I didn’t have to ask, necessarily. I knew a lot of the differences. I’m a Photoshop expert. I’ve been using it regularly since version 2.0.3. Countless thousands of hours using Photoshop. I have a degree in computer art. I’ve been doing digital photographer since the 90’s.
I was asking you what you thought GIMP was missing.
I think GIMP is adding CMYK support soon. Not something I care about, personally. Digital printing is all RGB these days anyway.
Plug-in support? GIMP has amazing plugin support! They had Mathmap before Adobe even dreamed of adding… oh, whatever it is they called their version of it. Pixel Bender. That was it.
Hell, you can write your own plug-ins in Python. They don’t need to be compiled or anything. I’ve written a few basic workflow ones myself. Mostly to fix the fact that GIMP doesn’t have Actions. You have access to the entirety of GIMP through Python, Scheme, C, and at least one other language. (I realize Photoshop has scripting, too. I’m just saying that GIMP is not lacking in plug-in support.)
Also, professional what? Photographer? Photo retoucher? Digital painter? Prepress tech? Graphic designer? Meme producer?
There are a lot of professionals that could do just as well in GIMP. I actually prefer it for photo retouching these days. The Resynthesize plugin is often better than Adobe’s content-aware fill (Ignoring AI, which you can do with a Stable Diffusion plugin, if you’d like). The healing brush is better than using the Spot Healing tool. Curves is identical. The clone tool is identical.
I could list a bunch of things that are simply better in GIMP. Like using the middle mouse button for dragging the canvas. People have been demanding that from Adobe for years and have been ignored. I prefer the always-on, one-click “transform selection” for GIMP’s selection tool verses having to use the “Transform Selection” command in Photoshop. I also really like the option where the brush stays the same size (on the screen) while zooming in. Basically, the brush scales down when you zoom in. Easy to toggle on and off. The Free Select tool in GIMP is better than the Lasso in Photoshop. There are more things I could point out.
The only thing that Photoshop is definitely better than GIMP at doing is CMYK and prepress work. And I do miss Actions despite having full control with Python. There is a solid batch processing plug-in for GIMP, though.
So what do you really do in Photoshop that GIMP can’t do? Would you even know? Hell, you thought GIMP doesn’t have plug-in support.
Saying shit like, “it takes you about 15 seconds using each program to understand the difference and to see the massive gulf between them” is unhelpful and simply not true. It takes weeks in each program to learn how to do things the way that program wants you to do them. One person not familiar with one of the two programs cannot make that judgment in 15 seconds. That’s nonsense.
Deception? I asked what you thought GIMP was missing and then you went and made huge assumptions about me. That’s on you. I only replied the way I did because of what you said. Next time maybe just answer a question instead of insulting someone for even asking. Or don’t answer it. That’s fine, too.