For me, the only thing missing in GIMP to be a viable competitor with Photoshop is support for layer styles. I realize you can do almost all of the effects tha

For me, the only thing missing in GIMP to be a viable competitor with Photoshop is support for layer styles. I realize you can do almost all of the effects that Photoshop's layer styles offer, with some workarounds in GIMP, but it's not the same. The easiness of just ticking a few checkboxes, choosing either drop shadow or gradient overlay, playing with the parameters and seeing the result real time... plus then coming back to the dialog to tweak some parameters.... is so much better than the gimp way (applying a filter, clicking undo, writing down what you had in the filter in case you need to rerun it with slightly different parameters, etc). People without experience who wonder "What's the big deal? You can do all the same things. Do you need some fancy interface to add bling-bling to your images?" are missing the point. Making some of the more common operations as easy and as that saves a ton of time for example when creating web sites. For drop shadows in GIMP I have to move around two layers and re-run the filter if I need to change some parameters of the shadow. In Photoshop I just click the "put a drop shadow on this layer" checkbox. That's saving my time and letting me focus on what's essential. Before GIMP gets support for these layer styles, it is, in essence, a fancy tool for cropping images. At least for me. Photoshop is used for the real work. Plus, the plugins to convert Photoshop layers to CSS are additional time savers. For example CSS Hat: http://csshat.com/ http://csshat.com/ (I'm not affiliated).