full pressure and then ramps down again to no pressure. Velocity starts from zero and ramps up to full speed by the end of the stroke.

Under the Hood - GEGL

Important progress towards high bit-depth and non-destructive editing in GIMP has been made. Most color operations in GIMP are now ported to the powerful graph based image processing framework GEGL, meaning that the interal processing is being done in 32bit floating point linear light RGBA. By default the legacy 8bit code paths are still used, but a curious user can turn on the use of GEGL for the color operations with Colors / Use GEGL.

In addition to porting color operations to GEGL, an experimental GEGL Operation tool has been added, found in the Tools menu. It enables applying GEGL operations to an image and it gives on-canvas previews of the results. The screenshot to the right shows this for a Gaussian Blur.

Photoshop CS4 is still the gold standard for image editing, Gimp 2.6 offers a great package at the right price. You can download the new Gimp for free by clicking here.






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Filter plugins greatly improve the capability of Photoshop, but Gimp users have fewer choices. One option to try is to use Gimp User Filter to run Photoshop plugins.

I can't guarantee that it will work for you, but it is free so it won't cost you anything to try and see if it will configure on your Gimp install, and if it does work it would make Photoshop filters usable for you in Gimp. Which will also allow you to benefit from the next tip.

For those who own Photoshop, there are tons of free filters. You can find those by visiting clicking here.



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PC Magazine has a new review of the Gimp image editing program. The review itself is rather short and sweet, with the primary comparisons being made between Gimp and Adobe Photoshop Elements. In that regards I suppose it is fair to compare Gimp to Photoshop Elements instead of comparing it to the much more powerful Photoshop CS3 Extended program. Nonetheless, the review does ding Gimp for perceived shortcomings when compared to Photoshop Elements. It should be pointed out though that Gimp is a completely free program, and Photoshop Elements, while far less expensive than its bigger brother, will still cost you a bit of money.

I have both Photoshop CS3 Extended and Gimp on my computer, and I confess that my primary tool is Photoshop. However, that is largely because I do a lot of work with Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks, so Photoshop fits in well with that workflow. I also use Aperture 2.1, but all that said, I find Gimp to be a powerful program, and if you don't want to spend the money on the commercial competition, it's a decent stand in.

With that out of the way, here's what the reviewer thought:

GIMP still lacks many niceties offered by commercial programs. There's no image or album organizer, which is a real strength in Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 (beta) and is also included in the Serif and Corel editors. There's no tool for quickly stitching panoramas together, either, nor are there built-in printing modules for rapidly creating greeting cards and the like. And the application contains no quick links, like the ones on Shutterfly or Flickr, for sharing photos on popular Web services. All these features are pretty much standard these days, and all are available in competing programs from Adobe, Corel, and Serif.

Fair point, Gimp on its own does lack a photo browser. However, the author fails to mention that there are open source alternatives, such as Blue Marine, which specifically is:

blueMarine foundation is very similar to existing applications such as Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture: a photo browser, which can be explored in different ways (by folder, by calendar, by tags, by galleries). This is just a core upon which different modules can be plugged in. The aim of blueMarine is to fully support the photographic workflow, even before the photo shoot (for instance, trip planning supported by maps) and beyond print or archival. For instance, an ornithologist usually manages field notes about the bird observed and photographed: directly binding them to photos and maybe GPS positioning data is much better than keeping a separate Excel sheet.

While blueMarine appears to be still fairly raw, leaving it out of the Gimp conversation doesn't seem fair. Open Source does have a photo browser option, and while it might not be as sophisticated as Aperture or Lightroom, it does exist.





Next, the PC Magazine review says:

Performance, too, can lag that of the competition. Some filters didn't process as quickly as I would have liked. And few respond in real time—so you don't see the effect on an image until you release the mouse button. As a result, you usually have to make multiple attempts until you get just the effect you want. Modern, for-pay applications such as Elements and Paint Shop Pro usually preview changes in real time. You'll find the lack of preview a real annoyance if you plan to use GIMP for a lot of fiddly edits.

This is a valid point, however it should be noted that the review is not for the latest version of Gimp as the author points out (the review is on version 2.4.7 and version 2.5.3 is currently in development and may address some of these issues).

GIMP is a powerful tool in the hands of an experienced user or developer, and it delivers broad support for building graphics and images (it can even open and save Vista icons!). But despite the progress the developers have made in making the program more intuitive, neophytes will still find the learning process arduous. So GIMP is essentially for those who enjoy poking around a program and primarily want to do fine-tuning on photos (although the lack of a preview makes this somewhat hit-or-miss). It's not for the weekend shutterbug who wants to quickly edit, share, and organize shots (programs from Adobe, Serif, and Corel are much better at that). On the other hand, given the irresistible price, many may find the extra effort worthwhile.

This is probably a fair point, but keep in mind if you're a Second Life designer, you may also find Gimp useful. At least it's free, so the price shouldn't stop you from at least giving it a go.



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We're receiving a lot of inquiries about how to run the photo editing software Gimp on a Mac. While our tutorials have all been done on Vista and XP, we didn't include any specific information about Macs and Gimp, so this post is to help alleviate those issues. So, here's what you will need to do.

First, you'll need to make sure something called X11 is installed on your Mac. X11 allows you to run a large number of unix applications from inside OSX, and Gimp is one of those applications. You will find X11 on your OSX installation DVD, and if you have installed it, it will appear in your Utilities folder:




Open up the X11 program in that folder, and it will launch a program that will look like this:




Now go to your Applications folder (assuming you've installed Gimp already) and launch Gimp. The result should look like this:




That's it. You can now run Gimp. Let us know if you have any questions or if you get stuck.

One of the software packages we track on this site is Gimp, not only because it is free, but because it is a nice alternative to Adobe Photoshop. While we use and like Photoshop and other Adobe products, Gimp is quickly becoming the go-to source for image management for a number of users.

One of the things you might not be aware of, however, is that there is a fairly robust set of plugins for Gimp, and they are collected in one place called the Gimp Plugin Registry. While these might not be Nik Plugins, many of them are of high quality, and the price is right.



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Here are some links for free fonts:

http://www.freetype.org/

http://www.dafont.com/

http://www.thibault.org/fonts/




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Scribus is an open source desktop publishing software that integrates with Gimp. It is available for Windows, Macs, and Linux. Scribus is an open-source program that creates what they call "press-ready" output. Scribus supports "professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation."

Scribus is completely free.







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The developers of Gimp have released some details on some of the new features coming up in the next release. The release 2.5 is not stable, but if you are brave you can give it a go. Changes in version 2.5 include higher color depths and a rebuilt graphical core known as the Generic Graphics Library (GEGL). Not all the features are fully implemented in this release, but the GEGL is the foundation for GIMP to support higher color depths, more color spaces, and nondestructive editing.


Here is a screenshot:





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How would you like more free software? How would you like more software to go with Gimp and the other free design tools we've covered in this blog? Something tells me that the overwhelming answer to that question is "YES!" So, here's another one to add to the list: PaintNet

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.
It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool. It has been compared to other digital photo editing software packages such as Adobe® Photoshop®, Corel® Paint Shop Pro®, Microsoft Photo Editor, and The GIMP.
The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with a small amount of C++ for installation and shell-integration related functionality. The source code is available under the terms of the MIT License.

Sound good? Well obviously if you are not using Windows, this won't work, but still...












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We've written extensively about Gimp, the free open source image editing program that handles many of the same features as Adobe's Photoshop. While Gimp is a fantastic program, and is essential if you are doing design work for SL, another image editing specialty is vector graphics (more info on vector graphics can be found here).

Another must have free program is the open source vector graphics editor Inkscape. It gives you similar functionality to Adobe's Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. So if you don't have Illustrator, go and grab Inkscape. It runs on Windows, OSX, and Linux. You can download it by clicking here.


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Here's design tip. A "greenscreen" background is what is often used to create bottom layer for texture replacement. You see this technique on TV weather reports where the weather person appears to be standing in front of real time radar maps, but is really standing in front of a plain green screen with the green replaced via computer with the radar images. You can use this technique in with Gimp (or Photoshop) to give yourself a background which can fairly easily be replaced. If you are doing clothing design, you can take front and back photos of a model wearing the clothing, and if she is in front of a greenscreen it is fairly easy to cut out the background so that you can create your transparent layer. All it requires is a large piece of non-reflective plain green fabric which can be easily acquired from any fabric store. Set it up as your "screen" and you have an instant studio for clothing design at a very low cost.

Once you have your photos, open one in your favorite editing program (GIMP, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Corel Paint Shop Pro, etc.). Create a new blank layer and set it as the background layer. Go to the photo layer, select the greenscreen background using the magic wand, and delete the green area. What remains should be your model against a blank background. If you wish, you can even insert another background in a new layer below the model layer, for example a SL landscape shot.

Gimp can be downloaded here and is 100% free of charge:

Gimp download


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