Image editing company Lightcrafts has introduced a new version of its Software - Lightzone. the big bonus with this new version is that it can be seamlessly integrated into Aperture for Mac or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for Mac or PC, turning these two RAW workflow applications into a more complete photo processing solution. Lightcrafts are offering LightZone to registered Adobe or Apple users for a 33% discount over the standalone version so combined with the current offers on Aperture and Lightroom, either package would cost about half of what a full version of Photoshop would set you back. more info can be found here.

is there a free alternative to Photoshop. I have some editing software, but nothing has it all in one.

GIMP?

yes - gimp is free - but keep in mind when you use it you are essentially using a reverse engineered copy of photoshop how it was half a decade ago, if you're fine with that then all power to you.

are you saying you like TI's over HP's RPN?

Do you have a reference to evidence for the reverse engineering claim? I'm not saying it isn't true, but I'd like to check out the backing for it.

I'm not sure about the 5 year claim, either, but this could be. Whether the new version will change this is yet to be seen.

Bear in mind, too, that Photoshop is not an option on all platforms. It cannot be tweaked if you want to tweak it, whereas Gimp is not freeware, but open-source. Many plugins etc. for Gimp are also open-source, but you have to shell out (more) money to get equivalents for Photoshop. I don't know if PS will export .xcf, but Gimp will export .psd. Don't know how well this works, mind.

I have not been terribly impressed by Adobe's applications under Mac OS X & they have been slow to move for Intel macs etc. Acrobat is still a Carbon application (as of 7, haven't seen 8 yet) which means it does not run as well as it might on PPC macs, either. (This isn't the whole story, though, as some Carbon apps are excellent. Firefox, for one.)

Gimp did not used to run that well on OS X, but it has been very, very good for quite a while now, despite the more idiosyncratic features of Apple's X11.

I don't know what Adobe are like addressing bugs in Photoshop, but they are not great about addressing them for Mac users of Acrobat. I've had excellent experiences getting bugs addressed in Gimp, on the other hand.

Will stop now by sheer force of will or, more likely general exhaustion.

- cfr

CS3 is fully compliant with Mac binary for all apps - Gimp is basically a rehashed version of Photoshop 7.5 in all but name - they even do a patch that reverts its GUI to match Photoshop exactly - something that wouldn’t be effectively achievable if it were not based on the same code.

Reverse engineering of software isn’t exactly a rarity but most developers let it slide for the good of the open source community or because they are way past that already. Gimp uses the same plug-in format as Photoshop so any 'free' plug-in you get with the gimp should work with Photoshop too. Adobe are historically bad at keeping pace with technology developments either by lack of effort or because of disputes with manufacturers - only Quark surpass them for their obtuseness. To be fair to Adobe though - taking seven months to get ten new products ready for simultaneous release isnt really bad at all - if it were equated to a Microsoft typical development timeline that lot would have taken four decades to do)

I'm not in any way dismissing the Gimp but you have to take it for what it is - if it were as good as Photoshop no one would be buying the adobe product but the simple fact is that it isn’t. carbon is the original code name for the darwin OSX engine so it works as well on an IBM ppc chip as any other carbon app.

Acrobat 8 isn’t carbon based it is a full universal binary app. It’s also worth noting that if you use the proper channels Adobe are quite responsive to both bugs and feature suggestions - they also constantly monitor user forums and if a bug crops up there they weren’t previously aware of a developer will more likely than not contact you directly within a couple of days.

I’m not sure to what extent you imagine you would need to tweak Photoshop - it has more than enough capability built in to deal with most problems - if you know what you are doing - and if you don’t there are quite literally thousands of free ware plug-ins that will hold your hand whilst you get to where you want to go aside from the more expensive plug-in suites aimed at professional users.

XCF is a tweak of Adobe's PSD format from version 6 of Photoshop - that’s no big secret – even the Gimp developers will tell you so. It’s also worth noting that Photoshop is essentially a pro commercial package and isn’t marketed as anything other than that. NOBODY in the commercial image manipulation field uses xcf as it is classed as a legacy format and isn’t supported by any commercial rips and output devices to any great effect so is rendered virtually useless to anyone other than the hobbyist user.

of course there isn't any documented evidence per-se as to the reverse engineering - that would be like robbing a bank then posting the video of it on YouTube along with your contact details. An image editing program's core is it's proprietary image format - usually everything else is built around that. So if the Gimps format is a rejigged PSD format from back in the day then it's not an unreasonable extrapolation to assume that the rest of the code has it's origins planted firmly in the Adobe family tree also.

Gimp doesn’t rely on X11 as it uses a Mac-native port of Gtk+ Perhaps the best explanation of the Gimp comes from one of their most ardent fans on the Gimp development threads...

‘Many people will tell you that GIMP can do almost everything Photoshop can do. Those people have no idea what Photoshop can do.
GIMP does not support colour management. Or CMYK. Or spot colour. If you do not know what CMYK is useful for and do not know what "spot colour" means, then GIMP is probably great for you--but chances are you only see about 10% of Photoshop's capabilities, and literally do not even know that the other 90% exists. That’s before you even get into adjustment layers (a huge omission), smart filters, smart objects, hi-bit, patch & heal tool, camera raw, and many, many more features that Photoshop offers.

The standard Mac OS X version of Gimp requires X11. It does not use the Mac-native port of GTK+. If it did, it would not be anywhere near as stable as it is. For details of the requirements of GIMP on OS X, see the official project page here.

'Carbon' in the relevant sense is independent of the underlying code shared with Darwin. If you ran the open-source OS Darwin, you couldn't use Carbon applications. 'Carbon' as opposed to 'cocoa'. This is one of the reasons that there have been printing issues from Adobe's applications under OS X. It is also why OS X's Services are not available in those applications. (Of course, they are not available under X11 either.)

GIMP is definitely _not_ everything Photoshop is. No question. There are things I would like to be able to do which I cannot using GIMP. Colour management isn't one of them, but there are definitely others to do with layers, styles etc. I'd also like to have Photoshop's ability to resize brushes rather than having to substitute the ridiculous number of differently sized versions of each brush that is the only work around at present. And I would like Photoshop's apparently superior text options, the flexibility of its undo functions etc.

But Gimp works very well and it keeps getting better. If it doesn't work, I can at least fiddle with the code. It has fantastic scripting potential - maybe Photoshop does too, I just don't know.

If both were open-source multi-platform, Photoshop would win hands down. But Photoshop is neither open-source nor multi-platform (OK, it is bi-platform). Also, Gimp is free.

If there were an alternative to Acrobat as good as Gimp, I would probably switch from Acrobat unless the latter still provided something really essential. There's not.

Then again, I use Acrobat professionally. The degree to which Gimp ever gets used in any professional capacity by me is minimal (and I don't need anything as powerful as Gimp for that anyway). I can see that a professional might well need Photoshop. No dispute.

Just that Gimp is too easily dismissed. On Mac, at least, you can do a lot with Gimp if you're prepared to use X11. Similarly with Inkscape. On other unices, Gimp is the _only_ game in town.

- cfr

This makes me wonder if there isn't some project to support Mac binaries on Linux. Hypothetically, it should work better than Wine, because the Mac OS is, superficially, at least, closer to Linux than Windows.

Although, you may be able to run Photoshop under Wine...
(now I have to check that out...)

Which brings us back by the usual incredibly protracted route to my original point – no, if your requirements are even vaguely in the commercial/pro/serious amateur field that requires you to get involved with colour profiling/output or RAW data processing – the Gimp isn’t a viable alternative to Photoshop by any stretch – if you are confined to just enhancing images and outputting them at home for your own uses then it would be fine. As both PDF and postscript colour management are proprietary software properties of Adobe – the chances of them appearing in the Gimp in any format legally are slim to none unless the Gimp bods license it in which case it wont be free anymore or even less likely, Adobe give it to them for free.

The original point of the post (remember that one) was to present a possible alternative for users who DO need access to profiling and RAW data work but aren’t prepared to shell out the full price of Photoshop itself.

So basically, Paint Shop Pro?

er...no.

for all the same reasons. but again - this isn’t intended as a thread to air personal preferences on the myriad applications that may or may not offer aspects of Photoshop’s functionality but instead to inform people specifically interested in colour managed RAW work of a cheaper family member.

On the side, Photoshop 7 runs perfectly under wine. The CS flavors, not so much, yet.