PS solves that by using Smart Objects, Krita by Transform Masks, GIMP? Nope
I'd say that GIMP is somewhat comparable to the feature set of CS2, though I admit I havent used gimp much.
The biggest drawback of GIMP is that it is the least intuitive software I or anyone I've asked in person has ever used.
Basic operations like making selections, cropping, and moving selections or layers are a chore. The keyboard shortcuts don't make any sense, and the tool icons all look the same, so I wind up hovering over each one to find the dang crop tool in the first place. Oh, it's the one that looks like an X-acto knife instead of the universal brackets icon for crop.
The selection tool is just weird. You can highlight a region of the image, but to manipulate or transform it, there's no "Control+T" equivalent as far as I've discovered.
The whole thing feels like a mess coming from Photoshop. Paint .NET has far and away better usability.
Sure, you can accomplish the same things, eventually, and I guess that makes them both capable image editors. But using GIMP feels like I'm interacting with a machination of Dr. Seuss if he had to draw a Whoville contraption that edited photos.
As you said, Paint.NET has far better usability despite GIMP actually having more features.
The icons really need an overhaul with GIMP, that hovering over each icon to see if it is the crop tool, and lack of Control+T struck all too close to home.
I don't know what ctrl+T is (there may be some nuance I'm missing), but in Gimp the corner resize handles are always visible in a selection, the side handles appear on mouseover, and moving a selection is click+drag in the center.
It's pretty much an all-in-one toolbox of most anything you'd want to do with a selection, and I could never find a good equivalent of that in GIMP.
Regarding the handles in GIMP - last I tried them, they resized the selection region, rather than the underlying image, which was immensely frustrating.
Personally I find GIMP far more intuitive than Photoshop. The problem with GIMP for me is that most of the editing tools are pretty low quality, across the board. The text layer tool is terrible, the filters aren't very good, support for non-destructive editing is missing, the quality of edits are pretty bad - at least for a long time curve adjustments were done in 8 bits, leading to banding when trying to do almost any kind of significant adjustment. That might still be the case, it wouldn't surprise me.
> Personally I find GIMP far more intuitive than Photoshop
Whew, we did it! I was worried for a few minutes, but we're still at 100% of GIMP/Photoshop comparisons containing this exchange in the comments.
Other parts of the complaint don't make a lot of sense either. For example the complaint about the icons -- I agree, the default icons are completely unintelligible. But GIMP ships with alternative icon sets, several of which are far easier for me to use and discern.
As someone who does use Photoshop sometimes, and still uses Lightroom as my primary tool for photography, I still prefer GIMP and its simple interface for quick edits.