GIMP vs Lightroom

Pictures are an essential source of information that helps in communicating our artistic abilities in the second person. Pictures are now used in each and every field of engineering. It’s miles a hassle-solving technique that simplifies complex data and helps in easy understanding. As long as we interact with images or illustrations, the question that inevitably receives requests is, “What’s the excellent image editor for me ?” So to find the answer we will compare Lightroom and GIMP.

What is GIMP?

GIMP is an acronym for the GNU picture manipulation program. It is a freely disbursed program for such obligations as image retouching, photo composition, and image authoring. It has many advanced abilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, a professional satisfactory picture retouching application, an online batch processing system, a mass production picture renderer, an photo layout converter, and many others.

Advantages of GIMP

• It offers toolbar customization functionality according to the user’s preference.
• It uses very few resources due to its lightweight nature.
• It supports third-party plugins for feature customization. 
• Files of different codecs can be edited easily. 

Limitations of GIMP

• It does not support the RAW file format.
• Development and bug fixing is slow due to their open-source nature.

What is Lightroom?

Lightroom previously known as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a creative photograph corporation and picture manipulation software evolved via Adobe Inc. as part of the innovative Cloud subscription. Its primary uses encompass uploading, saving, viewing, organizing, tagging, editing, and sharing huge numbers of digital photographs. Originally it was released in 2007 and its latest adaptation came on the market in 2022.

Advantages of Lightroom

• Workflow and user interface is beginner friendly.
• It allows the editing of motion pictures and snapshots distinctly.
• It is notable for capturing pictures from famous DSLR cameras.
• Lightroom has in-built presets that make the software handy.

Disadvantages of Lightroom

• It does not offer a one-time purchase option.
• It only provides a few integrations.

Following is a table of differences between GIMP and Lightroom:

	GIMP	Lightroom
Definition	It is  used for editing free-form and raster images free-form	It can be understood as image management software with advanced image editing and manipulation features.
Software Type	It is a raster graphics editor.	It is an image organizer and image manipulation software.
Price	It is absolutely free for its clients.	Its subscription is available at a cost of $9.99 per month.
Developer(s)	It was developed by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis along with the GIMP team.	It was originally created by Mark Hamburg.
Ranking	It is the second-best photo editing software.	It is the eighth most used photo editing application.
Written in	It is written using the C programming language.	Its source code is written using C++ and Lua programming languages.
License	GIMP has a GPLv3+ license.	It is licensed as SaaS (Software as a Service).
Cloud Storage	It does not offer cloud storage.	It offers 1 GB of cloud storage to its users.

Conclusion/Summary

On detailed comparison of both the software we can say that the user can use the software according to the cases for example in case the user wants a device for basic modifying duties together with resizing a photo, crop image, applying filters, and other editing responsibilities, GIMP is ideal for this as it is free. On the other hand, Lightroom is a high-quality program used for picture optimization. It’s miles suitable for professional photographers to use duties together with short optimization, effects, and beautify a series of pics.