Photoshop For Free? A Few Words About GIMP

Thursday, October 2, 2008 | The Cheap Mac | Read or Post a Comment

GIMP You’ve heard of Adobe Photoshop, right? It’s the famous, popular, highly regarded professional image manipulation tool for Mac and Windows. It’s also expensive. Very expensive.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get a free Photoshop-like application for your Mac? Guess what? One exists.

Actually, more than one. It’s called GIMP, but it’s not a Photoshop clone. It’s a mind over matter issue. If you don’t mind that GIMP isn’t Photoshop, then it doesn’t matter.

GIMP.... (excerpted).

4 Reader Comments

Detroit Bones said:

“If you go from Photoshop to GIMP, likely because you’ve come upon hard economic times and money has become an object, you’re also likely to run screaming from the GIMP interface looseness and sell a kidney to get Photoshop back on your Mac. “

Oh, truer words were never spoken….

This is *exactly* my situation. I don’t use Photoshop (semi-)professionally anymore, but I do need to edit images on a fairly regular basis. The latest full version I have is PS7…which doesn’t install on Leopard. I can’t stomach the upgrade cost when I can’t prove that it will pull in dinero…and GIMP, while usable in a pinch, is just such a step down interface-/intuition-wise from even PS7.

I should look into PSE…if I recall correctly, earlier versions did not support some key features (layers, masks, color range selection) that I use on a regular basis, but maybe it does now….

Jake Ahz (no relation!) said:

For the user that needs a lot of photo processing power but is on a budget I usually recommend GraphicsConverter (http://www.lemkesoft.com/) over Elements. GraphicConverter offers you everything you would expect for all-round editing software for your Mac with ease of use, an excellent range of functions, stability and reliability. And still less then fifty bucks! Not assosciated with the company, just a happy user for 15 years!

CK Sandberg said:

In a comparison between the GIMP at $79~149 and PSE 6 at $79~99, Elements is a hands-down winner! You get 90+% of the features of full Photoshop, a great browser (Bridge), full RAW integrated processing, and an interface that mere mortals can figure out (or run in assisted mode to get started.) I teach classes on using PSE, and EVERYONE can do it! Easy call if the GIMP has a price tag; even for free, the hassle of dealing with the GIMP has kept me firmly in the Photoshop camp.

Vince S said:

You should have mentioned GIMPshop. It is the open source variant of GIMP that emulates the menus and keyboard shortcuts of Photoshop. Any books or tutorials for Photoshop can be used to learn GIMPshop. It is still free and there is a version for MacOS X as well as Windows & Linux. Developer site is http://plasticbugs.com/?page_id=294. More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop

Editor’s Note: GIMPshop was last updated back in early 2006

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