4 ms·

For an agency this seems insane. Saving £3,000 seems like nothing, it's like a professional photographer buying a point & shoot camera for a pro job. Incompatib

by hnriot 14y ago

For an agency this seems insane. Saving £3,000 seems like nothing, it's like a professional photographer buying a point & shoot camera for a pro job. Incompatibility with clients and numerous other inadequacies of GIMP would make saving Adobe licensing fees seem like a really bad business decision to me. I can't imagine any designer I know joining a design agency that didn't provide professional tools, which in today's world means a fast Mac, a big cinema display and the Adobe CS.

threedaymonk 14y ago
Whoa, slow down a bit. They're not talking about taking Photoshop away from designers. The developers are using GIMP to do simple cropping and amendments to prepared images. GIMP works just as well as Photoshop for this simple use case. In fact, the post says that they find it better than Photoshop in some regards. Furthermore, some of the developers are using Linux, on which Photoshop is not available. So, given that they're using a tool that works for them, that they like, and that runs on their choice of operating system, what's insane about that? From what the post implies, the designers are still using Photoshop. They're the ones who need it - or think they need it - or are used to it and happy and productive with it, which is perhaps the most important consideration.
- benregenspan 14y ago
  I used GIMP the same way up until recently. It worked for me, but switching to Photoshop has sped up a ton of common workflow -- slicing an image, turning on and off groups of layers, and similar. Also I've found that some small tweak to the PSD is almost inevitably needed, and it's worth the cost of Photoshop not to have to wait for an updated design from someone else. I don't want to just hate on open-source graphics software - a lot of amazing work has gone into GIMP, it had fun things like content-aware resizing before Photoshop did, but Adobe has 1000X the resources to invest in usability and they've used those resources well.
  - michaelbuddy 14y ago
    I think Gimp can do the slicing with a plugin. There's a lot of stuff it can do that the gimp pros don't advertize, or the instructions are linux only or just difficult to lock down.
  - unhammer 14y ago
    In 2.8 at least, turning on and off groups of layers is a single click on the "eye" icon of the layer group: http://docs.gimp.org/2.8/en/gimp-layer-groups.html http://docs.gimp.org/2.8/en/gimp-layer-groups.html
- michaelbuddy 14y ago
  Photoshop's PNG export is inferior. It should be one of the best things it can do given the popularity of it for web design. Whatever tinypng.org is doing both PS and GIMP need it badly. Also, there are things like creating seamless textures, tiling them that is easier in GIMP. Animated gif import / export is pretty easy to do too. If only GIMP could do smart object work and live layer styling, I'd be all over it. But I do use it as a professional designer / developer for specific use cases. Another designer and I had a discussion. Basically since CS2, there hasn't been a valid reason to upgrade Photoshop really other than gimmicky stuff.
jaymzcampbell 14y ago
Me neither but I was talking about developers here :) Saving £3,000 isn't much in the scheme of our annual turnover, that is true. However that £3,000 didn't need to be spent on these licenses - instead it can (and did) pay for europython tickets & flights, spinning up & down aws servers, sublime licenses, the odd team lunch and beers on a friday afternoon. I'm a fan of saving money wherever we can. For what its worth I've lost track of how much we've spent on our photographers studio/rig/software. We're def. not adverse to spending money on software here and all the designers get a crispy fresh creative suite when it comes out. As linux, foss friendly devs though GIMP fits perfectly into our workflows and in 3 years of "we no longer need to use photoshop" we've had minimal problems with it. For those instances we really do need to consult and work off the PSD our one copy suffices to do what we need before getting back into GIMP.

by hnriot 14y ago

threedaymonk 14y ago

Whoa, slow down a bit. They're not talking about taking Photoshop away from designers. The developers are using GIMP to do simple cropping and amendments to prepared images. GIMP works just as well as Photoshop for this simple use case. In fact, the post says that they find it better than Photoshop in some regards. Furthermore, some of the developers are using Linux, on which Photoshop is not available. So, given that they're using a tool that works for them, that they like, and that runs on their choice of operating system, what's insane about that? From what the post implies, the designers are still using Photoshop. They're the ones who need it - or think they need it - or are used to it and happy and productive with it, which is perhaps the most important consideration.

benregenspan 14y ago
I used GIMP the same way up until recently. It worked for me, but switching to Photoshop has sped up a ton of common workflow -- slicing an image, turning on and off groups of layers, and similar. Also I've found that some small tweak to the PSD is almost inevitably needed, and it's worth the cost of Photoshop not to have to wait for an updated design from someone else. I don't want to just hate on open-source graphics software - a lot of amazing work has gone into GIMP, it had fun things like content-aware resizing before Photoshop did, but Adobe has 1000X the resources to invest in usability and they've used those resources well.
- michaelbuddy 14y ago
  I think Gimp can do the slicing with a plugin. There's a lot of stuff it can do that the gimp pros don't advertize, or the instructions are linux only or just difficult to lock down.
- unhammer 14y ago
  In 2.8 at least, turning on and off groups of layers is a single click on the "eye" icon of the layer group: http://docs.gimp.org/2.8/en/gimp-layer-groups.html http://docs.gimp.org/2.8/en/gimp-layer-groups.html
michaelbuddy 14y ago
Photoshop's PNG export is inferior. It should be one of the best things it can do given the popularity of it for web design. Whatever tinypng.org is doing both PS and GIMP need it badly. Also, there are things like creating seamless textures, tiling them that is easier in GIMP. Animated gif import / export is pretty easy to do too. If only GIMP could do smart object work and live layer styling, I'd be all over it. But I do use it as a professional designer / developer for specific use cases. Another designer and I had a discussion. Basically since CS2, there hasn't been a valid reason to upgrade Photoshop really other than gimmicky stuff.

jaymzcampbell 14y ago

Me neither but I was talking about developers here :) Saving £3,000 isn't much in the scheme of our annual turnover, that is true. However that £3,000 didn't need to be spent on these licenses - instead it can (and did) pay for europython tickets & flights, spinning up & down aws servers, sublime licenses, the odd team lunch and beers on a friday afternoon. I'm a fan of saving money wherever we can. For what its worth I've lost track of how much we've spent on our photographers studio/rig/software. We're def. not adverse to spending money on software here and all the designers get a crispy fresh creative suite when it comes out. As linux, foss friendly devs though GIMP fits perfectly into our workflows and in 3 years of "we no longer need to use photoshop" we've had minimal problems with it. For those instances we really do need to consult and work off the PSD our one copy suffices to do what we need before getting back into GIMP.