Questions about Gimp

Hi, I have some questions about the program Gimp, for those who use it.


Firstly, I had an older version of Photoshop on the older computer on which I made my game. Unfortunately, I don't have it on this newer computer, and as the program exhibited horrifying bugs on the older one, I'm not even sure it'd be compatible at all with the newer one (guess I could try, but that's beside the point).


Anyway, what I want to know is if Gimp has these same features as Photoshop. I've heard that Gimp can "basically do anything Photoshop does," but I don't really know this.


First up, I used the "Neon Glow" filter to pretty up the title logo of my game. Can Gimp do something like this (create a glow around lettering/text)?


Screenshot:

In Photoshop, you can combine two colors in a Neon Glow, for the center of the glow and the faded outer part (in this case, the center part is orange and the outer part is red). You can even do a "black glow" against a white background that resembles a shadow (really neat-looking if the text itself is white as well). Can Gimp do this?


Example 2:

For this image, I used a lens flare for the sun, a slight "glow" effect which is apparent in the grass, pink trees, and on some of the characters, and a fog texture overlay over the whole image (created on a higher layer than the base image so it would be transparent). Is Gimp capable of all this? Layers and all too?


Thanks for any answers.

I quickly made this up in GIMP



(keep in mind this was rough and could have looked a lot better (I'm trying to talk up GIMP here btw, not me :p )) All I did was type the text, copy it then paste it on two new layers. I coloured one orange and made it a bit bigger, then coloured the other red and made it even bigger still. I then faded the layers and combined them. I'm not sure if that's the easiest way to do it, but from the sound of it, doing it that way gives you a lot more control over what the final product looks like.

As for the second image, you can definitely create fog overlays, but I'm not sure about the lens flare and glow effects though.

Yes, you can do lens flare and have glow effects, on as many layers as you like.

As it's free, you lose nothing (except maybe a bit of time) trying it out.  The only thing to remember is that not all the tools are called by the same name, so you could be sat there thinking "heck, it doesn't do X" because you don't know what it's called in GIMP.  However, a bit of experimenting, and you should find what you're looking for.

Thank you both for the information!