We use it at the agency I work at. The developers all use Linux (2 as 'main os', 2 via VMs on their windows 7 & os x boxes). We use GIMP to take what are finished designs produced in Photoshop CS6 & CS3 and make the assets for our sites and applications out of it from the designers exported PNGs.
One of us (the windows user) has a copy of CS6 which if needs be he can use to make any minor amends before exporting out PNGs etc. If a designer has forgotten to export out a certain layer on it's own too - that sorta thing. For everything that _we_ need to do - (eg cropping out, making sprites, minor color amends, some blending) it is absolutely perfect and just as good as Adobes offering in that regard.
I would go so far as to say the selection tools are actually _much better_ than in photoshop. I find selection transformation a lot more intuitive and easier to do in Gimp.
As an added bonus we've saved ourselves at least £3,000 at last count on license fees. I have also found as a side affect that because we can't open the PSDs there and then (usually), we're more likely to get totally complete assets from the design team that we can get to work with. Beforehand we'd just get dumped on with several PSDs as is.
We have applied a similar workflow when it comes to office documents too - making heavy use of Libreoffice for all but a few users that really do need to edit and send out docx "exactly".
Finally, for what it's worth I have never seen the big deal about it's UI either. It follows the same sort of paradigms as many graphics tools so I've never saw that as a barrier to use. I appreciate you aren't suggesting this at all, I always saw the "Gimp is for amateurs or is rubbish compared to Photoshop" argument as arrogance or snobbery. Especially in office environments - I think (some) people associate the cost of the PS license with a validation of their skill.
For an agency this seems insane. Saving £3,000 seems like nothing, it's like a professional photographer buying a point & shoot camera for a pro job. Incompatibility with clients and numerous other inadequacies of GIMP would make saving Adobe licensing fees seem like a really bad business decision to me.
I can't imagine any designer I know joining a design agency that didn't provide professional tools, which in today's world means a fast Mac, a big cinema display and the Adobe CS.
Whoa, slow down a bit. They're not talking about taking Photoshop away from designers.
The developers are using GIMP to do simple cropping and amendments to prepared images. GIMP works just as well as Photoshop for this simple use case. In fact, the post says that they find it better than Photoshop in some regards. Furthermore, some of the developers are using Linux, on which Photoshop is not available.
So, given that they're using a tool that works for them, that they like, and that runs on their choice of operating system, what's insane about that?
From what the post implies, the designers are still using Photoshop. They're the ones who need it - or think they need it - or are used to it and happy and productive with it, which is perhaps the most important consideration.
Photoshop's PNG export is inferior. It should be one of the best things it can do given the popularity of it for web design. Whatever tinypng.org is doing both PS and GIMP need it badly.
Also, there are things like creating seamless textures, tiling them that is easier in GIMP. Animated gif import / export is pretty easy to do too. If only GIMP could do smart object work and live layer styling, I'd be all over it. But I do use it as a professional designer / developer for specific use cases. Another designer and I had a discussion. Basically since CS2, there hasn't been a valid reason to upgrade Photoshop really other than gimmicky stuff.
I used GIMP the same way up until recently. It worked for me, but switching to Photoshop has sped up a ton of common workflow -- slicing an image, turning on and off groups of layers, and similar. Also I've found that some small tweak to the PSD is almost inevitably needed, and it's worth the cost of Photoshop not to have to wait for an updated design from someone else.
I don't want to just hate on open-source graphics software - a lot of amazing work has gone into GIMP, it had fun things like content-aware resizing before Photoshop did, but Adobe has 1000X the resources to invest in usability and they've used those resources well.
I think Gimp can do the slicing with a plugin. There's a lot of stuff it can do that the gimp pros don't advertize, or the instructions are linux only or just difficult to lock down.
Me neither but I was talking about developers here :) Saving £3,000 isn't much in the scheme of our annual turnover, that is true. However that £3,000 didn't need to be spent on these licenses - instead it can (and did) pay for europython tickets & flights, spinning up & down aws servers, sublime licenses, the odd team lunch and beers on a friday afternoon.
I'm a fan of saving money wherever we can. For what its worth I've lost track of how much we've spent on our photographers studio/rig/software. We're def. not adverse to spending money on software here and all the designers get a crispy fresh creative suite when it comes out.
As linux, foss friendly devs though GIMP fits perfectly into our workflows and in 3 years of "we no longer need to use photoshop" we've had minimal problems with it. For those instances we really do need to consult and work off the PSD our one copy suffices to do what we need before getting back into GIMP.
One of us (the windows user) has a copy of CS6 which if needs be he can use to make any minor amends before exporting out PNGs etc. If a designer has forgotten to export out a certain layer on it's own too - that sorta thing. For everything that _we_ need to do - (eg cropping out, making sprites, minor color amends, some blending) it is absolutely perfect and just as good as Adobes offering in that regard.
I would go so far as to say the selection tools are actually _much better_ than in photoshop. I find selection transformation a lot more intuitive and easier to do in Gimp.
As an added bonus we've saved ourselves at least £3,000 at last count on license fees. I have also found as a side affect that because we can't open the PSDs there and then (usually), we're more likely to get totally complete assets from the design team that we can get to work with. Beforehand we'd just get dumped on with several PSDs as is.
We have applied a similar workflow when it comes to office documents too - making heavy use of Libreoffice for all but a few users that really do need to edit and send out docx "exactly".
Finally, for what it's worth I have never seen the big deal about it's UI either. It follows the same sort of paradigms as many graphics tools so I've never saw that as a barrier to use. I appreciate you aren't suggesting this at all, I always saw the "Gimp is for amateurs or is rubbish compared to Photoshop" argument as arrogance or snobbery. Especially in office environments - I think (some) people associate the cost of the PS license with a validation of their skill.