How to Make GIMP Look Like Adobe Photoshop in Windows

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Adobe Photoshop enjoyed monopoly as the most popular graphics editing program throughout the 90’s. But later on many new programs surfaced to challenge Photoshop and one of them is the free and open-source GIMP (short for GNU Image Manipulation Program). In the starting GIMP was only available for the Linux computers, but later on it was ported to Windows and Mac too and now it has become a good alternative for the Photoshop. But because of a little difference in the user interface of GIMP, many Photoshop users might not find it easy to work with GIMP.

Perhaps it will make it a little easier for the long time Photoshop users to make GIMP’s interface look like Photoshop so that they can switch to GIMP. In fact it is very easy to make GIMP look like Photoshop by replacing some files.

Make GIMP Look Like Photoshop

Here is how you can make GIMP look more like Adobe Photoshop:

  1. First of all make sure you have installed GIMP 2.8.x in your Windows PC. If you have not installed, then go ahead and download the Windows installer from https://www.gimp.org/downloads/ and install it.
  2. Close all the running instances of GIMP.
  3. Press the hotkey Win+R to open the Run dialog. Type %UserProfile% in the Run  dialog and press Enter.
  4. This will open your user profile folder. Locate a sub-folder named .gimp-2.8 and rename it to .gimp-2.8.old.Make GIMP Look Like Photoshop
  5. Download GIMP 2.8 Photoshop Tweaks files from http://doctormo.deviantart.com/art/Gimp-2-8-Photoshop-Tweaks-432736644. The download link is near the top-right corner of the webpage.
  6. Open the downloaded ZIP archive and extract the folder .gimp-2.8 from inside the ZIP file to your user profile folder.Make GIMP Look Like Photoshop
  7. Re-launch GIMP. It will go through loading the plugins and then you will see a familiar looking Photoshop user interface.

At any later time, if you choose to switch back to the older interface. Then you have to remove the new .gimp-2.8 folder from your user profile folder and rename the .gimp-2.8.old back to .gimp-2.8.

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  1. While reading the description of how this ‘patch’ works, I thought … this could be OS-agnostic. And it is.

    On the site linked in the above article, one may read this:
    ” … I’ve put together a download that anyone with Gimp 2.8 on Linux can use to make their copy of gimp look more like Adobe Photoshop …”

    So the multi-booters who read this need not despair … seems it’s useful no matter which OS you prefer. And, this is a great tip.

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