"The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for DigitalPhotographers" by Scott Kelby
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From: Troy Piggins on 20 Nov 2009 14:41 * Russell D. wrote : > On 11/18/2009 08:47 PM, Troy Piggins wrote: >> After a little deliberation, > > <snip good stuff> > > Are you bagging GIMP? > > IMWTK, > > Russell Not at all. Reason I switched to PS was purely because of this astrophotography I've taken up. The images I end up with after the pre-processing steps are, as you can imagine, still very dark. All the information is bunched way up at the dark/shadow end of the histogram. Have to do a lot, lot, lot of teasing/stretching of the histogram using many iterations of levels and curves to get that data out of that end. Can do all that with GIMP, but the 8 bits per channel kills it. You lose a lot of data when stretching so much. Wish I had some screenshots or something to show you what I mean, but can't at the moment. The shots get a bit posterised. PS's 16 bits per channel is almost a necessity for doing that magnitude of stretching. I hate saying it, but it's true. I've never been one to bag PS or whatever, but have always maintained that GIMP can do practically everything PS can do. I had always said that unless I was a professional photographer, I'd be happy with GIMP as it does everything a digital photographer needs, whether by the base package or with the plethora of plugins/scripts available. I still stand by that, except for the astrophotographer. But for "normal" dynamic ranges and photography, I'd recommend the free but extremely powerful GIMP. If you have the money you have another choice, I'd recommend both PS or GIMP. -- Troy Piggins |