GIMP vs. Adobe PhotoShop vs. Corel Painter

GIMP is great for anyone ranging from personal use to a small business. But, if you are a large business and have a sufficient budget, I would recommend you to opt for an expensive paid software like Photoshop, that would provide not only great features but also public recognition. Its great for beginners wanting to start editing photos, there is a small learning curve that could be gotten used to in no time.

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Photoshop is a useful tool for everything from creating social media graphics to editing and sizing photos. There is a bit of a learning curve, so you need to have a bit of experience to master it and use it for a variety of tasks. You also need to have a good sense of file organization so you can find files quickly without losing track of them.

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Corel Painter does have a lot of great brushes, and they do emulate real art supplies very well. Especially the thick paint is well done. But unfortunately there are so many functional and UX bugs that overall it is just horrible to work with. When contacting customer support about it, they really seem clueless about the seriousness of the situation, and clueless about what proper UX is in general. They have tried to make it work a bit like Photoshop, which is a good move but then some things are absolutely not intuitive at all and they are definitely missing the mark horribly with so many issues. I would highly recommend using Photoshop instead, though you'll have to download them separately; it also offers a lot of great brushes nowadays and works much much smoother without all those aggravating bugs of Painter. The price of Corel Painter is just not at all worth all these horrible bugs.

• GIMP has a large number of tools at your disposal for manipulating any type of image and exporting in any necessary format.
• GIMP does a great job of making everything intuitive so that even a new user can layer images or make an image transparent in little time.

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• The fact is that you may quickly pick things up on your own by spending time without using any other resources.
• It is the program that brings the phrase "to make PhotoShop" to almost all languages. It's not just a photo editing program.
• Practical and beautiful results are filtered by filtering the desired work without drowning in details.

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• Watercolor Compatible
• Multiple variety of Brushes and shapes
• Captured Dab Library

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• GIMP should make the font tool more intuitive. Make it easier to change fonts during edit process without resetting the typeface selection.
• Build in selection/move ability within tools like the typeface tool... I.e. don't require toggle between selection tool and typeface tool when wanting to move a line of type within a layer. Likewise with shapes, etc.

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• The effect applying time could be faster.
• There could be a smarter way to make mockups using smart objects, maybe by directly selecting an area, and generative AI can automate a few steps.
• If Photoshop can suggest the right stock imagery in case the generative AI doesn't get the right answer.

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• Way too many functional bugs, makes it hard to work with
• Bad UX and usability, too much unintuitive behavior, makes it particularly hard to work with
• Overall looks and behaves as if it was coded in the '90s, it really needs a complete UX overhaul
• Did I mention the many bugs yet? Yeah? I'll mention it again because it's bad

Capability, open architecture, compatibility with Photoshop plugins, wide platform coverage; To me, as an open-source, freely available application, it's the nest-in-class.

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We get a lot of use out of this software. It's vital for work with production in our industry and has a lot of cross-functionality - creating social media images, retouching photos, editing photos, creating gradients, and more. It's pretty fuss-free in that we haven't had to reach out to support and the program hasn't crashed on us. We are trained on the software (so again, this isn't for beginners), but for detail-oriented designers and creatives like ourselves - it's a no-brainer.

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I interface GIMP with other software--I need to. I generally use the major calculation, CAD, word processing, and photo editing programs. In my office, my use of this software is not limited to computer-aided design. However, I am sure that if I needed this software for other purposes, it would have no interface problems.

Adobe PhotoShop is a professional-grade tool that requires months/years to get a grasp of how to use it well. Even then, after over a decade of using Adobe PhotoShop both casually and professionally, I feel like I'm still unfamiliar with a large percentage of the available tools. Without a dedicated training program, it can be extremely overwhelming and/or you may not get good use out of it. That being said, once you do get comfortable with it, the layout and workspace are excellent with myriad shortcuts that speed up your workflow exponentially. Put in the time to learn it, and you'll love it.

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If it wasn't quite clear yet, I'll state it again: the usability of Corel Painter is, simply put, horrid. And I am not talking about rendering, lagging, etc., it is not even all that bad there. I am talking about the weird issues like being unable to move a brush into a custom brush palette when you work on a second screen, like being unable to move the software onto the second screen in the first place unless you separate all the palettes and the windows (and if nobody tells you upfront there is no way of knowing because the manual doesn't state this at all), and then having to drag all your separate windows and palettes over one by one every time your computer wakes up again, and they won't really want to move to the other screen but only through a tiny corner of your screen, and the fact that you have to scroll through lists and lists of fonts but can't search and when you apply this font, add another piece of text the font jumps back to the default font of all the text already applied even when you haven't selected any of the text. Just to name a very small few.

Adobe Photoshop is very reliable, but is never 100%. There have been times when Adobe Photoshop has had trouble opening, but nothing a little computer restart couldn't fix. I use Adobe Photoshop on a Mac for both work and at home on a daily basis, and I would be lost without it.

Speed can be an issue when you are dealing with large files for large format printing or billboards. When working on web images, speed is not an issue.

We have never needed to use the support functions for GIMP. Any queries we have or had about whether GIMP could complete a task we have used Google and YouTube. There is a wealth of information, guides, and forums dedicated to GIMP and how to perform certain tasks with the application.

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While I never contacted Adobe directly, there is so much content out there in the form of YouTube videos, Lynda/LinkedIn learning that almost any issue, including bugs, can be worked around (and this method is generally faster as there's no turnaround time involved).

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It was really hard to get them to understand what I was having problems with. It was hard to get the message through that Painter has an unacceptable amount of functional and UX bugs. When I finally talked to someone who was easier to communicate with, he was very stoic about the situation, like they didn't really care about the awful amount of bugs.

So, I received the training at the HQ and it was train the trainer training. A good time, I spent a week at their campus

As simple as can be. Download from GIMP website and install.

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I took a course so it really helped. I didn’t take the course until much later after beginning to use it, so I wish work would have sent me right off the bat. It would have alleviated a lot of frustratinon

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Online services like Canva are fine for quickly designing brochures and marketing materials, videos, etc. They're user friendly and fast if you have a good connection. But if you're in production mode and need to do a lot of photo manipulation at once, without being connected to the web at all times and just want to focus, GIMP is the go-to product for you

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[Adobe] Photoshop offers the best photo editing as well as content creation. The layer-by-layer approach of [Adobe] Photoshop helps to work between two apps or even two PCs of entirely different Creative Cloud apps seamlessly. The stability and the speed of the tools in photoshop make it even better to make a canvas of creativity.

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Corel Painter has support to multiple OS and across all the devices. Coloring and multi layer imaging works very well. The new enhanced brush settings and the redesigned brush libraries.

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It seems expensive compared to the free/cheap programs now available

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• GIMP is freeware, which allows organizations that are not graphics-centered to use the powerful toolset without spending money on very expensive alternatives
• GIMP is fairly easy to learn and does not require extensive user training (especially, if used for basic tasks)

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• Adobe PhotoShop in general is a great time saver.
• It does take a long time for the program to start up, however
• The most difficult task is onboarding new employees into Adobe PhotoShop who don't have experience with it. It's an investment for their future so we see value in it.

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• Customer support could be improved in my opinion.
• Multiple bugs while working with layered designing.

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