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!

I've never had to use Photoshop for anything prior to first using GIMP, so I have no real means of comparison. That said, GIMP has all of the functionality I need for original pieces, photo touchup and manipulation, icon design, etc. Small learning curve for someone with no graphical experience, but easy to use once you have the hang of it. :)

GIMP is superb and extremely powerful programme. And it is available for free. Any new interface takes time to learn especially when there is so much this programme can do. Search YouTube for the many tutorials to get hekp. Thanks a million to the coders for this magnificent achievement!

I forgot to rate GIMP in my comment above. I meant to give it 5 stars.

OSALT please insert a reminder to rate before allowing submission of comments? Thanks!

I have been using the gimp for years and simply love it. I create very cool layered art and image manipulations that people absolutely love. I have used many versions of Photoshop including the latest (CS5 extended) and am still a tried and true and extremely loyal user of the Gimp. Most of the plugins in the Gimp are a lot more configurable than of those in photoshop with little to no comparability in their proprietary plugins like with 'Difference clouds' plugin for example, in the Gimp you can alter the clouds in many different ways including stretching them and a whole lot else, in photoshop, the difference clouds isn't even configurable, you click it and what you see is what you get...oh boy! Also, by default the Gimp is only set to 72dpi resolution, you can easily increase that default as high as you'd like in order to bump up image quality in order to fit your needs. There are a ton of really nice free brushes and extensions for gimp, too, you just need to find what you need and ad it to the Gimp. If you give The Gimp a real good shot and get to learn it you will be glad that you did. It is an extremely feature rich application and the more you look the more powerful features you will find. It's free, it's opensource, it's actively being worked on by a world wide opensource community and can be used on a variety of different OS's, even plenty quick on older machines, if you haven't tried the gimp yet, please give it a shot and see how you like it.

I'm a moderate to advanced level photoshop user who switched
to GIMP b/c my bit-torrented photoshop CS3's attached crack
didn't work.

Gimp is awesome. totally differnet and difficult to get used
to if you already know the hot-keys for PS and are used to
PS layout, however it's probably 90% just as powerful. Core
abilities like Layers, masks, brushes, colour touchup tools,
opacity etc. are there along with Filters, and stuff I don't
even know about.

5

It is more than difficult to get use to it, it is just about as user unfriendly as you can get without it shocking you every time you open it. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone. I was looking for how to simply change my photo to black and white and it was unbelievably difficult to figure out; in fact I gave up. If you haven't used Gimp download it and try to do something as simple as changing your photos to black and white, then you'll realized paying for the user-friendliness of photoshop really isn't so bad. I realize those who work for gimp are probably required to post comments about their products on-line like at other companies but this is ridiculous. Do yourself a favor and save yourself from incredible frustration and buy or use anything but Gimp.

I'm not a regular Gimp user, but I've used it from time to time. I wanted to test out John's complaint just for fun, so I downloaded Gimp again. I started the download at 12:56PM. I installed the program, opened a photo, and found the "Colorize" tool. I adjusted the tool until the photo was in black and white and checked my clock: 1:04PM.

I've never used this tool on Gimp, but it wasn't difficult to find. It was right there in the color menu! /facepalm The real problem with Gimp is that it isn't the photo editor you are familiar with. Face it, they all use different menus and naming schemes, just like with every other program ever made. I've used dozens of photo editors over the years and had to learn a new interface and naming scheme each time, whether they were free, commercial, or proprietary (I used to work in a photo lab).

i want it so bad

Gimp is great for the simple tasks and good for the more advanced tasks if you know what you are doing. However, google is your friend, search and you will find an article on how to do the task you want.

The interface on windows is not so good because of the way windows are handled. On linux systems the interface is just fine because the same windows are handled differently. There was an announcement a while ago that the interface will change, so don't give up yet.

Overall Gimp is one of the greatest Free Open Source Software. Download and use it!