Product Review of The GIMP for Professional Digi-Scrapping

By PChip | Category: Reviews & Interviews | 8 comments

When trying to start up a business it’s always important to have an attack plan, set a budget, and stick to both as best you can while at the same time remaining flexible enough to make changes to both as the need becomes apparent. I can really vouch for this as I’ve been having health issues that have set me back on my business plan activities. I’m at a point where I’m stuck with re-evaluating major parts of my business. Members of our Networking community can read more about that this week in our forums.

While the activities portion of my business is changing, I’m very lucky in that my budget hasn’t been affected at all. Thankfully – money wise, I’m a little ahead of the game! However, that isn’t the case for every digital scrap professional. Many have a very tight budget and have to make the most of their every penny. One of the areas where scrappers often ask about cutting costs is in their choice of software products. The questions usually revert to peers asking how product quality is affected if they use free or open source product to meet their business needs.

Starting Out on a Shoe String Budget

There are free to use products available in just about every area of the digi-scrap business you can think of. From newsletter services, list maintainers, blogging platforms, online store software, community forum products as well as software for designing and delivering digi-scrap products.

It’s been my experience that some open source products have too many limitations to warrant using them constantly or as a mainstay product in the business. Some have security issues that concern me as well. However, there are plenty that offer us more. With some savvy tech expertise, practice, good documentation, and knowledge of the products, they each seem to offer viable options. There are several products that can help you really stretch your business dollars further and run a successful digi-scrap business if you use them wisely!

GIMP for Designing

One such open source software product is GIMP. This product can be used by digi-scrap designers to create digi-art as well as for creating layouts and other digital products for clients and your own family memories. I have not used this product myself. However, Norma Aguilera from Scrapbooks gone Digital is an avid user of this product and provides digi-art and training services to scrapbook hobbyists and professionals alike.

She’s a strong advocate for GIMP and designs many products using this software. Norma offers some helpful tips and her personal wish list:

Norma’s Product Review

The GIMP as a digital scrapbooking tool. [Version 2.2]

For the purpose of this review, I would like to say that I am reviewing The GIMP as a Digital Scrapbooking Tool. The GIMP is an image editor tool and can be used for a variety of tasks, but this review will focus on its usage for digital scrapbooking.

The GIMP is a powerful and stable open source image editor tool that allows you to edit your images and create digital scrapbooks. You can even design your own digital scrapbook elements with it. It is very similar to PhotoShop on its capability and tools.

I had used The GIMP, PhotoShop, PhotoShop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, Paint.net and HP Creative, and other much simple scrapbooking software like “Scrapbook Blow out”, etc. I can honestly say that while The GIMP and PhotoShop software packages have very similar functionality and capabilities – they are very much different in price.

Is Free Worth It?

Yes. The GIMP is free, but just because something is free it doesn’t mean is good or worthy to be stored on my machine for that matter. As a matter of fact, I had strictly prohibited my husband and my kids to download any “free” stuff on our computer while I remind them that “Nothing is for free” and that they are downloading “free viruses”. Nevertheless, we had The GIMP and not only that, I keep on looking at the www.gimp.org to track the news on their latest gimp version.

The first thing that impressed me about the GIMP, after rejoicing at the fact that it was open source, was that it has layer capabilities. Its layer capabilities were what made me qualify it as a digital scrapbooking tool. Being able to keep each of the digital scrapbook elements on its own layers gives the scrappers the powerful advantage of manipulation. Each layer can be manipulated without affecting any of the other elements. This is the same control that you get in other advance image editor tools.

Digi-Scrappers are Delighted to Learn The GIMP Product:

* Can open and use PhotoShop Templates
* Can save digital scrapbook templates in XCF format
* Can also save files as PNG, JPEG, XCF, etc, etc
* Offers photo-fix options
* Includes tools for special effects like black and white photography, sepia, and any other color.
* Has strong capabilities for cropping digital papers, photos and layouts.
* Can resize any digital scrapbook elements, photos, and layouts
* Can add texture like canvas, to papers and photos
* Includes brushes and tools for making your own as well
* Allows for adding additional fonts, brushes, and patterns
* Can resize layouts for a web gallery or email
* Has tools for adding shadows, coloring your own elements too
* Includes tools for creating word art and text on path [version 2.4]
* Can transform (move, resize, etc) several layers at the same time
* Can add, create and edit third party GIMP Scripts

With The GIMP you can apply so many different special effects to digital scrapbook elements and photos!

Layering Limitations

Although I am very impressed with The GIMP’s layer capabilities compared to other Digital Scrapbooking tools, I have to admit that there are a few layer features that I would be delighted to see in The GIMP. For example, The GIMP layers style is not as fancy as the one in PhotoShop. Everything can be done in the GIMP, but each of these attributes ( e.g. the shadow, the blending mode, etc, etc) is added as its own layer and can’t be copied to another element. If you want another element to have the same layer style, you need to redo all of the steps again for that element. This work can be tedious and inconsistent, so it would be great if in the future a new script or feature to copy layer style was created.

Wish List Additions

Another functionality that I would love to see in The GIMP, is ability to “drag-n-drop” several layers from one GIMP working window to another. This is a feature that as a digital scrapper, I tend to miss when I want to convert my 12×12 in. layouts to 8.5×11. As a work around, I just create a 8.5×11 paper inside my 12×12 layout and resize all of my layers at the same time to prevent changing the aspect ration between them.

Two Thumbs Up

The fact that The GIMP is a free, stable and advance Image editor program makes the GIMP my program of choice! I highly recommend it for the advance digital scrapper, beginning and intermediate level digital scrapbooker designers or simply for those who want to enter the digital scrapbooking world with out the financial commitment.

Norma is the administrator at Scrapbooks gone Digital where she goes by username, sgd in the forums. She offers a terrific set of instructions for using THE GIMP on the Scrapbooks gone Digital- Digital Scrapbooking Tutorials page. While you are checking out her site, be sure to visit the shop and see the newest products her team of designers are sharing with folks too!

Thanks Norma for the Excellent Review!

Do You Use Open Source or Free Products?

If you have experience using any particular free product or service, we’d like to hear your thoughts on it! Whether you are recommending it or offering strong cautions against it, your peers would like to know. I’m always open to have guest writers share their expertise and opinions here at DSD-Pro! Please, give me a shout if you are interested in sharing your thoughts.

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Photography tips » Product Review of The GIMP for Professional Digi-Scrapping January 7th, 2008 12:39 pm :
[...] post by dsd-professionals.com and software by Elliott Back This entry is filed under Photography tips. You can follow any [...]
Olga January 7th, 2008 5:58 pm :
I’m a Gimp user, I find it’s a great program for scrapping. It’s a bit difficult to find tutorials to learn to use the program but fortunately you can adapt many of the Photoshop ones around the net. It’s as difficult to learn as Photoshop precisely because it’s as good and full feature as Photoshop. It does not have all the goodies PS has but of course it’s a free program and always in development so you have lots to play around.

I also use many other Open Source programs and I’m quite pleased with them as some of them are actually easier to use than commercial versions. I never thought you could find so much software for free and the good part, so good. Of course you need to learn your way around as to how to find the good stuff, but it’s definitely worth it in many cases.

Very interesting review and very good one, thanks so much for the post and best wishes.

Happy New Year!! :O)
Karen (Karooch from Scraps of Mind) January 9th, 2008 5:57 am :
Very good review Cindy. Olga raised the point I was going to make about availability of tutorials. I assume that once you have mastered your initial learning curve you would be able to modify the PS tutorials as she suggests. But the question is how steep is that initial learning curve.
Norma January 11th, 2008 6:25 pm :
How steep is that initial learning curve?

Well, yes, there is a learning curvem; but this is truth for anything that you are learning new and it is also true for any other digital Scrapbooking software, including Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Elements. My first tutorial: “The GIMP: Getting Started” was created with the intention of minimizing the learning curve.

Some people claim that The GIMP is very difficult to learn, and then go and buy Adobe Photoshop and then they claim that Adobe Photoshop is much easier to learn. What they have forgotten is that they became more experience with the time they spent learning The GIMP and by the time they started using Adobe Photoshop, their familiarity and understanding about Digital Scrapbooking was improved.

How long it might take to learn The GIMP? That really depends on your Digital Scrapbooking experience. If you are an experience Digital Scrap booker, it might take you a day. That is how long it took me, since I was already familiar with other Digital Scrapbooking software, like Paint Shop and Adobe Photoshop. For someone that is just starting, it might take a little longer, perhaps a week, really depending on your computer skills.

So take your time, bring your cup of coffee and enjoy your learning experience. You will not regret it.

Thanks!

Norma
SgD Founder
http://www.scrapbooksgonedigital.com
http://www.scrapbooksgonedigital.com/TUTORIALS
Catherine January 15th, 2008 12:41 am :
I had tried GIMP about a year ago and just could not get into it – but to be honest, I was having trouble learning any new software then. Since my learning ability has somehow (and thankfully) come back, I will have to give it another try. It certainly looked very promising when I looked at it a year ago, and I am sure there are many improvements since then.

I use open-source software when I can – I specifically appreciate “OPEN OFFICE”.
Catherine January 15th, 2008 12:52 am :
ONE MORE NOTE: Norma, just took a look at your tutorials – THANKS! I will definitely give GIMP a try and visit your site quite often.
Nichole January 25th, 2008 10:06 pm :
Catherine, thank you for the review. It’s good to know there are great software tools available for us to use without busting our wallets! I checked out your tutorials and they look informative.
Norma February 13th, 2008 9:06 pm :
Catherine,

I am glad you will give The GIMP another try, I hope the tutorials are useful.

Let me know if you have any suggestions on how I can improve them.

Enjoy!