Among other things, I write proposals and document conditions on construction projects. I use Photoshop Elements at work for fixing/tweaking/annotating photographs and sketches. Elements costs about $100, and does much more than I need. Today, for example, I scanned a sketch from the field, reoriented some text, cropped out unnecessary detail, tweaked contrast, erased handwritten scribbling, wrote in replacement text, and fixed highlighting where I had erased some handwriting. I'm not sure how much of that you could do with GIMP, though probably quite a bit.
For me, even Photoshop Elements was a steep learning curve. In retrospect, I should have taken a course to flatten the learning curve, but now everyone at work comes to me for help with Photoshop.
I have an older version at home that works almost as well as the new one.
My niece works in commercial art. She studied Photoshop as an undergrad. She told me the optimal way to produce her work is to rough out by hand, scan, and finish up with a program like Photoshop. She's right.
(Yes I know the GIMP is GPL licensed too, no software's perfect)
