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It’s Adobe’s Creative Cloud TITSUP birthday. Ease the pain with its RGB-wrangling rivals

Alternatives to pixel-poking behemoth Photoshop

GIMP 2.8

RH Numbers

GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) bills itself as ‘like Photoshop – only 100% free’, and half of that is true. It’s an open source image editor that does a fair bit of what Photoshop does.

GIMP is available as source code or packaged for Linux, OS X or Windows. A full install is around 270MB, but this can be halved if you omit unneeded languages and support. Take care to download the appropriate installer direct from gimp.org or its mirrors; if you Google it, your first hits will be scam sites peddling adware.

GIMP 2.8

Like Photoshop, GIMP lets you work on individual colour channels. Unlike Photoshop, it doesn’t support any colour modes in which this would actually be useful – click for a larger image

What’s immediately noticeable about GIMP is that it hasn’t caught up with the trend for non-destructive editing. There are no Adjustment Layers, Smart Objects or History Brush, so most changes you make will be irreversible. Nor is there any support for raw images or 16-bit editing. Some of these shortcomings will be fixed in version 3.

A Channels palette, as in Photoshop, lets you select individual colour channels for editing, which would be useful in CMYK or Lab mode – but the only colour mode supported is RGB.

The basic tools are fine, including a clone stamp with a useful perspective variant and a healing brush. Advanced selection tools are not plentiful; Scissors Select, a sort of magnetic lasso, does a good job on fairly well defined shapes but can’t meet more complex challenges. There’s no Shadows/Highlights adjustment, and a clunky warp filter is as close as it gets to Liquify, although there’s a warp transform.

GIMP 2.8

The smartest of GIMP’s selection tools is Scissors Select, which finds the outline of an object as you click roughly around it – but it can’t cope with complicated soft edges – click for a larger image

Omissions can be addressed by plugins, which are fairly plentiful, although their format is incompatible with Photoshop’s. But constructing a vaguely usable image editor from spare parts is not everyone’s idea of time well spent.

If you do want an app you can customise, GIMP’s scripting is very powerful. And it is, to be fair, completely free, and supported by an enthusiastic community. Anyone looking for an alternative image editor should give it a go. Just don’t try to make a designer use it.

Price Free for Mac, Windows and Linux
More info GNOME Foundation
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