The fact that it's completely free is really quite impressive. Photoshop: Which One Is Right for You?īut underneath its rough exterior, GIMP is a powerful image editor, with the kind of features you'd expect in a pricy professional app. Many things work differently, the shortcuts aren't the same, and it's simply not as intuitive as Adobe's software.
It's also been forked multiple times, with versions like Seashore and Glimpse attempting to improve on the original formula.Ĭoming from Photoshop, GIMP can be a tricky beast to master. Completely open source, it started out on UNIX-based systems like Linux, before being ported to Windows and macOS. For over 25 years, the GNU Image Manipulator Program (GIMP) has been one of the most popular, free Photoshop alternatives on the web.
