The GIMP has historically been offered as an open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop. It's a servicable image editing tool, and works in a pinch if you're on a computer without Photoshop. However, many open source enthusiasts like to claim that because the GIMP can perform most of the same tasks as Photoshop and has the added advantage of being free, it's a superior piece of software.

Not true.

To believe that you can improve on a piece of software that's been around forever and commands a price of $500 by completely overhauling it is a very special kind of egotism. There's a reason Photoshop is the industry standard. It packs insanely powerful features into a UI as user friendly as possible, given its substantial horsepower. When GIMP passed up the chance to emulate that and instead pursued its own amateurish and confusing approach to the UI, it lost any hope it ever had of being better than Photoshop. It's destined to remain as nothing more than a last resort to serious graphic designers.

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The original writeup here listed certain flaws in GIMP that may or may not have existed. It's too late to go back and check, so I removed them. For accurate details on GIMP's shortcomings, I'd encourage you to instead refer to SilentElkOfYesterday's thoughtful and dead-on writeup below.

GIMP has infinite value for money because it is free. It does not have the subtlety or redundancy of Photoshop that lets you do the same thing six different ways, with two or three of them leaving new and interesting directions as results.

For example, if you want a metallic texture, you can:
1. scan one, of course
2. take any other texture, stretch it in one dimension till it bleeds, then remove color, blur and add highlights
3. use a built-in algorithmic filter
4. use a third-party filter like KPT or Xenofex
5. use the built-in convolution matrix if you're a graphics geek
6. (my favorite) fill an area with gray, add monochrome Gaussian noise, then either blur till it's soft again or apply a big motion blur in one direction. Then sharpen (not necessarily unsharp mask). as you repeat sharpening a way-cool striated metallic texture will begin to appear. Repeat till done.

Photoshop is the first piece of pirated software I paid for, and still the best $500 I ever spent. (I upgraded the LE version from a scanner and upgraded twice since then: $200+150+150). Of course I would say that, as I make my living using it.

I too was tempted by the GIMP. I'm not a graphics professional, but I occasionally need to do some fairly simple graphics work.

After switching to Linux, I thought, "Hey, I won't need that Mac sitting around any more, I can just use my new Linux box to edit the odd photo or graphic" (I even bought a GIMP book to educate myself).

Wrong!

Photoshop is better, easier, more professional, has more extensions and is downright cooler than the GIMP. No offense to the folks who wrote the GIMP. It's a huge task and Photoshop has been around a lot longer. They just have a way to go to catch up. Maybe they will someday, I hope so.

Now, to convince my wife that I need one of the new cool Cube Macs to use Photoshop on...

Linux nerds telling me that GIMP is just as good if not better than PhotoShop would be just as obscene as me ("Art Fag") telling my admin friends that NT works just as good if not better than *NIX for networking and server applications. I still have friends who persist in pointing out how fantastic GIMP is.

GIMP is not fantastic.

GIMP is "free"; "Free" is not (contrary to popular belief) the same as "good". Herpes, for instance, is generally free (unless you got it from a hooker or your ex-husband/wife, then you most likely paid for it one way or another). Herpes is generally not too useful for anything, people are usually not to happy about getting it and coincidentally, herpes flare-up is just about as erratic as GIMP's stability.

PhotoShop is more versatile, more stable, more supported, easier to use and far more powerful. It is also more expensive, but that is beside the point. Sort of...

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I stand corrected... but just on the scripting part! Though that feature is pretty cool (I have seen it at work) not many visually oriented people are lucky enough to be "left-brained" as well. This seems to hold fairly true. I for one couldn't code Perl to save my life, and most of my artistically inclined friends are the same way (they tend to be better at reading and such). My Ubernerd friends usually suck pretty horribly at creating anything aesthetically pleasing.

Though this is not by any means always true, I'm sure this is what Adobe has assumed and they have probably decided to cut some things out in order to try to keep PhotoShop simple.

I, for one, would like to see them introduce it.

If I may interject, I love Photoshop, and I've been waiting for many years for Photoshop to add a Turing-complete scripting language. I'd prefer a relatively "clean" or "minimalistic" language like Scheme or JavaScript, but I'd settle for Perl in a heartbeat. If there were a scripting language built into a program like Photoshop, writing plugins would be easier by an order of magnitude or two. You'd probably see dozens of them written by relatively ordinary users, freely available. There'd be websites full of the darn things, and you could download them and try them out.

Being able to do proper automation of tasks in Photoshop would be a tremendous "value add", as the marketing people call it. If you could run it non-interactively with a script on the command line, you could do CGI scripts with it that would automatically generate some pretty sophisticated graphics based on an arbitrary set of parameters. Even if you're not running a website, just being able to automate repetitive tasks in a sane and repeatable way would be hell on wheels for making some kinds of animations.

If there were a Photoshop-like program with that feature, I'll bet you'd see some pretty fanatical users. They might even tend to overemphasize its other strengths, and downplay some weaknesses (like, say, maybe a somewhat clunky GUI and annoying menu behavior in the Win32 port). Heyyy, waaait a minute. . .

(Speaking of plugins and plugs, can I plug whizkid's web page with Photoshop plugins that he wrote? See his home node, the URL is in there somewhere.)

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moJoe is right: Not a lot of graphic designers know Scheme, and even fewer would care to bother learning it. I agree that Photoshop's halfassed "macro recording" capability gets more use from the average user than Scheme would -- but that's not the whole story. The nifty thing isn't so much that every user can write scripts for it, but that it's easier and quicker to write "plugins" in Scheme or Perl than in ASM or C. Those scripts can be generalized well enough to be useful to anybody. The GIMP has expanded their potential plugin developer base to include Perl programmers in addition to the compiled language crowd: You don't have to write these things, because so many other people are writing them for you. This is a bit like the "open architecture" advantage of PC's which let them kill the (technically superior) Macintosh in the marketplace during the 1980s and early 1990s. I'm not predicting a similar market dominance for the GIMP; I'm just trying to explain by analogy why I think the feature is so cool.

But again, if Photoshop adds real scripting, they should still retain the relatively cheesy deal they've got now, because it's very friendly to the average user.

I think the two programs should be seen not as an "either or" holy war proposition, but as two different programs, each of which has unique strengths and weaknesses. One of them will probably suit you better than the other. Ignore the Slashbots and the Mac zealots. Hm, looks like klash already added this point below, but hey, it's worth repeating.

What dizzy means by "Photoshop just feels right" is just that s/he's accustomed to it. I've lost count of how many text editors and graphics programs I've felt that way about, only to use them again a year after switching and find them clumsy and annoying. Ten years ago I thought vi was the living end. This too shall pass.

Yes, the gimp is inferior to photoshop. The lighting effects of photoshop alone make it worth the price. The key strokes are well thought out and logical.

Photoshop just feels right in some hard to define, holistic or abstract kind of way. It has depth, features that you will only hear about if you ask another user, then you will think "ahhhhh, that would make my life so much easier!"

But try explaining that to a free software zealot? No chance.

"It's free!" they whine. "You can add features to it!" they scream.

Tough

Photoshop is just plain better. It seems that some things you have to pay for...

I'm not a talented graphic designer. I'm probably not qualified to have educated opinions on the relative merits and demerits of the GIMP.

But it seems rather silly to claim that the GIMP is not powerful enough when one observes the beautiful artwork talented artists such as tigert manage to churn out with it.

Of course it's going to seem inferior to people who are used to Photoshop. It's not Photoshop. But then again, how long did it take for Photoshop to support multiple undos? 5.0? (Hint: GIMP has supported it since 1998).

Both programs have strong points and weak points. Photoshop probably does come out on top in the end, but I think the GIMP is too easily written off by people who use it for a few days, are dismayed that it's not an exact Photoshop clone, and decide it's not up to the task of a serious graphic design tool.

(I wanted to put this to day log - I usually keep crap like this there, but this got too long.)

GIMP is acceptable.

• Don't criticize program you cannot comprehend. "GIMP doesn't know how to draw a straight line"? Read the documentation before you open the Gates of FUD, please. =)
• GIMP is not advertised as "Better than Photoshop" - more like "Almost better than Photoshop". GIMP developers frequently say in comp.graphics.apps.gimp that there are fields GIMP is not good with - like print work and stuff like that. Personally, I need only RGB because I work with display images; If you want to work with prints, get right tools for the job. I dare ya.
• "Photoshop feels better". Okay, your opinion. But don't use subjective stuff as an argument. I'm like fish in the water with GIMP, so it's my sort of program.

  I sorta-kinda-accepted Photoshop; I hated PSP to pieces. I'm not forcing you to change the program. Again, use what you're familiar with.

  Personally, I'd be delighted to get a Linux port/clone of Deluxe Paint... Now that's a cool program!

  But as usual: GIMP is not impossible to use. It was designed to be sorta-like-Photoshop to help people to migrate. If you can't learn to use it and still want to crawl back next to PS, well, go then. And tell the woes to the developers. They'll probably be happy to silence PS zealots over time... =)

• And will Photoshop ever have any of the ImageMagick, may I ask? =)
• Yes, I still advertise the fact that you can contact the developers and ask them to implement what you need - or join the effort and code it yourself. If I were not a nice wolf, I'd just ask you to shut up and contribute...

I will add to this writeup at great length later, but for now I would like to simply add:

BUMP MAPPING

The quite simply ridiculous things you can do off the "Map..." menu in GIMP put Photoshop to shame, and yes, I am aware of such things as plugins. ( oh, and IWarp is also kinda nifty. ) Look at some of the tutorials on the GIMP website. Coupled with the fact that it's quite fast and now pretty decently stable, GIMP has a lot going for it. They do need to totally rewrite the user interface however. Also it seems rather unfocussed overall. The fact that you can't preview some effects will have most users tearing their hair out.

Another point : why do some zealots conclude that the existence of a free Open Source graphics package should suddenly make Photoshop a "rip-off"? Open Source (like organic foods) isn't some kind of magic cure-all. Adobe charge $x00 for Photoshop (and moreover, people willingly pay) because they're probably the best company at writing graphics software in the world. (Photoshop, being a professional, powerful tool, falls outside of my argument that paying for software is a fad.)

Anyway, I don't see why you can't use both...

I use GIMP 1.2 for Windows. Here is a rebuttal to most of the other noders' objections.

Keyboard modifiers and shortcuts (to prole and dizzy)

• GIMP can draw a straight line and can constrain it in any of 24 directions. To make an unconstrained straight line, click with the pencil or brush at one end and shift-click at the other end. To constrain the line, add control to the shift-click. The advantage to this method (as opposed to a separate tool for drawing straight lines) is that it also works with the eraser, the smudge tool, the blur/soften tool, the dodge/burn tool, etc.
• Timesaver: With the pencil and brush tools, you can temporarily switch to the eyedropper by control-clicking the pixel whose color you want to pick up.
• Here are the rules for multiple selection:
  • Shift-click adds pixels to a selection.
  • Control-click subtracts pixels from a selection
  • Shift-release makes a perfectly square or circular selection. (If you are editing an image whose horizontal and vertical resolution are not identical, this selection is based on pixels, not physical space.)
  • Control-release makes the selection center-to-corner instead of corner-to-corner.
• You can change GIMP's keystrokes by hovering over a menu item and pressing the key you want to activate that menu item. Remove a key by pressing Delete.
• What are those timesaving features you're talking about? If you list them in your writeup, I might be able to point GIMP plugin developers to your writeup.

Advantages of free software (to shokwave and moJoe)

• Photoshop is slow if you switch platforms. Once I buy it for the Mac and then switch platforms, I can't run future versions on my new x86 computer and must deal with Gates' Law on fixed hardware. GIMP doesn't have this problem because it can be recompiled to a specific processor's microarchitecture.
• GIMP's stability has improved greatly over the last few years. It's now more stable (even on Windows) than most other Windows apps I use. Version 1.2 fixes that annoying system resource leak found in some of the 1.1 series.

GIMP may not be superior to Photoshop, but it's on par with Photoshop Elements.

This is the biggest problem with GIMP that I've seen expressed on forums such as Kuro5hin and Slashdot: GIMP does not support color correction. This is because the common method for color correction (interpolation of values in a multidimensional lookup table) is patented. Part of the reason Photoshop Elements (formerly Photoshop LE) is only $99 is that it doesn't include the licensed features. Lack of color transformation support blocks adding any support for CMYK process color, as the display engine must transform CMYK into the display's RGB space in real time while the user is editing an image.

(Questions? Comments? /msg me)

I noted this writeup was not written by people who use Photoshop regularly (many hours per day), so I thought i'd add a few things that people left out that have been the source of some arguments.

1. Photoshop does have automated scripting to a degree, with Photoshop Actions you can integrate 99% of what you'd ever want to script without ever using anything but the photoshop GUI (no it's not really a language it's just a way to say execute these commands in this order, but it's usefull without being too technical for artists).

2. The interface is more mature: Adobe has sunk a lot of research into the UI and it shows. Unlike the GIMP all the tools are layed out in a way that conserves space yet, lets you use have the tools you need in the most convenient position. The tool boxes have more efficient layouts too.

3. Vectors, the GIMP does not support vectors as well as photoshop. Photoshop keeps text in vector form AND still allows you to do cool stuff with it (map textures on it, add colors overlays contour it, and loads more). Additionally Photoshop allows you to create some simple vector shapes AND use Bezier curves, a function you will not find in the GIMP.

4. This is just a pet peeve of mine. Since the GIMP opens up every tool box in its own window, if the document window is in focus, if I want to select a tool I have to click twice, once to focus the tool window, and once to select the tool. There probably is a way around this I do not know.
EDIT: I have been informed that this is a window manager issue, so depending on your WM YMMV

5. More usefull filters, fewer cool but cheesy filters: Photoshop comes with a small ammount of cheesy filters, but GIMP comes with a whole buttload of them.

6. Better for creation of web pages: Adobe Image Ready, which is practically a part of Photoshop (it comes bundled with Photoshop and only with Photoshop) allows you to slice and dice images and generate HTML. This is great for rapid prototyping of web pages. Sure, you could do it by hand, but this does complex tables in a snap. I just generate my page layout there, and tweak it by hand (adding in non image items), for graphics intensive sites this is invaluable, along with its ability to easily generate code for rollovers and image maps.

7. Photoshop is not meant for coders: Many artists never get formal computer training, only art training. Try explaining the concept of a stack or objects or regular expressions to an artist and watch their head spin.

8. TEXT SUPPORT! MY GOD! The gimp has the worst text support on the planet short of MS Paint, I mean seriously, it's a joke in the gimp. The text support doesn't allow you to add slant, adjust kerning, adjust height, letterspacing, or the 30 million other things photoshop allows. It doesn't even allow you to resize vector text dynamically.

9. The resize tool is a pet peeve of mine, for one you can't dynamically resize an area with your mouse and keep its aspect ratio that I know of. Second, when you resize it doesn't show you a preview just a grid which often is just annoying. Before resizing anything in the gimp I usually think long and hard.