I will generally go along with what he says, and when I have a chance I'm going to revisit it because I really, really want my own installation of GIMP to be more Photoshop-like. I've skimmed through Riley Brandt's open-source pages and Photoshop-to-GIMP article. gives a screenshot and short description of most of the programs I mentioned. similar article looking at various tools. workflow of a photographer using open source software.

But anybody able to afford the kind of hardware you mention probably doesn't care much about a few hundred or thousand dollars a year for software.

Depending on the point in the photographer's career they might be most persuaded by the cost (Linux Mint is entirely free of cost, as are all the above programs except the last). I'd imagine a photographer just cares about having the tools they need on their desktop and the operating system being very stable, needing little to no maintenance, and generally staying as much as possible out of their way. Most of these are available also for Windows and/or OS X so they can try them out there.Īs for persuading them, switching to another operating system costs time & energy. The intended user would probably need to experiment a bit to see which could be useful for them. Corel Aftershot Pro - (this is commercial software) Some common suggestions for photo editing on Linux (at least some of these I know will work any kind of RAW images):

Riley brandt darktable tutorials