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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

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.
      - prokoudine 4y ago
        I wrote above that Photoshop 5.0 (which GIMP was compared against) did not have vector objects, Photoshop 6.0 was the first version to have it. I'm getting a feeling that you are talking about something else here.
        blkhawk 4y ago
        yes I assumed you were talking about GIMP - my bad
- ImHereToVote 4y ago
  Editing the alpha channel without having to sacrifice a goat and make an altar to Baphomet.
  - prokoudine 4y ago
    Are we talking about GIMP or Photoshop here? :)
    - phire 4y ago
      Probably GIMP. Last time tried to use GIMP, I spend about an hour trying to work out how to remove an alpha channel without also applying it. I could clearly see the image I wanted in the red, green and blue channels. But because the alpha channel was filled with full transparent, all I could see outside of individual color channel mode was the checkered background. Deleting the alpha channel or converting the image format from RGBA to RGB just erased the entire image to black. I eventually found the solution in the eraser tool, which had an erase alpha mode. I had to set it to a really large size and go over the entire image. Would probably have been faster to just write a script in python.
blkhawk 4y ago
If it were only that - there are features that will never be implemented if certain utterances by core devs are any indication. I am more a PSP than a PS guy and I really tried to use GIMP for my image editing needs on kubuntu. I even ran a pinned patched version of it fixing the save/export "bug" (Another boneheaded ideological dev decision). A few months back I wanted to add a few straight lines to an image. In PSP these would be vector object that can be adjusted in size, color and position. In GIMP not so much. It has only the pencil tool with an alt mode holding shift that does straight lines. However I needed to adjust the lines distance from each other slightly - What followed was a lot of cursing and repeated attempts, switching to the path tool followed by discarding that idea and switching to making a layer per line. After finishing I deleted what I had done and did the same by starting PSP 9 in WINE in about 30 seconds. I did some googling and found the reason why GIMP lacks any useable Vector functions is that vector functions belong in a Drawing program not a Manipulation program. And GIMP is the latter. This is a paraphrased from memory quote by a GIMP dev. That probably means that not putting any vector function in (even though stuff like the Text function really benefits from vector layers) was a decision long ago that passed into ideological canon by now and is probably a huge task to implement. So I am currently back to using a PSP version from 1998 for editing images on ubuntu. Even though its buggy as hell. Newer version after the Corel acquisition sadly come with a DRM service that balks at wine. I have licences for a few of those I would love to use.
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  Most of this is just down to GIMP being an almost entirely destructive editor, and destructive editing just never was any good at respecting the user's time and effort. The only reason to implement destructive editing in the past has been limited computer resources, not because it's actually a good paradigm in virtually any way.
  - prokoudine 4y ago
    I don't think it was due to limited resources. GIMP development started in 1995. First version of Adobe Photoshop with adjustment layers was released a year later, in 1996. The notion just wasn't there.

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.
    - prokoudine 4y ago
      I wrote above that Photoshop 5.0 (which GIMP was compared against) did not have vector objects, Photoshop 6.0 was the first version to have it. I'm getting a feeling that you are talking about something else here.
      - blkhawk 4y ago
        yes I assumed you were talking about GIMP - my bad
ImHereToVote 4y ago
Editing the alpha channel without having to sacrifice a goat and make an altar to Baphomet.
- prokoudine 4y ago
  Are we talking about GIMP or Photoshop here? :)
  - phire 4y ago
    Probably GIMP. Last time tried to use GIMP, I spend about an hour trying to work out how to remove an alpha channel without also applying it. I could clearly see the image I wanted in the red, green and blue channels. But because the alpha channel was filled with full transparent, all I could see outside of individual color channel mode was the checkered background. Deleting the alpha channel or converting the image format from RGBA to RGB just erased the entire image to black. I eventually found the solution in the eraser tool, which had an erase alpha mode. I had to set it to a really large size and go over the entire image. Would probably have been faster to just write a script in python.

blkhawk 4y ago

If it were only that - there are features that will never be implemented if certain utterances by core devs are any indication. I am more a PSP than a PS guy and I really tried to use GIMP for my image editing needs on kubuntu. I even ran a pinned patched version of it fixing the save/export "bug" (Another boneheaded ideological dev decision). A few months back I wanted to add a few straight lines to an image. In PSP these would be vector object that can be adjusted in size, color and position. In GIMP not so much. It has only the pencil tool with an alt mode holding shift that does straight lines. However I needed to adjust the lines distance from each other slightly - What followed was a lot of cursing and repeated attempts, switching to the path tool followed by discarding that idea and switching to making a layer per line. After finishing I deleted what I had done and did the same by starting PSP 9 in WINE in about 30 seconds. I did some googling and found the reason why GIMP lacks any useable Vector functions is that vector functions belong in a Drawing program not a Manipulation program. And GIMP is the latter. This is a paraphrased from memory quote by a GIMP dev. That probably means that not putting any vector function in (even though stuff like the Text function really benefits from vector layers) was a decision long ago that passed into ideological canon by now and is probably a huge task to implement. So I am currently back to using a PSP version from 1998 for editing images on ubuntu. Even though its buggy as hell. Newer version after the Corel acquisition sadly come with a DRM service that balks at wine. I have licences for a few of those I would love to use.

formerly_proven 4y ago
Most of this is just down to GIMP being an almost entirely destructive editor, and destructive editing just never was any good at respecting the user's time and effort. The only reason to implement destructive editing in the past has been limited computer resources, not because it's actually a good paradigm in virtually any way.
- prokoudine 4y ago
  I don't think it was due to limited resources. GIMP development started in 1995. First version of Adobe Photoshop with adjustment layers was released a year later, in 1996. The notion just wasn't there.