Comment by elithrar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elithrar | Hacker News Reader

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> Forget the next SoLoMo craze - who wants to disrupt Adobe? They need it.

I agree. As a photographer, I use Lightroom and Photoshop for most of my post-processing needs. Lightroom, when it hit, barely felt like an Adobe application (it's great), but Photoshop has always been a nightmare of crashes. CS5 on OS X is especially bad.

As an experiment, I tried to use (only) Lightroom and Pixelmator[1], which is the closest "indie" alternative to Photoshop I could find/had experience with. Note that GIMP was out as 2.8 wasn't released by then, and older versions were horribly clunky. Pixelmator gets a lot of things right; it's fast, has a clean UI and supports a raft of layer blending types. But it lacks a lot of useful keyboard shortcuts-and I don't mean "Photoshop shortcuts", I mean shortcuts, period.

This in itself slowed me down considerably; I have a small set of Actions in PS that I use for some final tweaks on most images. Having to re-create those layers manually, for each image, isn't that fun.

I would definitely say that for most users, Pixelmator (or Acorn, etc.) can definitely replace Photoshop. But it's difficult to move away from PS when there's such a large ecosystem attached to it (as unfortunate as that realisation may be).

[1] http://pixelmator.com/

I couldn't agree more with the sentiment that Lightroom doesn't feel like an Adobe product because it just works so well (barring speed issues that crop up on some machines). The purchase process for Lightroom 3 a year or two ago, however, was a stark reminder of who I was dealing with.

I purchased an education license online, going through the convoluted student status verification process (which was incredibly unintuitive at times, e.g. I had to open a support ticket to request verification). After I put in the payment details, I was told that the purchase was successful, and that I should be expecting the license key in my e-mail shortly. Few weeks pass with no e-mail, and no indication that anything had gone wrong, so I called them up. Turns out they had never received the payment, and the representative on the phone actually made me go through my bank transactions to verify that the transfer didn't take place, rather than confirming it on their end. Finally, I just gave up and used a pirate version until the version 4 beta became available. I hope the process goes smoother when version 4 becomes available for purchase.

Lightroom 4 is available to purchase now, but the buying process is still unintuive (at least as far as the education verification process is concerned). In a moment of madness I decided go for the physical copy, but that just yielded a ridiculous level of nested packaging for what was just a cd in a sleeve with a key stuck to the back.

When it's such a hassle to buy a legitimate copy, they wonder why the hell people pirate. Don't blame you!

Photoshop CS6 is a huge improvement over CS5. A lot of small changes that I think as a whole are long overdue. I'm one of the most anti-Adobe guys out there (as my Facebook feed is 50% jokes, and 50% screenshots of stupid things Photoshop does) but I have to give kudos to them.

Considering that gimp is out as 2.8 now, and will properly hit 3.0 before this mythical competitor can be written, what does Photoshop have that Gimp doesn't?

Quite a bit. Looking at GIMP's roadmap:

- Improvements in the text handling

- Automatic layer boundary management

- Filter layers and "Layer effects"

- Non-destructive editing

- Auto-anchoring of floating selection - or better, get rid of floating selections!

- Script recording and playback

- "Smart objects"

Even for me as a mere moderate power-user (I design websites/apps and do photo adjustments), there's four things on that list that are absolutely essential. And I'm willing to pay the extra dollars for it given how it enhances the final product.

That's quite a list. I wonder why it takes so long for these features to be supported. Perhaps what's necessary is a new paradigm of development: a core application with composable modules developed by a community on the basis of need. Evolution of standards will be tricky to manage but it seems likely to be inevitable.

It takes so long because the GIMP developers have a long-standing tradition of telling people with requests to go jump off a cliff if the feature being requested isn't directly useful to the developers. They have a fairly typical failing in assuming that because the source is available, anyone asking for features has the ability and the time to implement those features themselves, when often that is not the case.

If they're not being paid to work on it, why would you expect them to prioritize things they're not interested in working on or not going to use?

Because they want people to use their software?

Of course, if you don't care whether or not anyone uses your software, telling people with questions and requests to jump off a cliff is entirely reasonable.

I don't expect them to. I'm just answering the question as to why features take so long to get implemented.

So I'm thinking one way to reduce the barrier for entry into participation is to have the bulk of the application's features in a higher level language (rather than C), with the core in a high performance language. Unfortunately this is not something I'd have the time to pursue.

I tried the Gimp out in October last year in relation to photography. I found it pretty horrible. I had to download a third party RAW plugin. The plugin didn't support one of my newer cameras RAW files. With the files it did support the UI was a mess, and vastly less intuitive then Adobes raw offering.

Once I had a photo in the Gimp, the most obvious thing missing was non destructive smart objects and filters/adjustment layers. These are a pretty big deal for me, which is a shame, because I would like to see the Gimp progress - it still has a long way to go.

Sometimes I wish I could disrupt Adobe, but I can't figure out how. They have /so much/ inertia it is absurd.

For what its worth, I use aperture and pixelmator together to do all my photo processing.

As a photo / design professional or a casual user?

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