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.