Photoshop alternative

GIMP is pretty fantastic for a lot of basic Photoshop style tasks and it's free. Affinity photo is a one time $70 purchase and is also a very good alternative.

thinkbrown said:

GIMP is pretty fantastic for a lot of basic Photoshop style tasks and it's free.

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Absolutely. I've been using GIMP as a Photoshop substitute for quite a few years now, and with the recent update to 3.0 it has become even more powerful. There are still some glitches and imperfections, but for the vast majority of purposes, GIMP is really great.

Neil Grant said:

Just normal image file editing and ability to handle Sony / Nikon raw files.

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For the raw part, I use and really like RawTherapee. Like GIMP, it's free.

Does GIMP run on a mac ?

gary mulder said:

Does GIMP run on a mac ?

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Lacking a Mac, I can't say for sure, but it's explicitly offered for Intel as well as Apple silicon, with the following notes:

Source: https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

Another +1 for GIMP, RawTherapee and Darktable, which I run on Linux. In the earlier days of GIMP, doing fine inkjet printing was a challenge, but now it does pretty well on Epson 3880 and Canon Pro-1100.

gary mulder said:

Does GIMP run on a mac ?

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Yes, it can be clunky at times, but it can do heavy lifting too so to go major changes has a learning curve. I have used it for years.

djdister said:

In the earlier days of GIMP, doing fine inkjet printing was a challenge, but now it does pretty well on Epson 3880 and Canon Pro-1100.

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One qualm I do have with GIMP is its basically absent support for print layout management. When I print, I generally do all adjustments in GIMP and then open the image in IrfanView to print it. It can work in GIMP as long as you stick to standard paper size; once you deviate from this, you're on your own, it seems.

You can get Correl express or full boat as a download, I have a few years old full version but tend to used the 10 year old the Pro X9 for basic editing. But the full version also comes with Correl's version of LightRoom,

Paul Howell said:

You can get Correl express or full boat as a download, I have a few years old full version but tend to used the 10 year old the Pro X9 for basic editing. But the full version also comes with Correl's version of LightRoom,

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The Corel alternative to to Lightroom is Aftershot Pro, which is compatible with Macs with Intel processors, Linux and Windows: https://www.aftershotpro.com/en/

Aftershot Pro works well, but it requires a different mental approach than the Windows software I use, Paintshop Pro or FastStone Image Viewer.

Corel no longer offers a Mac or Linux compatible version of its more traditional Photo editor, Paintshop.

koraks said:

One qualm I do have with GIMP is its basically absent support for print layout management. When I print, I generally do all adjustments in GIMP and then open the image in IrfanView to print it. It can work in GIMP as long as you stick to standard paper size; once you deviate from this, you're on your own, it seems.

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Well, something strange happened in the update to GIMP 3.0.4 - it's likely a bug. The "Print" dialog window in GIMP 3.0.4 has only 5 tabs and is missing the "Image Settings" tab, which does provide some print layout settings, whereas the GIMP 2.4 Print dialog window has 6 tabs.

I have switched back to GIMP 2.4 because I could not print properly without the Image Settings tab.

Sorry to pile on, but I wanted to add a vote for GIMP.

But I also wanted to mention other programs like RawTherapee and Darktable. These programs do not look like PS, do not feel like PS, and they are meant to do different things. But that's good. They might be better for your workflow and maybe you just haven't considered them yet.

I use RawTherapee to edit film scans. One feature I like is that I can make a series of edits to one image and copy-paste them onto the next 10 or 70 images. When editing film scans, some of the edits apply to all or most other images in the same roll. It has better tools for inverting negatives, straightening an image, white balance, etc.

I haven't used Darktable, but much of what I said about RawTherapee would apply to it as well.

EDIT: RawTherappe can read RAW files from my mirrorless camera. GIMP cannot.

Capture One. I don’t go near HDR, so I can’t speak for that capability.

dcy said:

Sorry to pile on, but I wanted to add a vote for GIMP.

But I also wanted to mention other programs like RawTherapee and Darktable. These programs do not look like PS, do not feel like PS, and they are meant to do different things. But that's good. They might be better for your workflow and maybe you just haven't considered them yet.

I use RawTherapee to edit film scans. One feature I like is that I can make a series of edits to one image and copy-paste them onto the next 10 or 70 images. When editing film scans, some of the edits apply to all or most other images in the same roll. It has better tools for inverting negatives, straightening an image, white balance, etc.

I haven't used Darktable, but much of what I said about RawTherapee would apply to it as well.

EDIT: RawTherappe can read RAW files from my mirrorless camera. GIMP cannot.

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There's one more finesse to this - if GIMP knows you have RawTherapee, it will act like Camera Raw does for Photoshop - you open a raw file in RawTherapee and when you are done making edits, it passes the open file over to GIMP where you can keep working on it.

djdister said:

Well, something strange happened in the update to GIMP 3.0.4 - it's likely a bug.

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Previously in GIMP 2.x the paper size problem was the same. It has just never worked and AFAIK this has also been widely acknowledged in the GIMP community. To illustrate, this is the print preview I get after selecting 30x45cm custom paper size in the print dialog on my Epson 3880, landscape orientation with 40mm margins left and right:

The preview is for something like A6 paper size in portrait orientation. There's no way to fix this, apparently. It just shows how there's no people with an active interesting in printing on the GIMP core development team. It's a blind spot.

djdister said:

There's one more finesse to this - if GIMP knows you have RawTherapee, it will act like Camera Raw does for Photoshop - you open a raw file in RawTherapee and when you are done making edits, it passes the open file over to GIMP where you can keep working on it.

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Yeah, although that, too, is kind of cumbersome. If you go from RT to GIMP, RT will save a TIFF in a temporary folder which is then opened in GIMP. If you want to export/save the image after further editing, you have to leaf your way back to the original folder. Not a major issue, but it's one of the many little quirks that you have to tolerate in the GIMP/RT ecosystem. In that sense, Adobe still has the edge - but you pay for it. With GIMP, you get a heck of a lot more than you pay for, evidently!

Here's some more quirks on GIMP as it is now, at least on Windows:
* If you select multiple files in Explorer and choose 'open with GIMP' and GIMP is not already running, it may never finish loading the files you selected. It'll just hang.
* If you use one of the new (since 3.0) adjustment filters and then resample the image to a smaller size followed by an undo action, the filter layer may end up being masked to the smaller size the image temporarily was.
* If you apply a dynamic adjustment on a selection, there seems to be no way to edit the automatically created mask. If you want to modify the mask, you have to discard the filter layer, make a new selection and re-do the filter.
* There are severe performance issues that pop up once GIMP has been open for a while. Simple actions like resample actions that usually take a second suddenly start taking a minute or more; same with curves etc. It's unpredictable if and when this happens - just that it'll happen sooner or later, but always within a matter of hours. It appears to be some kind of memory leak.
* If you scan a big image directly into GIMP, the TWAIN plugin will almost always crash. The image will often be transferred, though. This is also a 'feature' that's been with us for years, that's recognized, but for which there's just no active willingness to fix it.
*...and many, many more.
None of this is necessarily a dealbreaker and as said, GIMP is insanely good value as it is (hey, it's free), but it's nowhere near as robust or streamlined as Photoshop.

dcy said:

I haven't used Darktable, but much of what I said about RawTherapee would apply to it as well.

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Last time I tried them both side by side, DarkTable was pretty much equivalent to RawTherapee, but DT suffered from some minor quirks especially when working on files on network shares. That made me lean towards RT.

koraks said:

Last time I tried them both side by side, DarkTable was pretty much equivalent to RawTherapee, but DT suffered from some minor quirks especially when working on files on network shares. That made me lean towards RT.

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I tried DT first and I really struggled trying to figure out how to do anything, even with tutorials. I'm not sure I managed to accomplish any useful task with it.

Then I tried RT and by comparison it was soooo.... much easier. The fundamental workings and layout of the program made more sense to me and I could follow tutorials and get it to do useful things I wanted in a fairly short amount of time.

You could also try Hasselblad Phocus. It is an obviously capable program and it is free.