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Comment by prathiks | Hacker News Reader

I have always advocated for Gimp but people esp designers want to stick to photoshop. Hope they understand the power of this open source

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Can GIMP load psd files correctly? I seem to remember that there was some trouble loading psd files, but I don't remember exactly what.

Edit to add: I ask because if GIMP cannot handle the de facto standard image file type without too much fiddling, people won't touch it. It is the same problem LibreOffice has, actually.

The notes OP linked to indicate that there are more fixes included in this version. It is likely what importing a .doc in open office was 10 years ago. It proably works 99% of the time but that 1% will be right before an important deadline or something.

You can't expect a non-proprietary tool to handle a proprietary file format 100% correctly. People who have no need for file formats that only work with Adobe software can use GIMP just fine.

GIMP doesn't support Smart Objects.. a huge shortcoming

As long as you're dealing with layers of raster data loading psd files works. Once you start adding things like smart objects it fails.

I use gimp to deal with psd files of web page layouts from designers and so far it's worked every time.

Never heard of PSD until your comment. Not so standard.

Wikipedia: "A .PSD file is a layered image file used in Adobe PhotoShop."

Oh, that's what you mean by "standard".

Not "standard" as in, I can put onto a server, point a web page's IMG at it, and be confident it displays on everyone's browser.

Or "standard" as in, documented in some RFC or other standard document.

How well does Photoshop open the "standard" GIMP .xcf files?

Anybody in graphics design for more than 5 minutes any time in the last 25 years knows what a PSD file is. Because you are not familiar with a (defacto) industry standard doesn't make it non-standard.

The Adobe PSD file format is documented in painful detail here https://www.adobe.com/devnet-apps/photoshop/fileformatashtml...

The format is binary and extremely convoluted, in part because it attempts to maintain compatibility with 20 years of versions of Photoshop. Because of this complexity, I am unaware of any program that can read or write a PSD file that supports all features of Photoshop. I am in fact aware of no non-Adobe program that will read and write a Photoshop file with editable text layers (including Gimp).

> Anybody in graphics design for more than 5 minutes any time in the last 25 years knows what a PSD file is. Because you are not familiar with a (defacto) industry standard doesn't make it non-standard.

True. I haven't used any program for image editing other than GIMP since 1996 (which I first installed on a GNU/Linux system running on a Sun Sparcstation 20!)

> I am in fact aware of no non-Adobe program that will read and write a Photoshop file with editable text layers (including Gimp).

That's just a consequence of being so incredibly standard.

PSD is an industry standard.

Sure; if you can say "industry" in reference to a bunch of people whose employability is hinged to a single PC/Mac application.

Not merely a single application, the entire network of Adobe applications, and the interoperability between them, which doesn't just mean still images, but audio and visual effects in commercials, film, video games, physical print, professional photography. Almost any visual media outside of the browser at some point interacts with Adobe and PSD files.

And someone whose employability is probably tied to a specific OS, toolchain or software stack really shouldn't throw stones.

What percentage of professional graphic artists do you think were using non-Adobe products through the early 2000s?

I don't know for sure but I'd wager upwards of 80%.

Just like Word's doc format?

It's only a 'standard' for those closed-minded industrial drones who won't ever contemplate using something different. This is the attitude that causes awesome, innovative software to disappear beneath a morass of "But it's not industry standard!".

I create graphics. I don't use any Adobe software. Adobe isn't the only graphics software company out there.

In this case standard meant industry standard. If you are working in the graphics industry (and web industry in agency world) people will send you psd files ALL the time. If you cannot open it accurately then you work off inaccurate designs and deliver a poor product.

A .psd file is not an end-user asset. I can think of no use case where someone would point a browser at a hosted .psd and expect that binary file to render as an inline image.

A .psd file was, for a good chunk of the past twenty years, the "de facto standard" file format for teams or entire departments of graphic artists who spent all day, every day in Photoshop. I once worked for an online ad agency and Photoshop was used more often, by more people, than MS Word and Excel combined. The Network Effect was in full force. Graphics teams at three different companies cooperating on the same campaign would assume that their counterparts were using Photoshop, and would expect to send and receive .psd files. Man, Adobe must have been printing money in those days.

If you worked in print publishing, digital publishing, advertising, marketing, there was probably a graphics department of people who spent all day in Photoshop... and an IT department that was constantly trying to add new server capacity as fast as those artists were consuming it. Back when we measured server storage in GB, not TB, fifteen different versions of the same massive PSD file could cause real heartburn.

I think you need to look up the meaning of "de facto", since its presence in GP's comment renders your entire complaint moot.

de facto and standard are basically opposites. Except when standard is used as a synonym for "the way things are due to some hegemony or similar situation".

My complaint is basically: fuck off with the Adobe in a thread about Gimp. If you think the Adobe program is better or must work with every possible instance of its files, or you just feel good to use a de facto standard, go use the Adobe program.

Gimp is its own thing; it is not an open source clone of Adobe Photoshop. Never has been.

So they're opposites, except in this exact situation? Cool.

> My complaint is basically: fuck off with the Adobe in a thread about Gimp

OK, sure, but maybe you should have A) said something resembling that in the first place instead of attempting some inane linguistic argument, and B) replied to the person who introduced the comparison rather than the one who had a pretty salient response to that.

"Better PSD Support The PSD plug-in now supports a wider range of blending modes for layers, at both importing and exporting: Linear Burn, Linear Light, Vivid Light, Pin Light, and Hard Mix blending modes. It also finally supports exporting layer groups and reads/writes the Pass Through mode in those. Additionally, GIMP now imports and exports color tags from/to PSD files."

I don't use GIMP to load PSDs, but I don't remember the last time I had a problem with a Word doc in LibreOffice.

Only as long as it's just bitmap layers with masks, and images are in RGB. Text layers will be rasterized. The rest of the features will usually be dropped.

Hope you understand that some of use need non destructive editing...

Think of it as Photoshop (Java) vs. Gimp (NodeJs).

You are going to have a LOT more reach with Java for "career stability". That's why designers stick with it.

It's not a matter of "career stability." It's a matter of the printer you send work to only being willing to work with PSD or PDF. If no one uses Gimp, and none of your tools integrate with Gimp's native format, and no one else's tools do either, and no one can open the files in their email, making them less portable than Adobe files, then Gimp is a technical liability, regardless of its quality.

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