For anyone who's not doing graphics as their main job description it is a photoshop killer. Asides from integration with other Adobe products, print colour management and a few higher level features it has everything a person might need who's main job is not image processing. That's most of the "market" in terms of general home users and web designers who need to process photos and do logos etc. So while I imagine photoshop can keep a lead, and an inertia, with professional graphic designers, people working for magazines and photographers the only reason the GIMP is behind in raw numbers is that people pirate photoshop. In effect it's free competing with free; piracy is functioning as shareware, market-shareware.
For anyone who's not doing graphics as their main job description it is a photoshop killer.
Doing Graphics is not my main job description, far from it (somewhere between damage control and janitor is more like it), but I still do a lot of front end development, at my job I prefer to do all the graphics production work myself for the apps I'm building and have tried using GIMP a crap ton of times over the years - I've never found it to be a suitable replacement. Maybe its familiarity but I've honestly tried to use gimp in this role and just getting around has always been a complete nightmare compared to Photoshop. It may be able to do the job that Photoshop does, but nowhere near as easily.
Having our Devs at our shop use Photoshop is an expense, but like good chairs and big ass monitors, at the end of the day a few hundred bucks every few years isn't really that much and if its that much easier to use then its an expense we'll eat and happily. This also means from our devs perspective the choice between PS and Gimp is not a financial one, and once you take money out of the picture most folks are going to choose PS. So anyway, no I don't think this is a Photoshop Killer.
Gimp is like the 'vi' of image editors. I hated it too but I slowly learned all the keys and now I find I can work at such incredible speed with Gimp that anything else seems awkward and slow. My right hand is on the mouse which never has to leave the canvas / work area and my left hand is dancing on the keyboard. Using Gimp primarily with a mouse is certainly a disaster of usability though.
Watch any photoshop expert and they all use hot keys as well so I don't think gIMP is any faster in that area.
But otherwise I think it really depends on the features you use. I use Photoshop's layer effects all the time. Anytime I want to point something out on a map or a screenshot I drop it in photoshop, draw an arrow, add some text. Then set a layer effect that makes the arrow and text a bright color with a black outline and a drop shadow. If I need to add more arrows or more text they get automatically styled the same.
AFAIK that's not simple in gIMP or even available.
Similarly I use photoshop's non-destructive layer adjustments all the time. I don't know how I'd get by without them.
My understanding is gIMP will be adding those some day. 3.0 maybe?
Can't agree more, I'm a front-end developer and for years I have tried to move from OS X to Ubuntu but I always come back to OS X and one of the top reasons is the Photoshop > GIMP situation, have tried to use it but I can never get any productivity out of it, it feels like trying to use a hammer to get a screw in the wall.
I use it on commercial work sometimes, and I would agree that gimp is usability hell, but functionally very useful for a number of things.
I keep meaning to go and have a look at the source to see how easy it would be to reskin, because it could be a nice cross platform starting point for anyone wanting to make a really nice image editor, that doesn't ape photoshop, but goes for the less technical users while still having a mass of good functionality. Y'know, for the kids ;)
Disclaimer: I haven't used the most recent version of GIMP yet. Also, I'm not a designer and that colors my position.
What I've found to be the case in prior versions is that it's not sufficient for many minor edits, because it's not 100.0% compatible with the PSD file formats. Even 99% isn't enough in some cases, unfortunately. Since I'm typically editing a file created by a designer in Photoshop, and since I might need the designer to build on my changes, I don't trust anything less than 100.0% compatibility.
Isn't that a separate issue? It sounds like it is sufficient for the edits, but not for the task of working with other people who use / content made in Photoshop.
You're right that in some sense it is a separate issue. I could do my edits in GIMP some of the time. However, since I have to keep Photoshop installed for interoperability, there's no real reason to also install GIMP.
