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Comment by 01walid | Hacker News Reader

How does Krita compare to Gimp at this point?

(Since someone on the comments here said it can be a Photoshop drop-in replacement)

To me, the thing that brings me back to Krita over and over is that fact that it's intuitive to use. I've been trying to use GIMP for the past 10 years and still have no idea how to resize an image/canvas or where the heck the crop tool is. In Krita those things are exactly where I end up looking for them.

Wife still uses Photoshop CS 2 on Windows, and I've basically told her that when her computer dies, she's getting Linux and open source software, or she's gonna have to figure out Windows 11 by herself and pay the subscription for Adobe. "Fine with Linux" she says, since it's installed on other computers in the house, "... but what can I use instead of Photoshop?". "Use Gimp, of course!" I say, and install it on her computer. Then I watch her get increasingly frustrated for an hour before rage quitting. It's not lack of features, it's UI, UX, workflow.

There are a lot of paths that are unique to each of them. I bet the reverse (from Gimp to PS) feels the same. My wife asked to make a logo and a leaflet, and I never offered other thing than Inkscape. She ended up using it for almost anything. After a couple of years I bet that she will find Illustrator frustrating.

The difference is that after a week of serious Photoshop training you will have at your fingertips a world class, incredibly powerful piece of software with modern ML tools for smart image manipulation, collaborative tools and cloud infrastructure for syncing documents, plus a massive ecosystem of plugins and assets available to purchase.

I say this as someone who strongly dislikes Photoshop. I wish I had a viable alternative.

Photoshop CS2 is good.

You'd better test if her Photoshop works fine with Wine. If it does, nobody get frustrated, there is no need for her to relearn everything from scratch if she is satisfied with that tool and her workflow established over more than 10 years, and you don't have to pay for a new tool.

It does! Some very minor UI issues but very usable. Actually, I've got an old trial version of Photoshop CS6 (I think? Whichever was the last version they released as locally installable) and it also seems to work on Wine. But you can't buy that any more :(

It shouldn't be difficult to set up a VM for Windows + Photoshop CS2.

You can run older versions of Photoshop (CS2 is almost certainly old enough) surprisingly well in wine. If she doesn’t like something like Krita, I’d try installing the exact version of photoshop she’s used to under wine.

Seriously? I can understand people having trouble adapting to a different layering model, but cropping? If over 10 years you haven't been able to figure out

Image -> Crop to selection

then either it's a real accomplishment they you can cloth yourself in the morning, or this is just willful ignorance.

Maybe Gimp has one of the worst UI/UX ever made? I still stand by my theory that gimp was made as a troll program to see how far people will defend opensource no matter how objectively bad it is to use.

As somebody who uses Photoshop for a living, I prefer the GIMP. The GIMP falls down on a few major features, not on usability. I can also see how Photoshop as the standard has broken people's brains so much that the concept of "intuitive" becomes entirely lost. It's not as bad as Illustrator, but features are just randomly thrown everywhere; the only reason I'm fast at it is from hard-won experience.

It's impossible to paint "Image -> Crop to Selection" as hard to find. The menu is at the same place it is in almost every other program one uses, at the top of the window.

I'd hesitate to call Photoshop or GIMP intuitive.

What was intuitive was Paint Shop Pro at around v3 and v4. I compliment Krita for being almost as intuitive as PSP.

I've never used Photoshop and gimp confuses the hell out of me. I installed krita a year ago for my simple editing tasks and never once had to search online for 'how do I....'

I've used all three, and the amount of searching from least to most goes Krita -> PS -> GIMP for me.

PS was the first I used, but I still had to search things for the entire time I used it. GIMP I just start by looking up how to do something, and Krita I just do it.

As someone who never used Photoshop before I find Gimp's UI functional and nothing worth complaining about. Especially I like the MDI interface with each widget being a seperate window.

It's been a long time, but when I was in high school I chose to use the GIMP rather than Photoshop for my photo class, which was the first time I used any photo editing software. I found it to be more or less fine.

(At that time, Photoshop was also MDI, IIRC.)

> then either it's a real accomplishment they you can cloth yourself in the morning, or this is just willful ignorance.

no, this is what the average user looks like. Most people had trouble with TV remotes until they started making them with 4/5 buttons at most.

> I've been trying to use GIMP for the past 10 years and still have no idea how to resize an image/canvas

The tool is right in the toolbox for interactive resizing, or Image > Scale Image for blunt numeric input.

> or where the heck the crop tool is.

Also right there in the toolbox.

There's exactly one thing I still prefer to do in Gimp - splitting a single image into multiple images, one per RGBA/HSL channel. There's also some image formats that Gimp supports that Krita does not. But that's it. There's nothing else I miss, and Krita is just incredibly far ahead on usability.

Krita’s Python API should have everything you need to do this automatically.

Layer->Split Layer got some love for this release, too, but I'm not sure whether it even made it into the release notes.

I think they are talking about Image > Image split

> splitting a single image into multiple images

There is Image menu > Image split in Krita

Krita has an amazingly frustrating text handling experience. It's the one major thing that makes me open GIMP. The font size never seems to stick.

They fixed the font handling in this release

They fixed a font size bug that made it inconsistent between computers, but did they change the user interface for font styling? It's the second that makes it annoying - I never got far enough to notice the bug.

It depends gimp have more photo editing features but is a mess, and krita is more of painting app who have features of photo editing( more than not professionals tends to need)

I think the only real advantage of GIMP at this point is its age and stability. Gimp was around 20 years ago and it is more likely to be there 20 years from now than Krita. EDIT: my error - Krita is much older than I thought.

Moreover stability is important if you access it programmatically.

And yes, even that is not guaranteed by any means. It's just the area where Krita does not beat Gimp totally.

Krita was started in the previous millenium, too. I've been Krita's maintainer since 2004... If I have to think about what I did with my life, https://krita.org/en/about/krita-releases-overview/ comes to mind :-)

Wow, this guy really sounds like a winner: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Freiherr_von_Grave...

Heh,those were "fun" times, and they even predate my own involvement!

Any chance you could drop a tl;dr for those of us who don't read German?

Poked around a bit at Wikipedia, but didn't find anything.

Also, thanks for all you do with Krita! It's one of the programs that I don't think I've ever not had installed on my daily driver.

I'm sorry, but it's untranslatable... Both for language and for custom.

Fair enough, I figured that might be the case but thought I'd ask.

Thanks for everything again!

"he was an utter asshole" is my take on it. See my earlier comment.

here is google's autotranslation:

https://de-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_F...

Just read this guy's vita. An entire long life of profit-oriented road rage, always using the law and presumably his connections to go after like everyone else for minor copyright and similar offenses, striving to make this planet a more miserable place for everyone else while raking in for himself. At almost 90 yo he finally got convicted for fraud and rather killed himself instead of going to jail. Not even his high-falutin name is all that real. At some point he tried to get courts deny people the right to even mention the fact that he was not born as a Von And Zu. Christ what an asshole.

I've never been able to do anything meaningful in GIMP, but Krita is relatively nice to use. It's much more intuitive than GIMP, and even things you have to look up and learn are easier to get used to and remember, because the UI actually makes sense.

In terms of photo editing, Gimp is far more featureful. I give some examples here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29664606

Krita is a better painting and animation program than GIMP. It also has much better scripting and color space support.

GIMP is easier/better at 8 bit image editing though.

The things I noticed: Nicer UI. Better colourspace support. Less good tablet support.

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