Maggie's Farm

 
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It's kind of a good news, bad news story. The good news is that it does most of the 'extra' functions that a premiere program like Photoshop does, such as selecting an area by color, expanding the canvas, incorporating layers and including the all-important Smudge Tool.

The bad news is that the program is broken into THREE separate windows; one for the tool bar, one for the options, and one for the picture you're working on. Why the fruitcake who designed this thing thought that was going to be easier to use than one single screen is beyond me. I pored through the menus and preferences looking for some kind of "make it like a normal program" setting but never found anything. You can make the tool bar as thin as possible and push it against the left side, ditto the 'options' window along the bottom, and they'll stay in place when you re-open it. The picture window will open centered on the screen.

What makes it a particular hassle to work with is that Windows views them as separate programs (even taking up three spaces on the Task Bar), so you can't flip between GIMP and other programs with Alt-Tab. You actually have to painfully reach over and manually flip the three windows back to the front by clicking on their Task Bar icons with the mouse. Obviously, ergonomics and economy of movement weren't on the forefront of the developer's mind.

With that said, it works a peach. The smudge tool, correctly, has a percentage slider so you can adjust the smudge, the 'expand canvas' feature, while a little odd, works perfectly, and various things like cropping and resizing are just a matter of learning where they are on the menu. Most of the nomenclature for the tools and menus is standard graphspeak.

One thing I was hoping it would do (that Photoshop can't) is crop a freehand selection, but it just crops it to a rectangle as Photoshop does. You can, however (as in Photoshop), do a quick Ctrl-C, Ctrl-N, Ctrl-V to pop open a new canvas and slap the selection onto a transparent background and work with it from there.

On a personal note, although I own Photoshop, I'd never pay that kind of money for it. I own an ancient version (5.5) that I bought through a school discount for $99 when I was teaching at a computer college years ago. The money Adobe wants for it these days is truly outrageous, and I don't mean to sound glib when I toss the word around like 'everybody has it'. Most everybody I know is using Paint Shop Pro.

I didn't spend a lot of time with the Filters but some of them are pretty wild. I'd say they're far better than your average graphics program (including Photoshop) but not on the same level as a dedicated program like Eye Candy.

Apart from the goofy 3-window routine, the only complaint I've got is while you can left-click to magnify an area of the screen like normal, you're supposed to be able to use the mouse's right button to back up. You can use the - key on the keyboard to back up, but if you want to use the + right next to it to zoom back in, you actually have to hit the Shift key to make it an official +, rather than the = sign — like that makes sense.

And a few tips:

• Don't panic the first time you open the text edit box. It's extremely plain. The adjustments are made over to the left at the bottom of the tool bar. Click on the Move Tool to move the text box around, and it can be kind of tricky. You have to grab the actual text, not just the text box or you'll move the whole canvas.


• You'll want to dump some of the unused items in the box at the bottom and add a few new things. Activate one of the ones you won't use, like the backgrounds, then go over to the right, click on the little arrow and 'Close tab'. You'll then want to add "Layers", "Undo History" and whatever else looks interesting.


• Close the program down using the tool bar. I closed down the options box and spent five minutes figuring out I needed to select "File Menu/Dialogs/Create New Dock" to reopen it.

The options box at the bottom is where the program really shines. One thing that's always been annoying about Photoshop is the way it breaks its various options into bunches of little boxes. This customizable single-box approach that GIMP takes is really the better way to do it.

I'll immediately update this post if anyone in the comments has any suggestions, additions or corrections. Like, uh, where to find the "Please make me look like a normal program" setting. Even with the 3-window problem, though, it's still an exceptional deal — even at twice the price!