GIMP vs Photoshop

[Rick C. Hodgin]

From thread451-1799058:

1. Photoshop is pretty much all 16bit internally, what about Gimp?
2. What about raw camera support?
3. I use the Healing Brush quite often, does Gimp have an equivalent feature?
4. What about support for HDR, panorama stitching, or focus stacking?
5. Does Gimp scale well on hi-res monitors?
6. Run on Windows 10?
7. I'm not sure what else I should be asking about. What are some often used features that will go missing when I switch to Gimp?

Answers:
1. GIMP is typically 32-bit internally. You can look at the file format of the XCF to see how it stores things. However, it depends on how your layers are defined.
2. I don't know. I've never used GIMP for anything other than image manipulation, not capturing.
3. GIMP has a healing brush. The algorithms you'll see in GIMP are different than Photoshop, but similar.
4. There may be scripts which do what you ask, but I've never done them so I haven't used them. GIMP has a powerful console mode where you can execute scripts and ad hoc commands that are more easily done programmatically than via the UI.
5. Yes. The icons can be sized, and the GIMP window works fine up to every size I've ever tried.
6. Yes. The splash screen is as big as the monitor though, which is weird.
7. Photoshop is a professional fee-based tool. GIMP is completely open-source and free (libre, and money-wise). You'll find that GIMP is like a primitive version of Photoshop in many areas. It is not used by many people for that reason. But, if you are a developer, or know someone who is, you can add things to GIMP.

I wrote for Geek.com and TGDaily.com from 2001 through 2009, and I used GIMP daily on Windows and Linux and did every graphic I ever needed using GIMP, save those few I custom generated using programming because they were data-driven.

GIMP is a wholly adequate tool for everyday use by non-professionals. It's adequate for certain types of professional work. You'll absolutely want to stick with Photoshop if you are doing truly professional work.

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Rick C. Hodgin