Introduction
The hype surrounding the GIMP and its almost asymptotic ascent towards version one has been unprecedented in the open source community. When the big one-oh appeared, not only did SlashDot explode with congratulations, but there were stories on all the big commercial sites like Wired News. Why? What does GIMP have that other free software doesn’t?
Let’s not get swept away with the hype. What is the GIMP? It’s full title is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, which is a bit of a give-away. It’s a bit-mapped picture editor along the lines of Paint Shop Pro and Adobe Photoshop. The developers claim that it can compete with these well known and well respected products. I’ll reserve judgment, let’s get the thing installed.
Installation
That I feel that the installation needs a mention does not bode well. The reason, however, is more than a little unfortunate. Let me explain…
One of the things that the GIMP team did before (more accurately: during) development was create a new X Toolkit called GTK. Apparently this is a nicely designed system that is also relatively small and quick. A lot of people like it, including RedHat who used it to build some of their utilities. The problem is that the version of GTK that the GIMP uses is newer than the one that RedHat 5 uses.
The upshot of all this is that, although the GIMP works absolutely fine, I can no longer user UserNet to connect to my ISP or the control panel to administer my system. Because of all the interdependencies, RPM seems to get quite upset if I try and downgrade and even then GIMP will be broken. (I suspect that the real solution would be to recompile UserNet and control-panel using the new libraries.
User Interface
I doubt that the developers will be too upset if I describe the user interface as unusual. I don’t think I’ve seen another program quite like it.
When the GIMP starts only a tool palette appears on the screen. It’s quite busy, with twenty-one monochrome buttons, a colour-picker at the bottom and a menu bar at the top, but it does look smart and presentable — not something to be taken for granted with much free software. The icons are all fairly obvious. You can open an image either from the file menu or by pressing Control-O. The GIMP makes a big effort to be operational from the keyboard.
The image opens in a new window, unlike the Paint Shop Pro MDI-style interface. Personally I found moving between windows to select tools to be a bit of a drag, however the effort required here is probably more a function of the window manager than the GIMP itself. (During testing I was using the XFCE2 environment.) Fortunately you don’t need to head over to the tool palette every time you want a different gadget. There is a context sensitive menu available by right-clicking the mouse. The menu has all the menu options available in the palette window in addition to the various tools.
Many of the menus lead to a dialog of some kind. Most of these dialogs remain on the screen until you dismiss them — not when you’ve clicked ‘Apply’ like in Paint Shop Pro. This is excellent as it allows much more in the way of experimentation. As does the multiple undo function, which seems to be limited only by memory. (Being a bit-mapped image application, limited by memory doesn’t mean quite as much as it does in most other programs. After five minutes of playing around, the GIMP had consumed over a quarter of system memory!)
So, yes. The interface is unusual, but it’s certainly not bad. After a short time I think people could be very productive with it.
Features
I’m no expert in graphics programs, but the GIMP certainly looks complete. It has everything that I use on a regular basis in Paint Shop Pro and plenty of other things that it doesn’t.
I’ll go through the vague process that I went through to get to the accompanying picture. (Vague because I can’t remember exactly how I did it. I did say the GIMP encourage experimentation.)
First I loaded the picture of myself. This is the picture that’s on my pass at work and is, therefore, in real need of improvement. Then I used the Select By Colour option to pick up most of my face. I’m not entirely sure what I did next, but it looks as though I managed to paste my face back into a slightly different area. I don’t think I’ve ever looked so scary.
Next I stumbled across the filter that added the lines around the edge — I can’t for the life of me find exactly what I used again. I guess I’ll just have to keep playing around. Next I erased every other row.
I found the text handling module to to very good, far better than Paint Shop Pro. It allows you to select text in point or pixel size and choose from any font on your system. I picked a font that I have in Windows 95 (as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t rate XFree86’s native fonts) and added a legend top and bottom.
I’d be the first to acknowledge that it is some way from even slightly artistic, but it was very easy to create and touched on a number of the GIMPs features. I did play with much more than this, but managed to undo all the other less desirable effects.
Conclusion
The GIMP is very cool, no doubt about it. Any free application that can compete with an eighty pound program and beat it in most cases and come a close second in others is worth a look. But when that same program can come as close as makes no difference for most people to the eight hundred pound market leader then you have to sit up and take notice.
Of course, it is a first release so it isn’t perfect. It’s not quite as fast as it could be. There are some occasional glitches, hangs and crashes, but they are few and far between and, certainly, no more frequent than in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.
Fully featured, fairly simple to use and very powerful, it could well be the killer application that Linux so desperately needs.
Comments
One response to “GIMP 1.0”
I have recently installed the GIMP on my RedHat Linux (version 4.2) system, and found the installation procedure to be very manual.
Since I have a now rather aged version of RedHat, I also had to install gtk myself. This was trouble-free, although I did have to do a bit of reading on the web to identify the most appropriate version of gtk for use with the GIMP.
At first sight, the installation of the GIMP appeared to go smoothly. However, I noticed a number of components of the application that were either incorrectly installed or not installed at all. I didn?t go for a pre-built distribution, e.g. an RPM, instead electing to do the whole build myself. The README?s supplied with the GIMP guide you through the initial steps in sufficient detail, but don?t say much about the changes required to the user?s or system?s environment variables. I have had to dig a bit deeper to find out what was needed.
My biggest complaint was that the GIMP plug-ins, although correctly built along with GIMP, were not installed correctly. This meant that I was unable to read any graphics file format other than the GIMP?s proprietary one. It also meant that none of the special effects and artistic tools implemented as plug-ins were available. Documentation supplied with the GIMP doesn?t seem to cover the correct installation procedure for plug-ins, and it was only after delving about in the script files in the GIMP?s installation directory that I figured out what to do. It was also not clear which tasks had to be performed as root to get plug-ins registered centrally, to be available to all users.
However, after eventually discovering the correct procedure and making suitable additions to LD_LIBRARY_PATH, the plug-ins eventually appeared and I was able to play with them.
Initial impressions are good! Finally, if anyone knows how to make the start-up tips work, please let me know as the GIMP consistently reports that it cannot find the tips file!