Photoshop vs Lightroom vs GIMP: The Ultimate 2025 Showdown for Photo Editors
Photoshop is Adobe’s flagship raster editor, available on Windows, macOS, and iPad, with Creative Cloud integration and AI features like Neural Filters and Generative Fill. Lightroom Classic offers end-to-end photography workflow with a library, Develop module, non-destructive edits, batch processing, presets, and seamless round-trips to Photoshop. GIMP is free and open source, cross-platform (Windows, macOS, Linux), and GIMP 3.0 (March 2025) introduces a GTK3 UI overhaul plus live layer effects. GIMP runs natively on Linux, the only one of the three to do so. Photoshop uses Camera Raw for RAW processing, Lightroom has built-in RAW processing via the ACR engine,