Dont know if we have had the discussion before.

What were your reason/s for choosing to use gimp as a graphic designer/manipulator

Mine would be - I never heard of the program until about 2003 when some people in a forum I was visiting at the time were doing a weekly manipulating project 'with gimp'.
I downloaded it and have been hooked since.
I had heard of PSP but never used it - didn't really have any need or desire too. And then the $ aspect also got me. Gimp was free!

I have a photography background. I really like the open source idea of GIMP and other software and despise the whole industry around patents. I believe in an open society and building on existing knowledge. I did use PS a lot, but was searching for an open source alternative, because of the fact that Adobe is making record amounts of money of their users by the prescription model they use nowadays. I think GIMP is amazing. Unfortunately it isn't always easy to get the same quality as with PS and I really miss using the actions for automated tasks. Other than that, I am really happy with it and I haven't used PS in weeks now so I'm slowly moving away from it indefinite.

Vincent

It came with my Linux distribution. Now that I don't do Windows anymore, I figured I might as well learn how to use it to it's full potential. I do like it however. I have also been editing photos and video for quite a few years now with various (mostly free/open source) programs.

racer - yes Linux and gimp do go together
Of course Wallace!
Ah Vincent. So do you retouch photos with it? Did you have trouble coming to Gimp from PS? I have used a couple of trials of PS but could never work it out. And they say there is a steep learning curve with Gimp.

@sallyanne I did have kind of a steep learning curve coming to GIMP, but I had the advantage of knowing what kind of things could be possible coming from PS. I tried to do some coding with a couple of plugins to make life easier, but I find it pretty hard, as I know only a bit of html. I want to learn more Python coding, but I lack the time for that at the moment.

I came to gimp on recommendation of an online friend. I had only done a bit of photo manipulation using a program that came with my gateway, I don't remember the name but it came preloaded, it was a microsoft product. This teenager was posting some really neat stuff and I asked her what she used to get her results. I downloaded Gimp when she told me where to find it and followed tutorials on Gimp Talk to help learn it (and migrated to Gimp Chat when O posted about it). Speaking of O, I miss her. I did get that free version of Photoshop they were giving away right before Adobe went to subscription but never really took the time to learn how to use it, I figured why bother when I already know Gimp.

These days, I could not afford to pay for a graphics program so of course it matters that gimp is free. When I first used it I was looking around for alternatives to PaintShop Pro and I bought the full version of Photoshop second hand but didn't really like it and actually gave it away again. Gimp was more fun to just play around in. I only did some very simple image editing and some basic graphics for my homepage back then and the version of Gimp I used was 1.something, it's that long ago .

Fast forward a few years when I was too busy with other things to care about computer graphics at all. I went to crafts and design school, I learned more advanced photo editing and digital image creating using Adobe tools. I left school, wanted to buy a copy of Photoshop and could afford it, but the thought of all the beads I could get for that money kept me back. I hated trying to do anything more advanced in Gimp, it felt like an awkwardly set up, bad imitation of Photoshop. I blush to think about that now. Before I had time to spend my savings on a copy of Photoshop a friend needed help with creating some printables for her child's christening - formal invitations, programs for the ceremony, some keepsakes for the guests etc - and she wanted me to do it at her place, using her computer. I downloaded Gimp (2.2 something, I think) and got to work, and after going through a billion versions of each image and layout option (my friend is a perfectionist and has very unique ideas on how she wants things) I started to get the hang of it again. I find Photoshop easily gives you bad habits. You get used to letting the software do too much thinking for you and you don't spend enough time making conscious choices yourself. In Gimp, for good and bad, we're forced to make those choices. For me, that did a lot of good and I got so much better at the artistic side of digital imaging after just a few weeks with Gimp than after two years with Photoshop!

Then there's my nerd connections . I've lost touch with them now, but over my years in online forums I've met a fair share of Open Source nerds and they have made me think a lot about the ideology behind open source. So if I could afford to pay for my graphics software today (which I can't!) I'd still stick with Gimp, Krita, Inkscape and the like because humankind has more to gain by sharing their tools and knowledge than by guarding them from eachother.

Great story AnMal.

I've used a lot of programs with steep learning curves. I don't think Gimp falls into that category, although the layout and tools are a little different than most. The beauty of Gimp is it,s very configurable. It's also a very powerful pixel editor. I like it and am glad I finally got a chance to learn it.

August 28th, 2010 - I was looking for a way to make a clock graphic for a website. I searched for "clock dial" or something to that effect on Google and came across Rod's "Dials And Gauges" tutorial on GimpChat: viewtopic.php?f=23&t=303 At the time I had no interest in graphic design beyond what was necessary to complete a website. My skills have always been HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, etc. Python is a large snake, not a coding language.

I always felt like PhotoShop was grossly overpriced and my previous experience with Adobe was mostly limited to Flash, which as many probably are aware, was and is a security risk, so I avoided it like a plague. I figured if Adobe cared that little about the holes in that product it spoke poorly of their other products, industry standard notwithstanding.

After discovering even a complete imbecile like myself could learn GIMP, and being not altogether too disgusted with the results of my dials and gauges efforts, I moved on to PhotoMaster's Rubik's Cube here: viewtopic.php?f=23&t=424 because I had some pictures of my girls I wanted to do something with beyond just adding them to a folder.

From there I was hooked. I've, unfortunately, lost a lot of free time I once spent with GIMP, and I've never had the talent of so many others here but I still enjoy the program and it has always met my needs with the one exception of svg images. I keep hoping that will be a future improvement to the software so I don't have to go back and forth between GIMP and Inkscape. Other than that GIMP is amazing and I would recommend it to anyone.

I did my first computer graphics using Deluxe Paint IV on the Amiga computer. I did animations in 32 colors and images in halfbrite mode, which was 32 colors +32 "shadow versions" of those 32 colors using some sort of Amiga hardware trick.

As I moved to Linux from Amiga (Windows was never an option), GIMP was the program that was available. GIMP 1.x something was really not very good so I reverted back to the Amiga for several years, doing most of my artwork with pencils and charchoal instead. It was not until GIMP 2.0 that the program really started to shape up for me and I moved over to using it exclusively. Around that time I also bought my first graphical digitizer, the Wacom Graphire, which really allowed me to move my entire workflow to the computer. I've not felt the need to go back to analogue art tools since.

I have done a lot of tutorials and images exploring how to use it for digital artwork rather than photo/filter manipulation (in this I was pretty early I think). I used GIMP exclusively up until late version 2.6 or so. GIMP used my images as linux-screenshots on their website for almost a decade.

When the GIMP developers made it clear that their goal was not from-scratch image creation but primarily photo-editing, it felt clear that the limited brush tools available to GIMP at the time (they were subsequently improved) were not the priority and I found MyPaint, a program specifically made for painting but with no processing tools (not even a crop tool initially). I switched to using MyPaint for painting and used GIMP for post-processing, and did so for many years.

These days Krita has arisen as the all-encompassing tool for handling all this for me - not only does it embed the MyPaint brush engine (but I think GIMP does too now, no?), it is built for digital, from-scratch painting - the whole workflow. So these days I only use GIMP very rarely when I need to do some quick editing.

I like pottering about quite a bit...