Posted by
Waski_the_Squirrel on Wednesday, July 30, 2008 6:47:00 PM
Let's save between $650 to $1000 today. We can retouch photographs or produce digital artwork with a free product that rivals its professional counterpart: Adobe Photoshop.
(By the way, I was corrected on my spelling yesterday. It's LyX and LaTeX.)
GIMP
Not too long ago, I started taking digital pictures. I went from taking maybe one roll of pictures in a year to taking hundreds. As you take more and more pictures, you start to notice that they're just not right. Perhaps if you could crop a picture, you could focus on the cool part. Maybe if you could rebalance the colors. Maybe someone in your family photo is wearing an offensive t-shirt. Might be nice to hide that ugly message.
There is a famous case of an Olympic photo of a hurdler who looked like she had impaled herself on a radio antenna. The controversy came because the antenna was airbrushed out. (This was in the eighties, before digital photography.) Purists claimed that it altered reality. The truth was, a security guard stood behind her in the picture with his radio. The photographer just happened to be in the right position that it looked like she fell on the antenna. I would argue that the original photo was more misleading, especially with the expression on her face.
So it's not a new technique. Now, however, it's a technique that the common man can do. Probably the software you use to upload pictures to your computer has some rudimentary features such as cropping and color adjusting. To really do a good job, though, you need good tools. That's where the
GIMP comes in.
It is a viable alternative to Adobe Photoshop. In fact, it is so much so that many photographers use it instead of the Adobe version. Its great weakness is one which it shares with Adobe: there are so many features that the beginner is overwhelmed.
I do all of my photo retouching with the GIMP. Check out some of my work on
Flickr.
Scribus
I want to briefly mention this product because I don't use it myself. LyX, which I described yesterday, is a great product for page layout. However, it is useless for graphics intensive layout such as you find in a brochure or a teen magazine. Microsoft Word will do these projects, but it won't do them very well.
Professionals turn to Adobe InDesign, a $750 product. A very viable open source alternative to Adobe InDesign is
Scribus. From what I understand, its features are very comparable. Better, the price is right!