I thought I would go back and look at Gimp and Inkscape again to see
if newer versions and a little time would change my opinions of them.
I have spent the better part of a day trying to do similar jobs on
them that I would normally do in Photoshop and Illustrator. It just
reinforced my opinion that the user interface for Gimp is a pain and
the program is a little buggy. Some odd quirks like windows that
can’t be brought to the front and having to restart Gimp and X11 to
get back to normal. I downloaded the Gimpshop program and it appears
not to work with the current version of Gimp it wants to open a
version 2.2 and I am currently running 2.6 so that will not work.
There are some interesting filters and it does most of the bit
manipulations that Photoshop does but it still lacks the user
interface to make it easy to use and as I said before I hate to
fight with my tools. Gimp was originally written for Unix/Linux users
who don’t have the array of commercial programs that are available to
the PC and Mac markets. It has many similar tools to Photoshop but to
me still feels a little kludgy. But it is free.
I find Inkscape to be a more easily useable program, but that may be
because what I do in Illustrator is fairly limited so my expectations
of what I need from a vector graphics program may be less demanding.
When I need to do really precise work in vector type drawing I use a
CAD program but they are not too good for loose quick sketches. What
I want from the vector graphics package like Illustrator or Inkscape
is a way to do sketches that don’t require a lot of fiddling to get
lines and curves into roughly the right shape then ease at editing
the curves to get exactly what I want. The latest version of Inkscape
for the Mac seems to do that fairly well and I feel like I could use
it but there are still UI issues but one could get used to it. This
is an definite improvement over the last version of Inkscape I tried.
So I likely will play a little more with Inkscape to see how well it
holds up and probably will not spend much more time with Gimp for
now. But neither is a real replacement for Photoshop or Illustrator
IMHO
Jim
James Binnion
James Binnion Metal Arts