GIMP is not great until it has adjustment layers.
In the meantime, nobody on a budget should be using Photoshop when Affinity Photo is so inexpensive (and significantly better than Photoshop in a couple of important ways).
To be fair to GIMP, I used PS back to when adjustment layers were not a thing. The work that team does is amazing and I give them props (though I still would love to see adjustment layers).
Yeah, this is super-useful. Also the layer blend curves are amazingly useful, particularly combined with live filter layers. And it can do LUT inference (e.g. from HALD CLUT images). I use that all the time.
> To be fair to GIMP, I used PS back to when adjustment layers were not a thing.
So did I, but GIMP has existed for almost as long as adjustment layers in PS! And for all that time they've refused to prioritise something that IMO is transformative in photoshop; it's the basis of non-destructive editing.