GIMP, which stands for “General Image Manipulation Program,” was originally founded in 1995 by developers Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, who were both students at UC Berkeley at the time. GIMP is a free and open source application that functions in the raster environment, and it’s widely recognized as the go-to free alternative for Adobe Photoshop. Let’s take a more extensive look at each application and how it can best be used.

Where Inkscape and GIMP come into play is that GIMP is intended for working with raster imagery, making it ideal for editing photos, and Inkscape is a vector graphics editor, making it ideal for creating digital illustrations. Vector graphics provide clean edges and can be scaled infinitely without quality loss This makes vector graphics ideal for things like illustrations and designs where you need to have crisp, definitive edges, but it’s not the ideal format for editing photos. Vector graphics are not made of pixels, they’re a series or coordinate points that dictate the properties of a graphic on an X and Y axis. Vector graphics, on the other hand, are a different type of imagery format altogether. The raster format is preferred if you’re going to do any kind of design work where you’ll be editing photographs, but it’s not ideal for things like illustrations and designs where you need clean lines and crisp edges. This is commonly used in things like photos, JPEGs, and other types of imagery you commonly see on the web.

Raster images are made of individual colored boxes known as pixels Rasterization is a digital imagery format where the image is made of individual colored boxes known as pixels, and it’s the format that you’re probably most familiar with.

Photoshop vs inkscape vs gimp