To help those who are used to Photoshop, +Martin Owens has created a collection of GIMP 2.8 tweaks that make it more like Adobe Photoshop.

If for whatever reason you need to install Adobe Photoshop CS4 in Ubuntu, here's the easy way of doing this:

PSPI is a GIMP plug-in which allows it to use Photoshop plug-ins. Download PSPI from Gimp.org.

To install it, copy the entire contents of PSPI into the GIMP Plug-ins folder (if you’re running Linux, make sure you copy both the PSPI plug-in and the PSPI.exe, or it will not work) and restart The GIMP, then open the Filters menu and you will see a new entry called "Photopshop Filters Plug-In Settings". Select this option and then use the dialog box to navigate to the folder where your Photoshop plug-ins are located. Also, make sure you store all future Photoshop plugins into this folder.

How to install Plugins, Brushes, etc. in GIMP:

You’ll find three different folders in the application’s program folder. The location of the application folder depends on the operating system you use:

• Windows: the folder is located in C:/Programs/GIMP.
• Mac: right-click and choose the application folder.
• Linux: press Ctrl+H in the Home folder to reveal the hidden .gimp folder.

Photoshop SpeedUp allows you to selectively disable plugins to speed up start time and increase performance of Photoshop. If there are plugins you never use there is no harm in disabling them, on the off chance you do need them while working in Photoshop they'll be loaded then. You can also set Photoshop to not load Adobe fonts CMap and Base. In addition to disabling items you can optimize the amount of system memory Photoshop will use. If at any time things feel weird or quirky you can run Photoshop SpeedUp again and hit the Restore button to turn it back to its pre-optimized state.

The documentation for Photoshop SpeedUp indicates that it's for Photoshop versions 3 through 8 only, but in our testing it also worked on higher versions of Photoshop. This may indicate that the structure of Photoshop hasn't changed enough to break the tool or that we simply got lucky, your mileage may vary.

Photoshop SpeedUp is a freeware, Windows-only application. [ via lifehacker ]

Tintii Photo Filter is a free and open source software which allows you to apply color separation effects to your images with just a few clicks. This saves you a lot of time without having to install or use some other software like PhotoShop.

The program will automatically separate the color profile of the loaded image into a handful of major hues. You can then select which one do you want to keep and which one you want to suppress.

tintii is free and open source software, available on both Linux and Windows operating systems.

You will need to purchase a key to activate the optional Photoshop plug-in, only available on Windows.

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