Neither are necessarily better ? it shows how much use you have for a professional image editing package : NONE. It has been a long time since I've picked up Photoshop (as in I'm used to its interface) so I can't say whether it's really hard to "pick it up" compared to beginning with the gimp but the environment is FAR MORE productive than what the GIMP offers if you were to master the two and compare their abilities. The amount of non-destructive tools in Photoshop alone make it ten times better than the GIMP if productivity is your priority.

The GIMP is like Photoshop 4 or 5. One of the worst "open source alternative" to proprietary software. It's an antique piece of software that hasn't caught up with the last DECADE of innovation.

Obviously it depends on the level you work on. And PS 5 might have been the last version I tried, don't even know what is current.

If PS is so much better, why don't you use it? What non-destructive tools are you talking about? I don't think tools are typically destructive in Gimp?

But you are correct, I am not a designer, I am a developer.

If you don't understand what "non destructive" means in the context of an image editor you obviously will never grasp why PS is actually better than the GIMP, and it's only ONE of the bigger example I took to compare them. http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Photoshop/11.0/WS2FD6768E-DB6B-4... "Nondestructive editing allows you to make changes to an image without overwriting the original image data, which remains available in case you want to revert to it. Because nondestructive editing doesn’t remove data from an image, the image quality doesn’t degrade when you make edits. You can perform nondestructive editing in Photoshop in several ways:"

A Smart Filter will be reapplied to the object every time you make changes to the object. But not in an "applied twice" way, because changes are not set in stone, it doesn't degrade the original object.

Photoshop is so much more productive than the GIMP. Anyone who pretends that those two packages are equal should keep from talking about image editors.

I thought that was what non-destructive means, I was just surprised that Gimp supposedly doesn't work that way.

Anyway, I am definitely not a power user - I think those already know if they are going to use Gimp or PS, and will not be swayed by HN discussions. I am just tired of the interface argument, because PS is definitely not easy to use. You have to dig through some tutorials and then you suddenly know how to do things, but it is not intuitive.

If you need specific PS functionality, obviously you have to use PS. My point was merely that the user interface is not really the big differentiator. (Also, I don't know the latest PS versions so I might be wrong, but I doubt it).