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A lot of the discussion here seems to be about alternative applications to Photoshop. That isn’t really the point, as there are, indeed, quite a few pretty good

A lot of the discussion here seems to be about alternative applications to Photoshop. That isn’t really the point, as there are, indeed, quite a few pretty good ones. What we need is an open standard format that does the things PSD does, but in a sane way, and have all those alternatives use that format as their native file type (export/import isn’t going to cut it). Having all these alternatives using their own formats is crazy. As an artist, I want to be very confident my files will be readable in the future, even if companies or projects cease to exist.

gnarbarian 6y ago
You're right. And it needs to have a text component so version control can be managed with things like git. Imagine binary blobs for the actual bitmaps but all operations on the bitmaps are sequentially translated to code, then simplified on save.
shakna 6y ago
That would probably be OpenRaster [0]. The specification is still in progress, but Krita, KDE, GIMP are all working on it. As it is today, there's a half dozen programs that can already read the format. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRaster
- thejohnconway 6y ago
  Right. Which has been in the works for 15 years, only reached 0.5, and isn’t the native file format of anything(?). I wish the people writing image editing applications would take this more seriously, because to my mind the file format is more important than the application, but there you are.
  - jakear 6y ago
    Trying to imagine a world where every text editor has their own proprietary character encoding and compatibility with other encodings is considered an extra... there’s something called UTF-8, but it’s been in development for 15 years without a stable release, and nobody supports it by default.
    - thejohnconway 6y ago
      Was UTF8 in development for 15 years without a 1.0? I don’t really know enough about it to interpret the Wikipedia page on its history. In any case, that would be good if it could eventually win out, but personally I feel it was started too late, and not had enough buy-in.
gmueckl 6y ago
That's just not realistically possible beyond simple stacks of blended layers - and even then there are corner cases where two implementations will end up computing different final composites. Anything nondestructive within a file format is almost always tied to the exact algorithm implementation of the program in which the file was created. Sometimes even swapping the order of commutative or associative mathematical operations for the same formula will lead to different results. I tried to make non-destructive workflows work in other contexts. It is probably not appreciated hard this is. It's easy to get yourself painted into a corner because if a file format says "apply operation x with these parameters", you are now stuck with shipping this operation x with all future versions of the software, even if you come up with a version 2.0 of x that is better, but not quite the same somehow. And if you want that software to keep a sane UI, it must hide that implementation detail of multiple versions of internal stuff somehow, usually with some kind of nasty hack. Especially open source programs are quite notorious for shying back from that because cruft like that is not fun to write or maintain.
- thejohnconway 6y ago
  Yep, I figured it was stuff like this. It’s unfortunate, but until it is sorted out, I (and seemingly everyone else) will be sticking with PSD.

gnarbarian 6y ago

You're right. And it needs to have a text component so version control can be managed with things like git. Imagine binary blobs for the actual bitmaps but all operations on the bitmaps are sequentially translated to code, then simplified on save.

shakna 6y ago

That would probably be OpenRaster [0]. The specification is still in progress, but Krita, KDE, GIMP are all working on it. As it is today, there's a half dozen programs that can already read the format. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRaster

thejohnconway 6y ago
Right. Which has been in the works for 15 years, only reached 0.5, and isn’t the native file format of anything(?). I wish the people writing image editing applications would take this more seriously, because to my mind the file format is more important than the application, but there you are.
- jakear 6y ago
  Trying to imagine a world where every text editor has their own proprietary character encoding and compatibility with other encodings is considered an extra... there’s something called UTF-8, but it’s been in development for 15 years without a stable release, and nobody supports it by default.
  - thejohnconway 6y ago
    Was UTF8 in development for 15 years without a 1.0? I don’t really know enough about it to interpret the Wikipedia page on its history. In any case, that would be good if it could eventually win out, but personally I feel it was started too late, and not had enough buy-in.

gmueckl 6y ago

That's just not realistically possible beyond simple stacks of blended layers - and even then there are corner cases where two implementations will end up computing different final composites. Anything nondestructive within a file format is almost always tied to the exact algorithm implementation of the program in which the file was created. Sometimes even swapping the order of commutative or associative mathematical operations for the same formula will lead to different results. I tried to make non-destructive workflows work in other contexts. It is probably not appreciated hard this is. It's easy to get yourself painted into a corner because if a file format says "apply operation x with these parameters", you are now stuck with shipping this operation x with all future versions of the software, even if you come up with a version 2.0 of x that is better, but not quite the same somehow. And if you want that software to keep a sane UI, it must hide that implementation detail of multiple versions of internal stuff somehow, usually with some kind of nasty hack. Especially open source programs are quite notorious for shying back from that because cruft like that is not fun to write or maintain.

thejohnconway 6y ago
Yep, I figured it was stuff like this. It’s unfortunate, but until it is sorted out, I (and seemingly everyone else) will be sticking with PSD.