Having used both GIMP and Adobe Photoshop I must say I personally believe GIMP is much better for common folks like you and me who need a relatively simpler set of tools to make quick edits to our Vacation pictures. Photoshop is undoubtedly more useful graphic designers, however for making quick tweaks, nothing beats GIMP.

In case you are not aware, GIMP is an open source image editing software that is bundled in most Linux distro and is touted as the closest alternative to Photoshop. It comes with plenty of toolset and filters for you to create/edit your image, and the best thing of all, it is free.

High-end graphics editing in the commercial world has been defined by Adobe's Photoshop. It is so dominant and so prevalent that the name is frequently used as a verb, as in the line from the movie Cheaper by the Dozen "We'll photoshop her in later." In the free and open source world the standard of comparison is GIMP.

As a long time Photoshop junkie and Gimp fan, this week has been a joyous overload. Gimp 2.6 released today and Photoshop CS4 has been announced (they need some time to hype before release). And again the all important question is being asked by some overenthusiastic Gimp lover whether we have finally come close to having a free, open-source Photoshop alternative.

GIMP is the favorite graphics editing program of many designers and graphic artists. It has a wide array of features, as well as plug-ins, filters and brushes. Documentation is primarily available in online communities, as well as through extensive add-ons.

I’m no graphics professional, but like probably most of you, I do need to edit photos from time to time. I used Adobe Photoshop before since it is the most widely used image manipulating software. But when I started using Linux, things changed.

Usually when we talk about programs for editing images we think to graphic programs such as The Gimp or photoshop, but they are not the only alternative.

I know this promotes the use of proprietary software but it does break down one more barrier to GNU/Linux adoption and that can only be a good thing while the GIMP isn't "good enough" for those picky Photoshop-loving graphic designers. Now even they can make the switch.

Web graphics designers running GNU/Linux seem to use the Gimp, Inkscape or Photoshop in a virtual environment. I have found the feature rich Xara Xtreme to be a good alternative for web graphics creation and editing. It is open source and you can download it here.