Occasionally I hear from people who are looking for an alternative to Adobe's photography applications -- Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw, Bridge, and Photoshop. The conversation usually comes around to Gimp, a free and open-source image editor. It's been around for a long time and can be enhanced with plug-ins, but is it a viable alternative?
The most basic observation is obvious: Gimp isn't Photoshop, but neither are applications such as OnOne Photo Raw and Alien Skin Exposure X2. Most of the applications that compete with Adobe are actually competing with Lightroom, not Photoshop. Lightroom, On One Photo Raw, and Alien Skin Exposure X2 are intended for macro-editing -- changing overall exposure, color, sharpness, and such. They all have limited abilities to apply modifications locally, but only Photoshop offers pixel-level modifications.
These applications are outstanding work-flow managers in that they import and organize images. In many cases, they're all that's needed. Professional photographers generally cull images in one of these applications, make the necessary corrections there, and often skip Photoshop entirely. But these are not the right applications for those who need pixel-level editing functions or who want to create graphics for use on the web. For those kinds of tasks, Photoshop excels.
So who needs Gimp? There are several classes of users: First is those who prefer open-source software. Second is those who refuse to pay for software. Third is those who don't like the rental system Adobe has adopted. Those who use Photoshop CS6, the last version to be provided with a perpetual license, wonder if Gimp will be sufficient when some future version of Windows or MacOS will no longer support Photoshop CS6.
Those who say "I'm only a hobbyist, so Lightroom and Photoshop are too expensive" puzzle me. One option for those who don't like rental software would be to just switch back to film. Problem solved. Or is it?
Let's run the numbers.
Amazon sells 10 rolls of Kodak GC 135-24 Max 400 color print 35mm film for $29.99 (about $3 per roll and 12.5¢ per shot).
To keep costs low, you'll choose a discount store to develop the film. The cost might be as low as $5 per roll, but that's for developing and scanning. Because you're avoiding Lightroom and Photoshop, you can't used scanned images. Instead, you'll need prints. The cost of developing and printing a 24-exposure roll will be at least $12 (50¢ per image) and you won't be able to share the images with friends unless you buy extra copies. Your cost will be 62.5¢ per image.
Because you're "only a hobbyist", let's assume you use one roll of film per month (24 pictures). This will cost $15 per month or $180 per year.
Adobe charges $10 per month for Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw, Bridge, and Photoshop. This eliminates the need to buy film and pay for processing. So I categorically reject the "too expensive" argument. If you just don't like renting software or you prefer open-source software, that's another issue and Gimp might be right for you.
GIMP ("GNU Image Manipulation Program") is a long-time favorite of those who prefer free, open-source programs. There's a lot to like. It's a powerful application and it's free. But it also has a reputation of being slow, buggy, and confusing. Additionally, it doesn't have most of the high-end features that Photoshop offers. Even so, the slow and buggy reputation is less deserved than it used to be. So maybe it's the right choice for some users.
Unlike Adobe products, Gimp runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux computers while Adobe's programs are limited to Windows and MacOS systems.
Two things become immediately apparent the first time a user opens Gimp: First, the application is highly visible because it's white and it's in 3 pieces that are spread around the screen. Second, by default Gimp can't open raw image files. Both of these are significant.
Adobe's default interface is medium gray, which is a good compromise between being visible without detracting from the images that you're editing and the user can make the interface brighter or darker to suit individual preferences. But the more disturbing issue is that tools are in a separate panel on the left, layers and brushes are in a separate panel on the right, open images are in a separate panel in the middle, and the menu remains in yet another panel. I have never liked this approach.
So the first thing most users who have Photoshop experience will want to do involves changing the interface with tweaks developed by Martin Owens (Doctor Mo).
Many years ago, GIMP-shop was an effort to create a Photoshop-like version of Gimp, but there's been no development since 2006. It's still available for download, but because it hasn't been updated for nearly 12 years, I think that using Doctor Mo's Gimp Tweaks is a better option. Here's how.
Close Gimp if it's running and download the tweaks file from the DeviantArt website. Don't do anything with the file yet.
Next, open a Windows Explorer window and type "%userprofile%" (without the quotation marks, of course). You'll see a folder called ".gimp-2.8" in the user profile folder. Rename that folder; a good choice would be ".gimp-2.8-ORIGINAL".
Extract the contents of the Doctor Mo zip file to the user profile directory. You can do this by copying the zip file to the directory and extracting the contents there or by performing the extraction in the directory where you stored the downloaded file and then copying ".gimp-2.8" to the appropriate location.
You'll now have two directories ".gimp-2.8" and ".gimp-2.8-ORIGINAL".
When you open Gimp now, it will look a lot more like the Photoshop CS6 you're familiar with. The next problem that you'll need to address is Gimp's inability to work with raw files -- at least if you shoot raw files instead of JPEG files. Several factors will determine whether you choose raw or JPEG and that's a topic that I covered in January.
So assuming you shoot raw images at least some of the time, you'll need to find a way to make them accessible to Gimp. Note my use of the word "accessible". Gimp cannot open raw files, but neither can Photoshop or Lightroom. Photoshop uses Adobe Camera Raw to process raw files, which will then be saved in PSD or TIFF format once you've edited them. Lightroom uses Adobe Camera Raw technology in the background to display the image you'll modify and then writes modification information to a catalog file. Gimp users need the equivalent of Adobe Camera Raw: One option is Unidentified Flying Raw (UFRaw), which can read raw images from many digital cameras. It can be used as a standalone application or as a Gimp plug-in. I cannot recommend it, though.
After installing UFRaw, I attempted to open the application in standalone mode, but it failed. Several dynamic link library (DLL) files were missing. The most promising recommendation for correcting the error involved copying some of the DLL files from the Gimp directory to the UFRaw directory. But even after doing that, UFRaw refused to open. In the image, (1) is one of the error messages, (2) is the Gimp directory, and (3) is the UFRaw directory.
There's undoubtedly a way to make this work, but the path to success seemed needlessly difficult. An easier solution involves using the photo application that came with your camera. Any camera that's capable of producing a raw image should come with a disc that includes a program capable of converting a raw image to a TIFF or a JPEG. For editing, you should use the TIFF conversion instead of the JPEG conversion because the TIFF format is lossless and the JPEG format is not. Then, once you've edited the TIFF, you can export it as a JPEG for sharing.
In addition to applications from the camera manufacturer, several other freeware applications can open raw files and save them as TIFFs. One that seemed promising was Adobe's free digital negative converter. The DNG format was created by Adobe as a standard format that camera manufacturer or software publishers can use. Gimp is supposed to be able to open DNG files, but when I tried, it opened only the embedded thumbnail. This is Gimp's problem, not Adobe's. Possibly DNG files need an add-in I didn't have. Before giving up entirely on plug-ins for Gimp, I tried one more, PhotoFlow, and -- even though I was able to open it in standalone mode -- I encountered the same kinds of problems running it as I'd had with UFRaw. So that leaves only the camera manufacturer's conversion option.
If, at this point, maybe you're beginning to wonder whether saving $10 per month is worth the fuss, I certainly was. I decided to work with a TIFF image for testing and demonstration, but even then there were problems.
When converted from raw, most TIFFs will be considerably larger than the raw file. My sample image grew from 30MB to 106MB and that could have an effect on how much storage space you need. Additionally, the DNG or raw file will probably have a 16-bit bit depth and Gimp can handle only 8-bit files. Converting down to 8 bits will reduce the quality of the image. Gimp will also suggest converting from whichever color space your camera uses (probably AdobeRGB) to the considerably less capable sRGB color space. You can skip that and retain the larger and better AdobeRGB color space.
Without going too far afield, I should probably note that the file you output from Lightroom, Photoshop, or Gimp should be converted to sRGB if you plan to share it on the internet but the output file should use the AdobeRGB color space if you plan to have it printed.
For 10 years or more I've tried to develop a working relationship with Gimp, but I've never succeeded. I can think of exactly one situation in which photographers might prefer Gimp: That's when they have only a Linux computer. Otherwise, there are applications for MacOS and Windows systems that are much easier to use.
Oh, maybe there's one other situation in which Gimp would be the right choice: It's for those who simply detest Adobe and who are willing to put up with Gimp's shortcomings.
If you're a photographer, either amateur or pro, Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop seem to be a better choice than Gimp, which doesn't include an image organizer. So when you return from a vacation with 1000 pictures, sorting through them will be difficult. If you take only a few pictures per year, maybe Gimp will be all you need. Also, if you shoot exclusively in JPEG format, Gimp can handle those kinds of files without a problem. There's doubtless an open-source image organizer that would be compatible with Gimp, but you'd have to find it, download it, and install it. Your camera's software may have a workable image organizer and the Geko and Fly website lists several open-source choices.
Many of the standard Photoshop tools are available in Gimp and by that I mean that it more or less replicates Photoshop half a dozen years ago. Adobe's new rapid release schedule means that new features are added more or less continuously and, once you've found a new feature that you're particularly fond of, it's difficult to go back. One of the most significant recent additions makes selecting and masking the main subject of an image easy. This is a feature that's mainly intended for professionals and advanced amateur and it can be a significant time saver.
Plug-ins are available to add some of the missing features. Some of the content-aware capabilities, for example, can be added to Gimp with the right plug-in. Still, the user needs to know that a plug-in exists, seek it out, and install it. As we've seen, installing plug-is isn't always as quick and easy as we'd hope.
The clone tool is among the basic features that work quite well in Gimp. The keystrokes for activating and using the tool differ, but the functionality is the same. In this example, I wanted to remove the twig that's in front of the lion, so I added a new transparent layer above the base image and cloned information from the base image to the image on top. Cloning to a separate layer makes it possible to erase the patched area and try again if your first effort isn't what you want. Likewise, Gimp's tools for modifying exposure, contrast, color balance and other basics are a match for Photoshop's.
When you're ready to save the image, whether you started with a JPEG or a TIFF, Gimp will save the file in its proprietary format with an XCF extension. Saving changes to either the 106MB TIFF or the 13MB JPEG created new 54MB XCF files. So if you start with a 30MB raw image, you'll still have that file along with a 100MB TIFF and a 50MB XCF file -- nearly 200MB for every image you modify.
Fortunately, disk space is cheap these days. Also fortunately there's a good on-line source for information about how to use Gimp for those who want to give it a try.
Despite significant shortcomings, Gimp is usable.There's a
big difference between usable and easy to use. Few people would argue that either Lightroom or Photoshop is easy to use, particularly for those who are new to either application, but learning resources abound for Adobe's applications. Learning resources for Gimp are far more sparse, but a determined user will be able to make it work. Overall, though, it seems to me that photographers should just stick with Adobe's $10/month photography plan.
Additional details are available on the Gimp website.
At the end of February, the software development hosting website GitHub was hit by a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. "Massive" as in "nobody has ever seen an attack this large before." That's not a good sign for the future.
The attack peaked at more than one and one third terabits per second and was so large that it caused problems elsewhere. Incredibly, the attack put GitHub off-line for less than 10 minutes.
GitHub is used to distribute software, but it's also a repository for version-controlled software development. The company was quick to point out "at no point was the confidentiality or integrity of [users'] data at risk." The company provided a detailed summary of what happened and how they hope to avoid having it happen again.
The attack worked by abusing memcached instances that are inadvertently accessible on the public internet with UDP support enabled.
Memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system that's commonly used to accelerate database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of times an external data source must be read.
GitHub says that spoofing of IP addresses allows memcached’s responses to be targeted against another address, like ones used to serve GitHub.com, and send more data toward the target than needs to be sent by the unspoofed source. The vulnerability via misconfiguration is unique because of its amplification factor of up to 51,000. This means that every byte sent by the attacker turns into 51KB being sent to the target.
"At 17:21 UTC, our network monitoring system detected an anomaly in the ratio of ingress to egress traffic and notified the on-call engineer and others in our chat system," according to the GitHub Report. The report describes the procedures GitHub's network engineers used to reduce and then eliminate the attack.
Looking to the future, GitHub says "Making GitHub’s edge infrastructure more resilient to current and future conditions of the internet and less dependent upon human involvement requires better automated intervention. We’re investigating the use of our monitoring infrastructure to automate enabling DDoS mitigation providers and will continue to measure our response times to incidents like this with a goal of reducing mean time to recovery (MTTR)."
Regardless of what's planned for the future, GitHub network engineers performed flawlessly in identifying the problem and reducing its effects within 4 minutes and then eliminating the issue 4 minutes after that. A second event was detected half an hour later, but it did not cause any service disruptions.
An even larger attack was detected this week by NetScout's Arbor security group. This one hit a peak of 1.7 terabits. To put that in perspective, let's consider the math. There are 8 bits in a byte, so 1 terabit is about 125 gigabytes or 128,000 megabytes. One terabit of inbound data would be roughly the equivalent of slamming 4267 30MB photos at the site every second. The 1.7Tbps attack would equate to more than 8500 30MB digital photo files per second. That's a nearly unimaginable amount of data.
And here's the bad news: An estimated 100,000 systems are on-line and using improperly configured Memcached installations.
There's been quite a bit of talk about robots in our homes, recently, but some stories about robots are a little far out. About 250 miles out, in fact. On the International Space Station.
IBM and Airbus have created the "Crew Interactive MObile CompanioN" (CIMON -- presumably pronounced like "Simon"). The floating robot will be able to assist astronauts as they work in space. It weighs 11 pounds on Earth and is about the size of a basketball according to Airbus.
The robot runs a modified version of IBM's Watson and is intended to display information about procedures and offer solutions to problems. As an artificial intelligence device, Cimon has the ability to learn.
Airbus says the gadget will help crew members as they follow checklists and will serve as an early warning system when it notices technical problems.
Airbus head of microgravity payloads, Manfred Jaumann, says Cimon was made from parts created by a 3D printer. It's characterized as being similar to Siri and Alexa because it can recognize speech and can interact with the astronauts. If you have a little less than a minute, check this short YouTube video. It's a parody of what might happen had Siri been a star in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Cimon will travel with astronaut Alexander Gerst and will be on the space station from June through October. The device will be tested in crystal experiments, the ability to solve a Rubik's cube, and as a flying camera during a complex medical experiment.
Airbus and IBM say the technology has a promising future on Earth, too.
