The GIMPIn my quest for the best graphic resources for church webmasters, Scott Wells directed me to The GIMP (short for GNU Image Manipulation Program). 36 hours later I emerge – impressed, but wrung out – and with some significant reservations. My one sentence summary is if you can get it to run and overlook its geekiness, it’s a great alternative to Photoshop.

I’m hopeful Scott will blog about it, since it has so much potential for a major niche – i.e., those needing a good graphics program who can’t afford Photoshop. Meanwhile, here are my more detailed thoughts on it.

Installing the Blasted Thing

Installation woes are more than a stumbling block. They basically constitute a “No Entry” sign for the non-geek. I ended up trying to install it on three machines.

On a PC running XP I had to install something called “GTK+ 2 Runtime Environment” (heaven help mere mortals) before I could install the actual application. Then it gave me DLL warnings, which scared the daylights out of me. But it ran. And so far, all my other apps still seem to run (blessings on my stalwart Dell PC). The good news is, as I looked around, I started to fall in love. I found commands like “Zealous Cropping” and “Script-Fu.” I’m a pushover for articulate geeks, not to mention it may go beyond Photoshop in some areas.

Next up was a Mac running OSX 10.4 (Tiger). Forget it. There were, by my count, five different ways to install it – and none of them worked for a time-pressed diva like me. I spent what felt like an eternity dealing with the fact that I didn’t have something called X11 for Mac OSX. I found scads of advice to “just” retrieve it from my OSX installer disk. Well, like many other people I don’t have the OSX installer disk for that machine. Why Apple doesn’t just put the thing on the web for download evades me.

Machine number three was an eMac running OS 10.3 (Panther). By this time I was in high dudgeon and nothing was going to stop me. Who cared if my machines were permanently damaged by these weird pieces of software? Gentle reader – this is an ill-advised mind state for working with your computers. Pamper them. Don’t do as I do. Do as I say – and if you are concerned that software might damage your machine, trust your instincts.

In the end, thank heavens, it didn’t damage my trusty old eMac. In fact I got it to work. If you are running 10.3, you can download X11 here and then get the GIMP app itself from here. But be warned: just because you can successfully install it, that doesn’t mean it runs like other OSX software. You must first run X11, found in the Utilities folder of Applications (where it installs itself without telling you), and only then can you open the GIMP. After that be prepared for weirdness in the way it responds to both mouse and keyboard commands. For example, you have to use Control-Z (instead of Apple-Z) to undo a command.

How It Measures Up To Photoshop

Suffice it to say, I did put it through the paces of my six basic commands, but if you’ve gotten so far as to install the GIMP successfully, I suspect you won’t need my hand-holding to figure out how to do these things. Or maybe I’ll recover in a few days and give you the specifics. Or maybe Scott can.

The Cliff Notes version is that it does do all these things quite well, with the exception of “Save for Web,” which it does well (if obscurely) for jpegs and adequately for gifs.

All-in-All

I have the distinct impression the developers of GIMP are more interested in other geeks than they are in graphic artists or poor-as-church-mice webmasters. If you can get past the major barriers of installing and opening it, you will probably (like me) love it. That said, I certainly can’t use it in my professional life. Just the fact that it doesn’t do “Save for Web” seamlessly creates a workflow issue for me. But in my church web diva life? I think it’s such fun I may just use it routinely – in solidarity with others who can’t afford Photoshop. Maybe I can even influence the developers to pay attention to mere mortals. I suspect it would be a win/win.