GIMP would be infinitely better if they just changed the name so we could talk about it around normal people without getting dirty looks
Also if they made it have a workflow friendly to people who are used to almost anything else
almost anything else
You mean photoshop right?
I mean, or Corel or even Paint.net.
Just don’t live in an English speaking country, easy!
Just run photoshop on linux.
Linux just needs more competition in the image manipulation space.
There isn’t even a real photoshop competitor in the broader market, but you want to further split the hobbyist devs effort on linux as well?
Affinity Photo
Can run on Linux via Bottles! I do not have much experience with it, but I got it running with this guide from 2022:
First google search result:
Photoshop undoubtedly has the edge over Affinity Photo with more tools, features and functionality for performing a range of advanced editing tasks. These include AI-powered tools, more Layer controls, masking options, 3D image creation and video support to name but a few.
And this sentiment is echoed by a wide range of opinions further down the search results.
It may be a competitor in the technival sense, but not in the practical one, where a photoshop user would realistically be able to switch to it.
First google search result
if you agree with the opinion that’s fine, but why would you admit to posting SEO spam? XD
This person still uses Google too haha.
Is anything I quoted untrue?
Since I haven’t used Affinity Photo myself - I can only rely on the opinions from the internet. I have read a handful, inclusing reddit, but only quoted the one that conveyed my general findings in a concise way.
If Affinity lacks features that photoshop users commonly use, my argument holds, no matter where the info comes from.
Is anything I quoted untrue?
You basically quoted thin air: “more features […] for a wide range of advanced editing tasks”. You probably know more than what’s written there, but from my perspective I haven’t learned one concrete feature that PS offers over Affinity. It’s typical SEO spam, which rewards swaths of text with little to zero information density.
I use affinity photo and it’s an acceptable replacement.
Is there an equivalent for lightroom?
I am pretty sure it would run in the same wine setup, but nobody bothered to set it up as an install script yet, so you’d need to do some manual dirtywork.
Tried a few times to run it but with no avail, however il try to give this a go.
Darktable
Sorry not looking for a replacement, just how to run it :)
Linux users try not to be Apple fanboys but replace popular Apple product with popular Linux product challenge (impossible)
Photopea
Photopea. It’s photoshop but on your browser.
Pixlr-E is in that same category.
It’s that phenomenon where people who endured trauma to attain something expect others to also endure the trauma.
I’ve tried learning GIMP, and it sucks. I’m not saying GIMP sucks, but you have to be crazy to not see that it’s hard to learn.
No, GIMP does suck.
It has the same problem as most FOSS packages that are too wide in breadth and have multiple contributors with their own hobby horses pulling in all different directions, and to this day does not actually provide a feature-complete whole, nor an interface that actually makes sense. And it’s not a matter of the workflow just being different – it categorically fails to replicate functionality that is core to its commercial competitors. Numerous other “big” productivity packages have the same problem including FreeCAD (boy does it ever), LibreOffice, etc. I say this as a staunch supporter of FreeCAD, by the way. It’s the only CAD software I use even though it’s a pain in my ass.
The shining exception to this I see is Inkscape, but it is still significantly less powerful than even early versions of CorelDraw.
For 2D graphics work these days, I hold my nose and just use Corel. I use it for work. Like, actual commercial work. That I get paid for. It is at least a lesser evil than doing business with Adobe.
And if you want to stick it to the man, it is easily pirated.
I’ve worked professionally both using and developing (proprietary) CAD software, but even I have trouble getting FreeCAD to do what I want.
Same. I have used SolidWorks, SolidEdge, CATIA and Unigraphics/NX…freecad just frustrated me
In FOSS most people can program, but only a hand full of people can design a decent UI.
So, why do UI people not use and contribute to FOSS then? Are they all on Mac? Then go complain to them or contribute your desired UI improvements. FOSS isn’t an all you can eat buffet.
Personally, I think UI people are less idealistic and I do look down on them for that.
It’s super hard to get involved as a UI person. If you’re a developer, you can just rock up to a project and fix bugs, and if you follow the coding style they’ll probably get accepted.
If you want to successfully contribute as a UI person you have to convince a bunch of developers that you know what they should be doing better than they do. It basically never happens.
I always wondered if I could contribute/volunteer to a FOSS somehow with some UIX stuff, but I don’t even know where to start. Would you just draw a concept ui for the team to work out or something?
Not that I’m great at it, but man, we gotta start somewhere, right?
This is probably common. The people that work on UI often aren’t the people who do pull requests. But I think if you want to contribute it would be best to get in touch with a maintainer on the chat of the project. Projects often have a matrix/irc/discord on the git page.
I think you can start a figma or other collaborative UI/UX as an idea first. If a developer is interested in implementing it, then you move on to the next feature
This never ceases to amaze me.
My old best friend and I used to be a programming tag team that worked pretty well; he’d slap together w semi-functional version of the idea we had and then id go in and make the UI make sense and fix all the logic bugs and typos.
I’m not saying I’m some perfect UI guru or anything but the way he (and other people I’ve met) seem to have no internal base knowledge of shit like “similar settings probably shouldn’t go on completely opposite sides of the screen under different menus” or “5-deep nested drop-down menus hurt people’s souls”
There’s also two main plus one lesser issue that are less commonly discussed:
- Lack of manpower. FOSS devs often doing it as a side project on top of some other and/or a full-time job, so that even lowers one’s ability of concentrate on stuff like the UI, when you’re already working hard on fixing bugs, looking up things (which is getting harder and harder thanks to AI slop - I once managed to destroy a Linux on my Raspberry Pi while trying to adjust the path variables).
- Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable parts of your application. There are many times I haven’t noticed a a very uncomfortable part of my GUI after months of use, then I had to refactor things, which obviously took time away from other things. This also affects the users already in the userbase.
Elitism is also a factor. A lot of people like the feeling of being part of a special group, and for them, the steep learning curve is a feature, not a bug. I’ve seen Blender users being angry at the devs for “spoonfeeding” the normies, and letting in all kinds of people. Also just look at OP’s image.
Oh god FreeCAD is a nightmare to learn. But it does get work done. I wish Blender could move more into that space.
Inkscape is lovely but imo it could use some interface cleanup. (And really it has been getting better each major update.)
KiCAD has also improved greatly over the last few years. It still has an opinion on how the work flow should be, but that work flow moves pretty well. It’s gotten easier to find pre-made footprints, too.
If only library management didn’t suck.
Blender is also great, probably because it has organized teams, meetings, ongoing large projects, deadlines, etc
Not vonly hard to learn, it lacks some really basic stuff like undestructive ediring (adjusment layers) and such.
I am using 2.99.18 (non release, unstable build). Non destructive editing has landed. You can make adjustments through the usual menus and then enable/disable the adjustment under layer effects.
Wow, that’s greate!
OHH it even works with text layers!!! you can finally add drop shadow to a text without discarding the text information! ;A:
I thought GEGL was supposed to fix that. Does it not, or are we still waiting on it, or what?
The sudden South Indian accent surprised me (vonly)
Photoshop is also hard to learn. What’s your point? Just because it’s different to what you used to does not means it’s more or less difficult to learn.
I’m not used to photoshop so I can’t say anything about that.
I was a big fan of paint.NET but now that I stopped using Windows, it’s the only software that I really miss.
It had fewer features than GIMP, but it was so intuitive yet surprisingly powerful.
Have not found a similarly amazing alrernative, I wish Wine could make it work…
Not having Paint.NET sucked when I switched to Linux. I got very used to it and that was the one I missed most… it took a few years bouncing between programs but I’m happy with Krita now. GIMP just never clicked for me unfortunately.
I sometimes think about making a Paint.NET clone for linux but i have too many other projects and hobbies i wanna do instead yk
You could contribute to Pinta, which I’m pretty sure has the same vision
I stuggled with GIMP at first, it was super frustrating because it does UI things differently than other image tools. i.e. in other tools your active layer masks your drag selection, and in GIMP I would constantly be grabbing lmages from another layer, till I realized the pixel under pointer determines what image is moved. That function can make you highly productive since you don’t need to preset layer, but god was it enraging at first
The Autodesk forums are 40% this, 20% “just learn to program, spend a few years getting good at it, then write yourself a custom script to do what you are struggling with”, 20% “you are wrong for wanting that in the first place” or “you are wrong for having this issue”, 15% “this has been brought up once at some point in the past two decades, try searching”, 4% “OMG yes I have this issue too!”…
…and 1% split between actual helpful answers, and confirmation that it’s a known issue.
I’ve been happier worth with Bricscad, but I mostly just need it for designing stuff to 3d print, so your mileage may vary.
It’s also not FOSS, of course, but I haven’t yet found FOSS cad software that works for me.
I’m only drafting for career not hobby at this point, so it’s all industry standard software.
One of these days, when I have a house, I might get into 3D printing, but not for the foreseeable future.
For 3D stuff, I’m good with Inventor, but it certainly has it’s quirks.
So much this
It’s infuriating trying to find solutions to issues with Autodesk.
But you did forget a classic one: “Hello I’m X from Autodesk support, you should open a support ticket so we can discuss this issue in a more one on one manner.” And then the thread is closed without a solution.
Oh yeah that’s a good one too.
The old “you embarrassed the company, report to the principal’s office”.
“And if I do give you a solution, we’ll be sure not to share it with anyone else.”
Yeah, I recently found a post there where a person wanted to modify a downloaded mesh. The first comment was telling them they would need years of experience to do it well. The OP responded that they had figured out a solution that they were happy with, to which someone told him that his results were shitty and then explained a way to do it better. When the OP got upset at this back to back dismissal, everyone unanimously decided they were an asshole.
I’ve tried learning GIMP, and it sucks. I’m not saying GIMP sucks, but you have to be crazy to not see that it’s hard to learn.
“Im not saying it sucks but it does” How do you want us to take you seriously when you don’t even agree with yourself ?
They didn’t say GIMP itself sucks, they said leaning to use it sucks. Those are two different things.
I’ve been using Gimp for years. It’s the only way I know. If I tried to use photoshop I would have a hard time getting anything done too. I’m really good with gimp though.
I’ve used Gimp all through my teenage years. And I used it a LOT. It was quite a difficult transition to Photoshop (which my workplace uses). But once I got the hang of photoshop, I realized how convoluted Gimp really is.
Half the time spent in Gimp is making backups before making an edit. A third of your layers will be backup layers in case you change your mind about a design decision. The whole design process is super inflexible and therefor kills creativity.
Want to use an effect like gaussian blur or drop shadow? Make sure you backup your layer! Want to edit text after you stretched it all out? I hope you made a backup of that layer! Want to work with large files with many layers? You better hit ctrl S after every edit, because the program just might crash on you if you make a difficult selection!
To be fair, I haven’t used much Gimp since 2.8, so if stuff is different now: awesome! And I admire all volunteers that work to make stuff better. But for now, I’ll stay away from it if I need to do heavy editing.
I’ve tried learning GIMP, and it sucks. I’m not saying GIMP sucks, but you have to be crazy to not see that it’s hard to learn.
I use GIMP for memes and here’s my two favorite tips
-
Hit the forward slash key
/to open a command palette and jump to any action -
To remove backgrounds, use a layer mask. select around the object and paint a white/black section on the layer mask. Here comes the trick - use a Gaussian filter on the layer mask to create a transition from black to white and the crop job looks a lot less choppy.
My anti-trick
- Adding text and shapes sucks and I never found a way to make it better. Export your image and finish the job in Krita, Pinta, Photopea, …
select around the object
Any tricks on getting the fuzzy select tool to work? Even after adjusting the threshold, it is just garbage in my experience. Nothing close to Affinity/Photoshop. Unless I am selecting something that is in front of a very solid background, I just use a paint brush on a layer mask in order to “cut out” an object.
I have no tips and agree with you 100% - never managed to get the fuzzy select or smart scissors going.
fuck, i neverthought of the gaussian blur thing, i always just traced over the edge with a soft edged brush…
I used the Blur Border (or whatever it’s called) option that’s right there in every selection tool’s settings.
Feather?
-
I’m saying GIMP sucks (it sucks)
Well, at least you don’t have to suck dicks or whatever to vote and post comments like in ShitStackOverflow
Duplicate question: 10-year-old-link-to-a-thread-that-doesn’t-contain-an-answer-either
Uh huh, uh huh. And how many dicks do I
gethave to suck per vote? Can you provide a link and very detailed instructions on the process? You know, so I can make sure I never go there before my wife comes home from work.
many such cases. good to call it out, and needs to happen more often and consistently as toxicity is the #1 barrier to the “year of the Linux desktop” in my experience
edit: also https://krita.org/
Krita is really good for digital drawing and painting, but photoshop does cover a lot of other things, which krita can not do. In that sense Krita is more of a Corel PaintShop Pro alternative. While GIMP is the best, but still very bad, alternative to photoshop.
I’ve been using gimp for as long as I can remember using Linux since 2000. The interface has changed so much lately that I can barely use it. I can’t find half the controls anymore.
The biggest revelation for me when I switched to Photoshop for work about 4 years ago is that non-destructive editing is sooooo much nicer.
I always had dozens of “backup” layers in my years with Gimp just in case I messed something up. I was always cautious about the order in which you had to do things. I was amazed with photoshop at the fact that you could edit text after warping, gradient coloring and outlining it. Saved so much hassle.
I read non-destructive is in the pipelines for Gimp, and that would finally make it start become a viable alternative again.
Non destructive means like when you use a tool to add something, it isn’t “final”. You can still edit that brush stroke or resize a shape?
Kind of like in Inkscape when you edit an SVG?
Yes its always just filters being individually applied.
I also think GPU acceleration is a huge issue in GIMP and I think GIMP 3 still dont really has it.
Yes exactly. I used Gimp extensively (i think 2.8?) back in the day, and especially text was a pain to work with. If you rotated or resized text, you couldn’t change what the text said anymore.
Another example is making a layer grayscale. In gimp it would make the whole layer grayscale without any way to revert it. In Photoshop it sort of is like an extra “layer” on top of your colored layer that you can turn on and off, making it “non-destructive”
Nowadays I mainly use Illustrator for work, so I could indeed probably give Inscape a good try. But sometimes you just need to work with pixels and gimps destructive workflow is just a dealbreaker for me. Still, it’s impressive that the team got it so far, and I hope one day it will do a Blender and become the powehouse it deserves to be.
Well, I don’t know if it’ll be maintained long term considering the disclaimer at the top of the README, but the PhotoGIMP plugin has always kept the interface consistent for me, and I’ve had it installed working well for 3.5 years now.
Oh that’s really cool
Well, there were no real GIMP changes in that period lol
It does change the keyboard shortcuts to mimic Photoshop’s and it also changes the UI including icons. I don’t know, I like it better than the GIMP defaults.
I have to try it but I am already on GIMP 3 from
flathub-beta(see instructions in my flatpak remote repo)This is probably pretty useful and I also dont really need the top right stuff but no idea how to remove it.
I dont know if this is some GTK2 style set and never did this, but porting it to GTK3 is VERY likely worth the effort, if it is possible.
Needs to be forked then though.
https://github.com/boredsquirrel/PhotoGIMP
I would remove the differnt launcher entry, even though maybe nice to have. The current GIMP splash screen is extremely ugly, that can go.
I dont like changing the name though.
Will try if it works on Gimp 3 and if not, see if this is fixable.
It looks like this was asked in a GIMP forum, so I’m not really surprised at the backlash. It’s super rude to ask that in that forum. Like, they shouldn’t be rude back, but I understand why they were.
Is it? It’s just a forum it’s not like he’s asking the devs
It would be like going into a Microsoft forum and asking about alternatives to Windows. That’s obviously not the right place to do it. They should ask this in a general digital photography forum, or a general open source forum.
They also called GIMP an “epic POS” in their comment.
Hey, you guys know any good alternatives to Lemmy? Lol.
Touch grass. It’s the best replacement for social media of any kind!
For you, I’d suggest xitter, filth casual
Sublinks looks like it could be interesting.
Mbin. Compatible with both Lemmy and Mastodon. Con: Mbin is even more beta software than Lemmy is. Lots of missing QoL.
Uh, I hate to be that guy, but if you can’t use Windows 11 due to hardware requirements, Microsoft put a “Try Ubuntu” button in the system settings page next to the message telling you that you are ineligible for a Windows upgrade. And if you go to their help forums, the Microsoft support reps will recommend Ubuntu LTS to you. So it’s not like the GIMP forums at all.
It looks like this was asked in a GIMP forum, […] It’s super rude to ask that in that forum.
Why? Just because you’re using a forum for a piece of software, presumably because you want to receive or offer help on using the software for the most part, doesn’t mean you’re obsessed with it and hate all other alternatives that exist.
It’s software, not a religion. These people need some perspective.
Imagine being in a community where being asked about alternatives is considered extremely rude. What a weird group of cult-like obsessives that would be. Creepy o.O
Because those people are there (presumably) to help people use GIMP. If you read the guy’s full comment, they were obviously there to take a shit on GIMP. And that’s fine, but maybe don’t do it to a whole bunch of people who have volunteered their time to help other people with it.
I disagree that this is the best group to ask about alternatives. These are GIMP people. If you want them to recommend something, they’re clearly going to recommend GIMP. A much better place to ask this question (assuming they weren’t just trying to shit on GIMP) would be a general digital photography forum, or an open source forum. A place where people use a wide variety of programs.
Forums are for discussion of a thing, which includes both praise and criticisms. They shouldn’t be echo chamber cults. That’s how you get elitist Vim users…
GIMP is already a suitable requirement
Krita
Dinosaur here.
Windows Paint, as it was back in 9x? Totally my jam. Between that and Irfanview for access to resizing and filter features Paint didn’t have, I could get a surprising amount done.
But then they updated Paint to have more advanced abilities and I had no idea how to do things any more.
I’ve tried Krita recently, but I felt lost. I think I need to attend a course or watch some videos on layers and the brushes and everything like that. It isn’t intuitive at all. None of the advanced graphics programs are.
Old Paint? You didn’t need a how-to or a course. It was one layer. No overwhelming number of tools and options. You wanted another layer? You opened another Paint window.
You wanted anti-aliasing? You drew things two or four times the size then used something like Irfanview to shrink it down when you were done.
Damn kids get off my etc.
Totally agree, sometimes I just need to crop an image and it’s not intuitive at all on the big programs. I’ve found paint 3D is fairly solid and non complex for most simple things one needs to do with images.
Cropping in Krita or GIMP is super simple. Open Image, rectangle select what you want to keep, then Edit > Trim To Selection, then File > Export.
In paint 3d it’s open image > click crop button > crop > save. My mom could do it with no problem since the Ui isn’t cluttered with stuff and the crop button is right there.
Yeah, but you can’t compare these two. That’s like trying to cut a 2×4 with a CNC and complaining that it is unintuitive. Yeah a hacksaw can also cut it and is more intuitive but a CNC can do about a million things the hacksaw can’t, so obviously its harder to use. The hacksaw is perfectly fine for a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean the CNC is bad.
Why are you cutting a 2x4 with a hacksaw?
A person shows up in a room full of random people. Punches one in the face and starts swinging at everyone else. People instinctively start to defend themselves and, as they are more numerous, overwhelm and badly wound the instigator. OP walks into the room, “everyone in this room is so violent, look everyone, they are so violent”. People outside the room hearing OP, “yeah, I bet anyone like them is just as violent”.
Also it’s funny that there is a dropdown with font previews in GIMP, despite this guy’s statement. Admittedly, it’s in an odd place (on the left of the font input box, rather than on the right, and doesn’t have a dropdown icon, but a font preview), but it’s there. It took me three clicks to find it.
I just tried it out. Picked a font I liked, right clicked the text, selected Filters -> Light and Shadow -> Drop Shadow, set offsets and blur to zero, grow to 10, opacity to 1, and boom, I had text with a stroke effect. I’m not sure why this guy had so much trouble. Maybe it’s cause I come from a CSS background, and that’s exactly how you would add a stroke effect in CSS.
Took me all of two minutes to make that, and I’m not a GIMP wizard.
Oh, vim community became gimp community.
