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[Sketch]

Hey I Have been using this all day as a substitute for Photoshop. On the Whole it is a very good piece of software for image editing. As always I have found some flaws and also a few things I like and quite frankly impress me. with that in mind, here are my First Impressions.

In photoshop, the main feature is ease of use. You use your transform button and you have a whole range of possibilities for warping contorting and adjusting your image. If you use the text button you can just start typing straight onto the screen, in the font you choose, in the colour you choose and you can then adjust it freely.

In Gimp they didn't think ease of image manipulation was at all a great idea. Instead they give you 7 menu buttons, or 7 hotkeys all for the same purpose that the 'Single' Photoshop control will give. Now I'm not saying this Doesnt provide similar results, it does. In a few cases it could give even greater flexibility for transforming and rotating images. So far though I get the impression that these controls are simply a bit of an arse and a hassle to deal with. Each time you use one of these controls it leaves an imprint of the original position or shape of your image, which distracts you from the shape you are attemting to make. Often resulting in retrying the method several times.

Thinks its vista! Each and every time I use a new tool I get a pop up window. when I try and edit the layer I get a popup window. Its the kind of bother you really don't need when you just want to stretch a circle into an oval. I pay Microsoft to annoy me with stupid double checks and conformations. This is free I don't understand the logic behind it.

Gimp has effectively tryed to replace the Functionality of a back button by making sure you know that you want to make your next move. Surely if its wrong I can just go back? I am A grown up and can handle this descision myself. Its like having Chris Tarrent as an Art teacher.

It Has made some nice features though. Despite its failings with quite an Anal UI. I was Surprised that all my Photoshop Files worked fine with it. The only thing missing is the Effects Button in the sidebar; I havent got round to using much of this side of the program yet anyway, as its normaly used for a bit of polish at the end of the work.

Controls were Fairly easy to get used to. As a novice user of Gimp But an intermediate user of Photoshop, I felt like I was in familiar, if not quite recognisable suroundings. There are the familiar windows surrounding the main image which provided me with most of the information that I normally would use. I did actually find the Layers tab Quite useful allowing you to instantly name the layer when you create it. The window also replaced the double and tripple click functions from photoshop with some buttons; which I found handy. I have yet to find out if it has similar masking, merging and selection useage though. Although buggy in places such as the Transform tool sometimes not selecting the right stretch tab to the side of an image. All the buttons worked how I expected to and none of the basic controls were hidden from me, as they sometimes can be in Photoshop.

So far I have mostly enjoyed using the Program, I would recomend it for most Photo editing and basic image manipulation and control. However first impressions are that you have to put alot more work in, to get the same results that you would in Photoshop. for more complex work and using your own brushes and painting I would still recomend Photoshop above this. Although if it keeps on improving at the same rate as it has since I last tryed it (was basically ms paint with frills) then its going to shine very soon as one of the Best and most complete Photo and Image Editing Packages you can buy, or get for FREE!