I started using Photoshop when we were still scanning prints, slides, and negatives. Having been a Photoshop user since about 1996, and having spent literally thousands on Adobe software over the years, I had developed a good little side business doing photography and graphics which augmented my work as a musician. When Adobe first announced in 2011 that Photoshop, and all of its Creative Suite applications, would go to cloud-based monthly subscriptions, I was upset, like many users.
March 2023 "Landscape in Monochrome" Photo Contest Winners.
Pentax is developing new hand-wound film cameras.So if you need an advanced but completely free Photoshop alternative for Mac, GIMP is likely your best choice. But there are many plugins that add that kind of functionality. There are several things Photoshop does that GIMP can't, like working with CMYK and RAW files. The fact that it's completely free is really quite impressive.
Photoshop: Which One Is Right for You?īut underneath its rough exterior, GIMP is a powerful image editor, with the kind of features you'd expect in a pricy professional app. Many things work differently, the shortcuts aren't the same, and it's simply not as intuitive as Adobe's software.
It's also been forked multiple times, with versions like Seashore and Glimpse attempting to improve on the original formula.Ĭoming from Photoshop, GIMP can be a tricky beast to master. Completely open source, it started out on UNIX-based systems like Linux, before being ported to Windows and macOS. For over 25 years, the GNU Image Manipulator Program (GIMP) has been one of the most popular, free Photoshop alternatives on the web.