Whether you are actively considering a move away from Photoshop, or simply hoping there is a non-proprietary tool for reading your Photoshop images if you ever decide to stop subscribing to Adobe’s cloud, you’ve probably wondered about GIMP. A free, open-source, image editor, the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) has been a go-to tool for Linux users for years, but has a reputation for being hard to use and lacking many of Photoshop’s features. The reality has changed dramatically over the last couple years. GIMP now has a very competent user interface, as well as an extensive and powerful set of features. Its openly extensible nature means that in some areas, like running well-known image processing algorithms on your photos, it actually outshines Adobe Photoshop.

We took a deep dive into the current version, GIMP 2.8, to help you figure out whether GIMP might be the right photo editor for you.

First impressions fromt Photoshop veteran

When you first load GIMP 2.8, you might be forgiven for thinking that you’d fired up an alternate UI for Photoshop. Familiar panels for Layers, Brushes, Tools, Paths, and plenty of others are available. Individual tabs can be torn off (although it requires using a command on the palette menu instead of Adobe’s more intuitive action), so you can tweak GIMP UI just about as much as you can Photoshop’s.

Menus also closely parallel Photoshop’s, with File, Edit, Select, View, Image, Filters, and Help serving the same functions — although in a slightly different order. The Colors and Tools menus are unique to GIMP, with Colors pulling together operations that affect image content, that are usually found under the Image > Adjustments menu in Photoshop. The Tools menu pulls together a mixed bag of the same tools that are found in the Toolbox, plus some tools Adobe puts in the Image menu, like Crop. It also provides a window into some of the very powerful and extensible scripted image transforms that GIMP allows. Unfortunately, some of the icons, like the one for the crop tool shown, are different from the ones used by Photoshop, so finding your favorite may take some hunting.

GIMP’s missing Text menu is a hint that its Text capability, while very competent, is not as feature-rich as Photoshop’s. Missing are some of the fancy layout options, as well as all the built-in effects and warps from Photoshop. The good news is that there are GIMP plug-ins that will restore many of the missing features.

The menu of 3D commands found in Photoshop’s Extended and Creative Cloud editions is also not part of Gimp. Some of the available GEGL (Generic Graphics Library) scripts are helpful in performing similar operations in Gimp, though. Those scripts are one of the coolest features of GIMP, making it an open platform for image processing developers. While Photoshop can be scripted, most image transforms are either “black box” plug-ins or actual built-in commands.

GIMP also lacks Photoshop’s powerful Adjustment Layers. You can make a new layer, apply a Filter, and then tweak the opacity or blend mode, but it is a full image layer — like it or not. There are some plans to try to offer equivalent functionality to Adjustment Layers through GIMP, but there doesn’t seem to be an ideal workaround for the issue yet. GIMP History feature is also much less powerful than Photoshop’s. You can go back through your History as you might in most software — essentially a graphical list of possible Undos — but you can’t play around with your History or use a History brush like you can in Photoshop.

Next page: GIMP for photographers…