I'm sure most of you have heard of The GIMP. It's a completely free, open source image editing app. It's comparable to Photoshop and this is where I get annoyed. I realise that it's not going to have quite as many features as Photoshop or not look as polished. That's understandable though because... it's free.

Yes, it does spawn multiple windows instead of just floating them like PS, that's not a problem because I use multiple desktops and usually have one devoted purely to GIMP.

The next version's gonna implement GEGL so you can all stop whining about CMYK colourspace support.

The main thing is, it can do pretty much everything you could want it to. It may not be as straightforward as in PS (sometimes it's actually easier) but it can be done. It's got two extension languages (Script-Fu, Python-Fu) so it has the scope to make life a hell of a lot easier than PS.

My biggest gripe (and the reason I wrote this) though is with people saying "Well we tried them both and it took us nearly twice as long to do the same with The GIMP." That's because you're used to using Photoshop you damn moron! PS has a complicated interface and to do some things it's not as simple as people would like to make out.

I've used Linux since I found out it existed and before that I'd never used PS anyway. So I'm used to using The GIMP, in fact I use it a lot. My profile graphics were done using it (and inkscape for the bass-clef) and it would probably take me at least twice as long to do the same in Photoshop.

I hope you can see my point here. It's a fairly obvious one yet all over the internet I read the same thing and I can't understand how people fail to realise that they're just more familiar with PS 'cos they're Microsoft lackeys and The GIMP doesn't get as much attention on Winblows.

There's no point giving me that 'GIMP's got poor documentation' crap either. When have you ever found yourself reading the help file when you wanted to do something in PS? I guess some people must or otherwise the docs wouldn't exist but most people would just turn to google. With GIMP you can do the exact same thing. There's an entire forum packed with tutorials and users willing to help others out. Plus I wouldn't expect the developers to write documentation for it. They're not paid a cent. I'd prefer them to keep adding to the app and let the community write the documentation.

There's plenty more I could say about the comparisons that get thrown around but I already digressed a bit at the top.
[/rant]