Personal and strongly-held opinion follows:

The biggest drawback of GIMP is that it is the least intuitive software I or anyone I've asked in person has ever used.

Basic operations like making selections, cropping, and moving selections or layers are a chore. The keyboard shortcuts don't make any sense, and the tool icons all look the same, so I wind up hovering over each one to find the dang crop tool in the first place. Oh, it's the one that looks like an X-acto knife instead of the universal brackets icon for crop.

The selection tool is just weird. You can highlight a region of the image, but to manipulate or transform it, there's no "Control+T" equivalent as far as I've discovered.

The whole thing feels like a mess coming from Photoshop. Paint .NET has far and away better usability.

Sure, you can accomplish the same things, eventually, and I guess that makes them both capable image editors. But using GIMP feels like I'm interacting with a machination of Dr. Seuss if he had to draw a Whoville contraption that edited photos.

> The biggest drawback of GIMP is that it is the least intuitive software I or anyone I've asked in person has ever used.

Personally I find GIMP far more intuitive than Photoshop. The problem with GIMP for me is that most of the editing tools are pretty low quality, across the board. The text layer tool is terrible, the filters aren't very good, support for non-destructive editing is missing, the quality of edits are pretty bad - at least for a long time curve adjustments were done in 8 bits, leading to banding when trying to do almost any kind of significant adjustment. That might still be the case, it wouldn't surprise me.

>> GIMP is the least intuitive software I or anyone I've asked in person has ever used

> Personally I find GIMP far more intuitive than Photoshop

Whew, we did it! I was worried for a few minutes, but we're still at 100% of GIMP/Photoshop comparisons containing this exchange in the comments.

Well, that's not all that surprising, is it? The reason the response is required is because people who use Photoshop frequently feel that it's just obvious to everyone that GIMP's interface is bad, and they need to be reminded that quite a few people find it more simple and intuitive.

Other parts of the complaint don't make a lot of sense either. For example the complaint about the icons -- I agree, the default icons are completely unintelligible. But GIMP ships with alternative icon sets, several of which are far easier for me to use and discern.

As someone who does use Photoshop sometimes, and still uses Lightroom as my primary tool for photography, I still prefer GIMP and its simple interface for quick edits.

Yup, this summarizes exactly my gripe with GIMP.

As you said, Paint.NET has far better usability despite GIMP actually having more features.

The icons really need an overhaul with GIMP, that hovering over each icon to see if it is the crop tool, and lack of Control+T struck all too close to home.

> The selection tool is just weird. You can highlight a region of the image, but to manipulate or transform it, there's no "Control+T" equivalent as far as I've discovered.

I don't know what ctrl+T is (there may be some nuance I'm missing), but in Gimp the corner resize handles are always visible in a selection, the side handles appear on mouseover, and moving a selection is click+drag in the center.

Control+T is the shortcut in Photoshop for Free Transform, which turns your selected region into a click+drag target for translating; the corners and edges become resize handles for the selected content; outside of the corners becomes a rotate click target. There's also now a context menu for more advanced transformations like Skew, Perspective, etc.

It's pretty much an all-in-one toolbox of most anything you'd want to do with a selection, and I could never find a good equivalent of that in GIMP.

Regarding the handles in GIMP - last I tried them, they resized the selection region, rather than the underlying image, which was immensely frustrating.

Ah yeah, that's nothing like what I thought you meant. That said, if I wanted to do something like that in Gimp, I'd just cut-paste - this creates a temporary layer with the content positioned exactly where it was before, where you can use the standard layer manipulation tools to transform it. You can then use either the "new layer" button to promote it fully, or "anchor" to paste it back onto the original.

There's Unified transform tool in GIMP 2.10 which does what you describe (the default shortcut is shift-T).

I haven't seriously taken a look at gimp in ages if I'm honest, but iirc it still doesn't have adjustment layers or support for more than 8bpp or color spaces other than RGB. The UI being awful is a major point against too, as is the poor performance. I'm sure there are use-cases where gimp is equivalent to Photoshop. I primarily use Photoshop in 16bit Lab color, so just off that it's a no-go.

No non destructive editing available is one of the biggest drawbacks

Does the history or duplicating the working/background layer not cover that?

No, it doesn't. Adjustment layers aren't committed; they're just a set of instructions that can later be altered.

Isn't that what layers are for?

Take an example you scaled down and 1000x1000px image to 100x100px and then scaled it up back to 1000x1000px. In the process you lost a lot of info on the image.

PS solves that by using Smart Objects, Krita by Transform Masks, GIMP? Nope

To be fair, photoshop didnt always do this. I still use CS2 and it definetely doesn't work like you describe.

I'd say that GIMP is somewhat comparable to the feature set of CS2, though I admit I havent used gimp much.

Smart Objects were introduced in CS2, so no, :)

Ah you are right. It gives the illusion of quality loss until you commit the change, and then it looks crisp again.

Obviously you should loose all of your details. You shouldn't be doing this at any rate.

Gimp has most of the "magic" tools Photoshop has, but their algorithms perform inferiorly. For example, "automatically snap this selection to the outline of this thing in the image" (magnetic lasso tool).

Use Gimp's circle tool to create a circle. Create a new layer. Now, try and chance the dimensions of the circle itself rather than upscaling (and pixellating) it. As far as I know, this is not possible in Gimp, but it's expected in Photoshop.