6 ms·

I find that Adobe is really pulling away from open source software with all this AI stuff. A few years ago it could be argued that GIMP, Inkscape, and Darktable

I find that Adobe is really pulling away from open source software with all this AI stuff. A few years ago it could be argued that GIMP, Inkscape, and Darktable could do almost everything that Photoshop, Illustrator, and Lightroom could, albeit with a jankier user interface. But now none of the open source software can compete with AI generative fill, AI denoising, and now AI rotation.

ceejayoz 2y ago
They'll probably be better able to compete once Adobe ups prices to reflect the actual cost of all that processing.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  Photoshop is £30 a month. NASDAQ.com reports their net profit to be 40% and elsewhere they're reported to gross $20B revenue. I think they can afford the ML based content generation costs without increasing prices.
  - egypturnash 2y ago
    They might do it anyway though. I have the "all apps" subscription but it's not actually everything they make any more, all their "Substance 3D" tools are another $50/mo. I can easily see this feature getting most of its functionality locked behind that extra subscription the way Illustrator's new 3d tools just give you a tiny handful of materials without that.
    - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
      Oh for sure, their implementation is slicks and they're somewhat of a monopolist. The whole "free to educational institutions" really worked well for them and MS. I don't doubt they will put prices up, just boring they don't need to.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    Adobe had 41% profit margin in 2020, but otherwise in the 25% to 30% range since 2018. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ADBE/adobe/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ADBE/adobe/profit-...
mr_machine 2y ago
I was just thinking similarly. I don't need any of these AI features and I'm certainly not about to start giving Adobe money, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous.
RustySpottedCat 2y ago
Not yet, but I imagine soon they will. Closed source is moving to video and open source is catching up to static images with incredible pace. I won't be suprised if not only GIMP integrates something like a couple of general stable diffusion models but pirated copies of photoshop find a way to hook up a local generative model instead of the online stuff.
gjsman-1000 2y ago
> A few years ago it could be argued that GIMP, Inkscape, and Darktable To a Linux user, yes. To a professional, it was always a cruel joke, it was never close, even a few years ago. It's like saying Notepad++ is a functional IDE, or Kdenlive is a functional replacement for DaVinci Resolve. I cannot stress this enough: Actual professionals do not think GIMP is a viable replacement, in any way, and never have.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  I would also like to add (as a separate comment though, this will be controversial): Some would say that GIMP, Inkscape, and Darktable aren't really competitive yet because they haven't had enough investment. If we invested in them enough, and managed them well, they could be like Blender. GIMP has been in development since 1995. Photopea was initially released in 2013, has been solely developed by one person, and is a far-and-away better Photoshop competitor. The projects themselves are mismanaged. GIMP should (frankly) be abandoned and completely reset, in my opinion, as being a failed attempt at salvaging old code forever. Wisdom is knowing when to keep pushing - and when to give up.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jetbalsa 2y ago
  GIMP did spawn one kinda good thing, GTK was made because Peter Mattis disliked Motif and wrote a replacement and called it the GIMP toolkit
- shadowmanifold 2y ago
  Krita destroyed Gimp years ago. This debate is always by people who obviously don't even use these tools. No one would compare GIMP to Photoshop in 2024 that has any idea what they are talking about.
CapsAdmin 2y ago
In some way, having followed the open source image generation scene for a while, it feels a little bit like it's opposite? Most of the ai image generation stuff I've seen from adobe feels late to party in terms of what you can do with open source tools. Where they do compete however is with tight integration, and I guess that's what matters the most to users in the end. There are plugins for gimp that let you do image generation, inpainting and other things. As far as what the post shows, it looks very much like current models that generate novel viewpoints of an object, but for illustrations. It might be doable to fine tune this for illustrations and simply vectorise the new viewpoint again. Though this will destroy any structure previously held in the object. All I'm saying is that we have the tech to do even more than what adobe is doing, we just haven't put it nicely together yet.
- NeroVanbierv 2y ago
  I think your last paragraph sums it up pretty nicely: users need a good UX to get to these tools. So I would love if GIMP started shipping these awesome plugins by default to pick up the pace!
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    GIMP does not fully support non-destructive editing yet. That, by itself, would be a complete deal breaker for professional work. There's plenty more deal breakers remaining.
  - Waterluvian 2y ago
    The more I spend time as a software developer, the more strongly I believe that UX is 80% of what makes a tool good, and that a lot of programmers really just don’t get that.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      There are also the programmers that do get that, but just don't have the ability to change it. I'm no artist, but I can tell you when something looks bad. I'm constantly playing with CSS to learn new things to make things look better. I'm now in that category of "it looks like someone tried but just didn't achieve, but better than most" level of design. Programmers making things for other programmers will always be forgiven as long as it works. Programmers making things for the general population will not be forgiven to the same extent if at all. As soon as someone releases something that is polished, it will be used even if it doesn't work as well.
jerf 2y ago
"But now none of the open source software can compete with AI generative fill, AI denoising, and now AI rotation." This is a common pattern across many fields. The truly top-end companies are always running ahead of open source. But that doesn't mean it's a permanent situation. It just means you're looking at it from a point in time where the commercials got there, and open source hasn't yet. Open source will get there, and then Adobe will be ahead on something else. I've played a bit with "comfyui" over the past few days, a bizarre name for an AI image generation power tool. (And other things, but I have no experience there to know how good it is at those.) It drips with power. The open source world is not generally behind on raw capability. As is often the case, open source's deficiency for generative fill for instance is that A: it offers too much control, too many knobs (e.g., "which of several dozen models would you like to start with?"), and while that's awesome if you know what you're doing, it is not yet at the "circle this and click 'remove'" yet, and B: the motivation and firepower to integrate this all into a slick package is not there. I can definitely do an AI generative fill with open source software, but I'll be exporting an image into comfyui, either building my own generative fill program or grabbing some rando's program online who may or may not be using compatible models or require me to install additional bespoke functionality into comfyui, doing my work, and re-exporting it. The job is done, but it's much more complicated, and most people don't care about the other extra capabilities this workflow yields so for them it's just cost. It's a very normal pattern in the open source world. Nothing about the current situation particularly gives me cause to worry specially about it. To be concrete, here's a YouTube video that's to the more advanced side of what you can do in the open source world, which is probably still ultimately simplistic compared to what some people do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijqXnW_9gzc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijqXnW_9gzc That entire series is worth a look, and there's more it doesn't cover. You can get incredible control over these tools in the open source world, but it involves listening to some guy on YouTube trying to explain why you might to sometimes use a thing called "dpmpp_2m_sde_gpu"... not exactly normie-friendly.
- cchance 2y ago
  I mean we've been able to do generative fill and denoising, better in open for a while, its just not as easy (except for video really) What Adobe does is wrap those things in an easy to use app, and then charge for it, and hopefully not change their licensing again to grab everyones shit again. Regarding the scheduler (dpmpp) sure adobe doesn't tell you those things, but thats because they found one that worked, removed the options and packaged it up with a bow, comfy and a111 and forge etc, are more complex because they give you EVERYTHING and let you have at it. There are frontends that wipe all that away but they arent successful because like the linux world, people in opensource want to be able to tinker with all the internals and shit, which is why opensource tends to see some groundbreaking optimizations, like taking the Flux model from requiring 30+gb of vram to run to running on 6gb of vram lol
horsawlarway 2y ago
I'm not convinced. The flows are a little less convenient right now, but that's basically it. Ex - I can absolutely get exactly this same rotation feature using open toolchains, they just haven't been nicely consolidated into a pretty package yet. So to recreate the same thing adobe is doing here I currently have to: 1. Use the 3d-pack in comfy-ui to get stack orbit camera poses for my char (see: https://github.com/MrForExample/ComfyUI-3D-Pack https://github.com/MrForExample/ComfyUI-3D-Pack scroll down to stack orbit in the readme) 2. Import those images back into the open source tool manually. Is it as convenient? Nope - it requires a lot more setup and knowledge. Is it hard to imagine this getting implemented in open source? Also nope. It's going to happen, it just won't be quite as quick.
- JoeyJoJoJr 2y ago
  Do you know if there is an AI tool to “explode” an image, such as a character, into individual parts for a texture atlas? See example: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/9606161/53874756-0eaed680-403e-11e9-9f11-e11f6effd871.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/9606161/53874756-0...
insane_dreamer 2y ago
Can't speak for PS vs GIMP but I used to use Illustrator a fair bit and Inkscape was nowhere near it in terms of both features and useability. Now that was 15 years ago, so it may have caught up.
- dagmx 2y ago
  You are correct even today. Inkscape is great but it’s a fraction of the utility that Illustrator offers. The only people who would actually equate them are people not professionally using these tools everyday. Even paid apps like affinity designer are a fraction of the functionality of Illustrator. Again, a great product but people are just dead wrong if they compare them as an absolute.
  - RunSet 2y ago
    > The only people who would actually equate them are people not professionally using these tools everyday. While someone who just needs a functional vector graphics editor and is not being paid to use adobe software might prefer inkscape. Speaking from personal experience, there.
    - dagmx 2y ago
      Sure, if they fit your need, nobody is saying you should pay for more. This is a common response when someone says something is better. It doesn’t mean they’re saying you need the better stuff or judging folks who don’t need it.
lofaszvanitt 2y ago
They can, but the user experience is abysmal, useless and nerve racking.
dagmx 2y ago
With all due respect there’s never been a time when that could have legitimately been argued unless someone was doing relatively basic things with those apps or was a hobbyist. There’s always been a significant gap in capabilities once you looked past the surface. I find this sentiment is common among FOSS advocates who don’t actually professionally use those tools. I am definitely an advocate for free tools closing that gap, but I both design content professionally and contribute to OSS projects to close that gap. So I feel quite confident in saying that gap has always been large when compared to the Adobe suite.
- woah 2y ago
  Even if the open source option is only slightly worse, why would a professional allow that to impact how they earn a living?
  - dagmx 2y ago
    Yeah precisely. The Adobe suite is affordable if you’re actively making money off using it. It’s also why there’s not as much investment in competing open source projects. $80 CAD/mo for the whole suite minus the substance stuff (prices are regional). For the average freelancer in Canada, that’s not a consequential barrier to entry. That’s <$1k for a year for everything. If I charge a rate of something like $40/hr, that’s two hours in a month? <2% of revenue. Am I going to risk spending that much extra time fussing with something else for 2% more $$? Meanwhile Blender gets a lot of investment because the competition is much more expensive. CA$305/mo for Maya and I need to augment it with an adobe subscription for any non-3D work.
    - cchance 2y ago
      Sure as long as adobe doesn't decide to go back and do the whole "we own the rights to everything ever opened in one of our apps" again lol
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    Why wouldn't they if they do not want to use them for professional deontology reasons ? What impact size are we talking about ?
whywhywhywhy 2y ago
>A few years ago it could be argued that GIMP, Inkscape, and Darktable could do almost everything that Photoshop, Illustrator, and Lightroom could, albeit with a jankier user interface. It really couldn't
juthen 2y ago
Almost all the AI models come from open research. Yes, open software hasn't caught up because they don't have the billions of research money to implement this models, but that doesn't mean it won't happen at some point.

ceejayoz 2y ago

They'll probably be better able to compete once Adobe ups prices to reflect the actual cost of all that processing.

pbhjpbhj 2y ago
Photoshop is £30 a month. NASDAQ.com reports their net profit to be 40% and elsewhere they're reported to gross $20B revenue. I think they can afford the ML based content generation costs without increasing prices.
- egypturnash 2y ago
  They might do it anyway though. I have the "all apps" subscription but it's not actually everything they make any more, all their "Substance 3D" tools are another $50/mo. I can easily see this feature getting most of its functionality locked behind that extra subscription the way Illustrator's new 3d tools just give you a tiny handful of materials without that.
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    Oh for sure, their implementation is slicks and they're somewhat of a monopolist. The whole "free to educational institutions" really worked well for them and MS. I don't doubt they will put prices up, just boring they don't need to.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Adobe had 41% profit margin in 2020, but otherwise in the 25% to 30% range since 2018. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ADBE/adobe/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ADBE/adobe/profit-...

mr_machine 2y ago

I was just thinking similarly. I don't need any of these AI features and I'm certainly not about to start giving Adobe money, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous.

RustySpottedCat 2y ago

Not yet, but I imagine soon they will. Closed source is moving to video and open source is catching up to static images with incredible pace. I won't be suprised if not only GIMP integrates something like a couple of general stable diffusion models but pirated copies of photoshop find a way to hook up a local generative model instead of the online stuff.

gjsman-1000 2y ago

> A few years ago it could be argued that GIMP, Inkscape, and Darktable To a Linux user, yes. To a professional, it was always a cruel joke, it was never close, even a few years ago. It's like saying Notepad++ is a functional IDE, or Kdenlive is a functional replacement for DaVinci Resolve. I cannot stress this enough: Actual professionals do not think GIMP is a viable replacement, in any way, and never have.

gjsman-1000 2y ago
I would also like to add (as a separate comment though, this will be controversial): Some would say that GIMP, Inkscape, and Darktable aren't really competitive yet because they haven't had enough investment. If we invested in them enough, and managed them well, they could be like Blender. GIMP has been in development since 1995. Photopea was initially released in 2013, has been solely developed by one person, and is a far-and-away better Photoshop competitor. The projects themselves are mismanaged. GIMP should (frankly) be abandoned and completely reset, in my opinion, as being a failed attempt at salvaging old code forever. Wisdom is knowing when to keep pushing - and when to give up.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jetbalsa 2y ago
GIMP did spawn one kinda good thing, GTK was made because Peter Mattis disliked Motif and wrote a replacement and called it the GIMP toolkit
shadowmanifold 2y ago
Krita destroyed Gimp years ago. This debate is always by people who obviously don't even use these tools. No one would compare GIMP to Photoshop in 2024 that has any idea what they are talking about.

CapsAdmin 2y ago

In some way, having followed the open source image generation scene for a while, it feels a little bit like it's opposite? Most of the ai image generation stuff I've seen from adobe feels late to party in terms of what you can do with open source tools. Where they do compete however is with tight integration, and I guess that's what matters the most to users in the end. There are plugins for gimp that let you do image generation, inpainting and other things. As far as what the post shows, it looks very much like current models that generate novel viewpoints of an object, but for illustrations. It might be doable to fine tune this for illustrations and simply vectorise the new viewpoint again. Though this will destroy any structure previously held in the object. All I'm saying is that we have the tech to do even more than what adobe is doing, we just haven't put it nicely together yet.

NeroVanbierv 2y ago
I think your last paragraph sums it up pretty nicely: users need a good UX to get to these tools. So I would love if GIMP started shipping these awesome plugins by default to pick up the pace!
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  GIMP does not fully support non-destructive editing yet. That, by itself, would be a complete deal breaker for professional work. There's plenty more deal breakers remaining.
- Waterluvian 2y ago
  The more I spend time as a software developer, the more strongly I believe that UX is 80% of what makes a tool good, and that a lot of programmers really just don’t get that.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    There are also the programmers that do get that, but just don't have the ability to change it. I'm no artist, but I can tell you when something looks bad. I'm constantly playing with CSS to learn new things to make things look better. I'm now in that category of "it looks like someone tried but just didn't achieve, but better than most" level of design. Programmers making things for other programmers will always be forgiven as long as it works. Programmers making things for the general population will not be forgiven to the same extent if at all. As soon as someone releases something that is polished, it will be used even if it doesn't work as well.

jerf 2y ago

"But now none of the open source software can compete with AI generative fill, AI denoising, and now AI rotation." This is a common pattern across many fields. The truly top-end companies are always running ahead of open source. But that doesn't mean it's a permanent situation. It just means you're looking at it from a point in time where the commercials got there, and open source hasn't yet. Open source will get there, and then Adobe will be ahead on something else. I've played a bit with "comfyui" over the past few days, a bizarre name for an AI image generation power tool. (And other things, but I have no experience there to know how good it is at those.) It drips with power. The open source world is not generally behind on raw capability. As is often the case, open source's deficiency for generative fill for instance is that A: it offers too much control, too many knobs (e.g., "which of several dozen models would you like to start with?"), and while that's awesome if you know what you're doing, it is not yet at the "circle this and click 'remove'" yet, and B: the motivation and firepower to integrate this all into a slick package is not there. I can definitely do an AI generative fill with open source software, but I'll be exporting an image into comfyui, either building my own generative fill program or grabbing some rando's program online who may or may not be using compatible models or require me to install additional bespoke functionality into comfyui, doing my work, and re-exporting it. The job is done, but it's much more complicated, and most people don't care about the other extra capabilities this workflow yields so for them it's just cost. It's a very normal pattern in the open source world. Nothing about the current situation particularly gives me cause to worry specially about it. To be concrete, here's a YouTube video that's to the more advanced side of what you can do in the open source world, which is probably still ultimately simplistic compared to what some people do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijqXnW_9gzc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijqXnW_9gzc That entire series is worth a look, and there's more it doesn't cover. You can get incredible control over these tools in the open source world, but it involves listening to some guy on YouTube trying to explain why you might to sometimes use a thing called "dpmpp_2m_sde_gpu"... not exactly normie-friendly.

cchance 2y ago
I mean we've been able to do generative fill and denoising, better in open for a while, its just not as easy (except for video really) What Adobe does is wrap those things in an easy to use app, and then charge for it, and hopefully not change their licensing again to grab everyones shit again. Regarding the scheduler (dpmpp) sure adobe doesn't tell you those things, but thats because they found one that worked, removed the options and packaged it up with a bow, comfy and a111 and forge etc, are more complex because they give you EVERYTHING and let you have at it. There are frontends that wipe all that away but they arent successful because like the linux world, people in opensource want to be able to tinker with all the internals and shit, which is why opensource tends to see some groundbreaking optimizations, like taking the Flux model from requiring 30+gb of vram to run to running on 6gb of vram lol

horsawlarway 2y ago

I'm not convinced. The flows are a little less convenient right now, but that's basically it. Ex - I can absolutely get exactly this same rotation feature using open toolchains, they just haven't been nicely consolidated into a pretty package yet. So to recreate the same thing adobe is doing here I currently have to: 1. Use the 3d-pack in comfy-ui to get stack orbit camera poses for my char (see: https://github.com/MrForExample/ComfyUI-3D-Pack https://github.com/MrForExample/ComfyUI-3D-Pack scroll down to stack orbit in the readme) 2. Import those images back into the open source tool manually. Is it as convenient? Nope - it requires a lot more setup and knowledge. Is it hard to imagine this getting implemented in open source? Also nope. It's going to happen, it just won't be quite as quick.

JoeyJoJoJr 2y ago
Do you know if there is an AI tool to “explode” an image, such as a character, into individual parts for a texture atlas? See example: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/9606161/53874756-0eaed680-403e-11e9-9f11-e11f6effd871.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/9606161/53874756-0...

insane_dreamer 2y ago

Can't speak for PS vs GIMP but I used to use Illustrator a fair bit and Inkscape was nowhere near it in terms of both features and useability. Now that was 15 years ago, so it may have caught up.

dagmx 2y ago
You are correct even today. Inkscape is great but it’s a fraction of the utility that Illustrator offers. The only people who would actually equate them are people not professionally using these tools everyday. Even paid apps like affinity designer are a fraction of the functionality of Illustrator. Again, a great product but people are just dead wrong if they compare them as an absolute.
- RunSet 2y ago
  > The only people who would actually equate them are people not professionally using these tools everyday. While someone who just needs a functional vector graphics editor and is not being paid to use adobe software might prefer inkscape. Speaking from personal experience, there.
  - dagmx 2y ago
    Sure, if they fit your need, nobody is saying you should pay for more. This is a common response when someone says something is better. It doesn’t mean they’re saying you need the better stuff or judging folks who don’t need it.

lofaszvanitt 2y ago

They can, but the user experience is abysmal, useless and nerve racking.

dagmx 2y ago

With all due respect there’s never been a time when that could have legitimately been argued unless someone was doing relatively basic things with those apps or was a hobbyist. There’s always been a significant gap in capabilities once you looked past the surface. I find this sentiment is common among FOSS advocates who don’t actually professionally use those tools. I am definitely an advocate for free tools closing that gap, but I both design content professionally and contribute to OSS projects to close that gap. So I feel quite confident in saying that gap has always been large when compared to the Adobe suite.

woah 2y ago
Even if the open source option is only slightly worse, why would a professional allow that to impact how they earn a living?
- dagmx 2y ago
  Yeah precisely. The Adobe suite is affordable if you’re actively making money off using it. It’s also why there’s not as much investment in competing open source projects. $80 CAD/mo for the whole suite minus the substance stuff (prices are regional). For the average freelancer in Canada, that’s not a consequential barrier to entry. That’s <$1k for a year for everything. If I charge a rate of something like $40/hr, that’s two hours in a month? <2% of revenue. Am I going to risk spending that much extra time fussing with something else for 2% more $$? Meanwhile Blender gets a lot of investment because the competition is much more expensive. CA$305/mo for Maya and I need to augment it with an adobe subscription for any non-3D work.
  - cchance 2y ago
    Sure as long as adobe doesn't decide to go back and do the whole "we own the rights to everything ever opened in one of our apps" again lol
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  Why wouldn't they if they do not want to use them for professional deontology reasons ? What impact size are we talking about ?

whywhywhywhy 2y ago

>A few years ago it could be argued that GIMP, Inkscape, and Darktable could do almost everything that Photoshop, Illustrator, and Lightroom could, albeit with a jankier user interface. It really couldn't

juthen 2y ago

Almost all the AI models come from open research. Yes, open software hasn't caught up because they don't have the billions of research money to implement this models, but that doesn't mean it won't happen at some point.