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Comment by gurraman | Hacker News Reader

Another project I would like to be high priority is GIMP.

Photoshop is the misruler and needs to be dethroned. It's a terrible piece of software that, more or less, forces people to use non-free operative systems. It has to be replaced and/or get some real competition that would force Adobe to get their act straight.

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The only problem I have with making a GIMP replacement is, I wouldn't know what to build. All of my image editing needs are filled by programs that shipped with my OS. I have used the GIMP before it was confusing(which would probably be resolvable if I spent time learning the app), but capable of what I needed. Yet every time I see it brought up it is usually called inadequate, with most of the problems called out looking like "doesn't work exactly like Photoshop so I am not even going to try it" sort of problems.

So my question is: Is there something actually wrong with the GIMP other than the fact that it is ugly? I don't consider the fact that it works differently from Photoshop a problem worth fixing.

One of the biggest drawbacks of GIMP is its lack of adjustment layers.

IMO the lack of layer groups is a second big drawback that I find myself working around as a regular GIMP user (lots of merging layers and hiding their source layers).

My (inadequate) understanding was that it could not process above 16 bit color spaces. Photoshop could manipulate the 24 and 32 bit spaces, hence heavy use in the professions.

IIRC this is supposed to be resolved in the foreseeable future with the change to use GEGL as a backend. I think that's also supposed to enable adjustment layers as well, although I don't know what the timeframe is exactly.

I've been using linux (and GIMP) for three years now, and adjustment layers have been just around the corner this whole time. I haven't read anything recently to have a better understanding of the current timeframe.

The piece of software that forces people like me to use non-free operative systems is not Photoshop, but Gimp. And more horribly, Inkscape.

That sounds backward. How could some software that is merely available for free drive you away from something? Also, have you tried alternatives? There is not just GIMP...

There are no serious alternatives to GIMP, and GIMP in turn is not a serious alternative to Photoshop. GIMP is an astonishingly user-hostile piece of software--though to their credit it appears the developers have finally begun to realize this and make changes with people who actually use graphics software, not people who write graphics software, in mind.

However, even despite these new-ish developments, there is just no real open-source answer to Photoshop (and Inkscape is only a partial one to Illustrator).

can you elaborate? I see people constantly bashing GIMP, and though it isn't without problems it's good enough for me for all web stuff, and good enough for a bit of print stuff.

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