You can eliminate flaws easily with the excellent clone stamp and healing tools, create custom brushes, apply perspective changes, and apply changes to isolated areas with smart selection tools. The photo editing toolkit is breathtaking, and features layers, masks, curves, and levels. Individual tabs can be torn off (although it requires using a command on the palette menu instead of Adobe’s more intuitive action), so you can tweak GIMP UI just about as much as you can Photoshop’s. Familiar panels for Layers, Brushes, Tools, Paths, and plenty of others are available.

When you first load GIMP 2.8, you might be forgiven for thinking that you’d fired up an alternate UI for Photoshop. There’s plenty for the more advanced user, too, including layer masks, Bézier curves, filters and even an animation package. GIMP comes with impressive selection and montage features, various ways to retouch your images, cropping, noise reduction and color adjustment tools, customizable brushes, gradients and so much more. Its openly extensible nature means that in some areas, like running well-known image processing algorithms on your photos, it actually outshines Adobe Photoshop. GIMP now has a very competent user interface, as well as an extensive and powerful set of features.

The reality has changed dramatically over the last couple years. GIMP is a free, open-source, image editor, the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) has been a go-to tool for Linux users for years, but has a reputation for being hard to use and lacking many of Photoshop’s features.

Gnu picture editor