Okay, where to start. I have a teaching opportunity that has recently come up, and I'm exploring the idea of giving some lessons locally on digital painting and 3d modeling. We live in a rural area and I'm hoping this idea appeals to a lot of kids and beginners, and for that reason i think its important to keep the cost down for people just starting out. No one wants to shell out $250 for a copy of CS6 that their kid ends up not using. So, a free 3d modeling program for beginners, that an easy solution, Sketchup is awesome. But for painting I really wasn't sure what was out there.
So after trying, gimp, krita and mypaint, I can easily say Gimp in the easy winner. Krita has MAD potential, but its still in alpha testing, and is buggy as heel. Mypaint, just didn't click for me. I hate to give a bad review of something that i only played with for a few minutes, but all I remember is it just sealed the deal for gimp with me. Gimp is still kinda buggy itself, but its really an amazing program. I don't think it could ever replace the editing power of PS, but, its really fun to paint with. I'm in love with the 1st brush i made, its just fun to use and I hope i can figure out how to get the same feel in PS.
Gimp feels really weak when it comes to editing, text, layer scaling, lots of things just seem cumbersome at best. Several features seem terrible when compared to PS, but, as I've heard people say, its not fair to compare the two programs. Gimp will work great as a free program to help people learn the basics cheaply, but in the end, anyone wanting to make pro level stuff, is going to have to work with a better program like PS or painter, in my opinion.
I'm going to keep using Gimp over the next few weeks, I still need to research somethings about it and get more comfortable using it before I try and teach others to use it, but its nice to know that for the most part, gimp and PS are actually a lot alike, and learning one, definitely helps to learn the other.
