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Comment by ethagnawl | Hacker News Reader

Gimp is a fantastic tool. I'm a developer who occasionally has to do some light graphics work and since I've started using it (~10 years ago?) have never missed Photoshop.

It'd be interesting to hear from Photoshop power users, who've made the switch, what they miss and what Gimp does better.

For those who didn't make it past the highlight list, here's the donation/support link: https://www.gimp.org/donating/ I just made a small donation and encourage others who use Gimp regularly to do the same.

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Gimp is a fantastic tool for developers. It does well the tasks that can be automated or thought about in terms of algorithms (rotate all images, resize, stretch levels to 0-255, etc.). Great product! Kudos to its developers.

It is, however, a lame duck to photographers (and I think many other artists) when compared with Photoshop. Those who want a visual interface to drag sliders around, instanly see how things would look and edit based on tight coupling with that visual perception still choose Photoshop. I have seen many, many artists try Gimp only to go back. Maybe Gimp does not need to be that tool for artists, but if it does its developer community needs to be more engaged with photography crowd.

As a data point: current Adobe licensing model is almost universally hated. If there were a viable option many users would migrate. I would (and I am just a hobbyist). And it is not for lack of trying -- they do try Gimp (and Liminar, and Affinity and such). But the fact that they curse Adobe but still use Photoshop tells you a lot about the fact that Gimp just does not cut it for them. My 2c.

I agree. I used to be a professional photographer and videographer. I switched jobs, but I still keep my gear around. One piece of virtual gear that I don't keep around is anything Adobe. Whereas before, I could buy an actual product and use it when I need it, now it would have to become a subscription I constantly turn on and off when I want to do a small, sometimes pro-bono, photo or video shoot.

Affinity Photo is a pretty good alternative. Familiar interface and features, and a one-time affordable purchase. Not entirely sure what an equivalent might be for video.

Final Cut

I still use Photoshop and Illustrator (because for my money there's nothing comparable, and I'll pay for them because of it) but for video I've moved almost entirely over to DaVinci Resolve. BlackMagic's free version is really complete and (possibly because it started life mostly as a color grading application) I find that the way it presents options and tools works better with the way I like to do things.

The Studio version's pretty cheap, too, if you want to upgrade.

As an anecdotal counterpoint, I'm a dedicated amateur photographer [1] who works entirely on a Debian stack (Darktable/GIMP). I've been occasionally curious about Lightroom/Photoshop's capabilities, but have never felt that I was lacking anything so grievous as to consider a switch.

Furthermore, I'd have to run an entirely different OS from the one I've been using since 2002, and lash myself to a licensing model that would be both crippling and expensive.

From my perspective, Adobe's tools do have remarkable capabilities and substantial support. The improved content-aware fill is remarkable, but I never need it. Adobe's close relationships with camera manufacturers (and large developer team) ensures that new cameras and lenses are supported almost at release. Lensfun and Darktable do a great job of keeping up with new hardware, but it often takes at least a few months for new cameras to be supported.

I buy slightly-older hardware, and I check for Darktable compatibility before purchase/rental. (The GFX50R isn't yet on my radar screen in part for this reason[2], though support is clearly on the way[3].)

[1] https://www.charliehagedorn.photography/ https://www.instagram.com/charliehagedorn/

[2] https://www.darktable.org/resources/camera-support/

[3] https://github.com/darktable-org/rawspeed/pull/161

I'm going to chime in my agreement here. I shoot film, develop at home, print in my darkroom, then scan my negatives if I ever want to share them digitally (rare-ish since the whole point of shooting film for me is to get off the computer, but like to share sometimes).

I ran Linux as a desktop for ~10 years and have just switched to OS X, but pulled in GIMP/Darktable/VueScan workflow even though I have access to the Adobe suite. I found GIMP lacking nothing granted I basically just replicate my darkroom process on the negatives when I scan them if I plan to share them digitally (dodge, burn, contrast).

I'm sure there are some advanced layering and other workflows, but I'm not really interested in doing anything I can't replicate in the darkroom. Plus as I said the entire point here is to use the computer less, but still derive joy from an old hobby.

Edit: Also, really enjoying your IG feed. Great work in your color palettes and in the tones across your black and whites as well. May be my love for the Hasselblads and 6x6 frames, but most of those work really well as straight squares as well. Nice to see another PNW photographer on here.

Thanks! -- I've not yet spent a lot of time making square images, but perhaps I'll give it a try someday. If IG were horizontal, I'd probably be working that way :); I primarily use the vertical 1.25:1 because it lets me fill the screen for the reader.

> Those who want a visual interface to drag sliders around, instanly see how things would look

Oh, do you by any chance mean on-canvas preview available for almost every filter since GIMP 2.10.0 released a year ago? With that split preview slider? :)

I do light graphics work too. Making blog post images and Youtube thumbnails mostly.

I started using Gimp a few months ago after 10+ years of using Photoshop. My biggest complaint is the quality of scaling an image down. It's really really bad compared to Photoshop (even if you play with the low level details of picking the scale strategy). It always seems to come out blurry or fuzzy, to the point where I stopped using Gimp for that. Is there a better way to scale images?

Also, I just wanted to throw in a comment of, if you're switching to Gimp, don't immediately discount it for not having features you're used to with Photoshop.

For example, with Photoshop, if you copy an image to your clipboard outside of Photoshop, then you when you create a new image in Photoshop, the dimensions of the canvas will be set to the image in the clipboard. This way it's super easy to make a new image, paste the image from your clipboard and now you have a properly sized image.

Gimp has this feature but it's not implemented in a way that's the same as Photoshop. Instead, with Gimp you can just press CTRL + Shift + V to paste the image from the clipboard into a new image and it's all set up and good to go. The menu item is "paste as... new image".

Haven't noticed excessive blurriness with older cubic, or newer nohalo, but my needs are limited.

convert -resize from ImageMagick is another option.

It happens whenever I resize a layer (any type of image) or generally resize an image. It's always so much worse than Photoshop's quality. Very noticeable.

The problem with using an external tool is I often want to resize layers on the fly to fit them into a final image I'm working on. So using a third party tool to do that goes from a 5 second operation to 5 minutes because I first have to resize it in Gimp to get the dimensions and then resize it "for real" with a different program and then place that into the Gimp image.

It's gotten to the point now where I'm looking for an alternative to Gimp, or I'll just go back to using Photoshop full time (even though it's a huge waste of $ since I only edit about 2 images a week).

My approach: import unsharpened image from Darktable, scale down with NoHalo (added in GIMP 2.10, along with LoHalo), sharpen final image with unsharp mask. When downscaling a clean image, try 1-pixel radius, strength 0.35, threshold 0.05 as a starting point.

"None" interpolation is occasionally useful as well, in image with really striking edges.

Agreed that the older downscaling algorithms aren't great. My impression is that they do a nice mathematical job of downscaling, but not a great perceptual one.

But then compare that to Photoshop where you don't need to use any external tools or play with a bunch of settings.

You just scale the image down and it looks flawless and takes like 2 seconds. In over 10 years of using Photoshop I never once noticed a blurry downscaled image, but the first time I used Gimp to resize an image I immediately saw a poor result. I used every resize strategy too (including NoHalo and LoHalo -- they are both really bad compared to Photoshop).

It makes working with Gimp for any web style graphics a huge hassle because down scaling images is something you do all the time, and it's not just the final image too. It's every layer you're working with. Having to export every layer into a third party app and then re-place it is a huge time sink.

Can anyone speak to the UX difference as well? Not just feature comparisons but what it's like to be using GIMP vs Photoshop.

I used Photoshop regularly for a few months in 2009 but that was a public school computer so I'm sure the version was one or two behind. My GIMP use is more frequent/recent but very irregular and for a variety of tasks that are never critical to my livelihood. Today I feel like GIMP is much nicer to use than when I started using it (~2006) but I still remember Photoshop being a nicer experience.

I don't know if that's well shared or has changed.

I worked as a graphic designer for about 12 years. I've been using Gimp at work (as a programmer) for light graphics duties. Mostly cropping and adjusting levels on images.

It's not been an easy transition, but I'm getting used to it. It's similar in function to Photoshop, but performing said functions is just different enough to make it challenging.

It have a lot of functions but it is still very lacking on the UX side. I launched it today for small image correction and had to wait literally for minutes. Also, no native file picker, dialog boxes losing focus and becoming unclickable, no way to find how to move text object, all that frustrating things happen in the same 15 minutes of use.

I doubt it'll be GIMP, but i'd like to see a program that follows the UX of Paint Shop Pro (especially PSP7, the last good version IMO before they rewrote the UI and then sold it to Corel that gutted it out) which i always found much easier and more intuitive to use than both Photoshop and GIMP.

For a little while i thought Krita would be it, but i quickly realized that they just copied Photoshop for the most part.

Was just thinking how great PSP was back in the days I still used Windows.

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