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GIMP


JimS

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Really can't afford to buy the full version of photoshop, so I have downloaded a copy of GIMP.

First impression is that it seems very good. Is there anything major that I would be missing out on using GIMP as opposed to Photoshop?

Are the photoshop tutorials still reasonably applicable to GIMP?

Cheers all.

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As far as I've been able to tell, GIMP is as capable in it's editing tools as PS, and there's a large plugin library of addons too. The main drawback, at present, with GIMP, currently it only supports 8 bit editing. This is an issue when processing Astro images, as the drop in bit depth from 16 bit will cause issues with how far you can push the image before it starts to break down. The biggest issue I found, was finding the tools in GIMP.

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GIMP 2.8 still only supports 8-bit, apparently 2.10 will support 16bit when it is released and is high on their development plan. I suspect we wont see a 16-bit verision for at least 6 months. Though the GIMP development seems to move in fits and starts.

For the photoshop layout & look and feel I found GIMPshop a mod of GIMP, the PC version now uses the 2.8 version of GIMP.

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If you are going to edit DSO images, I suggest you do your initial editing in Nebulosity which you can buy for $40. Nebulosity uses 32-bit real arithmetic internally so you can use it to the initial stretching and colour correction of your images without the danger of posterising it (i.e. splitting your image into distinct tonal bands). Once you're done in Nebulosity you can save the file and complete your editing in GIMP.

David

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I use GIMP for all my final processing and have no problem with the 8-bit (somewhat irrelevant anyway if you are going to display it on the web). However, you can run into trouble if you try to do subtraction or division (e.g. background removal or flat fielding), so best to do this before you get to GIMP. The other thing to remember, if you have a 16/32 bit image, is to scale the image so it looks reasonably bright before reading into GIMP (as GIMP will try to compress the whole 16 bit range into 8 bits - i.e. divide your numbers by 256, which can leave some very small numbers!).

NigelM

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