You could choose Gimp for free, Photoshop CS6 for 699, or Photoshop CS6 Extended for 999. It's time for an in-depth comparison of Photoshop and GIMP In this video, I go over my strengths and weaknesses for the two best photo editing and photo man. In the old days, before 2013 when Adobe changed to its subscription model, price was enough to decide between Photoshop vs GIMP.
Do as much photo improvement as you can in Darktable (framing, denoising, sharpening, color correction, lens correction, color aberration correction.) then finally edit the output in Gimp where you can remove unwanted details and do all final fine-tuning before exporting the image with the format and quality you'll need. Photoshop is proprietary software that is available via paid subscription, whereas GIMP is a free, open-source program. If you are still a beginner, I'll not advise you to always shoot in raw, because processing every single raw photo can be boring at the beginning (and even after.) You can shoot in raw + jpeg and have a try with only a few raw files. Also raw images with wrong exposure can be corrected easier if taken in raw, because it keeps most information the sensor has captured. GIMP small software contains some fixed slides. When you shoot in JPEG, the photo is automatically processed from the raw image on the sensor into JPEG within the camera, you don't control this process, that can even create unwanted artifacts, fake sharpness, excessive softening, and so on. Photoshop is very huge software and loved by all the photographers because they get the expected quality from it.
But JPEG is an 8-bit format that does not record as much information as raw. As a result, GIMP is free to everyone and always has been, while Photoshop will cost you a monthly or yearly fee, and it’s definitely not cheap, especially for those from countries with poorer economies. Most people take their photos in JPEG, so that they don't need a raw decoder and don't understand what use it is. Compare price, features, and reviews of the software side-by-side to make the best choice for your business. As a standalone, it is the equivalent of Lightroom: converting raw format then do basic editing on it, then save the result to JPEG, PNG or other popular formats, and also do basic editing on JPEG images from your camera. This is a great tutorial for beginner photographers and photo editors For those of you who dont know, Darktable is a great FREE alternative to Lightroom. RawTherapee - RawTherapee is a free RAW converter and digital photo processing software. Affinity Photo - Affinity is the imaging and design suite for creative professionals exclusively for Mac. As schumaml told it, Darktable is a raw file decoder, and, if you use it as a plug-in, it will do the same as Camera Raw for Photoshop: converting raw files into a format like TIFF that can be edited in Gimp. When comparing Darktable and Adobe Photoshop, you can also consider the following products GIMP - GIMP is a multiplatform photo manipulation tool.