GIMP

I have been using Photoshop for a few years now. While I love what I can do with it, it can be extremely complex and I get tired of the extravagant prices when it comes time to upgrade. With that in mind I decided to check out the leading Open Source competitor GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program.

For the most part, GIMP felt like a scaled down version of Photoshop. After spending sometime on it I decided that it would work well enough for someone who really only needed this kind of program to touch up their personal photos. However, if you are more into creating digital art this program just isn’t as robust as CS5. I would use it for anything short of high end work for the price, but in the end I think Photoshop is going to have the market on this one for a while. An article I found on Buzzle.com (Jathar, 2010) brought up another important point; technical support. There is something about being able to call Adobe if something goes wrong on a major project that is just comforting. In addition there are so many books and web tutorials available for Photoshop that it is generally easy to find answers to just about any questions you could have, providing that you have the time to research them.

References

Jathar, R. (2010). GIMP vs Photoshop. Retrieved from http://www.blogger.com/