Dean’s Pants

This may sound like part of a scene that got cut from “Pulp Fiction”, but let me assure you, this is about good software.

GIMP is a free software/open source alternative to a program like Adobe Photoshop, and serving as a you-pay-for-what-you-get replacement, it’s done fine for me. I’ve used it a lot, though I’d never touch one of my photos with it (I use Photoshop Lightroom for that), I’ve made many a Second Life texture with it, but here’s the number one reason I’m going to buy Photoshop: kerning. GIMP doesn’t have it. GIMP can do diddly-shit with text. And no, I’m not going to spend an afternoon building some legacy version from source on my Mac and hope to get the Freetype plugin working. Do you want to know how much I want this (and other things) to work out of the box? I’m going to spend $700 (or whatever it costs when it comes out) for Photoshop CS3. It doesn’t help, either, that while trying to make a minute markers on a clock face texture for SL, GIMP crashes 90% of the time while rotating a layer. Fuck that.