How to use Photoshop Plugins in Gimp

Well we all know one of the biggest lacks of The Gimp is that is misses a good number of plugins. Photoshop is the one software everyone loves and uses when they have to apply any sort of mutation/transformation to its images, or when they have to create outstanding graphics with the help of well projected plugins. For Photoshop there are hundreds of plugins around. Is this a problem for The Gimp? Not at all.

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Published in

Full Circle Magazine

· 11 Jan 2023

Written by Luca De Marini

Many of you may not know it, but GIMP supports a large number of photoshop plugins, both in the Windows and Linux versions, thanks to this wonderful tool called PSPI. Now, let’s see how to use it and what we can do with our new toy; paying nothing, of course!

Getting Started

First we need to install WINE on our Linux box (In Ubuntu, look for the WINE package in Synaptic), then we’ll need GIMP and PSPI, of course. We also need at least one Photoshop plugin. To get started and I downloaded two plugins, one commercial and one freeware. The first one is Designer Sextet from the company Flaming Pear and for the second plugin, the freeware one, I’ve chosen Caravaggio from Xero Graphics.

Installing PSPI and Photoshop plugins

Now it is time to install PSPI on your GIMP. The following is an extract from the PSPI site:

'The Linux packages include three files: README.linux pspi, a small shell script pspi.exe.so, the binary that wine runs'

Copy pspi and pspi.exe.so to your personal GIMP plug-ins folder, typically ~/.gimp-2.2/plug-ins .

When you run GIMP it will issue a warning “wire_read(): error” as pspi.exe.so can’t be started directly. (The pspi script can, though, and is from GIMP’s point of view a GIMP plug-in). This warning is harmless (GIMP just ignores that file then), but if you want to avoid it, move pspi.exe.so somewhere else and modify the pspi script to point to its new location instead.

After starting GIMP, go to the Xtns:Photoshop Plug-in Settings and enter the folder where you are going to keep the 3rd-party Photoshop plug-ins (.8bf files) that you want to use in GIMP.

Preferably you should use an empty folder for this, and then install (copy) Photoshop plug-ins there one by one, verifying that each works. It isn’t really useful to rush and install a great deal of Photoshop plug-ins at once and assume they all will work under pspi.

So I did what they wrote in the instructions and also copied my freshly downloaded PS Plugins to a folder in my home that I called ~/.gimp-2.2/psplugins.

Remember that this GIMP folder we are referring to is a hidden folder, therefore, you’ll have to set your file browser so that it shows hidden files. In my case, I use GNOME and Nautilus. I can see hidden files by using the Nautilus menu View > Show hidden files.

Setting The GIMP UP

As the guide says, I start GIMP and it hangs up for some seconds analyzing the newly installed plugin:

But once GIMP is loaded I get no error message as expected (The PSPI guide suggested that an error may have occurred but I didn’t see any). All works fine for now. Proceeding with the settings, I open the GIMP Menu Xtns > Photoshop Plug-in Settings and this window shows up:

Hit the New button (In my screenshot it is the white sheet of paper with an orange star over it, on the upper left corner of the above screenshot) and choose the path where you put your Photoshop plugins. In my case we saw that it is /home/darkmaster/.gimp-2.2/psplugins.

Push the OK button and a message will appear warning you that the new plugins will be loaded next time you restart The GIMP.

Testing the new PS Plugins

To complete the operation I close and then reopen The GIMP. Even now I don’t get any error message. I then load an image from my HDD and then click on the Filters menu. The plugins are at the bottom of the menu.

Let’s test them! Will they work? I start with Flaming Pear > Aetherize and… wow it works! Here’s a screenshot!

Now it’s Caravaggio’s turn and wow, it works too! Another screenshot for the press:

This is the result of applying the Caravaggio filter

Now doesn’t that look like a real painting? This Caravaggio plugin is excellent and it’s freeware.

Conclusions

So I tested two random Photoshop plugins from around the net and two of two worked. Guess there’s a very high compatibility thanks to Wine getting better and better with each release.. What can I say now? Enjoy, and say goodbye to one of the most deprecated defects of GIMP, the lack of good and professional plugins! If you have the money, you can buy and use serious plugins like those from Alien Skin in Linux with The GIMP and PSPI now!

Rating and Credits

Ok, it's not a review but none the less I rate this PSPI extension for GIMP as a 5 out of 5, it does what it promises to do and it adds vital functionalities to The GIMP.

A big thank you goes to the WINE project, PSPI team and to GIMP creators.