GimpShop: GIMP taking on Photoshop

Late is the hour when open source answers. There are some of us who'd like to recommend GIMP to those using Adobe Photoshop - behemoth on Operating Systems that get sluggish, the moment you start working on something huge. You can't just uninstall everything, yet GIMP had an alien interface and GIMP for windows was more GIMP, less familiar to the Photoshop community.

It wasn't released yesterday; why this post?

The original Photoshop tools equivalent to GIMP tools have been like the MS Windows 7.x to 8.x upgrade (everything is not where it used to be.) While I have convinced some, who out of brevity did try out, their patience wore thin till they got back to Adobe Photoshop. Being open-source, GIMP needed a few rebuilds, interface-changes, translations, plugin support layers to really get friendly to the Photoshop club. That's exactly what GIMPShop is. 

Read on for screenshots and direct download links ...

The first thing you'd like to know before you even try to install it, is "How does it look like?"

It takes a while to start, but that's the only delay I've noticed. Once you have it running, it doesn't pound CPU or GPU or memory to burn up resources. Random noise algorithms are available both from the native GIMP side (under Filters) and GEGL (which seems a lot faster.)


What is nice is that you can switch between "Single Window" mode and "Multiple Window" mode in real-time, by just clicking on the menu.

GimpShop: Single Window mode (looks a lot more familiar)

 Here's something that was done in less than a minute on an older box running MS Windows 7 SP2:

GimpShop: Random Noise generated really fast, in different levels for the water, and for the continents

You could see the layers on the right which have the familiar link, mask and sub-layer.

You can align the brushes either as a toolbar on top or to the right where in a wider screen it seems convenient.

It's just a click away, but read the Caveat below to ensure your installation goes smooth.

It's "Free" as in Freedom, and it's also priced free. Try it out and give them feedback. There's plenty of tutorials to get most of the stuff done accessible through the site. It's mostly on YouTube unless you like to flip through long manuals.

Caveat

The "Installer" that it is shipped with is not open source. When you start the Installation you are prompted to install at least one Search Tool and Mobile Application downloading tool - make sure you "Decline" the offer. Once you're done with this, you're ready to move on to installing GimpShop - this takes a while. The installer itself is 70MB, but downloads the rest of the content from their servers during installation. The base installation comes with "everything."

You can reflect your comments on this post or at the GimpShop blog.