I expected ridiculous propaganda from Adobe, but they give absolutely no reasons why Photoshop is better than Gimp and list a bunch of things that Gimp can do too.
They only mention Gimp a few times at the top and they never mention it again after:
How is Photoshop different from Gimp?
They ask a question they literally never answer.
They could have lied, they could have stretched the truth, they could have brought up the paltry number of things Photoshop does that Gimp can’t. They never do. They never say what Gimp can or can’t do.
Like I said, I expected ridiculous propaganda. I didn’t expect them to just pretend Gimp doesn’t exist in their article about Gimp.
For a real Photoshop vs GIMP discussion, I think I’ll leave a link to Franklin Veaux’s Quora post here.
tl;dr there is actually a lot of functionality in Photoshop not present in GIMP that most casual users will never use, but is very important to professionals. People don’t pay hundreds of dollars to Adobe just for funsies.
I would argue that there’s also lots of professionals who don’t use or need those features. Not everyone is using photoshop for print work, which that link seems to mostly discuss. It is still true, though, and every time I try to switch away from photoshop I run into some niche missing feature I need that most people wouldn’t care about.
There’s a ton of functionality in Photoshop that even pros never use. Every user of Photoshop needs something different from it. Sure, there’s a core of features that everyone uses (and which the Gimp also has) but there’s also countless other niche features that are a crucial part of the workflow for tons of users and they won’t give them up. This is one of the reasons Photoshop is so hard to replace.
It’s also the reason Latex is tough to replace as well. It’s a phenomenon which is not limited to commercial software, that’s for sure.
Also the UX difference is worth the money alone.
I’m pretty sure there’s a GIMP plugin that does that if that is all you care about
To redo the entire UI?
Now that single window mode is a thing across all platforms, it’s not as bad anymore.
I still don’t know how to draw a circle, though. I think I may need to turn a selection into a path? I just use Photopea for this stuff these days.
They do it because there really isn’t much of an alternative for substance painter…