Photoshop v Gimp

[Elines]

For what it's worth .........................

....I started off trying to learn how to use Gimp - because it was free. I bought a book to help me do that but have given up because I seemed to be getting nowhere and bought Elements 11 instead. (About £43 - ish from Amazon but may have gone up since I bought it)

I also bought a book to help me with that (as I am of a certain age I don't have time to spend gradually learning stuff). The book is The photoshop elements 11 book for digital photographers by Kelby and Kloskowski

For those of you thinking of getting some photo-editing software I strongly suggest you go for Elements 11 - it seems much easier to use than Gimp and for video tutorials this site takes some beating:

http://www.youtube.com/user/EssentialPSElements

There are some things that Gimp can do that I don't think Elements can eg guillotine pictures, draw straight lines but that may be because I haven't got that far with Elements yet. And in the general scheme of things these aren't that important.

No doubt others will have different views but that is my two pennies worth

 

[mountainm]

Paint .net is a good free alternative
http://www.getpaint.net/

If its just resizing, cropping, viewing, batch processing and a few basic effects etc you want then irfanview can't be beaten
http://www.irfanview.com

 

[Elines]

Picasa is also a good free option for basic uncomplicated stuff -I wanted to stretch myself a bit and so went for Gimp in the first instance - but I wasn't stretchy enuf!

 

[Dave]

Picasa is also a good free option for basic uncomplicated stuff -I wanted to stretch myself a bit and so went for Gimp in the first instance - but I wasn't stretchy enuf!

Thanks for the tip on Elements Elines

My photos are not well organised, all over the place, and need organising.

Thy get uploaded from different phone cameras, and a couple of different point shoot cameras, each with their own software...

its a mess.

Does Picasa organise all your photos, in an online folder like photobucket, or just in your PC hardrive, in a folder 'my documents'?

Im not a fan of splashing my photos all over the web on 'facebook' etc.

And I've heard worrying stuff about google and privacy issues?

Does picassa organise all your photos in one place?

 

[Elines]

Does Picasa organise all your photos, in an online folder like photobucket, or just in your PC hardrive, in a folder 'my documents'?

.....................
Does picassa organise all your photos in one place?

Can't really help you as I never used Picasa to organise, only for simple manipulation. Somebody did tell me though that Picasa stores 'virtual' images, not real ones - but haven't got a clue if that is true - and even if it is I don't understand it anyway

 

[sandbender]

Thanks for the tip on Elements Elines

My photos are not well organised, all over the place, and need organising.

Thy get uploaded from different phone cameras, and a couple of different point shoot cameras, each with their own software...

its a mess.

Does Picasa organise all your photos, in an online folder like photobucket, or just in your PC hardrive, in a folder 'my documents'?

Im not a fan of splashing my photos all over the web on 'facebook' etc.

And I've heard worrying stuff about google and privacy issues?

Does picassa organise all your photos in one place?

No, Picasa doesn't automatically move your photos to a specific location. By default it will look in your 'home' folder and creates a library of all the images found there, you can then scroll through them and edit them and even move them around as you please.

In that way it is perhaps ideal for you, it'll find all your photos and allow YOU to move them to the folders you wish them to sit in.

If you don't want it to look at your entire home folder, hard drive or whatever you can tell it which folders not to look in and which ones to check.

If you make edits to a picture in Picasa the original image is not altered, Picasa makes a copy and edits that.

Picasa will not upload your photos to an online gallery unless you tell it to, if you do choose to upload some then by default those photos are set so that only you and anyone you email a link to can view them, you can up that level of security so that only you can see them after you have logged in to your google account.

These days there is no upper limit to how many images you can store if you use the default 2048 pixel image size for your uploads, however if you upload several thousand in a couple of days they switch off your ability to upload for a few days.

The privacy issue thing (in the case of online photo storage) applies less to google than to some other services, your photos remain yours, google cannot use them for advertising etc. etc.

You can obviously create public online galleries, these are public, anyone who might stumble across your picasa public gallery can see those photos, they may even download them and nick them for their own websites, if that worries you, don't post any public photos.

Give it a whirl, my father in law is in his seventies and it helped him get on top of the seven hundred odd folders of photos he had scattered around his hard drive.

 

[mountainm]

.

If you make edits to a picture in Picasa the original image is not altered, Picasa makes a copy and edits that.

Its a little bit clever in that regard. It doesn't make a copy but stores a history of changes for each photo. However leaving the original image untouched. This is great for preserving source material but does mean you'll need to export changed photos from Picasa to use elsewhere.

 

[sandbender]

Its a little bit clever in that regard. It doesn't make a copy but stores a history of changes for each photo. However leaving the original image untouched. This is great for preserving source material but does mean you'll need to export changed photos from Picasa to use elsewhere.

Ah! Now that is clever, that means that unlike Apple's Aperture you will not suddenly find that half your hard drive capacity has vanished simply because you have been rotating some images.

I used to quite like the idea of the programs which 'sorted' my photos for me but have found that they often leave 'orphan' photos in the photo library which could quickly add up to hundreds of megabytes. Worse was that they would often interfere with an images exif or file meta data, so things date of taking were lost or changed.

 

[Dave]

Thanks SB, very helpful. I'll give it a whirl then. :You_Rock_

 

[sandbender]

Thanks SB, very helpful. I'll give it a whirl then. :You_Rock_

No worries, there are lots of 'how tos' and 'beginners guides' on folks blogs and youtube channels, so if you are stumped you should be able to find help.

Here is one...

Picasa Getting Started Guide

http://www.lmseniornet.com/workshop/picasa/pws2.pdf

 

[ged]

Useful tips here. Gimp, it has to be said, is very powerful but about as user-friendly as a cornered rat.

 

[Elines]

Useful tips here. Gimp, it has to be said, is very powerful but about as user-friendly as a cornered rat.

Well said that man.

 

[maddave]

I'm not bad with photoshop and paint.net but the gimp I find is just too unwieldy

 

[Stringmaker]

Maybe it's just me but when I saw this thread title I immediately thought of "Pulp Fiction"...

 

[neoaliphant]

Ive been using gimp for years,but I wont change as I have a huge collection of scripts, brushes etc
but it is unwieldy for people starting out

Picasa is very easy to sue, the thumbnailing aspect is one of the best features, especially of you have a NAS or network share

being able to resize an image when you want to email it is usefull
and the duplicate image finder is really handy

Sorry Elines that you havent got on with Gimp

 

[Elines]

..................

Sorry Elines that you havent got on with Gimp

Thanks for that - my general line is to start with the cheapest and if it suits then ok - in this case it didn't.

I had to think hard because I had invested a lot of time in trying to understand Gimp but in the end decided enuf was enuf. Mind you I will still be using Gimp (and have only this evening) to guillotine a picture, and also for making Mondrian clones - which I like a lot