So... I realize my computer skills are much below that of the average gimp-user. I only run linux when I must, to use some work-related software. I only code unix stuff with heavy mentoring, a tutorial at hand and google as my back-up assistant. Heck, I'm just a dumb biologist who likes to take photos and post process them. But I'm not completely beyond learning, so please bear with me...
I have bought just one photoshop filter in my life, but I really need it: A very powerful noise reduction plugin called TopazDenoise. I have been using it with gimp 2.6 with the help of pspi. Now I find that pspi doesn't work with gimp 2.7.
I asked google for help, and apparently there isn't a real alternative to pspi that makes gimp 2.7 recognize photoshop plugins, but several threads mention that you can get photoshop plugins to work via xnview. I looked at xnview: Apparently this is a piece of open source software that can convert a lot of different image file formats and can also use photoshop plugins. But I couldn't find out how to use it to install my TopazDenoise plugin in gimp...
...possibly, it can't. Maybe the threads are just suggesting to run the filter in xnview instead, and then move the noise-reduced image file to gimp afterwards? In that case I guess I might as well hang on to gimp 2.6 for denoising, and then save the image as .xcf and move to gimp 2.7. I would REALLY prefer being able to do everything in 2.7 to keep my workflow reasonably simple (I already need faststone to sort and quality filter the photos and then ufraw to convert the raw image file - I hate having to add a fourth step!)
IF there is a workaround for simple windows-users like me, to make my denoise-filter work in gimp, then I would really, really appreciate if someone could walk me though it. At a slow and child-like pace, preferably...
In any case, thanks for any thoughts, hints, ideas, pointers etc.