GIMP's Unified Window Mode is Looking Good

[Rob Williams]

For professional artists and designers, the name "Photoshop" almost seems synonymous with the type of work they do. But, with the software starting at $700, it's pretty hard to jump all over the opportunity of owning a copy unless you absolutely need some of the features it offers. Thankfully though, for the rest of us who don't explicitly need Photoshop, there exist many alternatives that not only happen to be free, but are very powerful.

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You can read the rest of our news post here.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

It's been a long time since i've sat down with the GIMP, but this coming update certainly makes me think again about installing it, but we'll need to wait a few months before the stable version is released since 2.7 is the developer release.

As an aside, i think one of the other reasons that many have a hard time with GIMP is simply because of the name, they find it hard to take it seriously. How many times has someone burst out laughing when you state that your proficient with the GIMP . But yeah, past the name, it's a little intimidating getting used to the naming scheme and UI - especially coming from Photoshop, too many expect a PS like experience, then shy away (even though they'll never admit to the learning curve of using PS itself).

I really wish GIMP the best, Adobe needs a kick up the ass to get them working again. The relatively limited incremental updates to PS have been getting a little thin, almost to the point of having to pay for updates just to get a fixed version of a tool. The GPU Acceleration was nice - especially since they (finally) enabled interpolation at none standard zoom levels, but otherwise, the feature is limiting. Canvas rotation has been available on competing products like Painter. The adjustment panel is just a new UI for existing tools... past that, there isn't really anything else that sticks out. Admittedly, Adobe works on more than just PS for their CS releases, so they have to cover a much broader range of enhancements and features over many products, but it feels like they're diluting themselves. 1 or 2 new features per product... hardly makes the upgrade worth it.