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GIMP review: free photo editing software that does a reasonable job
Feb 21, 2025
Far from perfect but surprisingly impressive for free software
Digital Camera World Verdict
GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program is a popular and completely free photo editing software that's similar to Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Photo 2. As you'd expect, being free and open source, is that it's severely limited in comparison, but it does provide features and functionality that allow you to make a variety of adjustments to your photos.
It's not one of the best photo editing software programs available, but that's not to say that GIMP isn’t a useable photo editing program thanks to features including Layers, Layer Masks, lots of useful adjustments, cloning and healing tools, painting tools, and filters. To be fair, what you do get in terms of features is impressive considering it's free software.
GIMP is far from perfect and alongside some quirky workflow elements and slow performance, there are no Adjustment Layers, which are extremely useful for photo editing; but you can work around this to maintain a non-destructive workflow by working on pixel Layer copies. Also, there's no Raw support, but GIMP does support RawTherapee and Darktable, which are both free Raw processing programs.
An important point here is that we shouldn’t forget that it's free with the source code available for you to tinker with if you have the knowledge to do so and you're that way inclined. The main problem with the software is that you have to make many concessions in terms of overall functionality and workflow, although you can perform a range of basic adjustments.
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