OK.. We have The Gimp, Paintdotnet, and Picasa. And Photoshop CS3 but that's a different story. I decided to do basically the same thing in each editor to the same picture to see the final results. Mostly sharpen, screen, blur, multiply and then some minor opacity adjustments.
Paintdotnet was about 6 minutes. Two of those minutes were spent waiting for the unfocus to render. Used 4 layers to sharpen,screen, unfocus and multiply.
Picasa was maybe 3 minutes. Fill-light, sharpen then export. Undo. Shadows up, soft focus then export. Collage with Multi-exposure the new exports. Contrast..Didn't like the results at all and the exporting/undoing/changing made it a slight headache. Someone had made a tutorial about Picasa and Orton effects. I can't remember all they did so I just had to try what I could remember.
TheGimp... Using a script someone wrote, it took about 30 seconds and that includes saving the file after it was done. That's all I got to say about that.
Then I stuck all 3 edits and the original into Picasa collage thingy and did the multi-exposure output and I like that one best.
The time it took me to write this post? About an 1.5 hours.
