The proposed replacement for Photoshop is Gimp. Aside from the name I'm told, and have read that Gimp is every bit as powerful as Photoshop. Today I tackled my first actual task in Gimp. The past few times I've explored the App I was more than a little impressed, it seemed to live up to the hype, with a plethora of powerful image editing tools that - according to reports - easily rivals Adobe Photoshop.
My simple efforts to product the Christmas banner for this blog ran into a serious roadblock almost immediately. I was shocked and disappointed to learn that within Gimp there is absolutely no way to modify kerning. None. So, as you can see by the result, there is massive spacing issues with the text, and absolutely no way to fix it. Well, no reasonable way that is. It was suggested by a forum goer that one should put each letter on it's own layer and kerning would be easy at this point. This technique seems like a rather nasty work-around clearly illustrating that this ain't no photoshop.
So, I do agree, that if retouching and balancing is you really need, Gimp more than fits the bill. However, for any sort of print design, posters, advertising or any work where actual professional typography is required... Gimp is NOT the tool.
I will be putting Karbon14 through it's paces, to discover if typographical kanoodling can be accomplished here and piped to Gimp without a lot of hassle. If I can't use it for text within Gimp, can Karbon14, KDM suite's vector drawing app handle the average jobs I normally allocated to Adobe Illlustrator?
No comments:
Post a Comment