N O T E

I posted this back in June of 2014 when I was giving one of my Hackintoshes a test drive.

I was sick of Apple’s pivot to non-repairability and distressed by Adobe’s equally sinister pivot to software as a service where what was once owned is now an eternal rental. This ran afoul of my frugal nature so I assembled an ersatz Mac from a pile of PC parts and sought out Photoshop alternatives like GIMP.

This was before Affinity released their Photoshop and Illustrator killers.

…and well before Canva bought up Affinity’s Photoshop and Illustrator killers.

Anyway…

Some minor computer catastrophe brought about the unfortunate deletion of this article’s artwork. I was going to reassemble it by recreating what I did originally, but I couldn’t find the photos involved.

Here’s the article with a few placeholders and a couple of substitutions:

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, that is! GIMP for short, but you can call it the FREE version of Photoshop!

I use Photoshop on a daily basis, and I wouldn’t say that GIMP is a same-to-same trade off for Adobe’s product, but it’s a very serviceable Raster graphics editor; is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and it’s FREE! Finding tools that are familiar in Photoshop is a little frustrating at first, but not paying a monthly and very annoying subscription fee makes it worth the effort. Admittedly, I have to delve deeper into the program in order to create some of the composite photo illustrations like the visual metaphors I create, but, in the meantime, I’m having a lot of fun with some of GIMP’s weird and wondrous filters.

Here’s one of my low angle subway shots I took recently along the Market-Frankford line.

{ARTWORK MISSING}

I shot it with a little Nikon L11 and adjusted the levels a bit just so it pops a little better. Then I started having fun with the filters.

This is something in the G’MIC section called Black Crayon Graffiti. There are some control sliders in this filter which I moved around until I was happy. I had an art teacher in high school who used to work on colored scratchboards. It sort of reminds me of his work.

{ARTWORK MISSING}

This one is called Dream Smoothing which took forever to process on my Hackintosh. I’m not sure why unless it is an overly complicated, automated action that involved a ton of different effects. I like the way it came out.

I like GIMP a lot, and it really wouldn’t be the end of the world if that was the only raster graphics editor I was allowed to use. It’s certainly worth further exploration!

I will probably revisit this article with a fresh version of GIMP and some fresher photos. I still use the program here and there for effects which sadly come and go depending on what version I download. It’s hard to complain when it’s free to use.

If I were stuck and forced to use GIMP, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.