This one really winds me up. I live in a small Cambridgeshire town. I just visited my local library. I counted twenty seven, yes, twenty seven books for loan on Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, or Adobe Illustrator. How many books dedicated to any Open Source or any other image editing software? None.
I then walk into a newsagents. I count no less than twelve photography magazines that mention Adobe Photoshop on their covers. Some were dedicated to it, or to aspects of it such as RAW in Photoshop, or Portraits using Photoshop. I dare say that should I have browsed almost any photography magazine, I would have found tutorials inside on editing photographs – in Adobe Photoshop. How many on other image editing software aps? None.
You join any photography group, say an online photography forum. You bet that you are going to be pushed towards Photoshop, almost as though it is a software package that EVERY modern photographer MUST HAVE! Use Adobe or you are not a real or serious photographer!
So how much does this commercial software package actually cost? Let me take a look at the latest Adobe offerings for the licence to simply use this amazing must have or you’re not a serious photographer software. Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6 for Home use – full version from (yes, from): GBP£667.20 inc. VAT. That’s for Photoshop CS6, not the full Creative Suite Package that they retail at £2,667 inc VAT. On the USA Adobe website, you can buy Adobe Photoshop CS6 for a more reasonable USD$699.
I don’t want to spend my hard earned money on a licence for a piece of software if I don’t need it, no bloody way. How the hell does something this pricey become pushed to the point where it’s considered as essential, the standard, as taught in colleges? Even the action to edit images using software has entered our dictionaries “to photoshop”. Bloody hell, that’s mass brainwashing.
So is there any er.. free, or at least cheaper alternative?
Yes, there is, and has been for several years, a free GNU multi-platform package named (maybe regrettably) ‘Gimp. It stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program and it has been created for us by the Open Source community. How much does it cost? Nothing but a bit of download. What does it do? Resize, convert, allow plugins and scripts to be added, levels, layers, masks, curves, clone tools, select tools, stamps, channels, rotate, crop, hue, desaturate, unsharp mask, blur filters, etc etc. It’ll run much lighter than Photoshop. You can install it on older or lower spec systems. I’ve even run it from a netbook. No more bloatware.
I’m not saying that it does everything that Adobe Photoshop does, but it does an awful lot, and costs £667.20 less. Don’t be a sheeple. Don’t be dishonest neither – don’t use cracked software. If you are running cracked software on a Windows pooter, you will be hit by viruses and malware unless you rigidly run it from a sandbox. But why cheat? Do you really need Photoshop? Gimp runs a treat on Linux as well as Windows. I’ll talk more about Gimp, and the UFRaw plugin later.
Gimp, loaded onto a notebook that I owned until recently. I had already removed MS Windows, and installed Ubuntu as the Operating System. Software cost? Nothing.
The Tight Fisted Photographer 