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Comment by jolmg | Hacker News Reader

> or do Photoshop-level editing of photos

How far ahead is Photoshop when compared to Gimp for the type of editing an average Photoshop user does? Do people really find Gimp lacking?

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Like a good FOSS nerd (and cheapo), I tried to steer my daughter towards Gimp rather than shelling out for Photoshop. She dug in her heels, and eventually I was able to divine that the reason was, the internet is chock-full of tutorials on using Photoshop to do all the kinds of art she wanted to do. The number of equivalently-useful Gimp tutorials was effectively zero. That's when I gave in.

I guess a variant of the network effect?

heck, even as a seasoned developer currently learning my way around webdev, i tinkered a bit with roda and hanami (both of which are wonderfully designed frameworks), and ended up ditching them both for rails because that's where all the tutorials, articles and example code are.

And yet, GIMP could have an interface much more like Photoshop. There are commercial Photoshop clones on the market (Paint Shop Pro). Why do open-source devs always have to make something out in left field?

Well, the average Photoshop user is a professional. I don't know if GIMP is lacking in features, but I definitely feel very out of place whenever I need to do anything. The features might be there, but either the UX is bad or I'm not used to it.

I've used GIMP way more often than Photoshop for the past two years, and I definitely don't feel any more at ease. The transform tool, for example, I always find unintuitive and hard, and everything else is more or less the same. It's a pity.

Yes, you’ll often see Gimp’s UX problems handwaved away as the user being too used to Photoshop, but it runs deeper than that.

I was having a discussion with a proprietor of a software retailer many years ago. He was thoroughly annoyed by people who walked in and insisted upon getting Photoshop and complaining about the price of Photoshop when it was clear their needs would be met by an inexpensive alternative. What they needed was the brand name, not the tool. Sometimes that need for the brand name is legitimate, say when you want to learn a tool to pursue a career. Usually that need for the brand name is purely emotional.

I suspect that Gimp has all of the features needed for the typical editing done by an average user. In cases where it is ill suited to their needs, I suspect it is due to a steep learning curve because it follows an image editing model similar to Photoshop.

Until GIMP fixes its UI to be usable to an average graphic designer, it's a complete non-starter. Until it gets CMYK editing and color separation, and nondestructive editing, it's a non-starter.

What's the point of CMYK? Your image is going to be displayed on a panel that has some form of red, green, and blue LEDs. For something like printing a picture you can always just have the printer do the conversion from RGB to CMYK.

Conversion isn’t a perfect process and often has undesirable effects on the image. This makes it necessary for documents intended for print to be created in CMYK.

How do you preview your image then? You have to have it in RGB for editing to show up on your monitor.

This is not a discussion worth having, there isn't good logic in any of the discussions with photoshop users, its pretty much going to come down to personal preference.

If by Photoshop users you mean print professionals, you're right. Arguing isn't worth your time. Adobe has built its reputation around actually listening to professional designers working in the print, film, and Web industries and adding features to their software to support workflows from those industries. GIMP... has not. (As another example also mentioned here, in addition to CMYK, Photoshop also knows about spot colors and can separate those for prepress as well.) Until GIMP gets actual, professional customers and really listens to them, it's a nonstarter in this space.

Working in CMYK lets you avoid the stage where everything looks muted when printed because you didn’t properly account for the different gamut, and because nobody knows how to properly set up conversions.

And beyond that, Adobe’s stuff knows about things like using spot inks outside of the RGB/CMYK spaces. Spot gloss, metallics, etc. Open source alternatives do not.

Though Krita[1] insists on advertising itself as a "painting program", it handles everything you listed: CMYK support,[2] color separation,[3] and non-destructive editing.[4] Krita supports both raster and vector layers as well. It's well-suited for graphic design, and its interface is more familiar to Adobe product users.

[1] https://krita.org

[2] https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/color_mode...

[3] https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/separate_image.ht...

[4] https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/layers_and_masks.html#...

If GIMP changed their UI we'd end up with drama and a fork.

The main reason I still use gimp as my daily driver is because it didn't change and I still am able to do things. Everytime I worked with Adobe products (every X years) it felt like learning a new software. Which i have zero interest in

What exactly is unusable about its UI beyond not being Photoshop and breaking muscle memory?

I found Photoshop CS6 from 10 years ago much more usable than Gimp. I was trying to do very basic things on Gimp and it was very hard or impossible. Like non destructive text editing or setup print size with ruler and markers. I think Gimp is fine to make some rough and quick edits but that's it.

I run Photoshop CC 2018 on Ubuntu 20.04 with WINE and it runs like a dream.

Anything earlier than 2018 won’t support high resolution displays and anything later is not currently supported by WINE, but Photoshop CC 2018 is very good.

Hey that's good to hear, I'm going to try it out later. I never succeeded to run photoshop on WINE until now. Did you had to do anything special?

I am using Play On Linux on Ubuntu 20.04. You can run CS6 without doing anything special, but if you want hires GUI then you need CC 2018. I set it up a while ago and don’t recall how much I had to do, but I pulled the latest Photoshop script from the Play On Linux website and modified it to point to my install.exe. I think the main thing was using a Windows XP base. Then once you open Photoshop you will have to disable in the preferences to disable automatic plugin updates or you will periodically get an annoying error message. Also set to hires in preferences. Other than those two things, it’s flawless. I run it almost daily. This stuff is all noted in the comments sections on the Play On Linux and WINE websites Photoshop versions pages, but admittedly there should be a guide somewhere. One last thing: I do not own the copy I am using because you can’t buy CC 2018 anywhere. Running the crack is done with the ‘Run an executable’ option in Play On Linux.

Not a professional in the area, but I follow gimp development for the last decade.

Biggest UI problems have been fixed by Peter Sikking and a few remaining will be fixed by the switch to gtk3 on version 3.0. Version 3.0 will also improve color management and, at least for a few non-professional cases, good enough CMYK.

Last remaining deficiency for me to suggest professional photographers to consider it is non-destructive editing (adjustment layers) which will (hopefully) be available in 3.2.

Interplanetary distances. My usual use case is editing 16k hdri's. Gimp can't do this, it simply crashes or grinds to a halt. I also spend a lot of time creating textures with filters. Gimp can't do this. Even editing a 4k texture barely works. Also digital painting sucks, tablet recognition is still terrible, and the UI is even worse than Photoshop's, which takes genuine, conscious effort and work on the part of the devs. The docs almost always show examples from several versions back with a different interface making them functionally useless. And it crashes. All. The. Time.

Even for ordinary photo retouching the experience is just worse.

Now darktable is a decent opensource alternative for Lightroom and parts of Photoshop for photo adjustment and if your aim is to make your photos look good rather than heavily manipulate them I would go with that. Krita is also ok for digital painting, although it has its issues.

Non-destructive editing is a big one for photo editing.

Photoshop has some really clever AI based tools that neither Gimp or Krita can match. For what I do, which is not manipulating photos for magazines, erasing objects and so on, Gimp has been overkill.

> Photoshop has some really clever AI based tools

Can you expound on these?

It does deep-learning based denoising and super resolution, de-blurring (as a result of camera shake or out-of-focus shots), sky replacement (e.g. if you took a shot on a "severe clear" day it can make your sky cloudy), and depth-aware haze removal. It can do auto-portrait touchups. It can automatically tweak a subject's apparent age and expression, it can transfer a style of makeup from one subject to another. It can adjust lighting in post, you can actually move the highlights and shadows around. Etc.

It's kind of amazing tbh.

Thanks, those sound pretty cool. I need to give modern Photoshop a spin one of these days, I haven't touched it since CS6.

Microsoft Image Composer came bundled with Frontpage (Microsoft's HTML editor from the 90's). It was easy to use and did nearly all the things an "average user", me included, would need. I used it all through the XP years. I've since learned to do most of what I need with GIMP.

one of the nice things about software going web-based (figma, for example) is that I don’t need to worry about the OS

I don’t know if gimp is lacking because I have no reason to use it. I need to use photoshop to work with other people using photoshop… we not only need to send each other files, but know the same interface, share scripts, etc…

I have no problem using GIMP. The lack comes in when people send me Photoshop files. GIMP usually mangles them.

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