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Comment by dist-epoch | Hacker News Reader

> At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions, it feels like the computer is on your side, you're free, you're force-multiplied, your thoughts are manifest.

It's funny that today there still isn't a free image editing software comparable with the Photoshop from 2000. Krita is close, but still cumbersome to use.

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I’m sure that it is a complete coincidence that CS6, the last before they moved to a subscription model, is the last time it was mostly nonsense-free

Indeed. The trouble with subscriptions is that you don't need to make the new version actually good enough to convince people to upgrade, you just need to make it not bad enough for people to abandon the subscription entirely.

I think the same thing happened to Windows and Office.

Having said that, there's probably another elephant in the room, namely the current generation that grew up with phones and tablets and didn't really learn to use traditional computers fluently

I would love to jettison Photoshop/Illustrator and just use Affinity. Illustrator has recently gone from taking 30 seconds to over 2 minutes to launch on my M1. It's an atrocity. But Adobe software is so entrenched in printing that, even though print media is only 10% or less of what I do these days, it would just be an endless headache to deal with file conversions to and from other designers, print shops and publishers. And anyway I expect Affinity will go the same way soon, now that they're owned by Canva.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned GIMP in the 2 hours since you wrote this (I still use Fireworks inside WINE).

I'm not particularly surprised: who wants to try to hold up GIMP as an exemplar of a good interface? Maybe by arguing "it's not as bad as it was, and now it hardly sucks at all".

I'm an old Photoshop user who has GIMP now. I'd like to do a breakdown of everything that's wrong with its interface behavior, but analysing exactly how it does behave would be a major mission. There's something - several things - wrong with how it selects, moves, deselects, selects layers, and zooms, compared to what I expect for the workflow I try to have. Possibly this is just a matter of needing to learn new conventions, but possibly I have learned the GIMP conventions and they're just clunky.

Interesting, though, since this is organic, grass roots, free software interface crappiness, not the coercive corporate kind.

I have used Photoshop and GIMP a lot. I do not see how GIMP interface is that clunky.

It seems clear to me that most people get used to some interface and anything different is wrong. I saw that a lot with Windows users changing to Mac or linux interfaces. Anything 100% identical is "interface crappiness". Apple interfaces have always run circles around Microsoft's, that copied things from Apple without understanding the fundamentals or hiring proper designers.

My problem with GIMP was always that it was not as powerful for the professional, like the support for color spaces with lots of bits per channel. That looks solved now, although I had not time to test is personally.

On the other hand, you could program GIMP much easier with Script Fu (a Lisp dialect) with less restrictions, like with most open source software.

I did change from Mac to Windows shortly after the millennium, and it was fine. Window buttons were in different places, but that was trivial. Windows would minimize properly instead of the "windowshade" thing Mac had at the time (folding up into the titlebar), because Windows had a taskbar to minimize to, and that was better. I disliked the prevalence of installers (generally you could just drag an executable to another Mac and it would work) and I disliked the creepy labyrinth of user-hostile system files and system folders, which has only gotten worse. But that isn't really interface. I thought the start menu was stupid, but I could just ignore it, and I still ignore it today (Explorer all the way).

On the whole I didn't think there was much difference, apart from a general vibe of crassness on Windows, which had no clear cause. But that's switching from Classic Mac OS: you're probably talking about the new OSX BSD linuxy one. Besides, it would have been Win2K I switched to, which was one of the best iterations.

I used Linux for a while too, but that was XFCE, so again kind of samey. Mainly I remember constantly having to go through Sudo whenever I wanted it to do anything, that was the distinctive interface difference.

Color spaces, a closed book to me. I can't stand color spaces, they were always some sort of unwieldy mess of interest to other people. People who print things, maybe, I don't know. From my perspective, they caused a lot of pretentious confusion when people were trying to make images on computers for viewing on computers and for some reason didn't do the natural thing and think in three bytes of RGB.

Scripting, I hadn't even thought about, and I'll give you that one. Photoshop had a mechanism for recording actions and playing them back, and it produced a linear list of actions, with no control flow. I definitely wanted a better scripting mechanism.

A while back I was making red-cyan anaglyphs [1] for which you want to have a slider that lets you move the left and right channels relative to each other so you can put objects close to the plane of the screen/paper to minimize all sorts of problems such as Vergence-accommodation conflict.

I wrote a little tkinter program to do it because, not least, tkinter is in the Python standard library.

I found out my stereograms looked OK in tkinter but when I exported the images to the web there where ghosts. What I found out was that modern GUI frameworks do color management in the sense that they output (r,g,b) triples in the color space of your monitor, which is what you get when you take a screenshot on Windows. So if you have a wide gamut monitor you can do experiments where you have a (0, 192, 0) color in an image specified in sRGB and then find it was (16, 186, 15) in a screenshot. [3] Drove me crazy until I figured it out.

What was funny was that tkinter was so ancient that it didn't do any color correction, it just blasted out (0, 192, 0) when you asked for (0, 192, 0).

It also turns out to be a problem in printing, where the CMYK printer presents itself as having an RGB color space where the green is very saturated but never gets very bright, and sRGB green also has red in it, but if you attach the printer's color profile to an image you can force a saturated green. A lot of mobile devices are going in the Display P3 direction so you can get better results publishing files in that format.

That and a few other print projects (so easy to screw up a $150 fabric printing job) have gotten me to care a lot about color management.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_3D

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergence-accommodation_conflic...

[3] the native green on the monitor is more saturated than the sRGB green so it adds a little red and blue to make it look the smae!

Yup. Issues like that have trained me to fear and avoid anything that says "CMYK" or "gamut" or similar, not because they're beyond comprehension, but because for many use cases the whole thing is an unnecessary pantomime. And it's often silently switched on by default, waiting to screw things up for you. Blender does similar things - in order to get what you intended to be pure black produce 0x000000, and what you intended to be pure red produce 0x0000ff, you have to dig down somewhere - "post processing," I think, because they suffer from some fantasy of being Pixar - and switch something to "raw", and as I remember that isn't even the whole story and there's some other tweaks to make too, just to make black output black and red output red.

Last summer I looked a lot at "print on demand" services of which I'd call out

https://www.contrado.com/print-on-demand

and something I found amusing was that almost all of them will only take files in sRGB format even though they actually support a gamut which covers some colors better than sRGB and other colors worse. My monitor supports Adobe RGB and covers both spaces pretty well.

I think, however, that they have more quality problems if people send files that have different color profiles so they just take sRGB.

I had some print jobs go terribly bad, turns out yellow flowers are out of gamut for my camera, for sRGB and CMYK, If you try to print something that has out of gamut colors, the printer will do something to put them into the gamut and you might not like it. I learned to turn on the gamut warning for Photoshop and bring the colors into the CMYK gamut before I print, even if I am sending in an sRGB file. It didn't bother me so much when I was printing 'cards' with my Epson ET-8550, but once I had orders come back ruined, I figured it all out.

Indeed, especially because Krita is terrible for a lot of what I think of as "image editing"; I'd much rather use Gimp for work like that. Though I do quite like the recent AI stuff available to Krita at the moment; e.g. there's a plugin that lets you "object select" performed by AI, so e.g. you click on a person's shirt and it selects the shirt, or add other parts of the person (or draw a box) and get the person themselves, separate from the background. Or click on a bird, or speaker, or whatever. And you can use the ai-diffusion stuff to remove it, easier than the old heal tool techniques. (The selection is of course not perfect but a great compliment to the other selection tools that more or less overlap with Gimp's, but I prefer Gimp's knobs and behaviors after the selection. And I'm sure Photoshop has similar AI stuff by now, but I remember over the years it's seemed like a lot of stuff crops up in open source first. e.g. I think for quite a while "heal" / "smart patch" was just a script-fu plugin..)

I just appreciate that there are many options, and can talk to each other pretty well. If one becomes unusable, I have others, and sometimes there are newer ones. I did a stage banner project last December but I had Gimp, Krita, and Inkscape all open at the same time. (With a quick use of an old version of Illustrator in Wine to export into an illustrator template matching the dimension outlines and particular color space the printing company needed...)

Photoshop tried to be the everything tool, and it probably is and will continue to be the best kitchen sink (and if I knew it better and had a license, it probably could have sufficed by itself for my project), but for any specific thing there's going to be something else that's better for at least that thing (maybe even one of Adobe's other products, like Illustrator). Krita isn't competing with Photoshop so much as with Photoshop's usefulness in drawing and making art, and in that space are also Clip Studio Paint or Procreate on iPads, both quite popular with hobbyist and professional artists. Gimp isn't competing so much on the art creation side (or even making simple animations like Krita lets you do more easily) as it is on the editing and manipulation side. And when editing camera raws, you'd use Lightroom/Darktable/RawTherapee. Inkscape is vector graphics, a whole other use case and competitive landscape.

(Speaking of old/dead software, I remember using Xara Xtreme LX for a while, it was really slick...)

Photopea

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