Gimp Is No Longer a Viable Photoshop Alternative | Hacker News Reader

Gimp Is No Longer a Viable Photoshop Alternative

medium.com

14 pointscooltrbl10 comments

There's little content to this article.

Basically it boils down to "I want Smart Objects and Gimp doesn't have them and I don't like the solution they are working on".

The rest is about the discussion he had on Twitter and someone said and someone else argued and there was a link and I read it and... It feels like one of those stupid reaction videos but in written form.

But also hasn't it always been argued by Photoshop people that "Gimp isn't good enough" compared to Photoshop since the dawn of this debates origin? I feel like I've always heard this.

Look, use whatever tool you want, but stop pretending like you get to decide if others get to recommend tools or not.

I would personally prefer to just use Gimp, but I'm not really a graphic designer by any means, which also makes justifying the costs of Photoshop for me silly.

Sidenote: Aren't there other pieces of software that match more things that Photoshop is better at than GIMP? I have heard praises for Krita, but I assume it depends on use case.

Those of us who aren't Adobe salespeople have less incentive to care about keeping feature parity with a predatory cloud-subscription-pushing entity.

Some of us see decadence driving many features on mature graphics applications, coupled with rentseeking on 30 year old code. If it's NOT 30 year old code, why is it seeking to replace funcioning code? Rentseeking.

I find GIMP satisfactory for my remaining raster graphic needs. I prefer vector graphics applications for anything that is not a photograph...

Would I rather pay £22 a month to use software that might stop working, where the company makes it actively difficult for me to cancel a subscription, or £0 a month for software that does basically the same things but doesn't have smart objects? Seems like an easy answer to me

It’s really a question of value what you have what you need and what you can learn with. For work where I already know Photoshop and work is willing to pay for it. That’s what I use - if I had to go my own way I would learn gimp.

In a professional workflow smart objects are important. Photoshop on its own is not cheap enough to be used for occasional edits so I do think there is room for alternatives like gimp.

Sadly GIMP has not yet had its "Blender moment", i.e. the courage to cut off old cruft and UI concepts, to appeal to a broader audience (both beginners and professionals) that can easily migrate from the proprietary competition.

20 years ago now, Cinepaint and FilmGimp were forks of Gimp that supported 16bit color and were used in Hollywood for big budget movies, because they were the best software for the time. I was getting into photography about then, and was dealing with 16 bit images, and was looking at trying to install CinePaint. Unfortunately, CinePaint was still on Motif for widgets and wouldn't move over to GTK.

(Gimp started on Motif then created GTK, Cinepaint forked before GTK)

Gimp meanwhile took a long time to support 16-bit color. Here's a thread [1] from 2010 where one person admitted it would be 6-8 years.

I gave up and bought a really nice package for editing photos that wasn't subscription based.

[1] https://www.gimpusers.com/forums/gimp-user/12724-how-is-16-b...

Just install Krita /s

No seriously, krita has made huge improvements over the last years. Just for example there is a AI plugin that is probably the best open source tool to do ai supported graphic design (if there are better ones i'd love to hear).

https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion

I second Krita's suggestion!

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