Photoshop vs GIMP

texkam · Feb 21, 2013

The good news is GIMP is under heavy development so things are being fixed and improved often, most notibly getting rid of the confusing multi-window interface. I think they've also addressed the text funtion as well and like I said, improved color depth is slated for version 3.0. Having said that PS CS6 remains the gold standard and charges accordingly. SumoPaint, Pixlr, Photoshop Express and others can indeed be a useful alternative for some tasks.

thunderkyss · Feb 21, 2013

I used Gimp for "graphic art" stuff. But it's really not much for post processing of photos.... not in my opinion. Photoshop is. A lot of the things Photoshop has built in tools for, you can do in Gimp. But it's time consuming. Some of the touch ups, hue saturations, effects.. takes a lot longer in Gimp. Takes a bit of learning in Photoshop, but you'll eventually get faster.

A lot of the masking stuff you can do in Photoshop, I don't know if you can do in Gimp.

It's expensive, but if you get the whole suite of stuff from adobe, Lightroom, CameraRAw, Photoshop.... there's just no contest.

Gimp is free, open source, & open ended. The Adobe stuff is specifically oriented.

KmH · Feb 21, 2013

People have been touting an imminent 16-bit capability for GIMP for about 5 years now.

480sparky · Feb 21, 2013

CA_ said:
I agree.

I used GIMP here at my office to fix an image email footer / signature. Took me 30 minutes.

30 minutes. To change a name in an image. It's worthless. I eventually used a web-based knock off of PS called Sumo Paint (which emulates PS to a T) and got it done in 5 minutes.

Sumo Paint FTW

Perhaps you just weren't familiar with the way it works. I have no doubt that if I were to buy Photoshop, I could make the same claim.... That it's bulky, clunky and a waste of time. But in reality it's simply due to having to teach an old dog new tricks.

Anyone of a certain age will remember when cars had the ignition and wiper control in the dash and the headlight high-low switch on the floor. When the manufacturers moved them, it took a while to retrain your 'muscle memory'.

texkam · Feb 21, 2013

People have been touting an imminent 16-bit capability for GIMP for about 5 years now.

Perhaps, but this info comes from the development team.

As 2013 is fast approaching, wed like to take a quick look at 2012 and what we did during the year.
In May we released the long anticipated new stable version, v2.8, with many improvements such as layer groups, tagging of resources, new Cage transform tool and more.
We also started the final transition to GEGL as a new image processing core. All legacy from the libgimp has already been removed.
Unstable version of GIMP is now capable of working in 16 and 32 bit per channel modes, both integer and float. Color management has been improved as well, and thanks to support by AMD and Google the GEGL library can do GPU-side rendering and processing with OpenCL.

namessuck · Feb 21, 2013

Yes I did find the text annoying in GIMP. Also making some borders was some how very difficult compared to Photoshop where I could just use shift.

I am no expert as you can read from my posts. I just want to know what program is more user friendly.

I don't think it's justifiable for me spending $600+ on Photoshop CS6.

I will have to see if Photoshop 7 will work on Windows 7.

Lightroom also costs $100+ which is way too much for basic stuff that I want to do.

Are there any other free programs like GIMP?

For really basic things I use Infranview. Such a great program.

Ysarex · Feb 21, 2013

namessuck said:
Are there any other free programs like GIMP?

No.

And I'm going to stand up for GIMP here. IT IS FREE after all. The 16 bit problem is real and it does matter and Keith is right it's been a long wait but a beta of the 16 bit version is available and we should get a stable version 3.0 sometime this year.

The 16 bit problem isn't as serious as it may sound if you do your photo processing the way you should. You get the RGB conversion of your raw file done properly in the raw converter and you can then move an 8 bit TIFF to GIMP. GIMP 2.8 will open 16 bit files but it does convert them to 8 bit as it opens them.

I am not aware of any other free editor then that properly implements color management. GIMP will: a) correctly use your monitor profile. b) correctly convert a photo between color spaces. c) maintain the color space and ICC profile of photos it edits. This makes GIMP unique among free photo editors and frankly it makes GIMP the only one that is usable. (If anyone knows of another free editor that implements a, b, and c above please let me know.) Because GIMP incorporates proper color management it can be used professionally along with a good raw converter.

Moving on, GIMP's UI isn't as elegant as Photoshop, but it's certainly usable especially in the new 2.8 interface that does away with the multiple floating windows UI. In terms of adjusting the tone response and color of a photo as well as the local tone response and color of a photo GIMP is fully capable. In addition it provides ample tools to correct shape distortion, to clone defects, to crop and re-size a photo and to sharpen a photo. It likewise has an assortment of special effects filters and assorted junk. And yes the text tool sucks.

I went looking for a photo to use as a test and found this one:

The camera blew the highlights in the JPEG -- I created the above by processing the raw file and I deliberately set up problems for GIMP to solve. I held the highlights but left the tone response poorly adjusted and deliberately screwed up the color. In GIMP I was able to:

1. Straighten the building using the Transform tools.
2. Apply a mask to hold the highlights in place while adjusting the tone response of the rest of the photo.
3. Apply a mask between layers to open up the shadows.
4. Apply a mask between layers to raise contrast in just the shadows.
5. Clone out the newspaper on the sidewalk.
6. Alter the color and tone of the blue plastic bag stuck in the fence lower left.
7. Get the white balance right.
8. Alter only the color of the sky which was too cyan.
9. Crop and size the photo.
10. Sharpen the photo which I did after converting to Lab color so as not to add color noise.

Even some commercial software out there can't compete with GIMP's capabilities. For example let's assume you have Elements. Convert a photo in Elements to Lab color and then make a tint adjustment by altering the "a" channel. I can do it in GIMP.

Here's the GIMP edit of the above photo:

Joe

KmH · Feb 21, 2013

Check out Photoscape.org

thunderkyss · Feb 21, 2013

namessuck said:
Are there any other free programs like GIMP?

For really basic things I use Infranview. Such a great program.

There is San Serif PhotoPlus which is pretty good. But if you haven't downloaded the free Lightroom trial, I'd at least do that much. To me, it's about work flow. If you shoot RAW, Lightroom is the quickest, fastest, easiest "darkroom" I've seen.

dmtx · Feb 22, 2013

If you do not wish to spend the $600+ on Photoshop, consider Photoshop Elements or Paintshop Pro X5. Both under $100, and I think that Paintshop supports 16 bit color.

lizheaemma · Feb 27, 2013

I think it all depends on what you want... I have been using GIMP for many years. I haven't found anything that it can't do. You might have to do a little work to make it happen, but for 600+ I believe that's justifiable. I for one on a budget prefer to put my money into my equipment and the speed of my computer. I try to shoot my pics so
that I don't have to process much afterwards. I try to be more aware while I am shooting rather then putting in the time later. For things like a watermark I just made a brush and stamp use that. If you are on a Mac you have the capability to create actions. I will say that using GIMP on both a PC and a MAC, that it is far more suited to a MAC.

That being said....

If you want to really manipulate your photos a lot in post and have extra money to spend and you love all the bells and whistles then by all means Photoshop is the way to go.

But...

If your on a budget, have the patience to learn a program and are not doing huge amounts of post them GIMP is a fantastic program that can do anything that you need it to do.