Photoshop is worth your money, however I did not try GIMP for last 2 years so I can not comment on it (2 years back it was realy just upgrade on Windows Paint program and no competition for Photoshop, maybe it improved since)

Photoshop is the industry leader in photo editing. It's the program that almost every professional photographer uses. It's also great for editing images and exporting to the web.

However, if you are looking to become a better web designer, you may find that Adobe Fireworks is what you are looking for. It is terrific for creating navigation bars, buttons, and other web graphics from scratch. It is also a good tool for slicing an image into multiple lightweight images. It basically enables you to create all the graphics you'll need for a professional CSS layout.

Also, Micro$oft has attempted to gain some of Adobes market with it's Expression Studio but, I haven't tried it out. The studio, along with Visual Studio 2008, Server 2003, and XNA Game Studio is free to download at the DreamSpark site if you are currently enrolled at a college or university.

Ah fantastic thanks and yes I am at university doing comp science and I've already takn advantage of their free software schemes so I'll definitely check them out many thanks to all replies

I'm a very good in graphics but I think, GIMP is pretty good image editing software and its worth learning. It has gained good reputation in community and the best freeware. Suffice most of my needs. The only thing I dont like about it is it's Non-MDI interface.

But of course Adobe Photoshop is now like an industry standard and incomparable to all those I have tried yet. So one day or other you will have to learn it, so I would say go for Photoshop.

Very often, GIMP is compared with Photoshop. You may see this link and see yourself

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...aphics_editors

I worked for some time at a publishing house and tried to learn photoshop, couldn't, it took too much of time and I did not have that luxury at the time. I have since then, changed jobs and have become acquainted with the Gimp, I like it. I hope that if you would do some tutorials, you will give both programs a try. I think they both have similarities, but the Gimp is reaching more people because it's free. Not everyone who is creative and artistic can afford Photoshop in this economy, so it'd be a good idea to give both their fair share to increase your reach of people.

GIMP is awful but Photoshop is not necessarily the best choice for web design (even though it is used widely). As BuddyLee17 says, Fireworks is a good choice (and has some compatibility with Photoshop files). It's what I use for all my website design work as that's what it was specifically created for. I find it simpler and more productive in use than Photoshop and it also has excellent export options.

gimp if your broke .. photoshop if you can provide

My suggestion, since GIMP is free, would be to download it, play around with for a while - see if you can do everything you want to do with it (there are a lot of different plug ins you can download for GIMP, such as one that will allow you to open psd files. As well, you can use Photoshop brushes in GIMP.) Now, granted, I'm not a web designer, I'm a totally n00b in the arena myself.

GIMP is entirely free, so really, it doesn't hurt to check it out before plunking down the money for Photoshop. All of the basics, to my knowledge, can be done in both. (But as I said, my knowledge is limited, I'm commenting because I use GIMP for the few web graphics I do create)

Photoshop is best and number one graphics design tool which all professional designer use to edit images, create logo, banner and other graphical work. Photoshop have many option which GIMP have not.