Gimp is not superior to Photoshop

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.

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.

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...

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.)

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...

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...

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.