Once fully installed, it is highly customizable on many levels, including the user interface. Many of the same core functions as Photoshop are available - except for the low, low price of absolutely free.

There are versions for Mac, Windows and Linux, and the source code is available to compile from scratch, should that be your idea of fun. exe file and download it locally, and finish setting up – all within 15 minutes. Not only is GIMP much smaller to store and run, it is also way faster to install and set up. While Photoshop can usually want up to 4GB of hard disk space, GIMP takes as little as 20MB. This might be less cumbersome on an office iMac, with storage and RAM paid for by the company, but it can still be extremely prohibitive for the small design studio or the enthusiastic amateur. Photoshop is one of the heaviest and most demanding editing tools for imagery, with designers often decrying its steep system demands, not just to run the software, but to render and store processed images. That makes it suitable to run on last-generation or even veritably old hardware. The first benefit to using GIMP is that it can be tested out with no upfront commitment, and, unlike Photoshop, downloading and running GIMP takes up very little PC processing power. With a one-time fee approaching US$700, Adobe was very aware it had the flagship photo editing software on the market – and charged accordingly. Until very recently when Adobe Creative Cloud allowed subscriptions to Adobe software for as little as US$10 a month, Photoshop developed a reputation as being exorbitantly expensive. GIMP has been called a Photoshop-killer for many reasons, but one of the primary ones is that the open-sourced software is essentially free to distribute and use. Plugins can be downloaded to flesh out GIMP’s functionality to be more like Photoshop.

Photoshop equivalent open source