Creativity for me - The tools I use to create

                                                       

I use various programs to produce photos for this blog, what makes my tools special is that I got both of them for free.  Like many people, I cannot afford the monthly subscription to Adobe’s creative suite of tools.  For now, all I’m using is Luminar and GIMP.  Allow me to explain my creative process.

Gimp

My GIMP interface (made possible by plugins)

Gimp is an open-source image editor maintained by a community of developers.  I mostly use it as an alternative to photoshop.  It has very good color correction tools and layer tools.  Much like photoshop, GIMP has a healthy ecosystem of plugins, in fact I use several to make it look and work like Adobe’s product.  Most tools are feature to feature accurate to photoshop, it is missing some things such as no native support for the format RAW (there are plugins to solve that) and no native support for CYMK color format(again plugins help solve this).  So far neither of these limitations have become a hinderance, but your situation might differ.  GIMP also is very resource efficient meaning it takes up fewer resources on your device which is very important for those with lesser hardware.  I use GIMP to touch up and edit title photos for almost every article.  I wish there was better text tools for styling text, but I might start using other tools for that task.  Overall I am very satisfied with the experience GIMP provides, there is a learning curve but as a free tool I couldn’t ask for a better tool.

Luminar

Luminar interface


I actually must disclose that I’m running Luminar 3 that I got for free from the company; the most current version is Luminar 4.  Either way, Luminar is another image editor I use to create pictures for the blog.  It’s very convenient for quick edits and color correction.  I wish there was better text tools(I really need to look for something to fix that) and better lighting effects.  It is definitely more “Lightroom” than “photoshop”.  The user interface is very simple and much easier to learn than GIMP, what’s interesting is that that very strength is also a weakness.  What I mean is that it looks like it should be on a Mac, no offense to the developer, but for those of us on Windows this is disgracefully.  I can’t shake the feeling that it looks like a mac app, every day I use it and every day I think about it, please developers of this app, fix it to look and feel better on Windows.  I also forgot to mention that this app is extremely resource hungry, in fact it usually takes about 30 seconds for any changes to apply to the picture.  It’s probably my hardware not being powerful enough but even then GIMP runs way faster so keep that in mind when using it.

Thank you all for reading
Content out every Friday-Saturday

Best, BenTechCoder