Introduction to Gimp 2.7 for Photoshop Expatriates

This is a little whirlwind tour of the Gimp 2.7 development release with an eye towards acclimating Photoshop users to the Gimp environment. We go over things such as the FX-Foundry plugin, the Gimp Paint Studio plugin, keyboard shortcuts, brush dynamics, and various UI tweaks that will hopefully make Photoshop users feel more at home with the Gimp.

If you have any questions about what's covered in this video, the Gimp, or how to do something in the Gimp that you do in Photoshop, please drop me a comment and I'll try to do a screencast demo for you.

• Category

  Howto & Style

[Zoltan Giber]

Hi, i liked the video, however as a "Photoshop Expatriate" here is where i find GIMP lagging behind:

- Adjustment layers (love their flexibility in PS)

- Smart objects in PS (i would be happy to find an alternative in GIMP)

- Vector masks (I heavily used them)

- Photoshop has Layer Blending effects in real time (the usual outer glow, inner glow, drop shadow, inner shadow, color overlay, emboss, gradient overlay the rest doesn't matter) with masking(!).

- Liquify in PS

+ some more

[SuspenduAuGaffa]

Many thanks! I've been using GIMP for a while off and on, on Fedora and Windows, but had never paid much attention to getting the user interface into shape.

Special thanks for the "single window" tip. Those floating toolbars were a constant annoyance to me, especially because the window focus behaviour was so idiosyncratic. In fact, I was wondering why I hadn't switched that option on, but it seems I'd been languishing on version 2.6.12, where the feature's not available. 2.80 RC1 here I come!

[Andrea Lazzarotto]

You can create Gimp themes if you like or you can just switch to a dark GTK theme, some people prefer black for image editing programs.

[mairinmo]

Pretty sure Gimp does the same. Examples are helpful for me to compare if you have any.

[dAnj0u]

Yeah ok, but I'm not only talking about drawing and changing lines, I'm talking about all kinds of effects.

[Guillermo Espertino]

That's true. Hopefully some of those limitatios will be addressed after GIMP 2.10 (which will sport a pure GEGL core, allowing non-destructive editing).

Meanwhile you have a plugin for creating layer styles (non-interactive) and the iWarp plugin (included in GIMP default install) used with some ingenuity can replace some of the basic features of Liquify.

Of course it's not the same and these solutions aren't as handy as PS', but you can get the job done.

[outwirednet]

Yeah I found it through planet fedora, I was checking out the layout and it looks great. I also saw the package project you were working on and it looked fantastic. Very simple, not flashy, but very modern. :D

[mairinmo]

Yeh, it's being completely revamped. Look at the anaconda category on my blog for an idea of the direction we're going in. It's uh, blog with a dot linux grrl dot and then a com.

[outwirednet]

Awesome! Anaconda works really well, but it did have a Windows 2000 feel to it. I'm glad they're redesigning it. I'll check out your blog :D

Thanks

[mairinmo]

I'm an interaction designer for the Fedora Engineering team. I've done stuff like the redesign of the Fedora website and I've been working on the F18 Anaconda / installer redesign. My blog is on planet Fedora so if you read that you might have seen some of the stuff I work on. (Youtube doesn't let me refer to websites in the comments, how stupid)

[outwirednet]

The wallpapers, Plymouth theme, Drakconf theme, login screens, etc. are done that way for Mageia as well. In fact one of the main packagers for Mageia has been working on Fedora for years. He's some french dude, I'm horrible with names. :D

Can I ask what you do exactly for Fedora? I'm very curious now :D

[mairinmo]

I'm glad you've liked Fedora's artwork. The thing about our artwork that's pretty special is that its created openly by a community. The GNOME 3 theme we use is the upstream theme, so I wasn't involved, but I agree it is quite nice.