Photoshop vs GIMP: 5 Graphic Design Features Compared

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be comparing five features for graphic designers in Photoshop in this is going to be for those of you who are graphic designers and are considering or are already making the switch from Photoshop to I'll be showing you to point 10.12 which at the time of this tutorial is the latest version of but of course before I get into that I wanted to write you guys over to my website at Davies media design.com as always we have tons of and Inkscape tutorials on here as well as and Inkscape help articles so definitely check that out you can also enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy and you can enroll in any of my skills share classes by visiting school comm I'll be using a few free images for this tutorial all of them are from pixabay and completely free to download I'll include links to those in the description of the video the first feature comparison I want to make is the difference between how shapes are drawn in Photoshop and so in Photoshop here I can come over here to my toolbox if I click on the shape tool here you'll see we have a variety of shapes so you can draw a rectangle a rounded rectangle and ellipse polygon line or custom shape I'm just gonna go with an ellipse tool for this demonstration just to keep things simple and the first thing you want to do really is change the foreground color so right now I have this set to a light blue I can click on that and change the color here or of course come over here in the colors panel I actually will just keep this a blue color and then you click and drag your shape here and that's going to draw your shape you can hold the shift key to draw a perfect circle or hold the Alt key to draw it from the center here but I'm just going to draw a random ellipse shape here and release when I release my mouse that's going to give me an ellipse shape and it's gonna fill it in with the foreground color I selected and it's going to give me the live shape properties dialog here so inside of here I can scale this shape up or down so I could type in 500 hit the tab key and as long as I have this link here enabled that's going to maintain the original aspect ratio of my shape I can also change the location of it I can add a stroke I can change the size of the stroke or I can perform any of the pathfinder options here so let's say I apply this shape by grabbing another tool so this shape has now been applied I can move it around of course well one thing you guys are probably used to as former or current Photoshop users is you can come over here and double click on the shape layer and you can change the color here and you'll see that this will live edit our shape and our shape will take on that color I'm just gonna hit cancel and keep this as this blue color I can also hit ctrl T and that's going to bring up my free transform and I can scale this up or down I can change the shape of it the aspect ratio or I can hold the shift key to maintain that aspect ratio and when I release my mouse and hit the enter key that will apply the new size to the shape and I will say that the shape here still has pretty crisp edges it hasn't really lost any of the quality or made it look pixelated so in instead of using a shape tool we are going to use these selection tools to draw shapes and this is the equivalent to the marquee tools in Photoshop so if I come over here to my tool box you'll see that I have the ellipse select tool and I also have the rectangle select tool so both of these will draw shapes much like the shape tools in Photoshop you also have the free select tool here which is the equivalent of the custom shaped tool found in Photoshop and we don't have a line tool but we do have the paths tool which will draw lines for you so there are some equivalents here inside of you just have to know where to find them and it is just gonna be a little bit different than Photoshop and if I click on the rectangle select tool you do have the option here to draw rounded corners so you can draw a rounded rectangle just like in Photoshop but let me click on the ellipse tool here just to demonstrate the differences between Gipp and photoshop so now when I click and draw this you'll see I can hold the shift key and that'll draw a perfect circle or I can hold the control key so not the Alt key but the control key and here to draw this from the center or I can just draw this really freeform and when I release you'll see that the foreground color will not automatically fill in the ellipse shape here so that is one major difference and by the way I can change forground color just by clicking on this and choosing from any of the color options in here I'll hit cancel you'll also notice that a new layer was not created so if I fill in this shape with a color it's gonna fill it directly on the background layer here so what I'll do is I'll come over here and create a new layer and I'll name this ellipse make sure the layer is filled with transparency and click OK and now I can grab my bucket fill tool and just click inside of our ellipse shape and now we have a blue ellipse much like we had in Photoshop another thing you guys might have noticed here is that there is no live shape properties dialog that pops up while you're editing shapes in that's because you can't really live edit shapes in once they've been drawn on the image window so once I have this shape filled in it's pretty much set if I make any changes to this such as scaling it up or down it's going to lose quality but if I hit ctrl Z I can always undo filling that in and I can come over here change the color to something else and then just fill that in I'll hit ctrl Z to undo that I do want to keep this at a blue color here so let's go with that light blue right there click OK and fill this in so some of you might be wondering I've drawn the shape I like the shape I want to be able to scale it up or down at a later time how can I do that within well there is sort of a hack to be able to go in and scale this up or down without losing quality without this shape looking really pixelated and that is going to be by creating a path from your selection area so right now I still have my selection here around my ellipse shape if I come over here to the paths dialog and if you don't have this open you can go to Windows dockable dialogs and click on paths what I can do is come over here and click this icon here to turn my selection into a path so now that exact selection area is a path and if I hit ctrl shift a to deselect that or I could of course go to select none and then come over here and unhide this path you'll see now we have a path in the shape of this ellipse and before I make any changes to this I can also come over here and duplicate the path and I can change the name of this so let's name this circle original hit the enter key come up here and name this circle copy get the enter key now with this circle copy path selected I can hit shift S on my keyboard or come over here and grab the scale tool and right now the transform option is set to lair so it's gonna scale the entire layer here that we're on I want to change this to the path option so I'll just click on path here and now I can come over and click on the circle copy path and that is going to enable my scale tool for the path and now with the chain link icon locked over here I can scale this up or down and it's going to maintain the original aspect ratio of our shape here and so of course I could scale it down or up and it won't lose any quality so let's scale this one way up here and hit scale so now we have our scaled up ellipse and I can come over here convert this path back to a selection come over here to my layers panel if I want create a new layer lips larger click OK hit shift B to bring up my bucket fill tool or click on it over here in the tool box and now I can fill that shape in and now we have a larger lip shape here and I can come to the paths tool just hide those paths and I can hide the ellipse shape the original one hit ctrl shift a to deselect that and there is our final ellipse but that is a feasible workaround for the lack of Live Paint editing features in but as you can tell both programs do allow you to draw shapes and there are just some key differences to know when switching from Photoshop to alright the second feature I want to compare between the two programs is the ability to drag and drop objects from one composition into another so let me come back over here to photoshop and I do have a second composition open right here this is a stock illustration I downloaded from pixabay and I will include a link to this in the description but coming back over here to my ellipse shape composition I do have my move tool selected here and in Photoshop to drag this object into my other composition all I have to do is click and drag this come all the way up here to this tab and then hover over anywhere inside of this composition and release and you'll see that when I do that and we'll drop my lips object directly into this other composition and it will automatically create a new layer in here called ellipse one so this is the exact same layer named as our original layer here in this composition and so that's all you need to do in Photoshop to get this object into another composition you can do that in as well it's a little bit different but it's pretty much just as easy so if I come over here to let's say I want to and I'll hide this ellipse larger layer and just unhide the ellipse layer so let's say I want to drag this original ellipse into our second composition here which is this Illustrated composition I'll come back over here to my ellipse composition hit the M key so you grab the move tool or you can click on it in the tool box here instead of clicking and dragging the shape directly and hovering over this tab which doesn't do anything so I'll hit ctrl Z what you do here in is you just click on the layer directly over here in the layers panel drag it over here to the second composition hover over anywhere on the canvas here or the image window and release and now you have your ellipse shape inside of your second composition and it's going to create a new layer instead of calling it the same exact name as it was called over here in this composition it's going to label it as the name of your layer in the original plus copy at the end so instead of this being named lips now it's named ellipse copy but we've accomplished the same thing here inside a that you can do in photoshop alright so the third feature comparison I want to make between these two programs is going to be the smart object feature so graphic designers are going to be used to using Smart Objects inside a Photoshop when designing projects and the smart object I will admit is a really useful tool for being able to change lots of colors throughout multiple compositions simultaneously so it saves a lot of time and unfortunately there is no smart object feature inside of and let me just show you guys real quick inside of Photoshop what I'm talking about with the smart object feature if you're not familiar with it so we have this ellipse inside of our composition that we dragged and dropped in here what I can do is come over here to this object and right click on here and come up here to convert to smart object and now you'll see a little icon down here indicating that this is indeed a smart object and with smart objects I can come over and add a filter on here or an effect so come over to fo come over to filter distort and let's just go with ripple for this example so I can add this ripple effect here to this object I can adjust the amount here so we'll go with that amount right there and click OK and what that did is it created this ripple effect on the smart object but it also created a smart filter down here so I can always come back here at any time and double click on the smart filter and I can just readjust this so this is really handy whenever you you know perform a bunch of actions and then realize that maybe there's too much of this filter on here and you want to maybe tone it down or maybe you want to increase it but regardless I can click OK and now the changes take effect on here I can also hit ctrl T to bring up my free transform tool and I'm gonna get this message here I'll just click OK it's gonna disable that filter momentarily but I can scale this up or down I can hold the shift key to maintain that aspect ratio and then hit the Enter key to apply that and it'll scale my shape up and then it will reapply that filter on the smart object so that just makes it a little bit easier to go back at any time and make adjustments to this shape and not have to you know undo the smart filter and then redo it something else that a smart object will do is if I double click on this it will open up the smart object into a new composition and then for example I can double click on here and that is going to bring up my color picker so I can change the color of the smart object so let's go with more of a green color here click OK and if I hit ctrl s to save the smart object and then come back over here to our composition you'll see our smart object is now green and the reason this is useful is if i duplicate the smart object and i have multiple instances and then i change the color of it that color will reflect across all instances of that smart object so for example if i click on the ellipse here and hit control J now we have a copy here and I can move this with the move tool so let's put it over here if I come back here to that smart object shape double click on it and let's change this back to a bluish and click okay and I'll hit ctrl s to save the changes if I come back over here to my composition you'll see that both of these Smart Objects now contain this blue color and that just saves you a lot of time of course when you're working with multiple instances of the same thing and so in unfortunately we do not have a smart object feature so let me just minimise photoshop so once i've drawn the shape in here i can't right click and convert this to a smart object but there is another hack inside of for being able to you know go back later and change the color of this or you know create a duplicate and change the shape of it so for starters i'll create a selection area around the shape by alt clicking on the shape layer so there you'll see we have the selection area around our ellipse and I'll come back to my paths dialog and now all I have to do is convert the selection area to a path just like we did of course early in the tutorial and now when I hit control shift 8th to deselect that path area so if at any point I want to redraw this ellipse shape all I have to do is come back over here and click the path to selection option and that will turn that path that we drew into a selection area again and then I can come back to my layers panel create a new layer and we'll just name this ellipse to click OK shift B to grab my bucket fill tool and let's just grab a green color and then I can fill that in control shift 8 to deselect that hit the M key to grab my move tool and now this is going to be green this workaround of course doesn't entirely cover the gambit of features available for the smart object inside a photoshop but it does allow you some ability to be able to redraw shapes recolor shapes without losing a ton of quality all right so the next comparison is actually going to be a photo editing comparison graphic designers do edit photos all the time so I thought this would be important to cover and that of course is the photo adjustment layer so in Photoshop you have photo adjustment layers which allows for non-destructive editing inside of you do not and for those of you who watch my tutorials you know I've covered this a lot and so let me come over here to photoshop and I'm going to click on this photo composition here so what you are making photo adjustments to an image layer inside of Photoshop you can come over here to your adjustments tab and click on any of the adjustments found in here so we'll go with brightness contrast for now and if I turn the brightness up and the contrast up I'm not really trying to make this look good just demonstrating this real quick before and after so what this has done is it's added an adjustment layer on top of our image layer so this is an editing on our image layer this is a non-destructive way of adjusting your photo if I click on my image layer again and add another adjustment so in this case I'll go with hue/saturation and turn the saturation down you'll see that a brand new hue/saturation photo adjustment layer has been added here and the reason this is useful is that if I you know go on and do a bunch of other photo adjustments and then I realized that maybe let's say I added too much brightness or too much contrast I can come over here and double click on the brightness contrast photo adjustment layer and I can change the settings on here so we'll go with these new settings or of course I can click on the image adjustment layer and come over here and just delete it entirely if I wanted to so I'll click yes and now all that we're left with is the hue saturation we didn't have to go back and undo everything until we got back to the point of the brightness contrast adjustment and then redo all of our adjustments we just had to double click on the adjustment layer and make those adjustments that we wanted to for that specific adjustment so now let's come over to and compare so I'll open up that photo layer the same photo so in whenever you're making adjustments to your photo as of right now this version 2.10 point 12 you make your adjustments directly on the image layer something else I've covered in a lot of my tutorials is the fact that the team is working on adding photo adjustment layers this is one of their top priorities and they say that this is going to launch somewhere around three point-two which hopefully will be around 2020 you know probably later 2020 if I'm being honest but a workaround here for the fact that your adjustments happen directly on the image layer is to come over here to your image and just duplicate it and that way you have an original copy here so I'll just name this original in that way if you need to go back at any point and start over you have the original copy here and so let's come up here to this top layer and we can just rename this one photo adjustments hit the enter key now we can come over and apply those same adjustments so I can go to colors brightness contrast and I'll just turn the brightness down and the contrast I'll turn up a little bit and click OK and then I can come over here and go to colors hue/saturation or just saturation turn the saturation down and click OK so both of those adjustments I made occur directly on the image layer one other thing I want to note is that a lot of times the order in which you apply your adjustments matters because each adjustment is interacting with the last adjustment you made directly on the image layer I do recommend checking out my 10 steps for photo editing tutorial which I will link to this tutorial but if I come over here to Photoshop let me hit control Z to back up to you before I deleted the brightness/contrast I can rearrange the order of this so it doesn't matter as much what order you do the photo adjustments in because you can go back at any time and rearrange the order of those image adjustments the final feature comparison I will cover for this tutorial is the difference between how new objects are added into existing compositions so in Photoshop you have the place option or the place feature and in you have the open as layers feature so let's start with Photoshop in here and let me just hide these image adjustment properties so if I come over here and go to file you'll see we have two options here so we have place embedded and place linked so let's start with place embedded and I'm just going to scroll down here and grab a random image so I'll go with this photo of a dog here so this will simply place my photo as an embedded image and what that means is that any changes I make to this image you know either in a brand new Photoshop composition or in another program will not affect this image that I've embedded in here and if that doesn't make total sense to you right now don't worry I'm going to demonstrate in a second what that means and you can see this photo is fairly desaturated right now let me just hit the enter key to apply placing this inside of this composition and then I will click and drag this above our image adjustment layer so here is our image and I'm just going to drag this off to the side here so this is our embedded image and now I'm going to place the same image in the composition but as a linked image so come over here to file place linked and we'll just find that same photo to this one right here double click and I'll hit the enter key to place that and just move this off to the side this one is already above our image adjustment layers you can see there's a difference here between the icons in the lower right corner so this one is embedded this one is linked with a linked object in Photoshop whatever changes I make to the original file let's say I open that file up in a new Photoshop composition as I'm about to do here and make changes to it those changes will then be reflected in the linked object whereas they won't be reflected in the embedded object so let's go ahead and open up this image in a new Photoshop composition and I'll do that by opening up the folder where this is I'll right-click on here go to open with and choose Photoshop so here is that file here opened up as a brand new composition let's say now I hit ctrl T to open up my free transform tool and I'm just gonna scale this down and maybe hold the ctrl key and change the perspective of this just so it's pretty obvious what we did hit the Enter key to apply those changes and then hit ctrl s to save this once that's been saved I'll come back over here to our composition you'll see the linked object has now changed in appearance it now reflects those changes we made inside of our other composition window whereas the embedded object does not have any of those changes applied to it here so this has remained the same in we do not currently have the option to open linked compositions or linked objects but we can open an image as a new layer much like you can do here in Photoshop with the embedded option so essentially you can only embed objects inside of before I open up actually let me come over here and undo the perspective change I did on this I'll do alt control-z hit ctrl s to save this and now open up and I'll come over here to file open as layers and choose the dog no background PNG file here and click open and so now as you can see this image has been opened up here in the this is an embedded file it is not a linked file I'll come over here and just change the name of this to dog photo so any changes we make to the original file here will not be reflected on this new layer that we opened up in our composition so a couple of things I want to leave you guys with as I close out this tutorial remember that is totally free and will always be free as an open source software whereas Photoshop is right now between 20 and 60 dollars a month depending on what package you buy and what part of the world you live in and Photoshop can always increase prices as it has done consistently throughout the past additionally is constantly under development so if the features you're looking for are not in the current version of they might be in the next version or in future versions you can always check back on my YouTube channel for videos on what's new in the latest versions of so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did you could check out any of my resources in the description of the video as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 9,378

Rating: 4.9316239 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp 2019, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, gimp vs photoshop, photoshop vs gimp, gimp comparison, photoshop comparison, graphic design, smart objects, shape, shapes tool, ellipse tool, marquee tool, shape tools, photoshop for graphic design, GIMP for graphic design, place embed, place linked, open as layers

Id: WYvBnH0MuaM

Length: 23min 45sec (1425 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 16 2019