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I wonder why more companies don’t get behind GIMP as a real alternative to Adobe. I remember Blender getting picked on all the time before it got its big sponso

I wonder why more companies don’t get behind GIMP as a real alternative to Adobe. I remember Blender getting picked on all the time before it got its big sponsorships. It got a real roadmap and development was done and was greatly improved on a feature and artist experience level.

justapassenger 4y ago
My uniformed guess. Blender was created as a an internal product by a company using it. While not very successful, it had marked oriented approach from a start. GIMP was always a toy for programmers, without any vision behind for how to actually make it a product that commercial users would want. It’s a big job to move a ship like that.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Been using it professionally for image and photo editing for 25 years.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  Not a big company, but there is the Zemarmot project. One of the project members implement things in GIMP, which are needed for Zemarmot. So there are people using GIMP professionally and extending it accroding to their needs.
- janc_ 4y ago
  All the stuff that made Blender more “user-friendly” only happened long after it became open source…
CharlesW 4y ago
> I wonder why more companies don’t get behind GIMP as a real alternative to Adobe. GIMP is not competitive with Adobe Photoshop from a capabilities or user experience perspective. Here’s a non-biased article comparing GIMP to Photoshop: https://thegimptutorials.com/gimp-vs-photoshop/ https://thegimptutorials.com/gimp-vs-photoshop/
- telman17 4y ago
  Exactly, and Blender wasn’t competitive to Max or Maya. But with enough focused money that was turned around.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    Nothing would make me happier than a serious, open source alternative to Photoshop, but GIMP is not currently on a Blender-like trajectory to be that.
    - Gualdrapo 4y ago
      And it will never be. Its developers don't intend that (sadly, uno).
  - dagmx 4y ago
    You also have to take into account the cost difference. Other DCCs cost orders of magnitude more than Photoshop does. The value of a free program really inspires more faith. Also blender was regularly used to make content with input from the community. Multiple shorts that dog fooded it and provided improvements through the process, while inspiring many to see what’s possible. GIMP doesn’t have any of that. Photoshop can be had now for $10/mo or something cheap like that. It’s not thousands of dollars a year like for DCCs. It doesn’t have productions driving features in it , or creating content regularly to inspire people. Krita does better here because they do small but more engaged community outreach to create content with Krita and have it feed back into the app
    - sbuk 4y ago
      > Also blender was regularly used to make content with input from the community. Multiple shorts that dog fooded it and provided improvements through the process, while inspiring many to see what’s possible. The Blender Foundation and community made that happen! No glib “if you don’t like it, fix it!” type comments. I’m not suggesting that you personally have said that, but look at the context and process of Blender’s development and success. The people at the Foundation, along with a buoyant community have worked hard and listened to the criticisms and transparently worked on them. It’s been a long slog.
dagmx 4y ago
Why would they? Companies don’t need an alternative to Adobe. The licensing costs are a drop in the bucket. Would it be nice to have? Sure. But there are tons of alternatives to Photoshop that just don’t compete on market share, despite photoshop lagging behind in many areas. If companies were backing an OSS editor though, Krita is by far more favoured by professional creatives. It’s more familiar coming from Photoshop, has better extensibility+Python scripting+Qt which is great for pipelines and has a much better handling of color science and other features important for professionals.
- prokoudine 4y ago
  > Krita... has better extensibility Really? How? :)
  - Eduard 4y ago
    > Companies don’t need an alternative to Adobe. The licensing costs are a drop in the bucket. You are ignoring non-profits and countries foreign to you.
    - dagmx 4y ago
      No I’m not because Adobe has pricing structures for non-profits and other markets. In the context of this discussion, the question was why companies aren’t funding GIMP development, and the ones that can’t afford a $20/mo aren’t the ones who would be funding development anyway. Yes, of course there’s a market for free stuff. But the price of admission into the existing paid for products is low enough that there’s little motivation to fund it.
  - dagmx 4y ago
    edit: never mind i had somehow missed the GIMP Python extensions. So extensibility is not a point in favour of Krita, though looking at both APIs, I prefer the Krita API though that’s subjective
    - prokoudine 4y ago
sandreas 4y ago
In the meantime, many companies use Affinity[1] (commercial) as an alternative... But Adobe stuff is still the default software to "learn" with, so most designers insist using it... and personnel costs are much higher than licensing costs. [1]: https://affinity.serif.com https://affinity.serif.com
canistel 4y ago
As image processing is a relatively processor intensive activity, Mac used to be, and is still (it seems) the OS of choice for this work. GIMP's native Mac support too came quite late. This is another reason which adversely affected adoption.
- sbuk 4y ago
  This post is completely on the money. As distasteful as this will be to proponents of FOSS - especially those that “hate” all things Apple, a majority of professional design and photo work is done with them, which has a massive impact on the hobbyists market. Until Macs are treated as a first class citizen, success will likely be completely out of reach. Demonstrate usability and performance with the platform the pro’s use and the trickle down effect will be there. Blender, who use their own UI kit on the Mac just like Adobe does, is successful because it’s approachable (now at least, I’m still a right-clicker) and performant on all platforms. They talk about, and with, pro users and where Blender fits in. I’d now say that if anyone wants to play around or learn 3D modelling for animation, games and FX, Blender is as good as any place to start.
klodolph 4y ago
My personal experience is that GIMP is not quite at feature parity with Photoshop 3 or 4. It's definitely nowhere near Photoshop 5, and there are some features and workflows I used in Photoshop 2.5 that are missing from GIMP--just not many. The UX of GIMP also continues to be a major problem. GIMP is just the most famous alternative to Photoshop, that doesn't mean that it's a good substitute for Photoshop for most Photoshop users. I think people who consider GIMP a good substitute for Photoshop probably haven't ever used Photoshop seriously, or have photo editing needs that fall in a very narrow range. Companies which don't want to pay for Creative Cloud can more easily pay for one of the various alternatives--the particular alternative that works for you will be different.
- prokoudine 4y ago
  > My personal experience is that GIMP is not quite at feature parity with Photoshop 3 or 4. It's definitely nowhere near Photoshop 5 Layer Effects are the only 5.0 feature from Photoshop that GIMP doesn't yet have. There's also a million things GIMP does better or does at all compared to all the versions of Photoshop you mentioned. I can give you examples or you can spare me the time and just admit you've seen Photoshop 3/4/5 so long ago that you don't quite remember what it was like :)
  - Gualdrapo 4y ago
    Creating/editing geometric shapes...?
    - prokoudine 4y ago
      Vector shapes were added in 6.0.
      - blkhawk 4y ago
        Really? Can you make a shape then adjust it after you made it? Cause I cannot find that - as soon as I fill or stroke the vector it drops into bitmap and can only undone not adjusted.
Karliss 4y ago
One of my guesses as outsider to both 2d and 3d software industries. Is lifetime of the projects created in each software and the workflows around it. With Gimp/Photoshop the drawing will be usually done by one person and once it's done it's mostly done. With 3d software used for games and animations and movies projects are much bigger, made by teams of many people, projects lasting up to few years. Art pipelines and processes get built around the tools, which might be at least partially reused across the projects within same studio. It's less unusual to have inhouse software developers for creating specialized addons and tools. With that in mind seems believable that companies where long term impact of investing in tools is clearer are more likely to consider investing in open source tools for the sake of long term benefits. In comparison with 2d drawing industry where investment in tooling is mostly limited to skill and experience of individual persons working with specific software. There is also fact that final output of 2d drawing software is plain image which have relatively simple widely used standard formats (for practical reasons the Photoshop files are still commonly exchanged but sooner or later result is treated as plain image). With 3D software the complexity of output and integration with other software is much bigger. This encourages other big software companies to invest in Blender for the sake of better integration with their tools. Unity, Unreal consuming 3d models produced in blender, there is interest for both good workflow and integration, as well general accessibility to tools required during game development because more game developers means more potential game developers buying their software. Nvidia and AMD interested in better support for their hardware, so that end users are more likely to buy it.
ekianjo 4y ago
Probably many factors at play. One of them being that the UI in Gimp is pretty bad to start with compared to commercial alternatives. Working with Text for example is atrocious in Gimp compared to Photoshop
- nine_k 4y ago
  But it's like saying "it's broken, therefore I'm not going to fix it". I think a lot of things in Gimp are not broken, there is a worthy foundation to build upon. The text UI is bad but it's not the cornerstone of the product, it can be fixed without rearchitecting it. The library approach to graphical ops is more important, and it looks promising to me. Look how much has Inkscape's UI improved, to say nothing about Blender.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    The problem is directional. Other FOSS out there seem to clearly understand what are the pain points and adress them as fast as they can while adding new features. Gimp feels slow in that regard. Maybe not enough dev resources or no clear focus among all devs.
    - nine_k 4y ago
      I think more bets are on Krita.
      - ekianjo 4y ago
        I dont understand this comment. krita is made for digital painting. Its not even remotely useful for photo editing.
  - sbuk 4y ago
    The Blender Foundation is a well oiled machine that actively seeks funding and offers easy ways to contribute. It all described here: https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/ https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/ Blender is, after Linux, the golden child of FOSS for professional level tooling and I’d argue the model for running an open source project.
grapeskin 4y ago
The UI is absolutely horrendous and despite decades of opportunity to fix it, there’s been zero attempt. Blender has made some big UI gains. I used it a long time ago, and the hidden menus and backwards control scheme made it unusable for anyone with basic computing knowledge (right click was select? Insanity) and doubly so for anyone with 3D knowledge. They revamped it a few years back and it’s usable now. I went from a blender hater to happily dropping paid 3D software and preaching about how good blender is. Companies could throw money at gimp. But that doesn’t mean it’ll ever have a control scheme that’s usable to the 99.9% of people with prior digital art experience who go in expecting something similar to 99.999% of other software, only to find it’s completely backwards. Literally just putting aside all other development plans and going all in for a year on making the UI usable would launch the project to success. And comments like this always get a “well, it’s open source so you could fix it yourself if it’s that bad!” I could and so could others. But there’s usable software out there, and instead of dedicating loads of time to trying to fix a decades-old mess, we’d all rather just use a better product even if it costs money and get to work, or make something different from the ground up.
- prokoudine 4y ago
  > The UI is absolutely horrendous and despite decades of opportunity to fix it, there’s been zero attempt. I'm afraid you are dismissing quite a lot of work to improve the UX/UI. Could more be done? Absolutely! Was there zero attempt? Not really, no.
  - grapeskin 4y ago
    Honestly, if there have been decades of efforts and it’s still this bad, that’s even less motivation to give them money. It’s like: if you’re a large manufacturer, would you prefer investing in a city where government officials pocket the cash and roads don’t exist but with handwavy excuses that something might improve with a little more cash, or invest literally anywhere else where the roads improve every year and things are getting cleaner? Gimp seems to be spinning its tires for infinity. I’ve tried it once a year or so for 15 years. It hasn’t changed much. It’s incredible. Almost no company is going to throw them cash and it’s obvious why.
throw_m239339 4y ago
because GIMP UI is terrible and the GIMP team has hard time questioning their UI choices. It was the same thing for blender for years, artists were telling the team that toolbars on the bottom of a window was a stupid idea, that the 3D view needed a visual nav gizmo and so on and so forth only to be rebuked by "gatekeepers" opposed to any sort of change. Yet Blender really took off with 2.8, only when it did its visual overall... If you're going to write a software for artists, design the UI for artists, not developers... "just learn the UI" doesn't cut it. The problem isn't resource oriented, it's "we don't want to change anything because we think there is nothing wrong with the UI". While every software is different, there are rules to UX/UI and GIMP is breaking too many of them. Also the bar to contribute is C and GObject knowledge which is quite high. Blender UI can be modified with Python so it's much easier for a designer to make prototypes.
- prokoudine 4y ago
  > the GIMP team has hard time questioning their UI choices That seems to be a popular myth.

justapassenger 4y ago

My uniformed guess. Blender was created as a an internal product by a company using it. While not very successful, it had marked oriented approach from a start. GIMP was always a toy for programmers, without any vision behind for how to actually make it a product that commercial users would want. It’s a big job to move a ship like that.

mixmastamyk 4y ago
Been using it professionally for image and photo editing for 25 years.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
zelphirkalt 4y ago
Not a big company, but there is the Zemarmot project. One of the project members implement things in GIMP, which are needed for Zemarmot. So there are people using GIMP professionally and extending it accroding to their needs.
janc_ 4y ago
All the stuff that made Blender more “user-friendly” only happened long after it became open source…

CharlesW 4y ago

> I wonder why more companies don’t get behind GIMP as a real alternative to Adobe. GIMP is not competitive with Adobe Photoshop from a capabilities or user experience perspective. Here’s a non-biased article comparing GIMP to Photoshop: https://thegimptutorials.com/gimp-vs-photoshop/ https://thegimptutorials.com/gimp-vs-photoshop/

telman17 4y ago
Exactly, and Blender wasn’t competitive to Max or Maya. But with enough focused money that was turned around.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  Nothing would make me happier than a serious, open source alternative to Photoshop, but GIMP is not currently on a Blender-like trajectory to be that.
  - Gualdrapo 4y ago
    And it will never be. Its developers don't intend that (sadly, uno).
- dagmx 4y ago
  You also have to take into account the cost difference. Other DCCs cost orders of magnitude more than Photoshop does. The value of a free program really inspires more faith. Also blender was regularly used to make content with input from the community. Multiple shorts that dog fooded it and provided improvements through the process, while inspiring many to see what’s possible. GIMP doesn’t have any of that. Photoshop can be had now for $10/mo or something cheap like that. It’s not thousands of dollars a year like for DCCs. It doesn’t have productions driving features in it , or creating content regularly to inspire people. Krita does better here because they do small but more engaged community outreach to create content with Krita and have it feed back into the app
  - sbuk 4y ago
    > Also blender was regularly used to make content with input from the community. Multiple shorts that dog fooded it and provided improvements through the process, while inspiring many to see what’s possible. The Blender Foundation and community made that happen! No glib “if you don’t like it, fix it!” type comments. I’m not suggesting that you personally have said that, but look at the context and process of Blender’s development and success. The people at the Foundation, along with a buoyant community have worked hard and listened to the criticisms and transparently worked on them. It’s been a long slog.

dagmx 4y ago

Why would they? Companies don’t need an alternative to Adobe. The licensing costs are a drop in the bucket. Would it be nice to have? Sure. But there are tons of alternatives to Photoshop that just don’t compete on market share, despite photoshop lagging behind in many areas. If companies were backing an OSS editor though, Krita is by far more favoured by professional creatives. It’s more familiar coming from Photoshop, has better extensibility+Python scripting+Qt which is great for pipelines and has a much better handling of color science and other features important for professionals.

prokoudine 4y ago
> Krita... has better extensibility Really? How? :)
- Eduard 4y ago
  > Companies don’t need an alternative to Adobe. The licensing costs are a drop in the bucket. You are ignoring non-profits and countries foreign to you.
  - dagmx 4y ago
    No I’m not because Adobe has pricing structures for non-profits and other markets. In the context of this discussion, the question was why companies aren’t funding GIMP development, and the ones that can’t afford a $20/mo aren’t the ones who would be funding development anyway. Yes, of course there’s a market for free stuff. But the price of admission into the existing paid for products is low enough that there’s little motivation to fund it.
- dagmx 4y ago
  edit: never mind i had somehow missed the GIMP Python extensions. So extensibility is not a point in favour of Krita, though looking at both APIs, I prefer the Krita API though that’s subjective
  - prokoudine 4y ago

sandreas 4y ago

In the meantime, many companies use Affinity[1] (commercial) as an alternative... But Adobe stuff is still the default software to "learn" with, so most designers insist using it... and personnel costs are much higher than licensing costs. [1]: https://affinity.serif.com https://affinity.serif.com

canistel 4y ago

As image processing is a relatively processor intensive activity, Mac used to be, and is still (it seems) the OS of choice for this work. GIMP's native Mac support too came quite late. This is another reason which adversely affected adoption.

sbuk 4y ago
This post is completely on the money. As distasteful as this will be to proponents of FOSS - especially those that “hate” all things Apple, a majority of professional design and photo work is done with them, which has a massive impact on the hobbyists market. Until Macs are treated as a first class citizen, success will likely be completely out of reach. Demonstrate usability and performance with the platform the pro’s use and the trickle down effect will be there. Blender, who use their own UI kit on the Mac just like Adobe does, is successful because it’s approachable (now at least, I’m still a right-clicker) and performant on all platforms. They talk about, and with, pro users and where Blender fits in. I’d now say that if anyone wants to play around or learn 3D modelling for animation, games and FX, Blender is as good as any place to start.

klodolph 4y ago

My personal experience is that GIMP is not quite at feature parity with Photoshop 3 or 4. It's definitely nowhere near Photoshop 5, and there are some features and workflows I used in Photoshop 2.5 that are missing from GIMP--just not many. The UX of GIMP also continues to be a major problem. GIMP is just the most famous alternative to Photoshop, that doesn't mean that it's a good substitute for Photoshop for most Photoshop users. I think people who consider GIMP a good substitute for Photoshop probably haven't ever used Photoshop seriously, or have photo editing needs that fall in a very narrow range. Companies which don't want to pay for Creative Cloud can more easily pay for one of the various alternatives--the particular alternative that works for you will be different.

prokoudine 4y ago
> My personal experience is that GIMP is not quite at feature parity with Photoshop 3 or 4. It's definitely nowhere near Photoshop 5 Layer Effects are the only 5.0 feature from Photoshop that GIMP doesn't yet have. There's also a million things GIMP does better or does at all compared to all the versions of Photoshop you mentioned. I can give you examples or you can spare me the time and just admit you've seen Photoshop 3/4/5 so long ago that you don't quite remember what it was like :)
- Gualdrapo 4y ago
  Creating/editing geometric shapes...?
  - prokoudine 4y ago
    Vector shapes were added in 6.0.
    - blkhawk 4y ago
      Really? Can you make a shape then adjust it after you made it? Cause I cannot find that - as soon as I fill or stroke the vector it drops into bitmap and can only undone not adjusted.

Karliss 4y ago

One of my guesses as outsider to both 2d and 3d software industries. Is lifetime of the projects created in each software and the workflows around it. With Gimp/Photoshop the drawing will be usually done by one person and once it's done it's mostly done. With 3d software used for games and animations and movies projects are much bigger, made by teams of many people, projects lasting up to few years. Art pipelines and processes get built around the tools, which might be at least partially reused across the projects within same studio. It's less unusual to have inhouse software developers for creating specialized addons and tools. With that in mind seems believable that companies where long term impact of investing in tools is clearer are more likely to consider investing in open source tools for the sake of long term benefits. In comparison with 2d drawing industry where investment in tooling is mostly limited to skill and experience of individual persons working with specific software. There is also fact that final output of 2d drawing software is plain image which have relatively simple widely used standard formats (for practical reasons the Photoshop files are still commonly exchanged but sooner or later result is treated as plain image). With 3D software the complexity of output and integration with other software is much bigger. This encourages other big software companies to invest in Blender for the sake of better integration with their tools. Unity, Unreal consuming 3d models produced in blender, there is interest for both good workflow and integration, as well general accessibility to tools required during game development because more game developers means more potential game developers buying their software. Nvidia and AMD interested in better support for their hardware, so that end users are more likely to buy it.

ekianjo 4y ago

Probably many factors at play. One of them being that the UI in Gimp is pretty bad to start with compared to commercial alternatives. Working with Text for example is atrocious in Gimp compared to Photoshop

nine_k 4y ago
But it's like saying "it's broken, therefore I'm not going to fix it". I think a lot of things in Gimp are not broken, there is a worthy foundation to build upon. The text UI is bad but it's not the cornerstone of the product, it can be fixed without rearchitecting it. The library approach to graphical ops is more important, and it looks promising to me. Look how much has Inkscape's UI improved, to say nothing about Blender.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  The problem is directional. Other FOSS out there seem to clearly understand what are the pain points and adress them as fast as they can while adding new features. Gimp feels slow in that regard. Maybe not enough dev resources or no clear focus among all devs.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    I think more bets are on Krita.
    - ekianjo 4y ago
      I dont understand this comment. krita is made for digital painting. Its not even remotely useful for photo editing.
- sbuk 4y ago
  The Blender Foundation is a well oiled machine that actively seeks funding and offers easy ways to contribute. It all described here: https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/ https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/ Blender is, after Linux, the golden child of FOSS for professional level tooling and I’d argue the model for running an open source project.

grapeskin 4y ago

The UI is absolutely horrendous and despite decades of opportunity to fix it, there’s been zero attempt. Blender has made some big UI gains. I used it a long time ago, and the hidden menus and backwards control scheme made it unusable for anyone with basic computing knowledge (right click was select? Insanity) and doubly so for anyone with 3D knowledge. They revamped it a few years back and it’s usable now. I went from a blender hater to happily dropping paid 3D software and preaching about how good blender is. Companies could throw money at gimp. But that doesn’t mean it’ll ever have a control scheme that’s usable to the 99.9% of people with prior digital art experience who go in expecting something similar to 99.999% of other software, only to find it’s completely backwards. Literally just putting aside all other development plans and going all in for a year on making the UI usable would launch the project to success. And comments like this always get a “well, it’s open source so you could fix it yourself if it’s that bad!” I could and so could others. But there’s usable software out there, and instead of dedicating loads of time to trying to fix a decades-old mess, we’d all rather just use a better product even if it costs money and get to work, or make something different from the ground up.

prokoudine 4y ago
> The UI is absolutely horrendous and despite decades of opportunity to fix it, there’s been zero attempt. I'm afraid you are dismissing quite a lot of work to improve the UX/UI. Could more be done? Absolutely! Was there zero attempt? Not really, no.
- grapeskin 4y ago
  Honestly, if there have been decades of efforts and it’s still this bad, that’s even less motivation to give them money. It’s like: if you’re a large manufacturer, would you prefer investing in a city where government officials pocket the cash and roads don’t exist but with handwavy excuses that something might improve with a little more cash, or invest literally anywhere else where the roads improve every year and things are getting cleaner? Gimp seems to be spinning its tires for infinity. I’ve tried it once a year or so for 15 years. It hasn’t changed much. It’s incredible. Almost no company is going to throw them cash and it’s obvious why.

throw_m239339 4y ago

because GIMP UI is terrible and the GIMP team has hard time questioning their UI choices. It was the same thing for blender for years, artists were telling the team that toolbars on the bottom of a window was a stupid idea, that the 3D view needed a visual nav gizmo and so on and so forth only to be rebuked by "gatekeepers" opposed to any sort of change. Yet Blender really took off with 2.8, only when it did its visual overall... If you're going to write a software for artists, design the UI for artists, not developers... "just learn the UI" doesn't cut it. The problem isn't resource oriented, it's "we don't want to change anything because we think there is nothing wrong with the UI". While every software is different, there are rules to UX/UI and GIMP is breaking too many of them. Also the bar to contribute is C and GObject knowledge which is quite high. Blender UI can be modified with Python so it's much easier for a designer to make prototypes.

prokoudine 4y ago
> the GIMP team has hard time questioning their UI choices That seems to be a popular myth.