Right now i have Gimp but could buy photoshop i would like to know if its really worth it to spend my money.
I strongly recommend Photoshop. Once you get the hang of it, its a great tool.
How inconspicuous.
Anyway is there anything that you feel you can’t do in Gimp that you currently have a need for? Remember trials are your friend.
Not realy im basicly just working on textures. but i havent used photoshop befor so i dont know if its any better. have you used both Gimp and Photoshop?
I would say photoshop is a bit more professional and polished, gimp is cool although slightly more fringey. On Mac at least, gimp uses x-windows which I find really really annoying, having to click on the tool window before I can click on a tool, then click on the picture window before using the tool. Highly annoying. But it does have plenty of useful features, if perhaps missing a few important things. If you buy photoshop you’ll have gimp + photoshop so I don’t see how you could lose.
TRUE. WOW,i didnt think of that.
Yep. I won’t touch GIMP. X11 is garbage.
Gimp is very powerful and will cover most of your basic needs. Photoshop has just about the same features except for animation and other rarely used features for game design. When I say animation I mean exporting to Quick-time or other video formats etc. Anyhow, I find Photoshop easier to use than Gimp as I couldn’t figure out how to offset images to help create seamless textures. The filters in Photoshop are very similar but seem to be more effective and generate better quality effects than GIMP. I would recommend Photoshop over GIMP if you are serious about game design and have the money to purchase it.
Also, GIMP is not trying to compete with Photoshop if you read their about page, so this is almost like comparing oranges to grapefruit as I see it. I do see why it is common to compare them though, their differences are subtle and they are both image editing software packages.
I second that.
I don’t know a whole lot about GIMP, but I do try to keep tabs on the free alternatives; Blender is actually my favorite 3D app, so I know free can be done right – it just usually isn’t. 
I believe GIMP is rather far behind now in terms of painting. Although CS5 is a great update for painting, Photoshop still doesn’t have the ease of use of Painter for emulating natural media, but it’s a much faster and more stable app than Painter is. In terms of video/animation, I don’t think “rarely used” is accurate (or at least it shouldn’t be); I wouldn’t want to design these kinds of texture atlases without such capabilities:
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/class-WorldParticleCollider.html
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/class-ParticleRenderer.html
GIMP is fully featured, there is not much you can’t do with it. However it is very poorly designed. The UI is not streamlined, and doing very simple things can be more of a headache than need be. And using it on mac is extremely frustrating.
Is biggest advantage when working with unity however is its ability to save and load .psd files, which is a HUGE workflow boon thanks to unitys support for .psd.
If I had the money I would defiantly buy photoshop, but tbh it would probably be the last app on my wish-list.
I’ve got both and I find GIMP works just fine for 95+% of what I need to do. But the limitation is that it doesn’t support all Photoshop plugins and there aren’t nearly as many tutorials for GIMP as there are for Photoshop.
I use gimp, and i think it is great!
I can still use PS whenever I want, because my mum has it on her computer.
I prefer GIMP over PS though
Pixelmator ftw
GIMP works well enough that I haven’t bothered to purchase Photoshop.
I do wish the filters were as good as Photoshop, although it does have a few that Photoshop doesn’t.
As a matter of budgetary concerns, I use GIMP on OSX. The extra clicks are a hassle, but not enough of a hassle to justify the cost. What I do in GIMP is not sophisticated enough to require Photoshop, but if I were to hire an artist or develop a sufficiently solid relationship with one, I could probably justify the cost of Photoshop.
i really tried hard on gimp, but in the end, it just got me very annoyed. after a lot of reading in forums, i still couldn’t figure out a good way to handle alpha channels on textures. never got it to paint / draw directly onto the alpha channel… something i do very often in photoshop.
@jRavey: if you refere to the extra clicks gimp (by default) needs on x11 whenever you click on a tool in the toolbar and had the canvas focused; that can be changed somehow in the settings (forgot where and how…)
i tried gimp once but it was a little buggy, other than that i didnt think it was bad or annoying, just takes a bit to get used too. Dont spend ALL your precious money in photoshop if you can get around with gimp, if you got money to spare though, its your choice, trials are your friends!
Wood, I will look for those settings. It’s not a huge problem for me, but ridding myself of the nuisance would making my life a little easier.
Setting X11/Preferences/Windows/“Click-through Inactive Windows” to true fixes this nuisance. Thanks for letting me know the option is there!
GIMP is really good, once you get your head round it, for many things. It’s not Photoshop - but if money’s an issue and you don’t have a good reason to need Photoshop, I’d make it a low priority.