Which picture manipulation app wins?

Photoshop has features like Generative Fill, which uses AI prompts to alter images.

© ADOBE

ADOBE Photoshop and GIMP have some very similar features: they’re both raster image editors. Both programs also support virtually every image editing feature you’re ever likely to need, including selection editing, layers, alpha channels, scripting, retouching, resizing, HDR, noise removal, and much more.

Photoshop is now a proprietary paid SaaS (software as a service) product. It’s used by millions of professional graphic designers every day. In fact, the software has become so ubiquitous that the verb ‘to photoshop’ was even added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2008, though the first use of the term was in a Usenet group in 1992, two years after the software was first released.

GIMP’s initial public release was in 1996. Although the name was originally an acronym for ‘General Image Manipulation Program’, after meeting with Richard Stallman, the developers agreed to allow the program to form part of the GNU software collection, hence a slight name change from ‘General’ to ‘GNU’.