Why do I need a professional-level image processor?

Creating great architectural visuals in SketchUp requires a large amount of digital image processing. This is a good thing, because it makes our lives easy, as we will see later. Every digital image we use greatly diminishes the need for creating complex geometry in SketchUp. So, we need to have tools at our disposal that will quickly and easily manipulate all the different photos and textures that will go into SketchUp, and all the images that come out. We will also be combining the output from SketchUp with rendered images later on.

Learning what GIMP/Photoshop can do will be one of the Eureka moments in this book. Until you learn about layers and masks, the door to digital graphics will remain firmly closed to you. Layers will allow you to composite multiple takes of the same scene together so that you get the best out of SketchUp's native output.

Grabbing a copy of GIMP

Although the GIMP project does not provide official installers, contributed precompiled binary setup files are linked on their web page for the Windows and Mac platforms.