Hacker News Reader

Comment by prox | Hacker News Reader

Stable Diffusion : controlnet extension is already uploading their own version of generative fill.

Adobe has no moat on creative software anymore. As impressive as their demos are, I'm actually less bullish on their future than ever before.

The open source community is doing more with GenAI and they're doing it better. If Gimp weren't in such bad shape, Photoshop would be over. This exact feature would already be ready to go and would be far superior to Adobe's version.

Any startup with minimal effort and capital will be able to duplicate this product. They'll eat Adobe's thick margins away.

> Adobe has no moat… If Gimp weren’t in such bad shape…

Only been saying this for 15 years or so.

And yet, here we are.

Look where Blender has gone in 15, it’s a real alternative to other programs in the same segment. GIMP is a failure in that sense of never working with or listening to the users, and never understanding the userbase and having the wrong kind of developers attitude.

Even Godot is going with that playbook like Blender and doing what GIMP never did. It’s a shame imo.

Hats off to the Blender team, from a piece of software so obtuse the right mouse button was the select button they really just sat down a few years ago, started addressing new user complaints instead of attacking them like a lot of open source projects do. Started seriously innovating, fixing the interface and pushing things forward and now it's truly paid off they're a major competitor and the next generation is all learning on Blender.

Imagine a world if GIMP and other open source creative tools had acted this way instead of the status quo of "Patches welcome" and "NOFIX", the attitude in the 21 year old "Adjustment Layer" feature request comes to mind...

We don't need Gimp anymore. The new sets of tools are being built in the open right now. It's just a shame Gimp couldn't make it.

Krita makes Gimp irrelevant. I don't know why anyone would use Gimp over Krita other than knowing the Gimp workflow that well.

Gimp is awful but I don't think Krita is the replacement. It seems great for drawing but 90% of my Photoshop use is image editing and Krita seemed to lack a lot of features in that department. Or I just have trouble navigating their UI.

Affinity for image editing, and Krita for painting. Or old copies of Photoshop were already 99% feature complete.

i am not a fan of adobe but nobody has been eating any margins or market share from adobe, really (c1 aside). skylum tried but guess what, having a half-baked, barely QAed product that you can't rely on is not competing with adobe. adobe's photography products are full fledged and at 10 bucks a month not even expensive.

but thinking you can fight adobe's photography setup (lightroom, ACR, photoshop, bridge etc) with minimal effort and capital to gain users for 6 bucks a month is delusional. but hey, if it happens, awesome.

Affinity is making slow but surely inroads. I know lots of people who use it know vs almost no one a few years ago. They stand the best chance of eating some of the cake.

Yes, though it's an open secret their development teams are barely functional and have management that can't manage much of anything. Even their forum staff are snippy and rude, discouraging people from reporting bugs etc. Things have stabilized over time, but it used to be the case that both Designer and Photo were absolute minefields to use - opening certain panes would crash, saves would corrupt, etc.

So far nothing from Gimp is good. Sorry. I am yet to see an impressive AI demo in Gimp. They might have done it first or whatever but none of it looks decent.

>The open source community is doing more with GenAI and they're doing it better.

Stable Diffusion is extremely cool and is a great project, but it does not compare favourably to Midjourney[1] or Adobe's offering. On the LLM side, StableLM is terrible compared to competitors. Some other "open source" models aren't open source at all, but instead were the "this doesn't compete so let's just dump it in the open" reactions.

Add that Adobe has a moat of legally licensed content that they used to train their model, which might turn into a massive differentiator if penalties fall hard on competitors.

[1] - A lot of people speculated that Midjourney used Stable Diffusion, but the products have veered so completely away from each other, the former just dramatically better for almost any prompt, that if they started with it they have made enormous improvements.

Midjourney has incredible default output, but the amount of control you can exert on the generation is extremely limited. Can't influence composition, pose, colour scheme (only to a degree), not inpainting, no outpainting, no API, no local operation, the list goes on.

I have to keeping saying this on HN: moats have only a little to do with technical superiority. For the most part, moats rely on stuff like brand, UX, integrations, compatibility, business arrangements, past familiarity, etc. It's very rare for technical superiority in itself to override all that. Even if Gimp could match PhotoShop technically, it would still miss all the plugins and UX. So OSS often doesn't manage to overtake paid offerings. It depends on special people who are doing the extra effort.

That said, OSS is in way better shape in the image space than in the LLM space. There are actually products and installers based on SD out there, something that won't happen in LLM space for awhile.

I don't think this is true. Imagine a piece of software you have been using 15 years. Sure it has its problems, and there may be ways to work around those problems, but you are familiar with those problems. Switching to something new may fix those problems, but bring an entirely new set of their own.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com