Fareham — Jan 25th 2014

The Fareham section started the new year with a talk on alternatives to Photoshop.
Derek spoke to the eight attendees about finding a cheap or free substitute for Adobe Photoshop for photo editing.

Aperture can supply a significant number of features however it does not support:
- Layers -to enable one to incorporate more than one image into a picture, for example:
swapping heads in group pictures so that all the people have their eyes open,
- Correcting perspective distortion (removing effect of pointing the camera up at the building)
- Ability to decorate text.

Functions that would only require one to use an external editor on perhaps less than 5% of the images being edited..

The two products that were demoed were:
GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program, an open Source program hence it is free.
To download go to GIMP Web Site


and follow the links. There are several books available on using GIMP, the most notable is perhaps -Grokking the GIMP- by Carey Bunks.


Pixelmator a commercial product designed an built to run on OSX, it exploits the available features in OSX - so extremely well integrated.
The product is available from the App Store for about 29.99 USD.

Pixelmator have a very informative web site at Pixelmator Web Site and a host of Youtube tutorials at Pixelmator Tutorials

Both products were were briefly demonstrated, to demo their full capabilities would take a very long time. GIMP is perhaps more fully featured than Pixelmator - however it requires some knowledge to get started however once the user gets to understand the product it can be very productive.

Pixelmator again requires some time to get into it, mainly via the Tutorial Videos, it has the advantage over GIMP as it can exploit OSX native functions - for example it can import RAW files and enable one to enhance the images.

Neither product was determined to be the best or most appropriate as that was not the objective of the talk, the objective being to demonstrate that there is life outside of the Adobe Eco System and that that life is not a very high cost life and no more challenging than using Photoshop.

The meeting then had an open session covering many topics.


Comments

Page 1
Page 1