Photoshop VS GIMP: which is better in 2024?

Photoshop and GIMP are two advanced editors for working with graphics.

They are widely used in the industry, but there are still certain differences between them. We will explain which program is better suited for which situations by directly comparing their aspects.

Price

GIMP wins hands down. It is free from start to finish, which is not the case with Photoshop. The minimum cost of Photoshop at the time of writing is $9.99 per month.

Ease of use and complexity

This is a more personal aspect. Both programs can seem complicated to beginners, and it is impossible to say definitively which one's interface and functionality will prove more difficult.

Since Photoshop is designed to work with digital assets, it covers many aspects of design and therefore has very, very many tools that you will probably never use.

In GIMP, your work will be faster, simply because it was designed specifically for working with digital photos.

However, it is still comfortable to use both if you understand them well. There are many tutorials for both programs, which can be found on YouTube.

By the way, and on our site you can find many references for working in each of these programs. These references are high-resolution photos of people and characters in different poses and clothes, animals, objects, props, thematic locations, environments and much more.

Size and speed

GIMP is a very lightweight program (after all, you can install and use GIMP from a portable USB drive).

Photoshop, on the other hand, takes up a lot of disk space. It also uses a lot of RAM. So if your computer has limited capabilities, Photoshop is not for you.

Just to give you a comparison: GIMP weighs less than a gigabyte and can be used quite comfortably on a machine with 4GB of RAM, while Photoshop weighs well over a gigabyte and requires at least 8GB of RAM, and ideally 16GB.

Portability

Many people now have good smartphones with excellent cameras and top performance. It is a sin not to use them, and the company Adobe, which develops Photoshop, realized this in time. It has also bet on the mobile segment - the mobile version is practically the same as the desktop version in terms of functionality, and all work is synchronized between platforms thanks to Adobe Cloud.

The same cannot be said about GIMP - it simply does not have a version for smartphones.

Functionality
Both programs have excellent tools to help you edit images correctly and efficiently. But Photoshop's features are much more powerful than GIMP's. Both programs use curves, levels, and masks, but the pixel manipulation is stronger in Photoshop.

For example, GIMP has a healing tool that allows you to remove misplaced pixels. Photoshop, on the other hand, has four separate tools that do the same thing. Except that each of them has a different set of controls that are better suited to a particular situation.

But GIMP still has a lot going for it. For example, it's open source, so it can be modified almost indefinitely.
Photoshop and GIMP are two great tools for the creative process and for working with graphic content. They both offer top-notch functionality, but the former is better if you have a budget and travel a lot for work, and the latter if you just want to hone your skills, spend a lot of time at your PC, and don't mind spending hours digging around in various plug-ins.

By the way, both of these programs can come in handy if you are involved in the creation of a video game or other digital content. On our website you can download various textures and mats that you can work with in these utilities.