Quote Originally Posted by major_small
Think about it. You've been using the GIMP for years now, and it keeps getting better and better. Now comes some proprietary software that's just a little bit better, but costs $600 more. What are you going to go with?
Photoshop. As a free tool, The GIMP is pretty good. Compared to a commercial product like anything by Adobe, you know what happens? It sinks.

If Photoshop is only "a little bit better" and costs a rather in-the-long-run-insignificant-but-at-the-time-heafty price tag of $650, why would anybody use Photoshop? It wouldn't make sense for professionals that have been doing this since you and I were born to make an irrational decision like that, now would it?

I honestly don't even know how you can compare GIMP to Photoshop, the interface of Photoshop is elegent and easy to follow, plus it pretty much has a flat learning curve for a lot of trivial things. The interface for PS is also quite streamlined and not broken up like GIMP 2.x. Along with that, Photoshop has numerous more features. I looked over the GIMP, and could not find an extraction feature. I mean, what?

Let's also ignore the fact that GIMP is insanely unresponsive and slow even to simply opening a menu selection. Wait, I think we SHOULD acknowledge that, don't you? I mean really, GIMPs GUI is totally horrendous. Did I mention how it's horrendous? 'Cause it is. There's more to software development than simply features. The Photoshop team recognizes this, they've made an easy to use GUI with Photoshop that contains more power than most people would like to admit, contra GIMP, which has a totally fragmented interface that almost caused me to have massive blood loss, and comes with a fairly large array of features that, mind you, vary in quality. Almost every built in tool and feature in Photoshop I've ever used worked great. Nobody cares about the features a tool has if it's not bearable to work with. This takes a special end-user sense that, judging from the GIMPs interface, the developers of it do not have.


The GIMP has gotten far and all that jazz, for a free program it's very good, and you can always pitch in and help, etc. etc.. Photoshop has been in the works by professionals for over a decate, who have dedicated themselves to it. Getting the GIMP to Photoshop Elements status would be none trivial for the developers of it, Photoshop CS2 status would be like building a latter to the moon. Besides, how many end users are really going to have so much appreciation for free software that they go so far as to fix some program as large as The GIMP? Not many.

I think that if I'm going to be working in a graphics industry making a possible $100k yearly wage, I can sacrifice a simple $600 for the software that'll help me do that, and serve me well in the future.



I am not dissing open source, some open source projects pass proprietary software in usability and features, such as Apache or PHP, etc., my only point is that, sometimes open source is better than costly software, and sometimes it isn't. Photoshop and The GIMP are one of those cases where open source doesn't meet the cut.