I am a fairly advanced photoshop user (mostly CS2 and up), and I want to learn gimp.
The transition wasn’t as smooth as I thought it would be. I was lost trying to figure out even basic things.
Is there some sore of reference/tutorial that highlights the differences between the two? or should I just play around until I figure it out?
Thanks.
You don’t have photoshop & you’re an advanced user? :?
When I first started I got confused. Terms are slightly different vs adobe products. IMHO gimp works more like Painter vs Photoshop in it’s layers & tools setup. Takes some getting used to! Now I’d say photoshop is bad in some aspects of how it does things. 
Have you looked @ the manual? It’s helped me quite a bit. I’d use it to figure out how to do something. Once I got the basics I was easily able to adapt a photoshop tut to use in gimp.
First thing I want to say is keep at it. Don’t get discouraged. When I first used GIMP I hated it because I expected for some reason for Open Source Developers to simply copy every aspect of photoshop. Luckily I eventually learned it for what it is, and now except for a few still missing features I love it. used Photoshop on a freelance gig recently and I hated it.
I was an advanced photoshop user who didn’t have 600 to blow on Photoshop. Learned and used it in school and used a pirated copy at home so it’s quite possible to know photoshop and not own a currently license. I’ll never use Photoshop again unless it’s for a gig where I have to.
Some major things to be aware of, layers can’t be scaled from the corners like in Photoshop, you have to use the scale tool, but I prefer that because with small layer I would always accidentally resize stuff in photoshop instead of moving it. There’s no on-canvas text editing yet, but there will be soon. You can’t paint outside of the layer youre currently on, so learn to scale the layer to the bounding box or whatever it’s called. Also there’s no Adjustment layers but there could be in the future. There’s lots of small differences in the workflow that compound to make things seem foreign, but you’ll have an easier time than a newbie once you learn those distinctions. Just play with it and read these if you need to:
http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/
http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/index.html (free book for GIMP, somewhat out of date)
http://www.gimp.org/books/
http://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html
Thanks for the links!
Like you I learned Photoshop in school and now use a pirated copy, but I would like to go legit so I’m trying to learn Gimp. These links look helpful, I guess I’ll just keep at it until I get a bit more familiar with it.