I tried Gimp but was unable to get used to the interface. Perhaps I just need more practice.
Even then, I do not think Gimp is up to Photoshop’s level. Photoshop is extremely stable, and Adobe seems to always come out with some new tool that you never know how you went without before. If your running 6.0 you are going to be amazed with CS.
One option if money is tight and you need Photoshop compatibility is Elements. If you can live without curves and 16 bit color along with a few other things.

GIMP is only acceptable IF money is a huge problem. Since it isn’t for you, buy Photoshop. GIMP has such an awkward interface… especially if you come from a photoshop background. I hate GIMP with a passion… just because nothing is where it’s supposed to be…

Functionally it’s a fine alternative for most people. But from an interface standpoint, ugh. In your case though, I’d say stick with version 6. No real reason to upgrade in my eyes.

GIMP is not of the same quality. If money is really a problem, a little searching and you could obtain a photoshop cs for the same price as GIMP if you know what I mean.

Adobe Photoshop just plain rocks. I have been using before I was even on the internet and that’s been since the mid 90s.

I gave GIMP a download and a look and quickly decided to stick with Photoshop as I had already spent hundreds of hours with it and wasn’t about to invest a bunch of time using GIMP.

Another program I would recommend if price is the issue. PaintShop Pro. I think it is still very affordable. I have two friends that use that and I have used it myself. I has a lot of Photoshop qualities and it’s in the price range more people can reach.

My vote is for PHOTOHSOP and Version 6 is fine for me, for now. It does more than I will ever need.

This is one of tehem comments that won’t help very much but….. In my past life as a digital retoucher / graphic designer for large format print and exhibition (phew almost forgot about that life!), I used to use Photoshop. However there was a guy there who really was the best. He used to retouch slides wityha magnifying glass and a horse hair brush. Malcom, as he was called, gave me many talks on the advantages of Gimp. He told me memory usage was far more efficient, meaning you cna work on larger files more quickly and that the options for retouching beat anything else available.

I still have not tried it as I thought it was solely a linux / unix program. However I recently saw that it is available on all platforms these days so will have to download it and give it a test run.

I’ve looked at Gimp a couple of times, but the interface just doesn’t seem that good. However, in terms of freeware, I do use Paint.net which is another good simple paint package, has anyone here has tried that?

The GIMP can do decent web graphics. There is an alternative GIMP install called GIMPShop (http://www.gimpshop.com/) that helps to make the GIMP interface on Windows more like Photoshop. Take a look at that version since it can make GIMP a lot easier to use if you are used to Photoshop. Personally I only use the GIMP when I have to and if money is not a problem buy Photoshop. It has a lot of great features in the new versions.

First, a bit about me. I’m a student and have taken several computer art classes focused around photoshop (though my major does not involve either graphics or computers.) Using Linux exclusively at home, I decided to start trying gimp as an alternative, but was a bit wary at first due to the number of complaints I have read regarding how difficult gimp supposedly was to use, and how it was not as feature complete as photoshop. Shortly after playing around with gimp… I’ve gotta say I am very very impressed.

Okay… 95% of the complaints here are about the gimp interface. This is the most sorry excuse to not use a piece of software I have ever heard! “Zomg… but the buttons are in different places!!1″… cry me a river.

First of all, the fact that gimp isn’t confined to a single window makes it vastly superior for multi-monitor workspaces, as well as making it much more customizable, and work better across platforms, desktop environments, widget toolkits, etc.

Secondly, the interface is not thaaaat different from photoshop. And the ways in which it is different are great! In gimp, each of the component dialogs (history, navigator, layers, etc) are completely modular, and can be created and arranged at will in any number of either isolated or connected windows, and also can be tabbed. This was not introduced into photoshop until CS afaik, and still isn’t as versatile as Gimp’s layout configuration. These modules are remarkably similar to photoshop. Things like paths, layers, channels, navagator, history, etc… they are all there, and are all very comparable to photoshop. If arranged correctly, the gimp interface can be made identical to that of photoshop (if you for some reason really want it to be).

One thing that impressed me right away was the fact that by default the color palate itself is in a tabbed module. No opening a separate window every time you want to adjust a foreground or background color.

The one thing that is different, but which shouldn’t take more than an hour of tinkering to figure out, is the names of the tools and their positions. (we’re talking ONE single panel of controls here… its not that tough folks.) I found it to be very intuitive. Healing brush = Healing tool. Clone stamp? clone tool. Lasso = free select. Seriously… you would have to be a complete moron to not immediately understand what these things do just by mousing over them and reading the caption. Even the icons resemble the tools purpose.

One thing about gimp that I generally find superior to photoshop is in making selections. For example: photoshop has several tools for creating/modifying paths. Usually when trying to draw a complex path involving many curves, you must first draw the rough outline of the path, then switch back and fourth between several tools to add/remove paths and adjust curves. In gimp, all of this is done with a single tool, and all of the options for that tool make much more sense than they do in photoshop. When you drag a handle from a curve in gimp, it doesn’t create both sides at once (so you usually end up having to drag one back to the middle, which isn’t exact, and can cause confusion), but rather you can create them independently. Other selection tools are better as well, such as the scissors select tool (equivalent to magnetic lasso). magnetic lasso is practically unusable in photoshop unless you are dealing with basic shapes with high contrast to a background. Gimp more intelligently creates nodes along the selection, and those paths can be dragged and altered in real time in much the same way as path nodes can. (and of course, you can switch between paths & selections just as in photoshop.) Gimp also uses “modes” for replacing, adding to, or subtracting from a selection. You just click a button, and it will always add or subtract. This is way better than having to hold down a hotkey and not remember to let up on it and lose part of your selection. Theres also quickmask & other such nifty things you’d expect.

And thats just selections… Now, i’m not saying that gimp has everything photoshop does. But by that same token, I wouldn’t say photoshop has everything that gimp has, or that it does everything as well as gimp can. There may be a few very advanced features that are implemented in one but not the other, and visa versa, but I am quite confident that all of the fundamentals are there, and that gimp has everything that is needed for a serious graphic designer.

AND! on top of all of this: Gimp is free in both terms of freedom and beer! That alone to me is more than worth a few technical concerns. When using proprietary software, when you run into a bug, something thats not implemented, or some other software conflict… you’ve generally hit a wall and theres nothing you can do but complain to customer service staff that do not care about your problem, and cannot fix your problem. Free software allows you the ability to jump on IRC and talk directly to the developers if you need to. (yes, some of us actually sit on IRC and answer questions.) You get great documentation, community support that is way better than commercial support in most cases, and source code access.

In conclusion, I wouldn’t listen to these folks who installed gimp for 5 minues, 5 years ago, and gave up immediately. Actually use it for a few projects and see what it can do. If theres someone out there who is more intimately familiar with both gimp and photoshop (not a 5 year old version either…), and can offer better insight than I can, feel free! Also, as was mentioned… theres gimpshop. I’m not sure how heavily developed it is though. I’d try the regular gimp first.

I agree with Smorg. Compared to Photoshop 6, GIMP rules the school, but compared to CS3, while very expensive it wins by a *few* points. Use GIMP.

I’m a software developer and designer, among other things. I’ve been using Photoshop for almost fifteen years, since version 3.0, and GIMP for the last year.

GIMP is for people who want power. Real power. Photoshop is for people who want convenience, sort of, as long as they’re doing things they’ve done for years, and don’t have to do anything new or very complicated.

Photoshop can’t be scripted, and the blunt, rudimentary command-line tools it offers are not nearly so powerful as GIMP’s Scheme interfacing. Translation: if you have a lot of photos to edit, Photoshop won’t help you much unless you pay a huge amount for server editions of custom-built software, whereas GIMP can do it out of the box. Photoshop is more closed-source than most bank vaults, so it’s almost impossible to build your own module or find a module that does what you want it to if Adobe hasn’t built it yet; whereas, if somebody hasn’t built a plugin to do a particular thing in GIMP (and, since everybody’s free to, there are a lot more) you can build your own. GIMP can read and write almost every image format imaginable, whereas Photoshop tends to be proprietary and to drive your saved files through a hole the wall in order to keep you from using them in any other program. Photoshop has some real problems with actual rendering if you’re on the PC version (can’t speak to the Mac version, I’m not as familiar) whereas GIMP has improved light-years over the last few years, and, so far as I can tell, is hugely more versatile when it comes to decoding the tags on tagged-image-format (.TIF) files.

In short, as far as the interface is concerned, Photoshop is crap. It offers very little power, very little scripting, very little optimization, and very little customization. All it offers is a slightly more pleasing splash-screen on startup; which, since Photoshop tends to take about three hours to start up on my machine, is a good thing.

There is one, and only one, drawback that GIMP has: its support of CKMY colorsets is somewhat limited. There are, however, several workarounds for this, because, as I’ve said, in GIMP, since anybody can fix, adjust, rebuild, or reconfigure anything they want to, people have already started working on patches and improvements. Photoshop development takes significantly longer. Closed-source software moves more slowly than mud through a sieve.

I should also mention the horrible mess that Adobe, a company which has made a huge amount of money from the low standards and lack of education common to most designers, has made of the portable document format. It had a lot of potential when it was originated, but Adobe has at turns been innovative and miserly, and the PDF associations with PostScript have been intentionally confused in order to keep the proprietary nature of the format profitable to the Adobe corporation. The last few updates tangled the web even further with idiotic schemes for linking portable documents with hidden web connections and secret notifications for authors and Microsoft-esque copyright protection that is as wasteful and inefficient as it is inept and utterly useless what it tries to do: prevent copying of documents. These mangled developments have not only made PDFs almost impossible to develop through Adobe’s own software; they’ve introduced whole levels of insecurity to the home user and layman, who has no idea if their PDF is trying to connect to the internet, and who is suddenly vulnerable to an unattended connection buried in a document that few can understand in the first place.

Adobe is finally getting the picture and opening up the source for the PDF format. It’s nice that we’re finally able to free ourselves from badly-designed memory-hogging programs like Acrobat and Photoshop with alternatives like Sumatra, GIMP, GhostScript, and others. In a year or so, Adobe had better improve its Acrobat interface drastically or risk losing a huge chunk of market share to developers who know how to write programs that people can actually use. I haven’t touched Acrobat in a good two years, and while that’s because I know some command-line stuff that’s infinitely faster and more powerful, it’s only a matter of time before somebody writes a GUI that blows Acrobat out of the water on the PDF front.

To sum up: Adobe Photoshop is pleasing to the eye, and, if you aren’t really dedicated to doing anything new or drastic to your images, and if the ‘hassle’ of learning a slightly different and much more powerful interface isn’t really worth it, you can do without the power and settle for Photoshop. I still don’t quite understand why people settle for $500 computer programs simply out of habit, but that’s their prerogative. It’s pretty clear to me that Photoshop is popular nowadays for the same reason that Microsoft Word is popular: it’s a crap program that costs too much, but everybody’s been using it for years, so it’s hard for them to stop. Not only is it good for your design work if you switch to GIMP; it’s good for design in general, because taking market share from Adobe encourages good design practices, opens software, and takes away the power of companies like Adobe who’ve been holding back the image-manipulation forefront for so many years.

The GIMP interface is actually very good, too. It’s just more powerful. But my wife always says that she hates Porsches because the struts are so stiff and the steering is so tight. Lots of designers are like my wife– they like the utter weakness that is Photoshop.

GIMP is scriptable, editable, customizable, portable, more versatile, more open, and just plain better. Photoshop is none of those things. GIMP simply offers more tools for the manipulation of images, and makes it easier to manage that manipulation.

For example, it takes about thirty seconds to increase the contrast on a hundred photos by 30% in GIMP. I don’t think there’s even a way to adjust the contrast on a hundred photos at once in Photoshop. I’ve seen some limited server-based custom versions of Photoshop that allow batching and scripting (at tremendous cost, of course) but none of them is really as powerful as GIMP’s ScriptFu module.

Photoshop is for designers who don’t like to learn. There are many. GIMP is for designers who want power.

Considering Gimp is absolutely free, it is fantastic.

Photoshop really does allow you to do some truly amazing things but you pay through the teeth for it.

I am hoping to start a free graphics course by email newsletter, very soon for un-experienced Blogger. It will be focusing on Free or very low cost software and aims to make better designers of all of us.