Rating and comments for Gimp

As an amateur photographer and web designer, I find that Gimp basically meets my demands as to create and edit digital images. I give Gimp four of five "stars", in that its layers, masks and selection tools fulfil my basic needs. However, I do not give top score, since I for instance lack save dialogue when closing my files.

I rather dislike the user interface. Very hard to get
simple things done.

Not a real alternative for a professional user.

"Not a real alternative for a professional user."
I Dissagree. It depends what you are doing. I think that there aren´t many things that you could not do with GIMP. If you learn to use GIMP its powerfull image editor and it´s free. Photoshop is very good but it´s also very expensive.

I do all my web graphics with Gimp and i do professional web pages.

Gimp is the best image professional editor with GPL. Some people who work in desing and estudie design and new technologies say that gimp is the most similar to photoshop program.

Very good! I use GIMP is all - I mean ALL - including web page designs. It's quite intimidating for first time users but as you go along, you will experience its vast features.

Gimp is a brilliant alternative for photoshop considering the price difference.
The User interface is clunky but once you get familier with it
is very-very useful and you can do professional grade job.

More like an alternative to Paint Shop Pro or Paint.Net with an interface that worse than both.

I would love using it completely as a replacement of Photoshop but the time hasn't come yet. I'll be waiting.

"I rather dislike the user interface. Very hard to get
simple things done."

I completely disagree. The user interface is simply beautiful and easy to understand. I have been using GIMP for under a month and I'm already doing marvelous things with it, without even reading the manual.

User interface heaven.

The user interface is hell. Not worth to call it user friendly. Maybe Linux-users can handel it but normal people not. The functions are quite well. But it was slow on my windows PC.

The interface is quite strange at first, but when you start using it, you see, that it's a lot easier to use than photoshop. 5 stars.

OK for basic stuff, but lets face it, its no where near as good as Photoshop CS2/3. Needs a complete interface overhaul and needs to wake up to the fact that MS Windows users want an MDI (photoshop like) interface.

Gimp is good enough for my needs & it has not failed me yet. One gets accustomed to it over time, which is fine. It is quite fun to read up on how it works, try out different processes; great stuff for those who like to learn. The only thing preventing me from awarding top marks is that it does occasionally crash despite being presented as very stable. And I would not be seen dead with Photoshop, there you have it!

A great photoshop alternative, photoshop is good but expensive. Moving over to this was easy it does everything I wanted. Great program at a great price

I've been using Paint Shop Pro X 10.01 for a couple years and have found it imprecise and somewhat frustrating (fuzzy rendering of text, clunky interface, darkened gif transparent backgrounds, palette editing issues, no ability to save .ico files) so I began investigating alternatives. I found Photoshop cost prohibitive (~$1,000) and Wikipedia mentioned GIMP as a GNU alterative. After having read the comments posted here, I had low expectations of the GIMP application. That said, I was immediately impressed with the richness of the app and the
intuitive interface. In shorter time and with more precision I was able to generate clear text images, remove backgrounds from images, modify colors and fonts (it's especially nice to work down the list of fonts and see the text in the image change as you go). My sincere gratitude to the code contributors for creating this superb no-cost product.

Great application!

I use GIMP for all my bitmap editing needs (for vector graphics I mostly use OpenOffice Draw).

I edit all my photos with it and find it very versatile and complete.

I must add that I'm not a professional user (i.e. working with images is not my daytime job).

From a performance standpoint, I think it's very good. Of course if you start creating several layers on a 7Mpixel image you'll soon start to swap even on a 1GB-RAM machine...

I tried photoshop a couple of times on the same machine where I have GIMP, and I found it much "heavier" in terms of resource utilization...

Yes, the user interface seems "wrong" at first, but once you get used to it (and it doesn't take long) it's simple and easy.

Unless you are an extremely demanding person, Gimp should satisfy all your needs.

its price is unbeatable. simply free, something the 700$ photoshop can never beat.

Gimp is a good tool for doing photo and web work and I can advise it. It is stable and has plenty of options.

The Gimp has also some disadvantages
*) The the lack of CYMK, 16bits, Lab, ... The Gimp development team is working on the issues and at Gimp 3.0 this shortcomings will be finally history.
*) The user interface has a steep learning curve. Also you need the GUI function te keep the gimp and the layer boxes on top. With KDE this is not a problem. The price makes worth learning this interface :-).

This tool is for free and gives advanced non-professional users a good tool for doing image manipulation.

I rate th Gimp with a 4/5

The only thing wrong with the Gimp is that it's not Photoshop. But the $700
discount offsets the alien interface. It will fulfill all web design needs.

Very bad program.
For instatce:
what about Lab?
what about ICM?
what about 16bpc ?
What's f** interface?!

As an artist I have to say it is unbelievable of adobe to take 1000 Euro (about 1500 Dollar) for a software. All you people who did not give 5 Stars to Gimp, why not give some money instead. Surely Gimp will outrun Photoshop in the longrun. And Adobe is known to treat their customers like cattle.

Wonderful rendering. It is a very good alternative to meeting my needs.

I actually learned Gimp before learning photoshop and I have to say that I find Gimp's UI more intuitive than photoshop. I think that when it boils down to it, people are complaining not because the UI is bad, but because the UI is not photoshop, and they have to learn again. Having used this program a fair amount, I have to say that this program is every bit as good, if not better than photoshop. Yes there are some trivial things that it lacks, but for everything it takes it gives something back. For example, I love that I can write batch scripts that I can reuse and even include as part of my website. While photoshop does have gui based batch processing, it simply just isn't anywhere near as powerful, nor as useful as being able to run scripts programatically.

Very good program

An example for all open-source programs. I have used Photoshop 7 and other photoshop-ish programs (Paint.NET) and none come anywhere close to GIMP. Many complain about the user interface; I find it just fine, and it's still not all that different from photoshop. I was comfortable working in GIMP within the first 5 minutes of opening it for the first time.

5/5

It is a fantastic software. The best there is! You can do amazing stuff with it. It is also free and open source! Go to YouTube and print GIMP you will get a lot of advices.

I have downloaded GIMP to use on Mac OSX simply because I could not afford the price of Photoshop. Compared to the usual Mac polish and ease-of-use the GIMP does look a little clunky but there is a wealth of help available online. I do think that most people are complaining about the interface because it is different to what they already know, not because it is inherently bad or wrong. If you learnt graphics manipulation with the GIMP then you would think Photoshop was doing it the wrong way.

Ultimately I saved almost the price of my iMac by using this amazing free software instead of paying for Photoshop, that is amazing, thank you to everyone who works on the GIMP.

It's way the best (for the money) graphic program ever!