On the desktop

Posted on 9 Feb 2007 at 11:28

Ian Wrigley and Simon Brock take a look at desktop open-source software aimed at publishing information in a variety of forms.

GIMPy graphics

Whether you're publishing to the web or to print, you'll inevitably have to deal with graphics from time to time. Whether it's just resizing an image or creating a masterpiece from scratch, some form of graphic-manipulation program is a necessity - and sorry Windows users, Microsoft Paint just doesn't cut it. Enter The GIMP. This venerable program has been around for some years, and the older it gets the better, the more powerful and more user-friendly it becomes. Unless you're a professional photo retoucher who's been using Photoshop for years, The GIMP will almost certainly be plenty powerful enough for you.

As with the previous two programs, The GIMP will run on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. However, for Mac users, things are a little less intuitive than you may be used to, since the Mac version runs under X11, a Unix windowing system. Even if you're not a systems guru, this shouldn't put you off, but you'll have to do a little more work and get used to an interface that's not particularly Mac-like. First, you have to install X11, which is provided as an optional extra on the OS X installation DVD or can be downloaded from www.apple.com. Then, once you've installed that and downloaded The GIMP from www.gimp.org (all 83MB of it), you'll discover that the X11 user interface isn't very like the Mac's. One key difference is that rather than menus being on the menu bar they sit at the top of each window, so if you have four pictures open, each one will have its own set of menus for File, Edit, Select and so on. Also, right-clicking (which is used all the time while editing images) is Command-click rather than Control-click if you're using a laptop or a single-button mouse. But then who doesn't plug in a three-button USB mouse these days?

Windows people won't need to worry about this learning curve, since the Windows version looks much the way you'd expect any Windows application to look. Windows, of course, has almost always had a set of menus per application window.

Once up and running, you'll soon see why so many people who've used The GIMP swear by it. If you're a Photoshop user, you'll find the program easy to pick up, as many of its features are virtually identical to those you'll find in Photoshop. The program has a full range of filters - Gaussian blurs, light flares, distortions and more. Of course, it also supports layers, so you can apply effects to one layer or one portion of an image without changing others.

The GIMP also provides some useful tools for website authors, such as a built-in image map editor (which is something missing from Nvu). At first glance, this seems like an odd thing to include in an image-manipulation program, but in fact it turns out to be very useful, especially if, like us, you sometimes edit pages remotely and just want to paste in a new image map for an image you've just uploaded without having to download the whole page and open it in Dreamweaver.

We can't recommend The GIMP highly enough. Any program this complex is going to be difficult to learn initially, but that goes for Photoshop as much as it does for The GIMP. Apart from high-end image-manipulation professionals, we'd be hard pressed to recommend that anyone buy a commercial program when this totally free alternative is available. Even though the Mac version isn't a native Aqua application and uses the X11 windowing system - which demands a bit of a mental switch every time we start it up - The GIMP proves invaluable to us, and at a total cost of £0.00 it's cheaper than Photoshop too.