Gimp versus others

i am looking to see wheterits necesary for me to part with serious $$$ or if i can instead use something like GIMP?

i am in love with aperture, but for the $$ and i am only a hobby photographer.

whats the feedback on GIMP and other software on Mac's?

I asked a similar question a while back, and got some helpful answers. Here.

May as well give gimp a try, its free! See if it meets your needs for now... I started out using Gimp, and don't have any regrets... It actually allowed me to wait out a version or two of Photoshop until I started wanting some of the things that were missing. (I use Elements, BTW... Version 5.0 is under $100... can be found even cheaper on ebay if you're brave.) I still use the gimp from time to time, and always install it on new machines for friends and family.

Raw conversion is best done elsewhere, however, using DPP or other option.

Until end of April, Lightroom is much cheaper than Aperture ($199... discount code floating around brings it down to $170.) However, it doesn't do layers, selective editing, and plugins like Photoshop, Elements, or Gimp will... everyone that uses Lightroom still uses one of these types of applications to do those types of things.

Also available that are based on GIMP are Seashore and GIMPshop.

Seashore doesn't require X11, latest version has native support for Intel Macs. Gimpshop uses X11 but the menus are simiar to PS & it is Universal Binary.