Over the years digital paintings and 2D animation gained a lot of popularity due to their use in clickable web ads, creating banners, online marketing and advertising etc. Photo editing, manipulation and creation have always been tough tasks for designers so a lot of IT organizations released different photo editing software to ease this task. There are a number of online as well as offline tools available for making these illustrations and images. The two most popular software are GIMP and Adobe Photoshop. Both of these softwares have great features for 2D drawings, digital paintings, vector artwork, concept designing etc. along with these features they can be used on different operating systems.
What is GIMP?
GIMP is an open-source graphic editor which is used to edit and manipulate images and free form drawings. It was developed by the GIMP development team. Initially, it was released in 1998 and its stable version came in 2021. It supports various operating systems like Windows, Solaris, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD etc. It is developed using C programming languages. Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis is their original author.
Advantages of GIMP
- It is free and open-source software so no money is required to use it.
- It comes with a simple interface which is easy to use so novice users can also learn it easily.
- Images of different formats can be easily imported and edited in this.
- It does not require any graphic card and runs on minimum specifications.
Limitations of GIMP
- Photoshop and Illustrator files need conversion before opening in GIMP.
- It does not allow opening RAW files.
- Cropping feature of GIMP hangs many times.
What is Photoshop?
Adobe Photoshop is a graphic editor which is used to create and edit different types of images and allows users to save them in different formats. Thomas and John Knoll is known as its author and the development credit for this software goes to Adobe Incorporation. Initially, it was released in 1990 and its stable version was launched in 2022. It comes with a large number of tools to create and edit images like shape tools, selection tools, clone stamp tools, pen tools etc.
Advantages of Adobe Photoshop
- It is a professional photo editing software which helps in editing photos in an easy way.
- Almost all the image formats are supported by this software.
- It is available for various operating systems.
- It provides a large number of templates to use.
- It is an all-round software which produces high-quality images which are compatible with different platforms.
Disadvantages of Adobe Photoshop
- Buying for a lifetime is not available, only monthly and a yearly subscription is available.
- It is heavy software which requires a lot of memory and space on your system.
Following is a table of differences between GIMP and Photoshop:
| GIMP | Adobe Photoshop | |
| 1. | It can be understood as an image editor which is used for editing free form and raster images. | It can be understood as a pixel-based image editing software which is used to create, edit and manipulate images. |
| 2. | It is open-source software. | It is not an open-source software. |
| 3. | It was developed by the GIMP development team. | It was developed by Adobe Incorporation. |
| 4. | It is available for a large number of operating systems like Windows, Solaris, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD etc. | It is available for Windows and Mac operating systems only. |
| 5. | It is built using only the C programming language. | It is built using Pascal and C++ programming languages. |
| 6. | It is available for free. | It is a paid software which costs $20.99 per month. |
| 7. | It uses XCF file format as default to save files. | Its files are saved in PSD or PSB formats. |
| 8. | It is available in 82 languages. | It is available in 26 languages only. |