Has anyone used GIMP AND Photoshop?

[swiss]

Not really. It is still destructive. Gimp scripts that are important to me don't emulate PS scripts. Plugins like the Felimage noise generator, and scripts like those RobA has here on this forum. More importantly, Gimp scripts are easy to open and change exactly the way I need.

If I understand correctly, Elements doesn't even have a curves adjustment, either as a non-destructive adjustment or just a straight curves adjustment. That alone is too much of a handicap. Photoshop CS2 is better than Elements, in my opinion. Gimp 2.10 has higher bit depth, and if I understand correctly, Elements is generally stuck at 8 bit. That's sort of breaks Elements for me at least.

Oof...count this as another thing I had never heard of. I looked up a tutorial...seems pretty straightforward on what it does, but now I have the same question as before....what's the typical application for this in mapmaking? Why would you want to lighten or darken a specific part of the map?

[Azélor]

I don't think there is a big difference if you go over 8 bit. 8 bit has plenty of colour, many of them you can't print or see the difference between them.

I also don't see tge usefulness of the curve adjustment, assuming we are talking the same thing. It's a must for photo editing but rarelly used in mapmaking.

[Sam101]

The 8 bit limitation can be important. Even if I cannot see the difference, the computer can, and more importantly, any filter or process that uses more than 8 bits can see the difference. For example, a histogram starts to look like a hair comb when you do a levels adjustment in 8 bit, or color banding, and this is mess sometimes in bump mapping, etc.

Gimp has 16 bit float, which I don't think PS has, and levels can be adjusted above and below the clipping points. This is important because the colors can be recovered.

Also, if I want to use a photograph as the basis for a texture then curves would be important, but I don't agree that curves are unimportant in map making.