The Compatibility of GIMP to Photoshop

Photoshop is one of Adobe's flagship products and it's the "bread and butter" of graphic designers around the world. With a price tag around $700 and a steep learning curve, it's not surprising that many designers are eager to find an alternative. GIMP is one open source graphics program that's come a long way in recent years. It lacks many of the features of Photoshop but it's getting closer and the price -- free -- is right.

Interface

  1. One of the main things Photoshop designers who've tried GIMP complain about is GIMP's free-floating arrangement of docks and toolbars. When you open GIMP, the canvas and tools, including brushes, paths, layers and even the toolbar, are scattered across your desktop whereas Photoshop keeps everything anchored together and neatly organized. The good news is you can keep these panels from disappearing behind GIMP's main menu or canvas by right-clicking them and selecting "Always on Top." Also, GIMP spin-off programs such as GimPhoto or GIMPshop have interfaces that look and work like Photoshop.

File Formats

  1. GIMP's native format is XCF but it can save files as PSDs and it can also read and write popular graphics formats, including PNG, TIFF, JPEG, BMP and GIF. If you're working with 16- or 32-bit images in Photoshop, you should also know that GIMP is limited to 8-bit color depths but a 16-bit mode is under development.

Filters, Plugins and Brushes

  1. Photoshop comes with a wide variety of plug-ins, brushes and filters, and it also has third-party developers who are constantly creating new ones. Although GIMP doesn't have the creative choices Photoshop offers, it does have Photoshop filters such as Gaussian Blur and Sharpen. In fact, Joe Eitel of DevHardware.com says GIMP has about 150 filters and effects. If you want more, it's also easy to add plug-ins to GIMP's Plug-ins folder and brushes to its Brush folder. Brushes are available at online repositories such as BlendFu and gimp.org has a PSPI plug-in that makes GIMP compatible with Photoshop plug-ins. All you need to do to install them is copy your brushes and plug-ins to their respective folders and restart GIMP.

Layer Styles

  1. Photoshop's ability to apply effects to layers is one of the reasons Photoshop is such a versatile tool. GIMP also has this ability but Layer Styles in Photoshop are Layer Effects in GIMP. You need to get and install gimp.org's Layer Effects plug-in to add this ability to GIMP and the Python version of this plug-in provides a live preview of every effect. These effects include shadows, glows, bevel and emboss, stroke and other Photoshop staples.

Color Management

  1. If you use Photoshop to save images for print output, you probably noticed GIMP doesn't have a CMYK color mode. Despite this shortcoming, GIMP can convert CMYK images to RGB when it opens them and if you save these images to press-ready PDFs, GIMP will convert them back to CMYK when it saves them. Yellowmagic.info also has a free open source CMYK plug-in called Separate+ that gives GIMP the ability to do CMYK separations.