As a popular application, GIMP is regularly reviewed and criticised
. The reviews often target the fitness of GIMP for use in professional environments; as such GIMP is often cited as a replacement for Adobe Photoshop. Even though comparisons to Photoshop are of regular occurrence, the maintainers of GIMP state that GIMP does not aim to replicate Photoshop.
GIMP 2.6 has been reviewed twice by Ars Technica. In the first review, Ryan Paul noted that GIMP provides "Photoshop-like capabilities and offers a broad feature set that has made it popular with amateur artists and open source fans. Although GIMP is generally not regarded as a sufficient replacement for high-end commercial tools, it is beginning to gain some acceptance in the pro market." While previously it had been recognized that GIMP had extensive capabilities, few noteworthy reviewers have cited GIMP as a tool used in professional environments. Dave Girard also reviewed GIMP 2.6, specifically with the aim of testing GIMP's fitness for professional tasks. He noted at the beginning that GIMP was a high-end tool, but the review conclusion noted that although many of GIMP's tools were of high quality, he felt that it lacked in some areas such as non-destructive editing, tools such as a saturation brush and that GIMP did not integrate well to Mac OS X; Dave Girard recognized however that OS X is not the native platform of GIMP.