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Comment by lukasbm | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure 95% of photoshop users only use a feature subset thats also available in GIMP (except for maybe the latest generative infill)

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>I'm pretty sure 95% of photoshop users only use a feature subset thats also available in GIMP (except for maybe the latest generative infill)

It's been a few years since I tried GIMP but the last time I did, I couldn't rotate text and then edit it without losing my rotations. Rotating text isn't some obscure feature. This wasn't only shockingly behind Photoshop, it was behind Microsoft Word or even Clarisworks. A quick Google search suggests this remained unsolved as recently as 2024: https://old.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/19ckuo4/text_layers_a...

This isn't blind hatred of OSS or learning new things. I've gotten annoyed with Photoshop now that they decided to replace their UI with web components, and so far Krita has been quite pleasant to use despite not also being identical to Photoshop.

I don’t know if rotating text is included in this, but the latest GIMP added non-destructive layer filters.

I highly doubt that. Photoshop, even for 95% of users, is pretty heavy on non-destructive editing. GIMP did not have that for a very long time and is no where near feature parity today AFAIK.

Don't get me wrong, Photoshop sucks hard, Adobe as a company even more, but on a technical level most Photoshop users cannot transition to GIMP.

Edit: Although, I have to highlight that GIMP has made noticeable progress within the last years. I can now, finally, group two layers together and apply a drop shadow effect to the group, which correctly applies to all layers within the group. It's been quite a while...

I have talked to plenty of people for which Krita was their preferred Photoshop replacement.

Photoshop does a lot of advanced editing well, but that's a feature many professionals don't really need. It's a bit like Excel: whole companies have moved from Excel to Google Docs, but many companies will never be able to use anything else because only Excel manages to render their VBA-sheet-database monstrosities correctly.

I don't know the current status, but at least last time I checked you could not have strokes/outline on text, and afterwards change the text :(

It's such a little thing that makes gimp annoying to use. And it affects a broad audience. Wedding cards or youtube title thumbnails.

Maybe it works now. I hope.

Non destructive layer resize works now, right?

Non-destructive text outline has been around for a while now: https://www.gimp.org/news/2022/11/18/gimp-2-99-14-released/#...

Non-destructive resize works on vector layers and link layers (essentially "smart objects" in GIMP). We have the capability to do this for regular layers too - just need to connect some things and change some internal assumptions about transform filters.

Huh, 2.99 does that mean it was the beta for 3.0?

Because I think i have been using stable gimp a few times over the last couple of years and not seen it.

What version of GIMP are you running? Stable GIMP at this point (at least by our definition) is GIMP 3.2, which definitely has this feature. If you've been using 2.10 or earlier, then yeah, it wouldn't be in there.

Yeah, but it being in 2.99 / 3.0 means it was only in stable gimp since 2025, so one year ago. That explains why I did not know about it.

But nice to see that they finally added it.

Considering their own bugtracker had them 14 years ago claiming adjustment layers were not useful and it's taken them over a decade to get that absolutely essential feature in only recently in a very weird way I don't think anywhere near 95% of the features are there.

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