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Nobody hates Photoshop. In fact it's one of the most loved software out there. I'm a developer and a Photoshop user and love it. The Unix philosophy would be a

Nobody hates Photoshop. In fact it's one of the most loved software out there. I'm a developer and a Photoshop user and love it. The Unix philosophy would be a disaster for a image editing software (ImageMagick much?) Once a developer who spent all day in VIM & co was honestly arguing with me that Photoshop should be a command line app. I filled that under "shit developers say" and "delusional".

dredmorbius 7y ago
Not so much in Venezuela right now. And, FBOW Linux has the Gimp, which I prefer to Photoshop, though that's largely on account of familiarity. ImageMagick itself is invaluable when what you need to do is programmatically change large numbers of images. I've seen it used on large (multi-million user) image-heavy sites as the standard image handling flow (thumbnails and default previews of standard sizes).
- investinme 7y ago
  That was exactly my point. ImageMagick and Photoshop serve completely different needs. You can't replace one with the other.
- pier25 7y ago
  > Not so much in Venezuela right now. Yeah but that's not because of the software itself.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    It's definitely a consequence of the software's implementation.
kragen 7y ago
It's strange that someone who spends all day in Vim (which is not an acronym, by the way), an editor driven by keystrokes rather than the command line like ex or edlin, would prefer a command-line Photoshop. I'm not saying you're lying but maybe they misspoke or you misremembered. A keystroke-driven Photoshop might be something like Blender. I think netpbm is more Unixy than ImageMagick. I've had good experiences with it, especially for images bigger than my RAM, but a paint program it is not.
- investinme 7y ago
  > I'm not saying you're lying but maybe they misspoke or you misremembered. No, that dev never did any serious image editing. He was just full of himself and of the "superior UNIX philosophy", the thought that there might be domains where that doesn't apply just never crossed his mind (image/audio/video editing being a major one)
  - kragen 7y ago
    Vim does not use the Unix philosophy. It is an Amiga program ported to Unix, designed along the lines of Emacs, which also does not use the Unix philosophy. You would think he would have noticed that his text editor was a domain where he wasn't applying the superior Unix philosophy. I'm not convinced that the Unix philosophy doesn't apply to image and video editing, but certainly we haven't seen an example (aside from filters, which work well in things like netpbm and Khoros, but I mean for actual interactive drawing and editing.) And certainly the performance cost of the Unix approach was infeasible in 1988, when Thomas Knoll wrote Photoshop. Still, the tree-structured pipeline structure of CAD models in FreeCAD, SolidWorks, and CATIA suggests that it might be a productive approach with enough work. We have seen the Vim philosophy applied to video editing, with great success; that's Blender.
    - investinme 7y ago
      I was talking more about the GUI/command line divide. SolidWorks/Blender are fundamentally GUI apps, even if they do contain some programmatic features (like parametric filters/models/...). Also, all media software have something like "Unix tools who do one thing well" - plugins, filters, ..., but you compose them using the GUI.
      - kragen 7y ago
        It sounds like you're being confused by the surface appearance of things, rather than paying attention to their fundamental nature. Maybe that's why you weren't able to understand the arrogant Vim guy's utterance and wrote him off as delusional instead of figuring out in what sense he might be saying something true. It's good that you did figure it out eventually even if you couldn't hear it from him. Unix wasn't distinguished from other contemporary systems by not using a GUI. With a few visionary exceptions like NLS/Augment, SKETCHPAD, Spacewar!, and GENESYS, computers didn't have GUIs when Unix was born. The Unix philosophy wasn't about using textual commands. Every computer used textual commands except desk calculators. It was about a uniform interface that permits unrestricted composition of orthogonal software components, easy and expressive automation of routine tasks, and prioritizing usability over absolute computational efficiency. These are not, to put it mildly, Photoshop’s strong points.
Kaiyou 7y ago
Personally, I yearn for a command line image editor. ImageMagick is nice, but it can't do everything. Once you've gone cli, it's hard to go back to gui applications, since they're so inefficient.
- investinme 7y ago
  You can only say this if you have a very limited imagination of what "image editor" is. Please explain to me how you imagine creating a mask around a human so that you can "extract" him from the background in the command line.
  - Kaiyou 7y ago
    I don't really know what "mask" and "extract" mean in this context. If you mean arbitrary selection of shapes then I have a couple of ideas how it can be accomplished. For mouse use I know the theory of arbitrary shape selection, but I never can get it quite right, since moving the mouse around the shape is very difficult for me.
yiyus 7y ago
ImageMagick is great, I use it all the time. Photoshop is superb for interactive image editing, but if you need to crop a thousand images, change brightness, add some text on top, and merge them one next to the other, for example, and you need to do this every day, a sciptable tool is essential, and I really appreciate having all the power of Unix instead of a limited environment that requires a huge platform.
- kragen 7y ago
  Wouldn't it be nice to have a programming-by-demonstration system that lets you interactively develop a filter on one image, then apply it to many images?
  - investinme 7y ago
    Photoshop actually has that. They are called Actions (basically macros). You can select a group of operations you did in your editing history and turn them into an Action, with parametrization support. You can then batch apply an Action to a bunch of files.
    - kragen 7y ago
      Nice! I don't know if this is new since I last used it or if I just didn't know about it.
      - fma 7y ago
        I imagine photoshop has had it for a long time. I do raw photography very sparingly and barely know photoshop. Literally one of the first thing I wanted to do was batch operations on a set of photos in which the lighting and camera setting were exactly the same. A quick Google revealed it is frequently used.
        kragen 7y ago
        Photoshop hasn't even existed for a long time yet.
mattkrause 7y ago
Same, but for Illustrator. I hate the price and subscription model, and the learning curve has some steep spots, but once you're up and running, it's fantastic. I want to like Inkscape, but I've hit too many weird bugs (text getting squashed, transparency disappearing randomly). I'm curious about Affinity Designer though.
- potta_coffee 7y ago
  I was a long time Illustrator user. I think before the subscription model, say around CS3, Illustrator was fantastic. Then they started changing things in the UI that didn't need to be changed. I'm not against adding features but unnecessary changes really annoy me. I've been using Affinity Designer for the last year and I think it's great. It doesn't have all of the features Illustrator has but you can do real, professional work with it. Inkscape doesn't even come close.
david_for_you 7y ago
I hate Photoshop. ;) It's a jumbled mess of features added over the years with no coherent UI workflow between them. It hides way too much of the complexity of image editing in one-click-effect solutions, that often don't compose well. I don't know of any good competitors in its price range though. I would recommend Nuke if it wasn't that expensive.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Not so much in Venezuela right now. And, FBOW Linux has the Gimp, which I prefer to Photoshop, though that's largely on account of familiarity. ImageMagick itself is invaluable when what you need to do is programmatically change large numbers of images. I've seen it used on large (multi-million user) image-heavy sites as the standard image handling flow (thumbnails and default previews of standard sizes).

investinme 7y ago
That was exactly my point. ImageMagick and Photoshop serve completely different needs. You can't replace one with the other.
pier25 7y ago
> Not so much in Venezuela right now. Yeah but that's not because of the software itself.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  It's definitely a consequence of the software's implementation.

kragen 7y ago

It's strange that someone who spends all day in Vim (which is not an acronym, by the way), an editor driven by keystrokes rather than the command line like ex or edlin, would prefer a command-line Photoshop. I'm not saying you're lying but maybe they misspoke or you misremembered. A keystroke-driven Photoshop might be something like Blender. I think netpbm is more Unixy than ImageMagick. I've had good experiences with it, especially for images bigger than my RAM, but a paint program it is not.

investinme 7y ago
> I'm not saying you're lying but maybe they misspoke or you misremembered. No, that dev never did any serious image editing. He was just full of himself and of the "superior UNIX philosophy", the thought that there might be domains where that doesn't apply just never crossed his mind (image/audio/video editing being a major one)
- kragen 7y ago
  Vim does not use the Unix philosophy. It is an Amiga program ported to Unix, designed along the lines of Emacs, which also does not use the Unix philosophy. You would think he would have noticed that his text editor was a domain where he wasn't applying the superior Unix philosophy. I'm not convinced that the Unix philosophy doesn't apply to image and video editing, but certainly we haven't seen an example (aside from filters, which work well in things like netpbm and Khoros, but I mean for actual interactive drawing and editing.) And certainly the performance cost of the Unix approach was infeasible in 1988, when Thomas Knoll wrote Photoshop. Still, the tree-structured pipeline structure of CAD models in FreeCAD, SolidWorks, and CATIA suggests that it might be a productive approach with enough work. We have seen the Vim philosophy applied to video editing, with great success; that's Blender.
  - investinme 7y ago
    I was talking more about the GUI/command line divide. SolidWorks/Blender are fundamentally GUI apps, even if they do contain some programmatic features (like parametric filters/models/...). Also, all media software have something like "Unix tools who do one thing well" - plugins, filters, ..., but you compose them using the GUI.
    - kragen 7y ago
      It sounds like you're being confused by the surface appearance of things, rather than paying attention to their fundamental nature. Maybe that's why you weren't able to understand the arrogant Vim guy's utterance and wrote him off as delusional instead of figuring out in what sense he might be saying something true. It's good that you did figure it out eventually even if you couldn't hear it from him. Unix wasn't distinguished from other contemporary systems by not using a GUI. With a few visionary exceptions like NLS/Augment, SKETCHPAD, Spacewar!, and GENESYS, computers didn't have GUIs when Unix was born. The Unix philosophy wasn't about using textual commands. Every computer used textual commands except desk calculators. It was about a uniform interface that permits unrestricted composition of orthogonal software components, easy and expressive automation of routine tasks, and prioritizing usability over absolute computational efficiency. These are not, to put it mildly, Photoshop’s strong points.

Kaiyou 7y ago

Personally, I yearn for a command line image editor. ImageMagick is nice, but it can't do everything. Once you've gone cli, it's hard to go back to gui applications, since they're so inefficient.

investinme 7y ago
You can only say this if you have a very limited imagination of what "image editor" is. Please explain to me how you imagine creating a mask around a human so that you can "extract" him from the background in the command line.
- Kaiyou 7y ago
  I don't really know what "mask" and "extract" mean in this context. If you mean arbitrary selection of shapes then I have a couple of ideas how it can be accomplished. For mouse use I know the theory of arbitrary shape selection, but I never can get it quite right, since moving the mouse around the shape is very difficult for me.

yiyus 7y ago

ImageMagick is great, I use it all the time. Photoshop is superb for interactive image editing, but if you need to crop a thousand images, change brightness, add some text on top, and merge them one next to the other, for example, and you need to do this every day, a sciptable tool is essential, and I really appreciate having all the power of Unix instead of a limited environment that requires a huge platform.

kragen 7y ago
Wouldn't it be nice to have a programming-by-demonstration system that lets you interactively develop a filter on one image, then apply it to many images?
- investinme 7y ago
  Photoshop actually has that. They are called Actions (basically macros). You can select a group of operations you did in your editing history and turn them into an Action, with parametrization support. You can then batch apply an Action to a bunch of files.
  - kragen 7y ago
    Nice! I don't know if this is new since I last used it or if I just didn't know about it.
    - fma 7y ago
      I imagine photoshop has had it for a long time. I do raw photography very sparingly and barely know photoshop. Literally one of the first thing I wanted to do was batch operations on a set of photos in which the lighting and camera setting were exactly the same. A quick Google revealed it is frequently used.
      - kragen 7y ago
        Photoshop hasn't even existed for a long time yet.

mattkrause 7y ago

Same, but for Illustrator. I hate the price and subscription model, and the learning curve has some steep spots, but once you're up and running, it's fantastic. I want to like Inkscape, but I've hit too many weird bugs (text getting squashed, transparency disappearing randomly). I'm curious about Affinity Designer though.

potta_coffee 7y ago
I was a long time Illustrator user. I think before the subscription model, say around CS3, Illustrator was fantastic. Then they started changing things in the UI that didn't need to be changed. I'm not against adding features but unnecessary changes really annoy me. I've been using Affinity Designer for the last year and I think it's great. It doesn't have all of the features Illustrator has but you can do real, professional work with it. Inkscape doesn't even come close.

david_for_you 7y ago

I hate Photoshop. ;) It's a jumbled mess of features added over the years with no coherent UI workflow between them. It hides way too much of the complexity of image editing in one-click-effect solutions, that often don't compose well. I don't know of any good competitors in its price range though. I would recommend Nuke if it wasn't that expensive.