What are the key photography-related features from Photoshop that are missing in GIMP?

Question

I am on a tight budget and chose to use GIMP for editing since it is free.

What important photographic post-processing features am I missing from Photoshop?

Answer 1

For photos? Not too much, actually. GIMP lacks automatic HDR processing. It doesn't have adjustment layers - although you don't need those too much for photos. Photoshop's Hue\Saturation dialog is superior. Photoshop CS5 has content-aware fill, which GIMP lacks, but there's a GIMP plugin called Resynth that does about the same thing:http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer

Some pretty good art has been done in GIMP. (My snow photomanip, for instance) It's more about the artist's skill than the tools he\she uses.

Answer 2

Gimp is great, but it's not without some shortcomings. Photoshop is a big-time commercial project with a lot of funding, and while Gimp's development community is awesome, there are a lot of areas which could be useful to photographers where Photoshop is ahead. I've tried to enumerate these here as fairly and as realistically as I can.

1. Adjustment layers. These apply the effect of a filter to the layers below, rather than being a layer with a filter applied. Gimp doesn't have this. One can live without, but they are nice. In some cases, layer blending modes can be used to achieve a similar effect, but they don't work the same way. This makes it much more tedious to experiment with different amounts of an effect when doing something complicated. (See this answer for an example of something that's easy with and a whole different more complicated process otherwise.)
2. Shadow/Highlight tool. There's several decent (free, of course) plugins which add this, but not as nicely as the integrated tool. (My favorite is this simple one; there are others with more options that sometimes give better results.) The main downside of the available add-ons is that you can't really preview the effects of different settings.
3. Match Color tool. This can be used to correct (to some degree) the white balance of a photo, given a "correct" sample. There are some match color scripts for Gimp, but they generally are designed for special palette effects, not color correction. One can use the color picker + curves tool to do the same thing manually, though.
4. Color Replacement Tool. This is a quick-and-dirty tool for changing colors — like making a red balloon turn blue. It's a paintbrush-like tool which remaps one color to another, by hue, saturation, luminosity, or "color" — hue and saturation together. Gimp's Color Exchange dialog is a global operation with only rudimentary thresholds and no anti-aliasing; it can't do the same thing. And setting blend modes in the regular paintbrush doesn't do it either, because that affects everything you touch, not just a target color.
5. "Vibrance" adjustment. Adobe uses this term for a special color tool which increases saturation in a gentle way, without overdoing normal tones, and specifically handling skin tones specially. That's very handy for photography, obviously. See this answer for an approach for emulating this in Gimp — a lot more work.
6. Content-Aware Fill. Gimp has actually had this for years through the Resynthesizer plugin, but that project has stagnated for a while — it's a great start, but it's just not up to the level of magic that the Photoshop tool accomplishes. Recently, there's a new maintainer for the project and updated code, so there is hope here — although Photoshop CS6 extends this technology into patch and move, while the Gimp version is still basically stagnant. (Side note: don't miss the "Heal Selection" fix to Resynthesizer's smart remove selection script.)
7. Face detection and select-by-skin-tones. Another new CS6 feature, and something that's useful for a lot of different photographic work (like this problem). There's open source technology for face detection, and decent research on skin color selection, but nothing I know that is integrated in this way (or even available as a plugin).
8. Denoise plugins. There's tons of proprietary ones for photoshop that give amazing results. The state-of-the-art for Gimp is a little more rough — see this question on the topic.
9. Fractal image saving and upscaling plugins. For whatever reason, there's no mathemagical upscaling software like Genuine Fractals in the open-source universe. That said, it may be no huge loss, as the results aren't always better than bicubic scaling. In fact, see this question on upscaling images, where one of Gimp's upscaling methods beats many proprietary options (for that particular image).
10. Action recording. Gimp has very powerful scripting capabilities, which is great for those of us who are comfortable with that kind of thing, but no GUI-based record-and-playback macro system. This isn't strictly photography-related, but if you're doing the same thing to a lot of images as part of your workflow, it would be nice.
11. 3D Support. Photoshop CS6 and newer feature real 3D tools (not just 3D-like effects). This is irrelevant to many photographers, but can be very useful for extensive image manipulation. See How to make a 3d model from an object in a photograph? for an eye-opening example of how easy this makes it to, for example, swap the fabric on a sofa for a different pattern. Photographers working with product photography or with high-concept manipulated images may really miss this.
12. Close integration with RAW processing tools. Many of the above shortcomings are covered by great open source RAW processing and workflow tools like Darktable and Rawtherapee, but without Photoshop's "Linked Smart Objects", raster-editing in Gimp is an afterthought, not something that fits into a non-destructive workflow. With the Adobe "family", integration is much more tight, allowing one to make edits in Photoshop and Lightroom together. It's not quite perfect, but it's a big improvement.

As of version 2.10 (released in April 2018), Gimp features high-bit-depth processing, one of the key previous shortcomings. This isn't about a wider range of colors but about more precision within that range. (See the bit about crayons in this answer.)

2.10 also adds a Shadow/Highlight tool, which previously was near the top of my list of shortcomings. And it adds LCH blend modes, resolving the lack of a luminosity layer blend mode. This can be used for sharpening, for example, or anything else where you want to affect luminosity rather than color. Gimp traditionally used slightly-different mode "Value", as in HSV (and this is still available if you want it).

Gimp is under active development, and the "roadmap" can be found at http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/GIMP_Roadmap. This is useful for getting an idea of what shortcomings will be rectified soon, and what else is coming in the near future. For example, adjustment layers are targeted at 3.2. And, since non-destructive editing is going to be a big feature of that, we may see better RAW workflows, too.

User interface complaints used to be very common, but the software has come a long way, and if you haven't used it in a while, it may be worth checking it out again. Version 2.8 featured a number of significant improvements to the user interface, most notably a single-window mode. The 2.10 update refines this even further, and UI improvements are ongoing

There's still some UI things which could use serious work. Frequently-used items are buried too far in disorganized menus, and while it's easy to remap keyboard shortcuts, there's no good way to tailor the menus for photographic tasks specifically, or to move favorite menu items to shortcut bars. That means more clicking than I'd really like, and it means that some great features are hard to discover. I think this will get better in time.

There are a number of other things like RAW development and lens profile correction which Photoshop does and which are not handled well in Gimp but which are covered by other open source tools (like Hugin, RawTherapee, and Darktable). As noted above, though, it'd be nicer to have more close integration, as Adobe does with its products.

Answer 3

This may seem biased/unfair, but GIMP has awful usability.

Disclaimer: i have used both, although recently i use photoshop much more.

In terms of functionality, GIMP doesn't tread much behind photoshop (for simple photomanips and adjustments - i don't do HDR), but layer manipulation and general use are tortuous (IMHO). I never couldn't do a task with GIMP, but i end up searching online how to do it, whereas in Photoshop i tend to find stuff on the menus or figure it out by myself.

And yes, i am aware that 600€ is quite a lot to pay for a small hobbyist.

EDIT: (in reply to the comments) Yes, awful is a bit vague.

I wasn't really referring to the panel approach, it's slightly confusing but not as serious as the layer manipulation controls in an image, selecting, dragging, enlarging, etc.

I didn't mean to bash, i learned the basics in GIMP, it's selection editing tools are fairly evident, but i didn't use many of GIMP's functionality (3+ layer composites, filters, color corrections) because i didn't know the name of what i was trying to accomplish, or simply because fell into dead ends (not being able to do something, not figuring it out quickly, getting frustrated, giving up) Only after transitioning to photoshop, and learning those tasks, did i know what to look for in GIMP.

I am not sure if i made myself clear, i am referring to findability vs discoverability (http://maadmob.net/donna/blog/2005/findability-vs-discoverability). I defend that photoshop is a very much better learning tool because it enables its users to discover functionality that they didn't even know they could do in the first place.

I suppose you COULD do them almost all in GIMP, after you know what to search for, and investing the time in learning it, but photoshop allowed ME to learn almost all that i know with almost no research at all.

Usability may seem something rather trivial or useless, but it really isn't. It is very complicated to get right, and is never ideal for everyone. But Adobe has obviously put a lot of effort into making Photoshop usable, and it shows. Also, i am aware of the difficulty for FOSS to engage in user testing and usability evaluation, because of the nature of the projects development structure (many developers, far apart, functionality oriented).

Answer 4

One item I don't see mentioned in other answers is performance. Especially on a Mac. Lightroom and Photoshop both crunch through adjustments and work MUCH faster than the Gimp does.

Answer 5

One key difference is not in the product itself, but its development. There are about two developers working on Gimp, and as a result, new features take a long time to be production ready. They 16-bit GEGL engine has been in progress for a couple of years and is not yet released.

I don't think it is fair to say that the Gimp UI is terrible, but it is very different from Photoshop, and its not nearly as polished.

I used to use Gimp all the time, and was very happy with it. But these days I use Aperture. I don't need pixel editing, the basics of crop/rotate and some exposure controls are what I need.

For those looking for an open-source package that is closer in spirit Aperture or LightRoom, look at Darktable.

Answer 6

When I process my photos, apart from color correction the two functions I most need are Smart Sharpen and Reduce Noise, and unfortunately both are missing from GIMP.

My understanding is that the algorithms used by Photoshop are proprietary and trade secrets, so you can't just implement them to GIMP, you'd need to reverse engineer or reinvent them yourself.

Noise reduction is in essence about removing unwanted details without removing wanted details and as such it's black art. However, you can work around this by shooting with lower ISO - using tripod or off-camera flash if necessary.

Smart sharpen is harder to replace. It basically makes the image look like the original version was slightly blurred version of the resulting image, instead of adding halos around high-contrast edges like most trivial sharpening algorithms do.

Answer 7

I've been using GIMP for years and I'm fine with it. I've never found the lack of high bit depth an issue. In my experience this issue is exaggerated in importance. The UI works fine, and I think it's partly what you're used to and what works for you as a person. The only thing I wish it had were adjustment layers.

An extremely useful plug-in is G'MIC ( awful name ), which contains a huge number of very useful enhancements, including :

• Noise Reduction ( several methods )
• Background Extraction Tool ( much better than GIMP's default one )
• A lot of effects

Just for those G'MIC is an essential.

If you need more ( and no application is perfect ), try these (free) applications :

• LightZone
• DarkTable ( not on Windows )
• RawTherapee
• Photivo

If anyone cares ( or dares ) to try them I have some GIMP scripts and plug-ins on my GitHub account :

• Imagemagick plug-in
• OpenCL plug-in ( experimental, but works for me )
• Some Python plug-ins

I'm working in a Java plug-in for GIMP ( not ready for the light of day ).

Answer 8

As the other answerers have pointed out, GIMP misses certain features that you can find in photoshop. But then you are not limited to using only GIMP. I use the following free of charge programs:

• dcraw
• ImageJ
• ImageMagick
• Hugin
• GIMP

dcraw allows you to have full access to your raw files, you can e.g. work with the raw data before any demosaicing is done. ImageJ allows you to easily manipulate the raw data of your picture in exactly the way you want it, unlike higher end programs like GIMP. ImageMagick allows you to easily manipulate images via command line instructions, it allows you to perform batch operations. Hugin is a panorama stitcher which includes the programs "align_image_stack" and "enfuse" which you can use to align images and compose HDR images, respectively.

In some cases I have used all these programs to do post processing to produce one picture. E.g. to sharpen an image I've used dcraw to extract the slightly blurred raw image of a star before any demosaicing. That image of a star the served as the point spread function that I used to deconvolve the image with using an imageJ plugin (the reason why you need the image of the star before demosaicing is due to the severe demosaicing artifacts when the brightness changes changes significantly over the range of just a few pixels). But this requires working in linear colorspace, and for that I used dcraw to convert the image to a 16 bit linear tiff file.

I did this for several pictures of the same scene and then I used the "align_image_stack" program from Hugin to align the images. Then using imagemagick, I could compute the "maximum" and "minimum" of the images (i.e. the images obtained by taking the maximum or minimum grey values of each pixel in the aligned images), and then you can computed the average of all the images where you subtract the maximum and the minimimum (this reduces noise by averaging as well as removing the outliers). Then I did this for different exposures and the results of the different exposures could be combined into a HDR image using the enfuse program (before that I had to converted the images to sRGB using ImageMagick). Finally with GIMP I could make some final adjustments and convert the tiff file to jpeg.

It may well be the case that with photoshop you could do all of this work, but I doubt if you could work smoothly with any single program. Some programs are more suitable for doing lower level processing while others are better at doing higher end photo editing.