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by pbhjpbhj
6063 days ago
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I use The GIMP for serious work - production of advertising materials for print and for any non-vector elements of website designs. The quality demands (see eg http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/ ) seem so low in the print media industry that most graphic designers probably aren't using CS4 to any great advantage. The only times I've needed anything else have been because the printers say "we only accept a PSD" or "files must be from Corel 9" or whatever. They always take something else in the end. Actually it's more often I need to use AI files and Inkscape's not doing to bad on that. Exact colour match (pantones, etc.) doesn't matter for me; my target market couldn't generally care less that the shade is ever so slightly out and in most print situations the colour is either off at print (newspapers) or off by the point of viewing (eg magazine in a rack that's faded for a month). |
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When you say “production of advertising materials” what do you mean? You work for an ad agency? Or you sometimes wear a “design hat” in addition to your other roles at your company? Because if you were spending 40 hours a week on design work, buying and learning and using Photoshop instead of the GIMP would pay for itself quite quickly.
I should have been clearer. I'm sure there exist people who use the GIMP, even though I don’t know them. I do not, however, think the GIMP provides “considerable competition” in the image editing space by any reasonable definition of “considerable”. I don’t have any solid numbers of my own, and really have no idea how I’d look for any, but if we just judge by, for instance, relative numbers of books offered for sale about each product, Photoshop has a simply crushing market-share advantage.
> quality demands seem so low in the print media industry
I don’t work in print media (I’m a political science student), but this seems like a pretty cheap shot. One could take similar shots at programmers, musicians, scientists, etc.