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Comment by pippy | Hacker News Reader

    This is not to say that CS2 is necessarily superior to the GIMP; it may or may not be. It doesn't really matter;

Oh god no. As someone who has used every image editor under the sun, a good image editor _does matter_. It has a direct impact on how productive you are.

I love open source. I really do, but GIMP is one of the most horrid applications I've used. Not just graphics applications. All applications.

GIMP is anti-user. You to get frustrated doing simple things, and expect to spend more time on Google than GIMP. And not in the good blender way where you learn a new shortcut and you become more productive. The "oh I'd never expect to see that option there" way. Even something simple as basic window management is a pain in the ass.

MyPaint, .NetPaint, and Inkscape make GIMP look like a joke. I hope the unusable mess that is GIMP either dies or gets it shit together.

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GIMP is only frustrating for simple things if you are adapted to the quirks of some other program. I can work 10x faster with GIMP than with Photoshop. Don't get me wrong, I hate the GIMP (especially the 2.8 version which tries to appease Photoshop snobs), but it's the kind of hatred one has for an unwanted but highly productive ally. I just hate Photoshop more.

Also, Inkscape, which I also use very regularly in my work, is not the best example to use when badmouthing GIMP. It crashes more, runs slower, and has an even less standardized and more unpredictable UI.

I think you misunderstand the author. It sounds to me like he meant that it doesn't matter which one you happen to prefer, as long as there is some meaningful number of users which would prefer to switch from GIMP to CS2 for free.

Wrong, the latest version of Gimp has major UI improvements. There are still some focus glitches and so on, but if you want to do serious image editing you either pay for Photoshop or use GIMP, it's that simple.

Paint.net and the like are amateur tools, they're not even playing in the same category. Pixelmator has a nice UI but is still underfeatured and so is Acorn. Inkscape is a vector tool.

I was optimistic when I learned that GIMP would open .psd files. Then I noticed the distinct lack of a slice tool. Googling found me no useable alternatives other than "crop, save, and ctrl+z".

May be trivial for those who don't work on front end development, but a huge selling point for Adobe.

It will also choke on certain vector formats in PSD as well as CMYK PSDs.

I shelled out for Adobe's new month-to-month licensing for exactly this reason (CMYK PSDs). When paying month-to-month, the $700+ license becomes much more palatable.

> .NetPaint

Do you mean Paint.NET or are you referring to another program?

Yes, I mean Paint.NET. I was a bit sloppy when I typed it in.

That program is dramatically less useful than GIMP.

I had a friend tell me I should try the GIMP and I mostly deal with Camra Raw files... The GIMP does not have a decent workflow for this.

Photoshop was worth the money.

Then again, Photoshop is also a UI disaster area. So many floating boxes with tabs and hidden menus on long clicks and the like.

GIMP is not meant for Raw management, that was not a good recommendation. Try http://www.darktable.org/ or http://rawtherapee.com/ . Both free software.

What's the point of your comment? Just four paragraphs shitting on an open source project, and completely barren of actual content or insight. Who cares.

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