This Photoshop alternative is almost perfect
So I had been searching for a free photo editing program, similar to Photoshop, since quite a long time. I did find some pretty good ones, like Raw Therapy and Pixlr, and none of them actually were that good. And that was when I found Gimp.
Gimp is currently, not only in mine, but also in many others’ opinion, the best alternative to Photoshop. It is completely free and supports a lot of GOOD third-party plugins like G’MIC QT and Darktable, which I will be talking about later.
As you can see, the application does its best to look as much as Photoshop as it can, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Gimp has a lot Photoshop like features like plenty of layer modes, personal brushes, warping images, some camera flares and paths. For people switching from Photoshop to Gimp, their are only minor things they have to keep in mind that are different.
Firstly, the terminology used for certain tools is different. For example, the Pen Tool in Photoshop is the Paths tool in Gimp. Liquify is the same as warp. And that Gimp does not allow non-destructive photo editing, which simply means that once a certain effect is applied to a layer, it cannot be changed. However, one can duplicate the layer again and again while making adjustments and adding masks. This is not as good as what Photoshop allows, but it is a cheap work-around.
So, Gimp does have it cons, however, after a while, the user can easily get used to it.
As I said before, Gimp allows plenty of third-party plugins. And these are GOOD plugins as well. The first one is G’MIC QT. This is a rather popular plugin which is widely used for adding unique filters to images that are not already present in GIMP, for example, adding rain, adding special types of camera flares which are not already present in Gimp and a ton more.
The other popular plugin for Gimp is Darktable. This is also a free plugin. Darktable can be thought of a complex RAW image editing program. For people switching for Photoshop, Darktable can easily be compared with Camera Raw or even Lightroom, for instance. Darktable is really good for editing almost any type of image file such as JPEGs and ARWs.
To conclude it all, Gimp, is almost the PERFECT alternative to Photoshop. It may not be as good, however, editing with Gimp is really simple, and most people won’t be disappointed using it, especially since it is free.
Download Gimp here: https://www.gimp.org/downloads/
Download G’MIC QT plugin here: https://gmic.eu/download.shtml
Download Darktable here: https://www.darktable.org/install/
