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Comment by perl4ever | Hacker News Reader

"Krita has proven relatively successful in the domain of "open-source painting app""

Ok, but is there a good alternative to GIMP as an open source photo-editing app? Which is automatable? You use the past tense as though everyone already stopped using it.

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Feel free to argue otherwise, but I think GIMP's relevance has waned over the years, which is why I speak in that "past tense" you take issue with. For what it's worth I think Krita has worth in the domain of photo manipulation as well.

Krita also has automation utilities:

https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/main_menu/tools_m...

https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/python_scripting/intro...

I'm curious how you use GIMP and whether or not Krita would prove usable for you, i.e. if there's some critical specific functionality GIMP excels at where Krita falls behind.

I never heard of Krita before this, but my background is of being a very casual user of Photoshop which was pretty unaffordable in the 90s (other people's licenses, plus there was a "lite" version included with a scanner once) and when I first learned of GIMP, it was extremely annoying how much it tried to imitate Photoshop yet be arbitrarily different, but eventually I learned to do basic stuff in it. So now typically, I just want to resize a picture, convert the format, change the gamma, do something simple with layers, etc, and don't want to pay or learn anything new.

However, I never did learn how to script GIMP, and it seems like I will need to soon for maintaining a website, and if as I recall it has some sort of lisp like thing, I'm kind of allergic to that. I don't know python either, but it's probably more my speed.

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