Graphics Gurus.

Navigation: Main page

Author: Stafford, Alan

• GIMP; Free, www.gimp.org

Bottom line: The app produces good results, yet requires a bit more time and effort than Photoshop Elements does. Not great for novices, but fine for experienced enthusiasts.

• Picasa: Free, picasa.google.com

Bottom line: This image organizer is so good, it's worth using at any price.

MANY HOME USERS would be happy with the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), an open-source graphics application. It supplies many of the basic tools that the $100 Photoshop Elements and other image editors deliver, including multiple selection tools. The program lets you work with layers and paths, features a wide selection of filters, and allows alpha channels for transparency. It also permits multiple undos.

However, the application lacks the unique, sophisticated tools that Adobe's Elements borrows from its pricier $600 sibling, Photoshop Creative Suite 2. While GIMP offers a cloning tool. Elements has that plus two powerful healing brushes, which you can use to correct blemishes and other imperfections quickly. Elements has a great automatic red-eye reducer: GIMP has none, so you have to make a fairly precise selection around the red area of the eye, set a feathering value, and then adjust the hue and saturation to fix the problem. And while GIMP has levels adjustments for lighting. Elements has those plus an effective shadows-and-highlights enhancer.

GIMP'S interface is a bit disorganized, as well. The program presents palettes, tools, and images in individual floating windows, and the commands aren't consistent among the windows. (For example, the commands available in different windows' File, Edit, Select, and View menus aren't the same.) Some of the application's shortcuts are inconsistent too: You can press the hyphen (minus) key to zoom out, but you must press the <Shift>-Plus keys to zoom in.

If you don't want to spend $100 for Elements, though, GIMP is worth a try. The free program offers plenty of usable tools, and if you're willing to make do with the capabilities it has and spend some time learning its quirks, you can get good results. If you want an easier, faster route to better pictures, however, you'll find that Elements delivers. The GIMP, now in version 2.2.8, is available for the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.

GOOGLE'S FREE Picasa 2 Organizer truly rivals the image organizer included in Adobe Photoshop Elements. And Picasa shares one of the popular Web search engine's best qualities: its speed.

Scrolling, searching, and categorizing tasks fly by. For example, search for pictures or videos by typing a word, and the results come up as you type. Elements' organizer feels lethargic by comparison.

Picasa offers many unique features, too: It will send pictures through Microsoft Outlook, Google's Gmail, or Google's Hello photo-sharing application. You can also select pictures to send to Google's free Blogger service. And Picasa lets you make a simple Web page or HTML storybook, or export images to a TiVo box. Elements' organizer can help you create great Web pages and slide shows, but it has no blogging aids.

Elements' main advantage is its tagging system, in which you drag icons that look like luggage tags onto one or more pictures to categorize them. After you tag your images, you can conduct searches by looking for a tag or for a combination of them. Picasa has its own labeling system, but it's nowhere near as attractive.

Photoshop Elements has more features overall, but Picasa has plenty of its own--so many that you'll feel like you're getting away with something by downloading the program for free.

Adobe Photoshop Elements' powerful tools, such as its healing brushes, make this app the fastest choice for cleaning up photos.

GIMP has many image editing tools, but for some jobs you'll have to complete a few more manual steps than you would with Photoshop Elements.

~~~~~~~~

By Alan Stafford