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Comment by jfaucett | Hacker News Reader

I love it! GIMP is one of those tools that's "almost" a photohop killer, not quite yet, but this is a big step in the right direction. Good job GIMP team! As an asside, I think the plugin API and scheme joice is great and a blast to develope with I'd just like to see others jump on board.

EDIT: I thought I'd add this since there seems to be a large discussion below as to the type of user for which GIMP is applicable. I'm a software dev, in the past couple of years though mainly web apps where I've had to at times do graphics, for this GIMP worked fine for me (that's my pitch in the discussion). I think GIMP shines (as well as the traditional imagemagick) for batch processing, the scripting is easy, clean, fast - and lispy :) Some links for those interested: http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Basic_Batch/ http://www.squidoo.com/gimp-how-to-write-a-script-fu-macro

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For anyone who's not doing graphics as their main job description it is a photoshop killer. Asides from integration with other Adobe products, print colour management and a few higher level features it has everything a person might need who's main job is not image processing. That's most of the "market" in terms of general home users and web designers who need to process photos and do logos etc. So while I imagine photoshop can keep a lead, and an inertia, with professional graphic designers, people working for magazines and photographers the only reason the GIMP is behind in raw numbers is that people pirate photoshop. In effect it's free competing with free; piracy is functioning as shareware, market-shareware.

The users you describe typically pirate Photoshop in my experience.

That used to be true of people I know, but a bunch of home users have since moved to Paint.NET on Windows.

Disclaimer: I haven't used the most recent version of GIMP yet. Also, I'm not a designer and that colors my position.

What I've found to be the case in prior versions is that it's not sufficient for many minor edits, because it's not 100.0% compatible with the PSD file formats. Even 99% isn't enough in some cases, unfortunately. Since I'm typically editing a file created by a designer in Photoshop, and since I might need the designer to build on my changes, I don't trust anything less than 100.0% compatibility.

Isn't that a separate issue? It sounds like it is sufficient for the edits, but not for the task of working with other people who use / content made in Photoshop.

You're right that in some sense it is a separate issue. I could do my edits in GIMP some of the time. However, since I have to keep Photoshop installed for interoperability, there's no real reason to also install GIMP.

For anyone who's not doing graphics as their main job description it is a photoshop killer.

Doing Graphics is not my main job description, far from it (somewhere between damage control and janitor is more like it), but I still do a lot of front end development, at my job I prefer to do all the graphics production work myself for the apps I'm building and have tried using GIMP a crap ton of times over the years - I've never found it to be a suitable replacement. Maybe its familiarity but I've honestly tried to use gimp in this role and just getting around has always been a complete nightmare compared to Photoshop. It may be able to do the job that Photoshop does, but nowhere near as easily.

Having our Devs at our shop use Photoshop is an expense, but like good chairs and big ass monitors, at the end of the day a few hundred bucks every few years isn't really that much and if its that much easier to use then its an expense we'll eat and happily. This also means from our devs perspective the choice between PS and Gimp is not a financial one, and once you take money out of the picture most folks are going to choose PS. So anyway, no I don't think this is a Photoshop Killer.

Can't agree more, I'm a front-end developer and for years I have tried to move from OS X to Ubuntu but I always come back to OS X and one of the top reasons is the Photoshop > GIMP situation, have tried to use it but I can never get any productivity out of it, it feels like trying to use a hammer to get a screw in the wall.

I use it on commercial work sometimes, and I would agree that gimp is usability hell, but functionally very useful for a number of things.

I keep meaning to go and have a look at the source to see how easy it would be to reskin, because it could be a nice cross platform starting point for anyone wanting to make a really nice image editor, that doesn't ape photoshop, but goes for the less technical users while still having a mass of good functionality. Y'know, for the kids ;)

Gimp is like the 'vi' of image editors. I hated it too but I slowly learned all the keys and now I find I can work at such incredible speed with Gimp that anything else seems awkward and slow. My right hand is on the mouse which never has to leave the canvas / work area and my left hand is dancing on the keyboard. Using Gimp primarily with a mouse is certainly a disaster of usability though.

Watch any photoshop expert and they all use hot keys as well so I don't think gIMP is any faster in that area.

But otherwise I think it really depends on the features you use. I use Photoshop's layer effects all the time. Anytime I want to point something out on a map or a screenshot I drop it in photoshop, draw an arrow, add some text. Then set a layer effect that makes the arrow and text a bright color with a black outline and a drop shadow. If I need to add more arrows or more text they get automatically styled the same.

AFAIK that's not simple in gIMP or even available.

Similarly I use photoshop's non-destructive layer adjustments all the time. I don't know how I'd get by without them.

My understanding is gIMP will be adding those some day. 3.0 maybe?

As someone who uses Photoshop almost every day, it's nowhere near a "photoshop killer". The workflow is still one of the worst I have stumbled across.

For people who need to put some text on an image[1] or who need to tweak some minor stuff gimp is a "photoshop killer" - and it's nice to push people to legally free software rather than a pirate download of Photoshop.

[1] But see this gimp document - the first returned hit in a search for [gimp drop shadow text] - which appears to be weirdly complex.

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/The_Basics/

At first glance, it doesn't seem like this Mac version is capable of using the system's installed fonts - only the fonts bundled with the app.

If you need to do basic image editing on OS X I'd say use Acorn[1] or Pixelmator[2].

[1]: http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

[2]: http://www.pixelmator.com

I like LiveQuartz

http://www.rhapsoft.com/

I like Paintbrush

http://paintbrush.sourceforge.net/

...what?

Eh, the only reason it's a photoshop killer for really simple edits is because photoshop is really kind of the wrong tool for such jobs anyway.

Yes, photoshop is totally the wrong tool for most people. Photoshop is great for professionals and keen amateurs. It's overkill for most other users.

And yet photoshop is heavily pirated software.

By pushing other softwares, such as gimp, I'm not in anyway saying that photoshop is bad, or that gimp is a photoshop clone, or that the people who need to use photoshop should switch to a free open source alternative. I'm just trying to get people to move to a more suitable tool, and to stop using pirated software.

Speaking of weirdly complex, I've always been a fan of the totally deadpan delivery of the 'Straight Line Tutorial' [gimp lacks a 'line' or 'shape' tool] http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Straight_Line/

I've been lambasted for not knowing how to do this in gimp... all I wanted was an icon somewhere!

CS6 is the first Photoshop update in years where I'd say it has fixed a TON of problems that irked long-time Photoshop users.

My experience (which is a little stale) of watching "photoshop experts" is that this is a familiarity effect. Photoshop workflows are uniformly bizarre and awful, in my experience. Serious practitioners are like voodoo priests, pulling tools out that have no sane relevance to the problem at hand and making them work.

But it works, because you know it really well and have spent (literally, in most cases) years perfecting your art. You haven't done that wiht GIMP, so of course it sucks. But the suckage isn't inherent, it's because the problem is inherently sucky, and you've simply trained your eyes not to see it.

When I made my comment I was really referring to one or two-step processes, such as creating a new layer, or adding a border to an image. These things are very easy to do in photoshop, but GIMP makes them more complex than they need to be. (adding dialogues when you create a new layer), requiring a filter to add a border to an image (but I'd be surprised if they hadn't changed that by now).

And my experience is that people who say the same thing as you do are ignorant who have never used either Photoshop, The GIMP or have no business using either and should stay with something like Picasa.

For the record, The GIMP doesn't even have what we call "Non-Destructive editing" which allows to make a change to some of the filters and transformations you did on the image much later even when the image has been touched by other editions. It has been supported by Photoshop for way more than a decade, already. After all of this time, the Gimp still works like a toy and has zero productivity.

Zero. There is nothing productive about The GIMP. Anything you can do in The GIMP will be done faster with a competitor, Photoshop being the best in the category.

And before anyone comes to tell me that "THE GIMP IS FREE!!!11!ELEVEN!", Photoshop isn't expensive for a Photographer either, so price does not enter the game here. If you're a photographer with one or more DSLR bodies, lots of lenses, travel equipment and so on, spending some money on one measly Photoshop license is not going to kill you. The gain in productivity will more than make up for the money spent anyway, the Gimp truly is an awful tool compared to Photoshop. If you can't afford something like Photoshop it means that you can't afford being in that business in the first place.

I'd like to add that Photoshop Elements is probably fine for the average user / developer that deals with graphics and that costs only around 60 Euros (Mac AppStore). And with all the guides, filters etc... around for Photoshop and the guaranteed compatibility with PSD files, it's a very interesting deal.

Yep. It's great for basic tasks. I used it early on when moving from Photoshop to Gimp... useful for dealing with files from new versions of Photoshop, but disabled enough by its lack of advanced features with layers.

"Professionals can afford professional tools" is not much of a counterargument against "it's free". Not everyone is a professional, and in this case it's not supposed to unseat the professional product.

The comment you replied to says nothing about professionals, and there is some truth to the claim that compared with a camera/lens that is any good Photoshop's license won't hurt your wallet.

Also, I've used Gimp a bunch and I've read the Gimp book from Apress and as far as I can tell there really is no such thing in Gimp as the non-destructive editing Nicole060 describes (assuming I understood the description correctly--that you can say first apply levels, then sharpen the image with unsharp mask, then go back and adjust the levels some more without the need to re-apply the unsharp mask--I don't think you can do this in Gimp.) So it's really a shame that the comment you replied to, which is truthful and presents a valid point of view, got downvoted into gray. And I'm saying this as a fan of Gimp who never used Photoshop.

I can't tell the price in the US, but here in Aus, Photoshop is $1168. That's around the price of a reasonable SLR body (and 3 times the price of entry level SLRs), so it's a bit over-the-top to characterise it as 'measly'. The only context this price being 'measly' belongs in is 'professional'.

edit: found US price is $699 (before tax, Aus is post-tax). That's still not 'measly' in any context other than professional.

The general idea is that before becoming a professional you're a student, and get a very significant student discount.

Of course, this essentially puts one more barrier for people who can't afford formal studies. And especially with the DRM becoming more and more effective, I've actually seen this being a significant obstacle for designers-in-spe from e.g. Poland (where even the discounted price is quite a lot of money). They deal with it, one way or another, but it's always a huge strain.

As for the established professionals for whom the price isn't terrible -- well, good for you, pat yourself on the back for being rich. Less competition that way, or something.

Looking at the roadmap: http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Roadmap it seems there won't be non destructive editing for quite some time either (several versions).

I've tried Gimp numerous times, and the lack of smart objects/filters makes it a complete non starter. Generally I found I could do most of the things I wanted to in Gimp, but they required many, many more steps.

Though it won't be several versions; they're looking to move to a much quicker release cycle - so shouldn't be as long as it took for GEGL to get included in the first place.

As someone who uses GIMP on a regular basis, I find my experience to be exactly the opposite - Photoshop's workflow is very irritating. I think it's just a matter of what you're used to.

I'm not sure about photoshop killer ... although I do suspect that outside of the professional class of photoshop user (webdevs, print designers etc), a great many people who have a less-than-legitimate copy of photoshop and dramatically under-utilize its features could do worse than try out Gimp. These are the users for whom an entire copy of photoshop is massive overkill and a terrible waste - the absence of some professional-level features from Gimp won't be a problem.

I would gently suggest that Photoshop Elements or Pixelmator are probably more likely to be of value to such people. Pixelmator is something like $20 and vastly more user-friendly than Gimp.

I'd definitely agree. I guess more specifically (and more charitably), I'm thinking of the section of the audience that uses photoshop but doesn't need any of its intermediate or advanced features, whether they paid for it or not. There's a lot of them. If they had more awareness of their own (lack of) requirements, I think it would be a greater opportunity for the < $100 graphics packages to pick up more sales (since that's definitely a more attractive price than Photoshop's), or just more users in Gimp's case - if they were willing to put the time in to learning the interface.

Photoshop Elements is a < $100 package (you can get it for $60 on amazon.com) and it's still vastly superior to the GIMP since it supports some of the non destructive editing tools like Adjustment Layers : http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/adjustment-layers-in-p...

When you can get something that good for $60 there is absolutely no reason whatsoever as to why you'd put up with something like The GIMP. None. Photoshop had things like Adjustments Layers since 1996 with Photoshop 4.0, the same version that introduced an easy method to make your own automation (macro recording). 1996. The GIMP can't beat something that was made in 1996. I'd rather put up with a VERY old version of photoshop running under a PC emulator with an old OS than use the GIMP. That's how different the two software package are, and how useless The GIMP is.

The real missing piece is 8BF (Photoshop plugin) compatibility. There is an entire ecosystem of productivity enhancement out there that's missing from the GIMP, at least from the professional photographer's point of view, that, absent a coding pro photographer scratching his own itch, probably isn't going to be filled. Selling a $200 plugin for a $600 program to reduce image turn-around times by an hour apiece works in the pro world; selling a $200 plugin for a free program to people who have essentially all of the time in the world to do things the hard way is a fool's game. That's a sort of chicken-and-egg problem—until there is sufficient pro adoption of the GIMP, the tools won't be there; and until the tools are there, there won't be a large-scale pro adoption of the GIMP. (A wedding photographer, for instance, may have 200–300 images from a wedding that "make the cut" for the album and slideshow, and need editing. Spending even ten minutes per image on skin is a week's work somebody has to do and somebody has to pay for. A plugin that takes that down to two minutes is the difference between profit and failure, even if the big prints still need manual work to look right.)

A really quick google found this

http://registry.gimp.org/taxonomy/term/366

"This plug-in enables you to use the vast number of existing filters made for Photoshop's Filter Factory"

It's not only not "in the box", it doesn't support many of the high-end filters/plugins pros depend on (something it has in common with many basic 8BF-compatible programs, like Corel's PaintShop Photo Pro and Topaz Labs' photoFXLab).

I disagree. Maybe one in ten of the professional photoshop artists I know use _ANY_ 3rd party plugins. I think the photoshop plugin ecosystem is surprisingly unhealthy for such a dominant platform.

I have tried to convince myself to put out some photoshop plugins, but I just don't see many people buying the plugins already out there.

Also the photoshop plugin API is crufty as hell.

What percentage of plugins out there are being rewarded well by the marketplace? I would bet that there are only a few plugins on the market right now that make a noticeable amount of profit.

I've never met a 9-5 Photoshop user that thinks Gimp is anywhere near the quality of Photoshop. Perhaps more importantly, _none_ seem to think that it will ever, ever, be able to catch up let alone surpass PS.

A few years ago oracle DBAs used to (and some still so) dismiss MySQL and PostgreSQL saying they were toys that didn't scale. 10-15 years ago 'real men used Solaris' and Linux was a toy for hackers.

Any time any with any technology those that have mastered the 'premier' product, especially those that are paid because of their knowledge of it, will always think it superior.

That's why the second point is so important. It isn't just Adobe people (the oracle in your comment) or Silicon Valley startups dismissing Gimp, it is the in-the-trenches graphic designers that do their work for $12/hr in a small rural town. That's a huge barrier to overcome. It isn't impossible, but with your other examples progress in numbers was seen all the time with MySQL. Not so much with Gimp, right?

(Also I'm not like all-in for Adobe. I'd love to see something hit the PS market, but I just don't see Gimp being the one to do it. Something like http://www.pixelmator.com/ has a better shot, because they seem to be making good traction in a fraction of the time as Gimp)

Switching between one version of *SQL and another requires intellectual knowledge, while stuff like Photoshop involves a lot of "muscle memory". Remembering (slight) differences in syntax is a different type of cognitive task than remembering where to click to find everything in a mondo-complex UI like that of Photoshop or The GIMP.

Both the Gimp and Photoshop are actually pretty lousy for UI/web development. Fireworks is much better but Adobe seems to be neglecting it. I don't really see much hope for a free alternative to displace PS any time soon but an app that was designed from the ground up to make designing interfaces easier might find a niche.

Honestly, the improvements in HTML5/CSS3 (including font-face) make translating graphical mockups into coded web designs much easier. There's a lot less image slicing and a lot more logical markup.

I love Fireworks, but I find myself using it less and less often. Usually I can look at a design straight from a designer who went wild in Photoshop and Illustrator, and make it look extremely close using nothing but HTML and CSS and images only where you'd expect image content.

As much as we like to complain, the web landscape has improved considerably.

With the huge number of form factors and display types applications have to support these days I think the kind of pixel-perfect UI design we've gotten used to from PS and FW is going the way of the dodo. Interfaces need to be able to adapt and the pretty but rigid products of that school of design are just too inflexible.

I do think there is an opening here for design tools that can help create declarative UIs in a more visual way though.

I wish I could say the same, but every time some site surprises me with its design, I go to inspect it and it has those background patterns, box shadow and sprites pngs sprinkled all over.

In general open source creative tools have come a long way - with Scribus, Gimp, Inkscape, Darktable, Ardour, Blender, etc. all being quite functional, I think there is a pretty strong argument for the 'open source creative suite' being more than capable enough for all but the most stringent professionals.

I don't know about the others, because I mainly do photo stuff ( Darktable seems decent though, and it has a been a long time since I've run linux on my desktop computer so I don't know how far it went ), but the GIMP is NOT functional in any way for a professional and a professional who is not willing to spend some dollars to get something that triples his productivity is NOT a professional.

The GIMP doesn't even support something like Adjustment Layers and that's a feature that was added to Photoshop 4.0 in 1996. Get real. Those who make that kind of argument for the GIMP, even pretending it could be used as a professional tool, have no idea what they're talking about.

Even the all-public, cheap edition of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, that you can get for $60, has features like Adjustment Layers.

The GIMP has been working on that stuff for a long time and they're still not done yet. They put off all features related to non-destructive editing until they finally fully switch to the GEGL engine.

The GIMP has "layer modes."

http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-concepts-layer-modes.html

Which have nothing to do with adjustment layers.

To be honest, I don't view Gimp as a tool for working with photos. I prefer RAW editors, and find myself surprised that you wouldn't be using Lightroom or Aperture.

In fact, I don't really see Photoshop (despite its name) as a tool for working with photos, either.

I admit adjustment layers are nice, but I don't see lacking them as a fatal flaw when there are a few workarounds and, depending on the task you're trying to accomplish, might not even be an important feature.

In any case I don't really claim the open programs are currently 'better' per se (though in one or two cases it may be true or close true), just that they're more than good enough to get decent results from.

Gimp definitely has some hidden surprises.

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