GIMP 2.4 vs. Photoshop Elements 5?

Question

I have photoshop elements and it kept crashing so I came across GIMP and seems to offer the same stuff and is even free. I use it to enhance real estate photos. What do you see is a big difference between the 2? I know free is too good to be true so there must be a catch. no?

Answer 1

I don't know the technical differences between the two, but I can answer the "is there a catch" part.

GIMP is what's called "open source" software.  This, basically, is software that has been written by a person, or group of people and then released in to the public domain for free.  The provisions of the release are that the source code (the program in it's human programming language) is available so that anyone who wants to can improve it, or use it as a base for their own project, provided that is then (after reviews, etc) put back into the community for free general use.  So the upshot is that if I write a spreadsheet program and then need a word processing program, for example, I can put my spreadsheet program out for general use so anyone can benefit from it, and maybe someone has written a word processing program that I can use.

Obviously it's more complex than that, but the upshot is that there is loads of (mostly, very good) free software around that anyone can use.  Firefox is an example of this, as is Open Office - these are a web browser and an office suite respectively - the MS counterparts are internet explorer and MS office.  There is also an alternative to windows called Linux (again, this is free) - this comes in many different forms (called "distributions"), each customised and built in it's own particular way.  I have windows, but only use it for games that I can't get working on Linux, for everything else I use Linux as I think it's a h**l of a lot better.  I also think that Firefox and Open Office are better than their MS counterparts and have done some funky stuff with GIMP.

As for using open source software, feel free and don't feel guilty that it's free.  Even if you aren't a programmer, you can still help and contribute by writing manual sections, publishing tutorials online (there are many ones for GIMP, just hit google and you can find out how to do many things with it), reporting bugs (errors in the programs) or just telling other people about it!

If you want to know more, here are a few links

Open Source

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source...

Firefox (you can run this along side IE and see which you prefer)

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

GIMP (for anyone else reading this)

http://www.gimp.org/

Open Office

http://www.openoffice.org/

Googling "open source" with whatever other software you want to try to find will also usually yield some results.

Answer 2

No catch, except if you are looking to carry out very advanced tasking then Photoshop is more suitable. Otherwise GIMP is extremely capable and totally open source. You can download GIMP for Windows from here http://www.gimp.org/windows/ Here also is a list of the Official GIMP Tutorials http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/

LUg.

Answer 3

There is no catch. The GIMP is open source and is therefore free. If you prefer the feel of photoshop there is even a version called gimpshop which is even more similar to photoshop.