But I’ve been using Photoshop for years as my digital darkroom. I probably only use a tenth of the features, and sparingly. My feeling is that if one of my images requires hours of fiddling in Photoshop, then it’s not a good picture and should be rejected. Mostly, all I do is crop, adjust color balances, brightness, contrast, and saturation, and in some cases add sharpening. Scans of my older slides will require a some color compensation (some have faded or shifted), and dust/spot removal. But that’s all. I don’t get into masking layers and other non-photographic effects. That’s not for my eyes.

And as you’d expect, I’ve pretty much gotten it down to a routine, where I can quickly take a scanned slide or digital image and process it thru Photoshop and upload it to my photo blog in a manner of a few minutes. But I think now the time has come to rid myself of Photoshop and use Gimp for real.

So I’ve been deep into Gimp this weekend, reading the online help and the many tutorials online (just Google “gimp tutorials”), trying to develop a Gimp workflow similar to what I’ve been doing with Photoshop.

What I’ve discovered is that Gimp is slower than Photoshop for some actions, but better for others. Knowing Photoshop helps a lot because they are similar in many respects. Still it’s the differences that are hard to learn. For one thing, the sliders on many of the adjustment dialogs are not as nice in Gimp as they are in Photoshop. And not all features have a usable preview mode, so you can’t always be sure of what your doing.

I went thru my usual workflow with an Ektachrome slide from 1975. Instead of conrolling the scanner from within Photoshop’s Import menu, I had to run the scanning software (SilverFast AI) stand-alone and generate a TIFF file for Gimp to open. Then the usual image cleanup/color/brightness/contrast/saturation/sharpen/resize steps, and finally saving as an 800 x 533 px jpg for uploading. The result is here.

I’m not entirely too happy with the result, and not sure if it’s my ineptitude with Gimp, or with the image itself. And, I’m unmotivated right now to reboot the system into 10.3.9 and try the same steps with Photoshop, and compare. Not sure what that would prove either.

I may be ready to drop Photoshop altogether at this point. Just need to read more and play with it more. But the images you will see on my photoblog will be processed by Gimp and not Photoshop going forward.

But another issue related to the upgrade to 10.4.11 is what to do about my asset management software. Up to now I’ve been really quite happy using iView Media Pro 3.  I bought the software a few years ago after getting totally frustrated with iPhoto. And I’ve lived thru two versions of iView until they were bought out by Microsoft last year. Now it’s called something dumb like Microsoft Expression Media. And I won’t buy it, or anything from Microsoft.

Luckily, iView Media Pro 3 works as is (apparently) on 10.4.11. But I can’t expect any updates. It works really well, making it possible to keep my 35 GB Pictures folder organized and easily accessible. And it can do other things like create slide shows, bulk process images, and keep annotated notes about each image.

So, what do I replace it with? I haven’t been able to find anything comparable as open source software. I would prefer something I could also run on OpenSolaris or Windows, as well as Mac OSX. And it be low cost. Anyone know of anything out there? I’d like to hear about it.

Meantime, I’m bouncing back and forth between 10.3.9 and 10.4.11. At some point I’ll see no need to be on 10.3.9 and use that disk only for backup.  The other programs that I use daily (Logic Express 7.1, Audio Hijack Pro, Reason 2, Jam 6, Toast 6) all seem to work on 10.4. I’m not willing to shell out more $ for upgrades every time I move to the latest OS.

… and sometimes I start thinking about how nice it would be to throw the whole kit out, forget about email and the web, buy envelopes and stamps, get my old IBM selectric  typewriter working again,  dig out the old vinyl records, close the blinds, and await Armegeddon while watching reruns of I Love Lucy.  I think the downfall of the human race started with the touch-tone telephone.

But that’s another story.