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Comment by healthyhippo | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much about photo editing, but I've used Gimp for a little while along with Inkscape for editing. I use it for simple stuff- drop shadows, minor logo work, etc. Is there a noticeable difference vs. photoshop on that level?

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Not really. The nice folks at Adobe would have you believe otherwise, but at low color depths, low image sizes, low skill levels; the difference isn't worth 5$, much less (googles) 999$ (before 100$ rebate. Unless you are making a lot of images, _and_ relying on them to make money, gimp is more than enough.

> the difference isn't worth 5$, much less (googles) 999$ (before 100$ rebate).

I think Photoshop, like Windows, is a beneficiary of piracy in this respect: if there were no way to get Photoshop for less than $999, there would be a lot more people using alternatives for a lot of niches where Photoshop isn't absolutely necessary. But students, people starting out, small-time freelancers, and even some random home users editing their Christmas photos just pirate Photoshop. Although, Paint.NET is gaining some market share in the home-user category.

Photoshop Elements is reasonably priced at £58 on Amazon as of right now. The people you're talking about do not NEED the full $1000 package.

They don't NEED it, but they WANT it.

At my school students recieve Photoshop for free if they are in a class that requires it, and if not they can buy it at deeply reduced rates---about ~90-120 for CS4 if I last recall.

In my opinion there is. In Photoshop you can attach dropshadows (layer styles) to layers. This will save you a lot of time when something changes. I used Photoshop and Gimp. I can create the same images in Gimp but it just takes a lot more time. For hobby that's ok, but for work it's not. Thats why people are willing to pay a lot for Photoshop. One thing that is bothering me in Gimp is that there is a layer size. Seems like a minor thing. But these are the little things that get in the way of working quick.

I think that for small stuff like that the difference won't be very noticeable,especially to the end user. If you get some designers to really look at it they might notice a difference, but I wouldn't want to pay for a Photoshop license for minor stuff like that.

A more interesting question is, to me: is The GIMP an adequate replacement for Photoshop Elements? I believe they have the same target market—people who are "adding drop shadows, doing minor logo work, etc."

Purely feature wise they might might be comparable, but features isn't where PSE's strength lies. Photoshop Elements has done a lot of UI work to make common tasks really easy. Someone who has never done any photo editing before can probably sit down with PSE and quickly get pretty great results without any major problems. The same can definitely not be said about The Gimp.

Yes, the noticeable difference is Gimp sucks!!

Hats off to the Gimp development team for pulling off so many features and above all having an open-source product out there. But the problem is PhotoShop has set the expectations way too high. And I'm afraid, a non-commercial product will never be able reach that level.

Are there any arguments why a non-commercial product (not necessarily Gimp) will never be able to reach "that level"? This looks suspiciously like "open source software is always worse than closed source!!!!!" which has been refuted more than once.

I don't think anyone doubts that for things like OS kernels, database engines, web frameworks, browsers, libraries, editors etc. FOSS software easily wins.

But for end-user applications where you pay for the competition and where the typical end-users are not developers, or similar, (e.g. MS Office, PaintShop, most games) then FOSS versions seem rather poor by comparison.

Have you ever tried MyPaint?

IMO a good example of a software which does its tasks very well (I'm no (digital) painter, but I've heard about graphic artists seriously thinking about switching to it... if it only had a Mac version...).

I agree Photoshop sets the expectations high. But I don't agree that a non-commercial product cannot reach that level. Take a look at Blender.

That's probably not the best example, as Blender was initially closed-source until the creators went bankrupt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)

But it's been open source for 8 years and under active development:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#Development

There can't be a huge amount of the original source left, surely?

Just because Photoshop might have set the bar high doesn't mean the GIMP "sucks!!".

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