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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

And yet I'm not flocking to the Gimp download site, why not?

Because you've convinced yourself that you need some feature it doesn't have.

So instead you pay $900 for something that doesn't work right either, and then you "make fun of me" on a social news site.

Clearly you win!

GIMP vs. Photoshop isn't just about features. It's about polish.

I don't think I'll be able to convince you of this, but proprietary apps are usually more polished than the open source counterparts. I'm talking about every sense of the word polish: usability, reasonable bug levels, compatibility, etc.

It's not that open source is bad. It's that for-profit software companies pays programmers to polish the apps in such a way that open source programmers aren't intrinsically motivated to do (real usability testing, compatibility, etc.).

It's that for-profit software companies pays programmers to polish the apps in such a way that open source programmers aren't intrinsically motivated to do

You say this like it's a fact. Could you cite a source?

(I like your "compatibility" argument. The other day, we received some Word documents that crashed MS Word. OO.org opened them just fine, and the version exported from OO.org didn't crash Word anymore. Clearly Word is more polished, which is why it segfaults on invalid input.)

> Could you cite a source?

Like a research paper? No, I'm afraid not. All I can provide are similar anecdotes like you provided (except for the opposite argument).

Please, Word and Photoshop. Don't put them in one bed, ok?

That's the work of paid _designers_. Graphic designers, user interface designers, interaction designers. How much respect get those people in open source project land? How much art school students know what the heck "open source" even means?

The GIMP still lacks full CMYK color model support.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CMYK_support_in_The_GIMP

That makes it unsuitable for working on anything that's going to be printed.

..proprietary apps are usually more polished..

Well if they weren't they'd already be dead & you'd only know of the open source version. It usually takes a different business model (eg opera), or microsoft to prop up an inferior proprietary product. And opera's pretty much dead.

I think you are correct in that commercialization can put on the finishing touches needed to sell a product.

But that doesn't mean it has to be a proprietary commercial product either. See MySQL, Firefox, SugarCRM, etc.

In my experience, MySQL has gotten more buggy and less stable over time.

I paid around $150 for Jasc's Paint Shop over five years ago. It gave me 90% of the features of Photoshop at around 15% of the price.

It's worked fine from day one through to today and I've not had to torture myself with mysterious config file adjustments every time I upgrade my o/s.

The hassle saved has been worth every penny.

The problem is that 90% of the features is not good enough much of the time. I am not a designer but I know enough about design to know that getting the last pixel right is often 90% of expertise. It is a different world from software.

Maybe it's that The Gimp has an even worse interface? I'm an amateur, and I can at least comprehend Photoshop. The Gimp terrifies me.

Pixelmator's got the sort of interface I wish other image apps had. That's my standard, and it's payware.

I've also used both, and they are both incredibly confusing.

I'm going to blame myself for being ignorant, though, rather than insisting that the software is the problem. Clearly it's not.

Why not? Software should be made for the user. Any image editing software that punishes you for never having used it has a problem. It also means that there's a market for an easy image editor that effectively lets users do what they want to do. (That's Aviary's goal, largely.)

That's what Photoshop Elements is for. The idea Photoshop does not have a well-designed UI because the learning curve is steep is ridiculous. The "user" that Photoshop is made for is the professional designer or photographer. There's plenty of room for lower-end consumer products, but there's nothing wrong with the Photoshop UI.

I've never used Photoshop Elements before. Perhaps you're right.

I don't hate Photoshop's UI. (Where was I critical of it?) I dislike the Gimp's user interface very much.

Because Adobe has money to market their products, the Gimp does not.

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