4 ms·

Isn't the main problem for OSS adoption advertising? If you are a graphic artist and don't give a rat's behonkus about computers do you really dig until you fi

Isn't the main problem for OSS adoption advertising? If you are a graphic artist and don't give a rat's behonkus about computers do you really dig until you find the GIMP(and the continual slog for documentation and understanding) or do you read graphic artist monthly with big color Photo Shop ads, Photo Shop books on B&N's book shelves, and training courses. The choice is just about made for you, in their world Photo Shop exists the GIMP doesn't.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
access_denied 17y ago
GIMP and Inkscape are not ready for prime-time. (And as always at this point: They lack proper support for CMYK, Fonts, Color-Management, Workflow in big publishing and printing shops.) Never mind the usability desaster that the GIMP represents for anyone who is accustomed to PS.
- indiejade 17y ago
  Nah. It is possible to make professional-quality, shiny, colorful graphics with GIMP if you know what you're doing. Sure, installing the non-default fonts (that is, not having a one-button install method) and configuring everything is what prevents most people from adopting it. There are graphic designers who are graphic designers, and then there are web developers who are also graphic designers. Have a look at what some "designers" are getting paid on sites like crowdSPRING.com and 99designs.com and it's pretty obvious that graphic designers who don't know code are fairly easy to find. I think this has been why there's been such a backlash against the freelance sites by the brick-mortar "design only" firms.
  - teilo 17y ago
    You miss the point. The Gimp and Inkscape, as for as they go, are great tools - if you care about nothing but the Web. They are in no way, shape, or form, ready for the print production environment. Not even close.
    - davidw 17y ago
      How many photoshop users really need to do print production work? Compared to people who just need to whip up some graphics, perhaps for the web? It's not necessarily about being "the best", it's about being "good enough". The Gimp is probably there for what a lot of people need.
      - teilo 17y ago
        Oh, how about almost anyone who needs to work with a commercial printer? And I said Gimp is fine "for the web". Were you listening? This is not a question of "best" vs. "good enough" for those who need CMYK and color management. It's a question of "works" vs. "doesn't work".
      - fatdog789 17y ago
        The vast majority of them. Photoshop was designed from the beginning to work with print media -- it's called Photoshop for a reason. Conversely, the people who just need to whip up some graphics don't need Photoshop; they have cheap alternatives like PaintShopPro, Paint.NET, or competing lesser-known commercial software.
- SwellJoe 17y ago
  Never mind the usability desaster that the GIMP represents for anyone who is accustomed to PS. In the interest of fairness...I just bought Adobe CS4 Web Premium (with Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.). I've been working with the GIMP and Inkscape for a good long while, off and on, and I'm still finding Photoshop and Illustrator to be incredibly hard to use and obtuse. I've been watching video tutorials, reading the docs, searching the web, and tinkering, for a couple of weeks now, and I'm still nowhere near as productive as I am in GIMP or Inkscape. Partly this is just that the Adobe products do more. This is an acceptable cost, to me, but I still find myself feeling grouchy a lot of the time because things do not work as I would expect (not just "as the GIMP or Inkscape would do it", but also in terms of discoverability...for example, sometimes I accidentally break my workspace, or whatever it is called, and can't figure out what I did or how to fix it; you can't undo workspace changes, as far as I know). Take it all with a grain of salt, as I'm a barely functioning idiot with quite a few products that are supposed to be easy to use. iTunes, for example, is a nightmare for me; I always end up deleting my whole collection either on the device or on the computer or having something else go totally amok and I have to reboot into Linux just to recover all of my data. So, maybe Adobe software is "easy to use" like Apple software is "easy to use", and I'm just an idiot. Stability of the Adobe stuff also leaves a lot to be desired. It's kinda like Inkscape a couple of years ago, or GIMP ten or twelve years ago (or during the 2.0 beta years). Sometimes weird things happen and it just freezes up. This may be the newer Adobe stuff; I'm usually watching a tutorial video when it happens, so maybe Air or Flex or whatever is to blame, rather than Photoshop or Illustrator. But it happens a lot when I'm watching those videos.
  - ahlatimer 17y ago
    There are most definitely stability problems with Photoshop. You would think something that cost that much would at least be <i>stable</i>, but I suppose "serious professionals" look at feature sets and not stability. My experience with GIMP is none, so I'm not exactly qualified to comment, but Photoshop has to be one of the biggest usability nightmares on the market today. There are strange restrictions and ambiguous error messages that don't make any sense for the novice. Once you get more comfortable with Photoshop, you realize the power and flexibility of it, but it takes a while to get there. As someone that spent a good long while being frustrated by photoshop, I can't imagine GIMP actually being harder to use.
- nailer 17y ago
  I agree GIMPs UI is a clusterfuck, but I do believe it has CMYK and OpenType support these days. Are they lacking somehow?
marcusbooster 17y ago
Maybe it's the average programmer that doesn't give a "rat's behonkus" about the graphic designer? I think most designers I've met know what OSS kinda is and are always looking for tools to improve workflow - they just want tools that work. Last time I checked out Gimp it still didn't support adjustment layers for non-destructible editing, which is pretty much a show-stopper. Packages get used when they lead the way in a given field, most of the OSS design apps I've seen are just playing catch-up.
- stonemetal 17y ago
  >> Gimp it still didn't support adjustment layers for non-destructible editing, which is pretty much a show-stopper. Packages get used when they lead the way in a given field, most of the OSS design apps I've seen are just playing catch-up. So which is it? Gimp isn't good enough because it doesn't provide feature for feature compatibility with PS or because it doesn't do something different? You just claimed both. It has a different workflow than PS so yeah as long as you try to keep using it like ps it is going to compare poorly.
omouse 17y ago
Isn't the main problem for OSS adoption advertising? You can't advertise without doing some marketing work. Free Software projects have to figure out who their target markets are and cater to them. GIMP is the best example because it could be split into a few different versions; one that's suitable for Photo Shop users, and another that's useful for people who haven't been "tainted" by Photo Shop. There could be tutorials and books that make it easier for Photo Shop users to use GIMP. If there was some cash, you could do the sleazy thing and pay people to use the GIMP when teaching graphic design classes or whatever. Heck, you may not have to pay them at all if you can convince them that the price of $0 makes the GIMP better than Photo Shop.
- _phred 17y ago
  The trick, it would seem, is convincing them that a $0 tool with its faults and crashes is better than a stable $400 industry-standard tool 15 years in the development and that, when billing design time at $80-120/hour, the latter tool won't quickly prove its worth. Time and time again, Gimp has proven to me that it's not the tool for doing anything but the most basic editing. I want to love it, because it's free, but I don't have the time to waste when it eats my drawings. What could really help would be a gallery of stunning art created with only open-source tools; the trick there is teaching the artists to use the tools and making it worth their time to do so...
jcromartie 17y ago
The main problem with FOSS graphics packages is that they aren't focused on being usable and producing beautiful-looking graphics. They're focused on being FOSS packages first, and software that does graphics second. The combination of usability (or maybe just familiarity... but still, it's the measure of the ability of a package to be used) and just really nice looking results are what put Photoshop and Illustrator ahead of GIMP and Photoshop in nearly every area. I just don't see anybody saying "look at this beautiful art I made with GIMP." I see people making lame fan art and bad gradients.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

access_denied 17y ago

GIMP and Inkscape are not ready for prime-time. (And as always at this point: They lack proper support for CMYK, Fonts, Color-Management, Workflow in big publishing and printing shops.) Never mind the usability desaster that the GIMP represents for anyone who is accustomed to PS.

indiejade 17y ago
Nah. It is possible to make professional-quality, shiny, colorful graphics with GIMP if you know what you're doing. Sure, installing the non-default fonts (that is, not having a one-button install method) and configuring everything is what prevents most people from adopting it. There are graphic designers who are graphic designers, and then there are web developers who are also graphic designers. Have a look at what some "designers" are getting paid on sites like crowdSPRING.com and 99designs.com and it's pretty obvious that graphic designers who don't know code are fairly easy to find. I think this has been why there's been such a backlash against the freelance sites by the brick-mortar "design only" firms.
- teilo 17y ago
  You miss the point. The Gimp and Inkscape, as for as they go, are great tools - if you care about nothing but the Web. They are in no way, shape, or form, ready for the print production environment. Not even close.
  - davidw 17y ago
    How many photoshop users really need to do print production work? Compared to people who just need to whip up some graphics, perhaps for the web? It's not necessarily about being "the best", it's about being "good enough". The Gimp is probably there for what a lot of people need.
    - teilo 17y ago
      Oh, how about almost anyone who needs to work with a commercial printer? And I said Gimp is fine "for the web". Were you listening? This is not a question of "best" vs. "good enough" for those who need CMYK and color management. It's a question of "works" vs. "doesn't work".
    - fatdog789 17y ago
      The vast majority of them. Photoshop was designed from the beginning to work with print media -- it's called Photoshop for a reason. Conversely, the people who just need to whip up some graphics don't need Photoshop; they have cheap alternatives like PaintShopPro, Paint.NET, or competing lesser-known commercial software.
SwellJoe 17y ago
Never mind the usability desaster that the GIMP represents for anyone who is accustomed to PS. In the interest of fairness...I just bought Adobe CS4 Web Premium (with Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.). I've been working with the GIMP and Inkscape for a good long while, off and on, and I'm still finding Photoshop and Illustrator to be incredibly hard to use and obtuse. I've been watching video tutorials, reading the docs, searching the web, and tinkering, for a couple of weeks now, and I'm still nowhere near as productive as I am in GIMP or Inkscape. Partly this is just that the Adobe products do more. This is an acceptable cost, to me, but I still find myself feeling grouchy a lot of the time because things do not work as I would expect (not just "as the GIMP or Inkscape would do it", but also in terms of discoverability...for example, sometimes I accidentally break my workspace, or whatever it is called, and can't figure out what I did or how to fix it; you can't undo workspace changes, as far as I know). Take it all with a grain of salt, as I'm a barely functioning idiot with quite a few products that are supposed to be easy to use. iTunes, for example, is a nightmare for me; I always end up deleting my whole collection either on the device or on the computer or having something else go totally amok and I have to reboot into Linux just to recover all of my data. So, maybe Adobe software is "easy to use" like Apple software is "easy to use", and I'm just an idiot. Stability of the Adobe stuff also leaves a lot to be desired. It's kinda like Inkscape a couple of years ago, or GIMP ten or twelve years ago (or during the 2.0 beta years). Sometimes weird things happen and it just freezes up. This may be the newer Adobe stuff; I'm usually watching a tutorial video when it happens, so maybe Air or Flex or whatever is to blame, rather than Photoshop or Illustrator. But it happens a lot when I'm watching those videos.
- ahlatimer 17y ago
  There are most definitely stability problems with Photoshop. You would think something that cost that much would at least be <i>stable</i>, but I suppose "serious professionals" look at feature sets and not stability. My experience with GIMP is none, so I'm not exactly qualified to comment, but Photoshop has to be one of the biggest usability nightmares on the market today. There are strange restrictions and ambiguous error messages that don't make any sense for the novice. Once you get more comfortable with Photoshop, you realize the power and flexibility of it, but it takes a while to get there. As someone that spent a good long while being frustrated by photoshop, I can't imagine GIMP actually being harder to use.
nailer 17y ago
I agree GIMPs UI is a clusterfuck, but I do believe it has CMYK and OpenType support these days. Are they lacking somehow?

marcusbooster 17y ago

Maybe it's the average programmer that doesn't give a "rat's behonkus" about the graphic designer? I think most designers I've met know what OSS kinda is and are always looking for tools to improve workflow - they just want tools that work. Last time I checked out Gimp it still didn't support adjustment layers for non-destructible editing, which is pretty much a show-stopper. Packages get used when they lead the way in a given field, most of the OSS design apps I've seen are just playing catch-up.

stonemetal 17y ago
>> Gimp it still didn't support adjustment layers for non-destructible editing, which is pretty much a show-stopper. Packages get used when they lead the way in a given field, most of the OSS design apps I've seen are just playing catch-up. So which is it? Gimp isn't good enough because it doesn't provide feature for feature compatibility with PS or because it doesn't do something different? You just claimed both. It has a different workflow than PS so yeah as long as you try to keep using it like ps it is going to compare poorly.

omouse 17y ago

Isn't the main problem for OSS adoption advertising? You can't advertise without doing some marketing work. Free Software projects have to figure out who their target markets are and cater to them. GIMP is the best example because it could be split into a few different versions; one that's suitable for Photo Shop users, and another that's useful for people who haven't been "tainted" by Photo Shop. There could be tutorials and books that make it easier for Photo Shop users to use GIMP. If there was some cash, you could do the sleazy thing and pay people to use the GIMP when teaching graphic design classes or whatever. Heck, you may not have to pay them at all if you can convince them that the price of $0 makes the GIMP better than Photo Shop.

_phred 17y ago
The trick, it would seem, is convincing them that a $0 tool with its faults and crashes is better than a stable $400 industry-standard tool 15 years in the development and that, when billing design time at $80-120/hour, the latter tool won't quickly prove its worth. Time and time again, Gimp has proven to me that it's not the tool for doing anything but the most basic editing. I want to love it, because it's free, but I don't have the time to waste when it eats my drawings. What could really help would be a gallery of stunning art created with only open-source tools; the trick there is teaching the artists to use the tools and making it worth their time to do so...

jcromartie 17y ago

The main problem with FOSS graphics packages is that they aren't focused on being usable and producing beautiful-looking graphics. They're focused on being FOSS packages first, and software that does graphics second. The combination of usability (or maybe just familiarity... but still, it's the measure of the ability of a package to be used) and just really nice looking results are what put Photoshop and Illustrator ahead of GIMP and Photoshop in nearly every area. I just don't see anybody saying "look at this beautiful art I made with GIMP." I see people making lame fan art and bad gradients.