Published May 5, 2026, 10:30 AM EDT Nolen began their writing career in 2019, with three years dedicated to editing the Creative section at MakeUseOf . Their expertise lies at the crossroads of technology and creativity, covering areas like photography, video editing, and graphic design. Outside of work, you'll often find Nolen diving into a good book, writing their own stories, or playing video games. GIMP gets recommended as the open-source image editor by default. That's also how I got into it at first, but ended up drifting away from it because the user flow just wasn't for me. I still have it installed and poke around in it from time to time, but primarily moved on to other free editors now . Although GIMP wasn't specifically built to replace Photoshop , it ended up wearing that label anyway, mostly because there wasn't much else in the open-source space doing what it did. The community latched onto it, and it just kind of became the top alternative recommendation.…