It had been a while since I tried out the Gimp, probably a couple of years. Back then, being used to Photoshop, the Gimp’s interface seemed a little too fuzzy for my taste, with a plethora of tool panes that didn’t make much sense. I vaguely remember some instability too, and in short, wasn’t impressed enough with the tool to keep it.

This past weekend, I looked at the progress update on Pixel (dead link at the moment, but a very promising product which apparently found golden angels to finance it at last), and decided to look at alternatives. I quickly stumbled across Paint.net, an Open Source project that’s grown out of necessity, and looked at the Gimp again. I downloaded both tools, but installed the Gimp first (I think I really liked Wilber’s confused look).

It takes a little while to get used to the interface, but it’s been much improved since the last time I tried it. The first immediate stumbling block is how the Gimp handles layers. They’re pasted into a “floating” layer by default, and it took me a while to understand why pasting several clipboards in a row made them all end up collated into the bottom layer. Once I found out that I needed to create a new layer after pasting clipboard content, I ran into issues with the scaling tool, which produced a blank space in the overgrown area; the default highlighting scheme isn’t quite as easy to make out as it should, but I got used to it.

All in all, I was able to get going and do all that I usually do with Photoshop in a rather short amount of time, and was happy to notice all tools are solid and compare with my usual software.

Stability-wise, I only managed to make it crash once, when scaling the color palette to an unreasonably narrow width. In other words, it’s stable enough, and intuitive. Thumbs up.

Didn’t get to Paint.net yet. I blame Wilber.