Making Peace with GIMP

Last week I explained why I was looking for a freeware or Open Source bitmap graphics editor for my MacBook in...

In Search of GIMP for the Mac (GIMP == Graphical Image Manipulation Program)

The basic issue was that I was happy with the commercial/proprietary graphics editor on my iMac (Pixelmator) but was looking for something for the Macbook. I tried Adobe PhotoShop Elements 4 running under Rosetta a while back and found it too slow to be useful. I know that Elements 6 is out as a Universal binary. But, my experience with Adobe products is they always take forever to start up for some reason or another. As a casual user of graphics editors, I just wanted something that started up fast, make a quick edit of some kind, and then get out. The Open Source SeaShore graphics editor met all those requirements and used to work great on my G4 based Mac mini. But, I found it unstable on my Intel-based Macbook. So, I ended up taking another look at the various GIMP ports for the Mac after years of avoiding this powerful graphics editor with a quirky (IMHO) user interface. I settled on using the...

Wilbur love Apple GIMP port

...on my Macbook. Here's what I've found after using it for the past week. I should not that I also been using GIMP on my Linux workstation. I've found myself alternating between Macs and Linux boxes for the last couple of weeks. And, that played a big part in the decision to really take another look at GIMP.

The first thing anyone notices about the GIMP is that everything is in a separate window. Each menu, each image, open file dialogs, everything opens to its own window. This is generally unsettling regardless of what you install the GIMP on: Mac OS X, Linux, or Microsoft Windows. The biggest problem with this UI design is that individual windows can get lost behind other application windows. This is a giant pain when using GIMP on Linux or Microsoft Windows. Fortunately, Mac users have Expose and the F9 key. I just press F9 when a GIMP window gets lost. The other advantage Mac users have is that, with the exception of the Mac mini, all Macs can support multiple physical displays. The Mac, like Linux X11 windows managers, also supports multiple virtual display spaces natively. So, you can always thrown GIMP in its own display space if its multiple windows really bothers you. My main lesson was to just deal with the UI and work with it rather than let it bother me.

However, I found at least one oddity unique to this GIMP implementation: The file open dialog box often opens up with the left side of the window off screen (about 90% of the time). I didn't see this happen on my Linux workstation.

My Macbook is a first generation 2GHz Core Duo (not a Core 2 Duo) box with 1GB RAM. In other words, it is pretty light on computer resources by current day standards. This is not something you would want to use to, for example, render video or run Photoshop CS3 on. One of the things I've become interested in lately is working with RAW images from my ancient but still very usable Canon PowerShot G3 digital camera (the only camera I own that can create RAW images). RAW files are big. The G3 is only a 4 megapixel resolution camera. But, its RAW files are larger than the compressed 7 megapixel images that the Canon PowerShot A710IS produces. So, I wondered if my Macbook could actually load and work with these files in a reasonable time. The answer is: Yes. In fact, I was very surprised how fast GIMP loaded a RAW image and got it ready for me to work with. GIMP itself works very quickly. So, I have no hesitation to fire it up to work with just one or two RAW images. It is a fast painless process.

My photo editing needs are modest compared to professional photographers or even a very serious amateur photographer. I just have a few things I like to do to correct and adjust images: Crop, color adjustment, saturation, brightness, contrast, sharpening, and resizing probably takes care of 99% of my needs. So, I want these tasks to be easy to understand and carry out in whatever I'm using. Pixelmator does a good job of this. PhotoShop Elements had too much hand holding for my taste. It was easy to figure out where things were in GIMP and then get things done. Quite frankly, I'm not sure why I was so unhappy when I last tried GIMP four or five years ago. It might have just been the multiple windows UI thing.

So, loading up a RAW image, making the kind of basic photo corrections I typically make, and saving the file back out were all fast and simple. The fact that GIMP loaded quickly even though it first has to bring up the X11 windowing system made the whole task a fast and painless one.

My final set of tests involved the other end of the photo quality spectrum: Photos taken with a cameraphone. My cameraphone is a T-Mobile Dash. Its photo quality is OK for a cameraphone. But, it is not even in the good category compared a regular digital camera. Its images are blurry, the images are not sharp, images are often over- or under-exposed, and it tends to have skew towards magenta tints. The example here is the result of a two or three minutes of fussing with a few settings. It is not perfect (it would be nice to see more blue in the sky above), but it is good enough. By that, I mean it is close enough to what I remember of the scene to be acceptable.

So, this version of GIMP is definitely the new default photo editor on my aging Macbook. But, I still really wish a non-X11 native UI version was available.