Photoshop vs GIMP

A philosophical discussion on image editors. I have been slowly moving over to GIMP for various reasons. The biggest reason: Adobe's greed. They want $240 a year for Photoshop CC AND you do not own the program. So the umbilical cord is never broken and they have you for life. In principal I do not agree with the subscription model for any program and will avoid it as much as I can. Other reasons: for the most part GIMP has equivalent commands that match Photoshop. It has been a pain to relearn, but I can not justify the cost. Was pleasantly surprised when I installed g'mic as a GIMP plugin and XQuartz on my Mac. The various tools in g'mic plus the GIMP builtin functions in many ways surpass Photoshop.

I understand that for many professionals, the need for Photoshop is absolute. Both from a production point of view and from a client base that demands the "known" quality of Photoshop. For a creative like myself, this is not necessary.

Another interesting point: Photoshop CS6 was partially disabled on my Mac a few months back when the online validation starting saying the product was "invalid". I knew this to not be true, bought a valid license. Through online research I was able to fix the problem, basically disabling the Adobe Genuine Integrity Service. I have also started to move away from Adobe's PDF products for the same reason since the "integrity service" is reinstalled if you use the Acrobat reader. I'm using Foxit for now. More greed from Adobe, it appears that they will eventually disable all "owned" products from the past if they can get away with it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/commen...y_service/

As for me, I love unique programs. Programs that have some peculiar characteristic.

Filter Forge is really great on this.
There is no other comparable software.

Then, other interesting programs are BlackInk, Rebelle, Flame Painter, Leonardo, Expresii, Paintstorm Studio, Vector Magic, Axialis IconWorkshop, MediBang Paint Pro, etc.

Differently from you, my first experience with graphic editors was GIMP, and then I passed to use Photoshop too. It was probably easier for me not caring of Adobe choices.

Thanks for the replies, Ramlyn and Indigo Ray.

Ramlyn, I found it interesting that localization was an issue. Adobe, as far as customer support goes, I agree, yuck. I understand the business model of subscriptions to a point, but think that this hurts the companies long term prospects. Basically it will push away non-professional users who can not justify the ongoing price. Only time will tell.

Indigo Ray, G'mic is a set of over 500 plugin filters for use with various image editors (GIMP, Paint.net, Krita) and more. It allows you to write your own filters as well and more. I have found the filters to be high quality. And yes, Adobe knows how good Photoshop is, but the corporate ego could be their ultimate downfall.