I’ve been having trouble with my Photoshop licensing, so I am thinking of trying out Gimp. Anyone have any ideas? I have just opened it for the first time and will be playing with it while I am on the phone with Adobe. 
I’ve used it quite a bit. It’s rather different from Photoshop interface-wise, and doesn’t have all the same capabilities. But it’s been perfectly adequate for all my photo-editing needs thus far.
The interface does take some getting used to, especially if you’re used to working with Photoshop’s plethora of palettes.
I tried it out recently but found it didn’t have CMYK capability so it was useless to me. It does, apparently, have a plugin that adds CMYK and a plugin that allows saving those CMYK documents to a prepress PDF document. But i haven’t gotten around to trying said plugins out yet and they look rather messy.
I like it, but it did take some getting used to. For some reason it seems to behave differently on the various computers I use it on. But it is very capable and it does everything I need it to do (photo editing, but nothing major) for free. It’s also very dependable and has never crashed on me. I can easily open 10 photos right off the camera and it has no issues.
If you’ve been using Photoshop a lot, you really do have to get used to the way it handles layers. The functionality is all there, but it doesn’t really present them in the same way. Otherwise, I have no real complaints. Free and with the exception of SOME filter effects (many of which you can also download version of for free with a little searching), does everything I need it to.
The layers business is SO true. I never do anything particularly hard core, but I always end up very very confused when I paste one thing in, move it to somewhere on the canvas, then paste another thing in, move it to somewhere on the canvas, then I want to go select and resize of touch up the first thing, and I just can’t get at it. Even worse is trying to edit text I’ve already pasted in.
I should probably read the docs 
I like it, but I only use it for color correction via levels for photographs.
It depends on what you want to use it for.
I’m a professional web programmer (amongst other stuff) and GIMP is easier to use for me and more efficient than photoshop when I’m chopping stuff up to build web sites. On the other hand, PS has much better CMYK support, which is pretty much a deal breaker if you design for print.
I got a book on GIMP and found it MUCH easier to use and very powerful. I’ve yet to find someting in Photoshop that I can’t do in GIMP. IF you look for it.
This is the issue I have with GIMP, it is NOT easy to use. Photoshop IS (relatively) easy to use. It is like technical people wrote GIMP and it makes sense to them but no one else.
Get a good book on GIMP and you’ll be happy or spend a few weeks to a month experiementing and go to some GIMP discussion boards and get some help. It is an excellent program but it is VERY difficult to learn. The hoops you jump through to get a correct result don’t seem, at least to me, where you’d think they’d be. As a photoshop user, you think you want to do something and you look where you think it will be and there it is. In GIMP you spend a day looking for it and it’s in the weirdest place, but is there.
Meh, it’s not that difficult that you need to go read the docs. First off, drag and drop is probably better than copy-paste for what you’re doing. Each dropped item gets its own layer in the layers dialog (Dialog -> Layers to enable). Select the other layer to get back to the other thing you dropped.
If you use copy-paste, you need to choose Layers -> New Layer (or the equivalent button in the layers dialog) after you paste each item. Just pasting does not create a separate layer, so when you paste again, it anchors (i.e. flattens) the previous item to the layer beneath it.
As for editing text, that’s even easier. Just double click!
Like others have said, GIMP is fine for everything except prep for professional printing.
Thanks all. I am looking to use it for print ads but it’s not going to go in glossy fashion magazines so I am not terribly worried. I’ve worked in pre-press, comic coloring, and have supported DTP depts on the technical side so I am quite familiar with Photoshop, at least pre 2003. I moved over to Open Office and I’m kind of on a kick to move more and more open-source but what you save in money you make up in learning curve I’ve found.
In photoshop I can deselect a selection by pressing ctrl-d. Is there a way to do that in GIMP? I am trying to configure the shortcuts but I don’t see that as an option. CTRL-D opens the selection in it’s own window.
As far as I know, in GIMP deselecting is the same as selecting everything. So press CTRL-a
CTRL-A just selects all which of course is functionally equivalent to deselecting the current selection.
I am generally missing my favorite shortcuts like CTRL +/- for zoom or CTRL-0 for full screen. It’s taking some getting used to just because of those things.