That is an interesting take on 'value'. How much is tuition where you work and will you continue to work for your students long after they have graduated? 

In addition to GIMP, also consider RawTherapee. These free programs run on Win/Mac/Lin, which is more than can be said for Photoshop.

Interesting that you feel a student Photoshop license is too expensive.

I'll bet they blow $200 on one night out with the girlfriend or boyfriend, on gas to drive home to see their parents, on a couple of months of cell phone plan...  Out of curiosity, what does a typical printed textbook cost a student nowadays?

Does teaching them "Gimp" have much real-world use?  Anyone serious about imaging is using Photoshop.

Have you considered Photoshop Elements (I see Jeff has asked this also)?

-Noel

I know. I sent my son back to university for the winter semester with $1,000 for books. He called to say just one book for one engineering course, was $250, so please send more money. And he's taking six courses.

And yeah, since when are Harvard students strapped for cash?

Last time I looked at The Gimp, admittedly a year or two ago, all I saw was a bug-ridden toy that barely worked.  I'm sorry to be blunt, and maybe my information is dated, but it was worth exactly what it cost (less when you consider time I wasted futzing around with it to get it to work).  Should Harvard be teaching people to use junkware?

But you make a good point - why not just teach fundamentals, and advise the students to get Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paintshop, IrfanView, or Gimp - whatever their budget allows.  Show examples using Photoshop and assume the bright young minds would easily be able to translate to whatever else.  I should hope they can do that, or the world is in for REAL trouble.

-Noel

PeterPershan wrote:

 

RawTherapee does not work on OSX10.7...

Are we certain?

The download page for RawTherapee shows downloads for 10.6, just as Photoshop shows system requirements for 10.5/10.6. That does not necessarily mean that these programs do not work in later versions of the OS.

I also use DarkTable on Linux but it looks like you might run it on OS X as well:

http://www.darktable.org/install/

That same goofy site has people saying that Photoshop can't save files in Lion.

http://roaringapps.com/app:412#post-1381

I've heard the electric light is from the devil so I won't try it. 

Chris Cox wrote:

 

...And if you're using color profiles, then GIMP isn't going to help at all.

On what do you base that?

GIMP has supported ICC/ICM since 2007.

Marian #7, not often we agree 100%, but here we do!

A good teacher does not teach software. They teach concepts that work in any software.

Best regards --Gernot Hoffmann

PeterPershan wrote:

 

You are probably right that Elements might work, on the other hand, now that I have discovered GIMP I may just use that.

Again, if you are teaching a photo course as apposed to a digital imaging course, then I think you need to look at Lightroom. It's a photo based imaging application that is designed for photographers not graphic artists. The student version is $99 and it has a 30 day demo.

It looks like your Law School has a computer lab with Photoshop available.  http://www.law.harvard.edu/about/administration/its/students/additiona l-information-pages/lab.html

Here in NY most community colleges have Photoshop available in at least some of the on campus computer labs.

Regardless, if you're going to have the students shoot RAW and you want to go open source, I'd suggest taking a look at RawTherapee.  Truth has a date stamp - just because someone says it won't work on a given platform doesn't mean that is still the case even as of the latest compile.

Having said that, I just bought Photoshop and with the exception of not yet knowing how (if?) to spot white balance an image, I'm doing raw processing just about as quickly and, sad for this open source aficianado to say, getting better results out of my crappy photography skills (only had a dSLR for 2 months now) with ACR / Ps than I was with RawTherapee.

Have you checked out the curriculum thingees that Adobe has in their educational resources area?  Might be some neat ideas for assignments.