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If you are doing art Krita is a fine Photoshop replacement. So I can understand the switch. But I'm also a little amazed that there still isn't a good Photosho

by huuu 12y ago

If you are doing art Krita is a fine Photoshop replacement. So I can understand the switch. But I'm also a little amazed that there still isn't a good Photoshop replacement. I think that's because a lot of developers think Photoshop is layers and blend modes. But imho the real strength of Photoshop is the interface. Not only the GUI but also the interaction design. I can do with Gimp what I can do with Photoshop but it will take a lot more time. In-place text editing, attaching effects to layers (drop shadows), non destructive editing, it's all missing from most Photoshop alternatives. Also check out Natron (mentioned in the article): https://natron.inria.fr/ https://natron.inria.fr/ I never heard of it but it's looking great!

antome 12y ago
If you count inkscape as a "photoshop replacement", it does many of the things photoshop/illustrator does, as well as more, and better. Kinda wish someone just merged the concepts of Paint.NET and Inkscape.
- roel_v 12y ago
  Do you understand the differences between 'raster' and 'vector' images?
  - girvo 12y ago
    Photoshop and Fireworks didn't. That was their strength. By that I mean they handled both, reasonably well.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    Do you know Inkscape? Inkscape has free-hand and raster tools, you can do masking and such. The GP mentions "in-place text editing" for which PS presumably uses vector methods. I use Inkscape pre- and/or post- GIMP for things like text layers. I've long thought that a great graphics package could be achieved if Inkscape and The GIMP (or other primarily raster programmes) could draw to [different layers of] the same canvas. Inkscape lets you link in images which is a small step towards this.
    - roel_v 12y ago
      "Do you know Inkscape?" I've been using it on and off since it was Sodiwopi or whatever it was called. "Inkscape has free-hand and raster tools" Yes, and Gimp has 'vector tools', so what? GP says "If you count inkscape as a 'photoshop replacement', it does many of the things photoshop/illustrator does" which makes no sense on all levels except the most abstract, like saying a pair of Nikes is like a Mercedes because you can use both to go from point A to point B.
      - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
        The way the post was phrased with the quotes made it clear that antome felt it was a shaky equivalence. I'd guess they were hooked in with the talk of in-place text editing as being a top differentiator for a _raster_ package (if PS does text manipulation using raster techniques I'll be shocked). Just consider it to have an implicit "for me" and I'll bet you'll find it hard to find a genuine objection that's worth making. [PS: SodiPodi, me too]
    - boudewijnrempt 12y ago
      You mean combining vector and raster layers in one image? Krita does that -- has been doing that since 2006. It's not perfect, but it's there...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
pepijndevos 12y ago
The thing is that Photoshop is HUGE and does a good job at almost any task involving pixels. There have been projects that do a subset better, like art or graphic design or pixel art, but to do everything Photoshop does probably requires dozens of years of development by a skilled team.
- galfarragem 12y ago
  The only thing I miss in Photoshop is a command line (Autocad style). This would be a killer feature. I hate looking for a command in the menus or remember a shortcut, I would prefer to remember an alias derived from the name (like Autocad). This (and probably a huge reduction in price) is the only way to make me change to something else.
  - brudgers 12y ago
    AutoCad began with the architectural premise that user interaction would be primarily via a terminal. It was built with the ability to run headless. It was built with the ability to run in batch mode. Like Unix, it was built on a set of single purpose tools. These tools formed the API and the user interacted directly with it in the form of commands. The graphic display was a side-effect. Events on the graphic display were mapped back to the API, i.e. mapped back to commands. The reason, most likely, is that in the days of MSDOS AutoDesk had to write hardware drivers themselves or convince third party hardware vendors write them. Having a developer friendly architecture helped in both cases. Post-Macintosh programs such as PhotoShop went down a different architectural path. There was a pre-existing graphics subsystem and no obvious interest in developing up from the terminal. So these applications were developed down from the GUI. In the days of 256k RAM and 10meg disks, there was a lot of need for expediency and GUI code and application code often mixed. The result was a lack of an AutoCad style API. If a procedure looks at screen layout directly, how do you turn it into a command from the keyboard with sensible parameters? Such a refactoring is hard, messy, and not at on the feature list marketing has developed. Lets face it, the PhotoShop user community would not just reject a command based interface, it might express outrage. Going one step further, in the early 1990's AutoDesk massively refactored AutoCad's code. They took the hit in the form of R13. Then they started adding incredible features with each version again for the next twenty years.
steveridout 12y ago
I was a fairly light Photoshop user - occasional retouching, compositing, and web UI stuff. Last year I switched to Pixelmator due to cost and found it relatively painless, the UI is similar enough to Photoshop that it's easy to switch and IMO more attractive than Photoshop CS3 which I used to use. I tried Gimp once a few years ago and had a far worse experience, it slowed me down a lot compared to Photoshop. This may just be because I didn't devote enough time to get used to it.
- freshyill 12y ago
  I switched to Pixelmator for the same reasons. The only thing I really wish it had was dockable palettes.
mangecoeur 12y ago
> Also check out Natron (mentioned in the article): https://natron.inria.fr/ https://natron.inria.fr/ I never heard of it but it's looking great! Apparently from INRIA, the french national digital research institute. They actually have quite a lot of really good projects that fly a bit under the radar in the US. They're also behind things like Scikit-learn machine learning tools...
- Ironballs 12y ago
  OCaml is another nice invention from INRIA.
- auvi 12y ago
  another INRIA product I have extensively used in grad school is Scilab.
dingaling 12y ago
For me the absolute killer feature for Gimp or Krita would be a way to save the editing history, which is currently lost with all the levels of 'undo' when you save in native format. Versioning for image editing; I don't know how it would be done but by Jove it would be a time-saver.
- michaelmcmillan 12y ago
  I use git for that, works great.
  - slightlycuban 12y ago
    With Gimp? Explain.
    - notatoad 12y ago
      Git handles binaries perfectly fine. Your repo is gonna get big fast, and it isn't going to handle merges, but if you just want a linear version history and are used to git, you might as well use it.
    - yoha 12y ago
      He probably means to add the project file to the versioning system and commit regularly so that you can rollback to a previous version. It's way less flexible than Undo though.
  - blowski 12y ago
    And even easier (though more expensive and less versatile) - Dropbox or Time Machine.
- henningtegen 12y ago
  I am the main developer of a new painting application called Leonardo ( http://www.getleonardo.com http://www.getleonardo.com ) which include this feature for our native .LEO file format. Leonardo is currently in early beta.
JonoBB 12y ago
I was a long time PS user on Windows. When I switched to linux as my work computer, the only suitable replacement was Gimp. The interface drove me absolutely crazy - window management is from some kind of sadist (floating toolbar panels) and its not possible to "Save as" (only Export). Since then I have tried Pinta Image Editor - the toolset is far simpler than PS/Gimp, but it is 100x more intuitive. It reminds me of Paint.NET
- hf 12y ago
  The Gimp has certain, err, noteworthy notions about user interface design. Nevertheless, single-window mode has been around for years (I think): Select 'Windows'->'Single-Window Mode'. The distinction between Save and Export is one of those measures to gently remove the user's feet from below the barrel, I imagine (only the native xcf-format stores certain information, like layers).
  - romaniv 12y ago
    They should make single-window the default. Many new people do not know about it and quit Gimp before finding out about it. But more importantly, the worst thing I have to face in GIMP is layer/selection management. I understand how it works, I worked with it for years, but it's annoying as fu... very annoying.
- aerique 12y ago
  Gimp used to be better than that like having a "Save as" that worked or "Save" just saving the PNG you loaded and changed, instead of insisting on saving an XCF. I think they we're too close to some Gnome developers and got infected by their way of thinking.
- iwwr 12y ago
  Pinta in Ubuntu (14.04LTS) still lacks beziers and an ability to resize selected bits of an image (you have to resize the whole image at once). Then there is "gnome paint" which is merely a placeholder for a yet-to-be paint application (no functionality). So does Gnome desktop have a flagship GTK paint application in the vein of paint.net?
ris 12y ago
Oh my god I think photoshop has a hideous interface. It is accepted due to the massive traction it has and the number of professionals that are used to it.
- jasonwocky 12y ago
  It's an interface for professionals. It takes awhile to learn, but when you do, you're rewarded with quite efficient access to the tools given how much Photoshop is capable of.
  - ris 12y ago
    Thanks for patronizing me. I have used it extensively, professionally for a time and I think it is highly inconsistent and frustrating.
    - jasonwocky 12y ago
      And so what then? You use it because it has traction and because other professionals use it? Or because, as many professionals find, it's the most capable tool for the job at ahnd?
      - ris 12y ago
        That's a whole other discussion. I'm talking about the interface being inconsistent and painful, whether people need to use it or not.
- zippergz 12y ago
  I'm a pretty expert Photoshop user, and I see it as similar to the command-line. It's not intuitive to a brand new user, but once you get it, it's incredibly efficient and productive. I think this is appropriate for a professional tool.
nkg 12y ago
In my opinion, it is all about training. At school I was trained to use Photoshop, so now everything I have to do with this software seems natural. But it wasn't. It is the same feeling for people who switch from MS Office to Open Office. MS and Adobe did a great job of setting standards.
blowski 12y ago
The big feature of Photoshop is that it's Photoshop. A typical designer has dozens of expensive plugins for Photoshop, their PSDs only work in Photoshop and they only know how to use Photoshop. Changing would be expensive and risky, and would only be worthwhile if lots of their colleagues and clients were also moving. So Adobe has intentionally created a lot of barriers to exit, and even if an amazing good open-source package came out today, it would struggle to gain traction.
- teamonkey 12y ago
  Maybe that's true when dealing with clients who also use photoshop, but the majority of artists I know love to experiment with new software - and hardware - and flit between them depending on the job at hand. Photoshop is a bloated, expensive piece of software, but Adobe listen hard to the people using it, and it's really good at what it does, and that's why people keep going back.
- iwwr 12y ago
  There is also the printer-oriented color management in Photoshop, whereas Gimp appears more screen-oriented. Designs made in sRGB may look radically different when converted to CMYK.
  - egypturnash 12y ago
    If you go to print, the fact that Adobe's tools understand multiple color models is a HUGE advantage over most other tools, which usually only work in RGB. It's not just open-source competitors, it's smaller teams trying to compete in this space as well.
- haaaaaaryf 12y ago
  There is one contender that's been getting some traction with a significant minority iOS designers; Sketch - http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/ http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/ It's nowhere near an entire replacement but it has a very different take on the UI which arguably makes it better suited for app UI design and it appeals to the "cool kids" ... those starting out their design careers with app related projects as best demonstrated by this book / tutorial - https://designcode.io/ https://designcode.io/ And that's probably the only way to unseat Photoshop - with a generational change.
higherpurpose 12y ago
If only Pixelmator came to Windows (and Linux).
- rimantas 12y ago
  Very unlikely, I think they depend too much on OS X CoreGraphics and other libs to make porting feasible.
tomkin 12y ago
Someone will mention Scratch, but then forget to tell you that it's a piece of garbage.
pikewood 12y ago
To me, the biggest feature that Photoshop has that others don't is their type support, especially with kerning. I can accomplish most of what I want with other tools until I need to tweak the kerning of a word. Most tools require you to select pixels and move it over and don't support in-place editing.
felipeerias 12y ago
Creative work requires continuous experimentation and refinement. If a tool lets you do this easily and without getting in the way, your brain is free to focus on the piece that you are creating. So, while it is true that one can do the same things using another tool like Gimp, the fact that it takes significantly more time and effort means that it will be much harder to end up creating the same art. The funny thing is, engineers actually understand this perfectly when talking about text processors, but for some reason they (we) often fail to generalise it to other fields.
- rifung 12y ago
  Is it common for engineers to even be able to influence the UX decisions? I thought that was generally left to designers.
  - JohnBooty 12y ago
    On a lot of software development projects, particularly open-source ones, the reality is that there are often only engineers.
    - omnimus 12y ago
      Well as a designer, its not realy easy to help on opensource projects. Its hard to join something like that and if you do, the projects themselves usualy need UX design not some pretty colors and some logo. But thats exactly what engeneers mostly want. I dont blame them, they spend lot of effort to make the project and they have their own ideas about how it should work (for them). But good UX is about objectivity and about efficiency. Its also a process. Another thing is that there is no tradition in that for designers. Opensource programming free time fun project for programmer is equivalent maybe something like making print posters for designers. And interaction design schools are hardly helping that, they should make students to help out on opensource projects maybe as part of their assignments/diplomas. How would i join opensource projects that need designers? I dont know.
      - 12y ago
jscheel 12y ago
I too have never heard of Natron. Really excited to dig into it!
drzaiusapelord 12y ago
Paint.net never seems to get much attention. It has a simple interface and a decent featureset for freeware. Windows only.
deleted 12y ago
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erroneousfunk 12y ago
Gimp is good for basic photo editing and manipulation, but it sucks as a professional-grade tool. Gimp can't handle raw images. It can't handle more than 8 bits per channel, no CMYK support. None of the Photoshop CS5 features (like content-aware spot healing) are there. Yes, it's better than most Photoshop alternatives, but it would never be a satisfactory replacement for, say, commercial photographers. I mean, I've only casually used Photoshop for random freelance work over the years (for clients who don't want to hire a real designer), and in my limited experience I've done things with Photoshop that Gimp literally doesn't have support for.
- abandonliberty 12y ago
  Is that different from content aware fill? Gimp had that feature first, actually. The workflow difference seems minor to me on this one. http://www.gimpology.com/submission/view/getting_around_in_gimp_content_aware_fill_heal_/ http://www.gimpology.com/submission/view/getting_around_in_g...
  - erroneousfunk 12y ago
    I stand corrected :) I wasn't aware of that feature. However, I believe there are still problems with raw, CMYK, and images with large color depth.
untog 12y ago
I think there isn't a good Photoshop replacement because it tries to do too much. For example, it's used by both photo editors and web designers. The crossover of requirements there is really quite small - so I'm quite happy to see smaller apps hacking away at a subsection of what Photoshop does. For example, I work almost exclusively on web UI stuff, and I love Sketch. The UI just makes so much more sense to me.
- reitoei 12y ago
  > it tries to do too much I don't think it does. It offers a massive feature set that is useful to different people in different ways, but there is still a lot of crossover. Maybe you're pigeon-holing users based on their 'roles'. Web designers/photo editors, when working in Photoshop are both working with layered images at the end of the day. Plus people have different ways of working. You may do web UI stuff, but you may have a completely different workflow to another web UI designer.
  - jcrawfordor 12y ago
    I think this points to a bigger difference between engineers and "normal people" - programmers tend to have grown up on the Unix philosophy of "do one thing well," but most everyday users find out that they need to use a different tool for a task and get irritated with that. The fact that Photoshop can do so many things is a huge appeal to users, because if they need to do some workflow item that maybe isn't part of their normal job, they can still do it within a familiar tool. This is handy and saves learning time. Compare this to "unix people" who are likely to regard a tool with a lot of functionality they use rarely as bloated.
d33d33 12y ago
absolutely agree with huuu. if you're somehow forced to use gimp, there is at least a better gui enhancement/tweak that tries to replicate photoshop's gui: http://doctormo.deviantart.com/art/Gimp-2-8-Photoshop-Tweaks-432736644 http://doctormo.deviantart.com/art/Gimp-2-8-Photoshop-Tweaks...
perderder 12y ago
Paint Shop Pro, anyone?
- joshmn 12y ago
  Checking in! Well, the 12-year-old me (2003). Jasc Animation Shop for AIM buddy icons!
saidajigumi 12y ago
> But I'm also a little amazed that there still isn't a good Photoshop replacement. As others have noted, Photoshop is vast. It represents a large investment of domain knowledge that's quite hard to replicate. It has a lot of UI features that allow for powerful, efficient workflows (actions, heavily customizable GUI and shortcuts, even scripting, etc.) beyond its core image creation and manipulation functions. And that's not to mention the entire ecosystem of Photoshop plugins. That said, the best competing apps I've seen out there are really domain specialist apps. They don't try to be better than Photoshop at everything, just better at one niche. Depending on the tool, they often don't even try to displace Photoshop from the workflow, just add on to it. Mischief[1] is a good example of this category of Photoshop competitor. If there's to be a significant competitor to traditional Photoshop, my bet would be on one of these "worse than Photoshop, but better at one thing" apps that met with initial success and eventually grew to displace Photoshop from a larger arena. I still doubt that we'd get a total Photoshop "replacement", per se. (Note, that "one thing" might well be "runs on mobile" versus any task-centric domain.) [1] https://www.madewithmischief.com/ https://www.madewithmischief.com/
- saidajigumi 12y ago
  > powerful, efficient workflows An addendum to my prior post, I suspect a lot of folks here won't be aware of something: in various professional positions heavily dependent on Photoshop use (e.g. pro photo editing / retouching), it's common practice to have speed tests in the interview process. This part of the interview shows that 1) you know the available tools and know how to use them well for job-typical tasks and 2) you are utterly fluent in the UI, keyboard shortcuts, etc. for the task. Not all pros need this kind of workflow efficiency, but those who do are scary fast at what they do. A fair bit of Photoshop's design over the years has been influenced by the needs of these kinds of high-skill, high-efficiency workflows.
maxxxxx 12y ago
The real killer feature of Photoshop is YouTube videos and books. I am learning it right now and it's extremely helpful to watch tutorial videos. There is almost nothing for GIMP so if you don't know exactly what you are looking for, you are out of luck.
- shmerl 12y ago
  There are tons of videos on Gimp. Krita has somewhat less of them.
aikah 12y ago
> But I'm also a little amazed that there still isn't a good Photoshop replacement. Photoshop has loads of features, really, most users use like 1% of these,but professionals are required to know Photoshop. Because professionals will share photoshop files. I mean, you wouldn't use Sublime Text 2 to code in C# right? sure you can do that, but a .net shop requires you to know Visual Studio Pro. > I can do with Gimp Gimp is a sad story imho,it feels too much like developpers doing UX-UI and failing at doing it properly. It has great features but feels way to clunky and un-inspiring for artists.Gimp needs to be heavily redesigned. I wish Fireworks was still developped, it was an amazing tool for drawing,especially for webdesign,2d game design and prototyping.And god it was so easy to write complex plugins with a few lines of Javascript, it was mind blowing. I wish Adobe never bought Macromedia.
- contingencies 12y ago
  Gimp is a sad story imho,it feels too much like developpers doing UX-UI and failing at doing it properly Yeah, same feeling initially ... but now that I'm used to it, I actually prefer it. On the same tangent, for a good example of a clean interface, check out Lightworks for Linux with a cheap Wacom tablet. You'll be blown away.
Animats 12y ago
But I'm also a little amazed that there still isn't a good Photoshop replacement. It's hard. Inkscape is a good Corel Draw replacement, and the drawing functions in Open/Libre Office aren't bad. In 3D land, there's Blender, which is a good 3D animation program. (It still has the UI from hell, though. 3D UIs are really, really hard to do well.) GIMP started life as a command-line program and had a GUI tacked on later. That never works well. Pinta Image Editor tries to be Microsoft Paint with some extra Photoshop LE features. It has roughly the right feature set, and a reasonable Photoshop-like UI, but it's so buggy it's useless. Components of the GUI randomly disappear. The drag markers from selection end up in the actual image. Resizing fails for moderately large images. The original developer abandoned it around 2012, and while it's getting some maintenance, it's still not very stable. Putting the current 2014 release into the Ubuntu repository might help.

by huuu 12y ago

antome 12y ago

If you count inkscape as a "photoshop replacement", it does many of the things photoshop/illustrator does, as well as more, and better. Kinda wish someone just merged the concepts of Paint.NET and Inkscape.

roel_v 12y ago
Do you understand the differences between 'raster' and 'vector' images?
- girvo 12y ago
  Photoshop and Fireworks didn't. That was their strength. By that I mean they handled both, reasonably well.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  Do you know Inkscape? Inkscape has free-hand and raster tools, you can do masking and such. The GP mentions "in-place text editing" for which PS presumably uses vector methods. I use Inkscape pre- and/or post- GIMP for things like text layers. I've long thought that a great graphics package could be achieved if Inkscape and The GIMP (or other primarily raster programmes) could draw to [different layers of] the same canvas. Inkscape lets you link in images which is a small step towards this.
  - roel_v 12y ago
    "Do you know Inkscape?" I've been using it on and off since it was Sodiwopi or whatever it was called. "Inkscape has free-hand and raster tools" Yes, and Gimp has 'vector tools', so what? GP says "If you count inkscape as a 'photoshop replacement', it does many of the things photoshop/illustrator does" which makes no sense on all levels except the most abstract, like saying a pair of Nikes is like a Mercedes because you can use both to go from point A to point B.
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      The way the post was phrased with the quotes made it clear that antome felt it was a shaky equivalence. I'd guess they were hooked in with the talk of in-place text editing as being a top differentiator for a _raster_ package (if PS does text manipulation using raster techniques I'll be shocked). Just consider it to have an implicit "for me" and I'll bet you'll find it hard to find a genuine objection that's worth making. [PS: SodiPodi, me too]
  - boudewijnrempt 12y ago
    You mean combining vector and raster layers in one image? Krita does that -- has been doing that since 2006. It's not perfect, but it's there...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

pepijndevos 12y ago

The thing is that Photoshop is HUGE and does a good job at almost any task involving pixels. There have been projects that do a subset better, like art or graphic design or pixel art, but to do everything Photoshop does probably requires dozens of years of development by a skilled team.

galfarragem 12y ago
The only thing I miss in Photoshop is a command line (Autocad style). This would be a killer feature. I hate looking for a command in the menus or remember a shortcut, I would prefer to remember an alias derived from the name (like Autocad). This (and probably a huge reduction in price) is the only way to make me change to something else.
- brudgers 12y ago
  AutoCad began with the architectural premise that user interaction would be primarily via a terminal. It was built with the ability to run headless. It was built with the ability to run in batch mode. Like Unix, it was built on a set of single purpose tools. These tools formed the API and the user interacted directly with it in the form of commands. The graphic display was a side-effect. Events on the graphic display were mapped back to the API, i.e. mapped back to commands. The reason, most likely, is that in the days of MSDOS AutoDesk had to write hardware drivers themselves or convince third party hardware vendors write them. Having a developer friendly architecture helped in both cases. Post-Macintosh programs such as PhotoShop went down a different architectural path. There was a pre-existing graphics subsystem and no obvious interest in developing up from the terminal. So these applications were developed down from the GUI. In the days of 256k RAM and 10meg disks, there was a lot of need for expediency and GUI code and application code often mixed. The result was a lack of an AutoCad style API. If a procedure looks at screen layout directly, how do you turn it into a command from the keyboard with sensible parameters? Such a refactoring is hard, messy, and not at on the feature list marketing has developed. Lets face it, the PhotoShop user community would not just reject a command based interface, it might express outrage. Going one step further, in the early 1990's AutoDesk massively refactored AutoCad's code. They took the hit in the form of R13. Then they started adding incredible features with each version again for the next twenty years.

steveridout 12y ago

I was a fairly light Photoshop user - occasional retouching, compositing, and web UI stuff. Last year I switched to Pixelmator due to cost and found it relatively painless, the UI is similar enough to Photoshop that it's easy to switch and IMO more attractive than Photoshop CS3 which I used to use. I tried Gimp once a few years ago and had a far worse experience, it slowed me down a lot compared to Photoshop. This may just be because I didn't devote enough time to get used to it.

freshyill 12y ago
I switched to Pixelmator for the same reasons. The only thing I really wish it had was dockable palettes.

mangecoeur 12y ago

> Also check out Natron (mentioned in the article): https://natron.inria.fr/ https://natron.inria.fr/ I never heard of it but it's looking great! Apparently from INRIA, the french national digital research institute. They actually have quite a lot of really good projects that fly a bit under the radar in the US. They're also behind things like Scikit-learn machine learning tools...

Ironballs 12y ago
OCaml is another nice invention from INRIA.
auvi 12y ago
another INRIA product I have extensively used in grad school is Scilab.

dingaling 12y ago

For me the absolute killer feature for Gimp or Krita would be a way to save the editing history, which is currently lost with all the levels of 'undo' when you save in native format. Versioning for image editing; I don't know how it would be done but by Jove it would be a time-saver.

michaelmcmillan 12y ago
I use git for that, works great.
- slightlycuban 12y ago
  With Gimp? Explain.
  - notatoad 12y ago
    Git handles binaries perfectly fine. Your repo is gonna get big fast, and it isn't going to handle merges, but if you just want a linear version history and are used to git, you might as well use it.
  - yoha 12y ago
    He probably means to add the project file to the versioning system and commit regularly so that you can rollback to a previous version. It's way less flexible than Undo though.
- blowski 12y ago
  And even easier (though more expensive and less versatile) - Dropbox or Time Machine.
henningtegen 12y ago
I am the main developer of a new painting application called Leonardo ( http://www.getleonardo.com http://www.getleonardo.com ) which include this feature for our native .LEO file format. Leonardo is currently in early beta.

JonoBB 12y ago

I was a long time PS user on Windows. When I switched to linux as my work computer, the only suitable replacement was Gimp. The interface drove me absolutely crazy - window management is from some kind of sadist (floating toolbar panels) and its not possible to "Save as" (only Export). Since then I have tried Pinta Image Editor - the toolset is far simpler than PS/Gimp, but it is 100x more intuitive. It reminds me of Paint.NET

hf 12y ago
The Gimp has certain, err, noteworthy notions about user interface design. Nevertheless, single-window mode has been around for years (I think): Select 'Windows'->'Single-Window Mode'. The distinction between Save and Export is one of those measures to gently remove the user's feet from below the barrel, I imagine (only the native xcf-format stores certain information, like layers).
- romaniv 12y ago
  They should make single-window the default. Many new people do not know about it and quit Gimp before finding out about it. But more importantly, the worst thing I have to face in GIMP is layer/selection management. I understand how it works, I worked with it for years, but it's annoying as fu... very annoying.
aerique 12y ago
Gimp used to be better than that like having a "Save as" that worked or "Save" just saving the PNG you loaded and changed, instead of insisting on saving an XCF. I think they we're too close to some Gnome developers and got infected by their way of thinking.
iwwr 12y ago
Pinta in Ubuntu (14.04LTS) still lacks beziers and an ability to resize selected bits of an image (you have to resize the whole image at once). Then there is "gnome paint" which is merely a placeholder for a yet-to-be paint application (no functionality). So does Gnome desktop have a flagship GTK paint application in the vein of paint.net?

ris 12y ago

Oh my god I think photoshop has a hideous interface. It is accepted due to the massive traction it has and the number of professionals that are used to it.

jasonwocky 12y ago
It's an interface for professionals. It takes awhile to learn, but when you do, you're rewarded with quite efficient access to the tools given how much Photoshop is capable of.
- ris 12y ago
  Thanks for patronizing me. I have used it extensively, professionally for a time and I think it is highly inconsistent and frustrating.
  - jasonwocky 12y ago
    And so what then? You use it because it has traction and because other professionals use it? Or because, as many professionals find, it's the most capable tool for the job at ahnd?
    - ris 12y ago
      That's a whole other discussion. I'm talking about the interface being inconsistent and painful, whether people need to use it or not.
zippergz 12y ago
I'm a pretty expert Photoshop user, and I see it as similar to the command-line. It's not intuitive to a brand new user, but once you get it, it's incredibly efficient and productive. I think this is appropriate for a professional tool.

nkg 12y ago

In my opinion, it is all about training. At school I was trained to use Photoshop, so now everything I have to do with this software seems natural. But it wasn't. It is the same feeling for people who switch from MS Office to Open Office. MS and Adobe did a great job of setting standards.

blowski 12y ago

The big feature of Photoshop is that it's Photoshop. A typical designer has dozens of expensive plugins for Photoshop, their PSDs only work in Photoshop and they only know how to use Photoshop. Changing would be expensive and risky, and would only be worthwhile if lots of their colleagues and clients were also moving. So Adobe has intentionally created a lot of barriers to exit, and even if an amazing good open-source package came out today, it would struggle to gain traction.

teamonkey 12y ago
Maybe that's true when dealing with clients who also use photoshop, but the majority of artists I know love to experiment with new software - and hardware - and flit between them depending on the job at hand. Photoshop is a bloated, expensive piece of software, but Adobe listen hard to the people using it, and it's really good at what it does, and that's why people keep going back.
iwwr 12y ago
There is also the printer-oriented color management in Photoshop, whereas Gimp appears more screen-oriented. Designs made in sRGB may look radically different when converted to CMYK.
- egypturnash 12y ago
  If you go to print, the fact that Adobe's tools understand multiple color models is a HUGE advantage over most other tools, which usually only work in RGB. It's not just open-source competitors, it's smaller teams trying to compete in this space as well.
haaaaaaryf 12y ago
There is one contender that's been getting some traction with a significant minority iOS designers; Sketch - http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/ http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/ It's nowhere near an entire replacement but it has a very different take on the UI which arguably makes it better suited for app UI design and it appeals to the "cool kids" ... those starting out their design careers with app related projects as best demonstrated by this book / tutorial - https://designcode.io/ https://designcode.io/ And that's probably the only way to unseat Photoshop - with a generational change.

higherpurpose 12y ago

If only Pixelmator came to Windows (and Linux).

rimantas 12y ago
Very unlikely, I think they depend too much on OS X CoreGraphics and other libs to make porting feasible.

tomkin 12y ago

Someone will mention Scratch, but then forget to tell you that it's a piece of garbage.

pikewood 12y ago

To me, the biggest feature that Photoshop has that others don't is their type support, especially with kerning. I can accomplish most of what I want with other tools until I need to tweak the kerning of a word. Most tools require you to select pixels and move it over and don't support in-place editing.

felipeerias 12y ago

Creative work requires continuous experimentation and refinement. If a tool lets you do this easily and without getting in the way, your brain is free to focus on the piece that you are creating. So, while it is true that one can do the same things using another tool like Gimp, the fact that it takes significantly more time and effort means that it will be much harder to end up creating the same art. The funny thing is, engineers actually understand this perfectly when talking about text processors, but for some reason they (we) often fail to generalise it to other fields.

rifung 12y ago
Is it common for engineers to even be able to influence the UX decisions? I thought that was generally left to designers.
- JohnBooty 12y ago
  On a lot of software development projects, particularly open-source ones, the reality is that there are often only engineers.
  - omnimus 12y ago
    Well as a designer, its not realy easy to help on opensource projects. Its hard to join something like that and if you do, the projects themselves usualy need UX design not some pretty colors and some logo. But thats exactly what engeneers mostly want. I dont blame them, they spend lot of effort to make the project and they have their own ideas about how it should work (for them). But good UX is about objectivity and about efficiency. Its also a process. Another thing is that there is no tradition in that for designers. Opensource programming free time fun project for programmer is equivalent maybe something like making print posters for designers. And interaction design schools are hardly helping that, they should make students to help out on opensource projects maybe as part of their assignments/diplomas. How would i join opensource projects that need designers? I dont know.
    - 12y ago

jscheel 12y ago

I too have never heard of Natron. Really excited to dig into it!

drzaiusapelord 12y ago

Paint.net never seems to get much attention. It has a simple interface and a decent featureset for freeware. Windows only.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

erroneousfunk 12y ago

Gimp is good for basic photo editing and manipulation, but it sucks as a professional-grade tool. Gimp can't handle raw images. It can't handle more than 8 bits per channel, no CMYK support. None of the Photoshop CS5 features (like content-aware spot healing) are there. Yes, it's better than most Photoshop alternatives, but it would never be a satisfactory replacement for, say, commercial photographers. I mean, I've only casually used Photoshop for random freelance work over the years (for clients who don't want to hire a real designer), and in my limited experience I've done things with Photoshop that Gimp literally doesn't have support for.

abandonliberty 12y ago
Is that different from content aware fill? Gimp had that feature first, actually. The workflow difference seems minor to me on this one. http://www.gimpology.com/submission/view/getting_around_in_gimp_content_aware_fill_heal_/ http://www.gimpology.com/submission/view/getting_around_in_g...
- erroneousfunk 12y ago
  I stand corrected :) I wasn't aware of that feature. However, I believe there are still problems with raw, CMYK, and images with large color depth.

untog 12y ago

I think there isn't a good Photoshop replacement because it tries to do too much. For example, it's used by both photo editors and web designers. The crossover of requirements there is really quite small - so I'm quite happy to see smaller apps hacking away at a subsection of what Photoshop does. For example, I work almost exclusively on web UI stuff, and I love Sketch. The UI just makes so much more sense to me.

reitoei 12y ago
> it tries to do too much I don't think it does. It offers a massive feature set that is useful to different people in different ways, but there is still a lot of crossover. Maybe you're pigeon-holing users based on their 'roles'. Web designers/photo editors, when working in Photoshop are both working with layered images at the end of the day. Plus people have different ways of working. You may do web UI stuff, but you may have a completely different workflow to another web UI designer.
- jcrawfordor 12y ago
  I think this points to a bigger difference between engineers and "normal people" - programmers tend to have grown up on the Unix philosophy of "do one thing well," but most everyday users find out that they need to use a different tool for a task and get irritated with that. The fact that Photoshop can do so many things is a huge appeal to users, because if they need to do some workflow item that maybe isn't part of their normal job, they can still do it within a familiar tool. This is handy and saves learning time. Compare this to "unix people" who are likely to regard a tool with a lot of functionality they use rarely as bloated.

d33d33 12y ago

absolutely agree with huuu. if you're somehow forced to use gimp, there is at least a better gui enhancement/tweak that tries to replicate photoshop's gui: http://doctormo.deviantart.com/art/Gimp-2-8-Photoshop-Tweaks-432736644 http://doctormo.deviantart.com/art/Gimp-2-8-Photoshop-Tweaks...

perderder 12y ago

Paint Shop Pro, anyone?

joshmn 12y ago
Checking in! Well, the 12-year-old me (2003). Jasc Animation Shop for AIM buddy icons!

saidajigumi 12y ago

> But I'm also a little amazed that there still isn't a good Photoshop replacement. As others have noted, Photoshop is vast. It represents a large investment of domain knowledge that's quite hard to replicate. It has a lot of UI features that allow for powerful, efficient workflows (actions, heavily customizable GUI and shortcuts, even scripting, etc.) beyond its core image creation and manipulation functions. And that's not to mention the entire ecosystem of Photoshop plugins. That said, the best competing apps I've seen out there are really domain specialist apps. They don't try to be better than Photoshop at everything, just better at one niche. Depending on the tool, they often don't even try to displace Photoshop from the workflow, just add on to it. Mischief[1] is a good example of this category of Photoshop competitor. If there's to be a significant competitor to traditional Photoshop, my bet would be on one of these "worse than Photoshop, but better at one thing" apps that met with initial success and eventually grew to displace Photoshop from a larger arena. I still doubt that we'd get a total Photoshop "replacement", per se. (Note, that "one thing" might well be "runs on mobile" versus any task-centric domain.) [1] https://www.madewithmischief.com/ https://www.madewithmischief.com/

saidajigumi 12y ago
> powerful, efficient workflows An addendum to my prior post, I suspect a lot of folks here won't be aware of something: in various professional positions heavily dependent on Photoshop use (e.g. pro photo editing / retouching), it's common practice to have speed tests in the interview process. This part of the interview shows that 1) you know the available tools and know how to use them well for job-typical tasks and 2) you are utterly fluent in the UI, keyboard shortcuts, etc. for the task. Not all pros need this kind of workflow efficiency, but those who do are scary fast at what they do. A fair bit of Photoshop's design over the years has been influenced by the needs of these kinds of high-skill, high-efficiency workflows.

maxxxxx 12y ago

The real killer feature of Photoshop is YouTube videos and books. I am learning it right now and it's extremely helpful to watch tutorial videos. There is almost nothing for GIMP so if you don't know exactly what you are looking for, you are out of luck.

shmerl 12y ago
There are tons of videos on Gimp. Krita has somewhat less of them.

aikah 12y ago

> But I'm also a little amazed that there still isn't a good Photoshop replacement. Photoshop has loads of features, really, most users use like 1% of these,but professionals are required to know Photoshop. Because professionals will share photoshop files. I mean, you wouldn't use Sublime Text 2 to code in C# right? sure you can do that, but a .net shop requires you to know Visual Studio Pro. > I can do with Gimp Gimp is a sad story imho,it feels too much like developpers doing UX-UI and failing at doing it properly. It has great features but feels way to clunky and un-inspiring for artists.Gimp needs to be heavily redesigned. I wish Fireworks was still developped, it was an amazing tool for drawing,especially for webdesign,2d game design and prototyping.And god it was so easy to write complex plugins with a few lines of Javascript, it was mind blowing. I wish Adobe never bought Macromedia.

contingencies 12y ago
Gimp is a sad story imho,it feels too much like developpers doing UX-UI and failing at doing it properly Yeah, same feeling initially ... but now that I'm used to it, I actually prefer it. On the same tangent, for a good example of a clean interface, check out Lightworks for Linux with a cheap Wacom tablet. You'll be blown away.

Animats 12y ago

But I'm also a little amazed that there still isn't a good Photoshop replacement. It's hard. Inkscape is a good Corel Draw replacement, and the drawing functions in Open/Libre Office aren't bad. In 3D land, there's Blender, which is a good 3D animation program. (It still has the UI from hell, though. 3D UIs are really, really hard to do well.) GIMP started life as a command-line program and had a GUI tacked on later. That never works well. Pinta Image Editor tries to be Microsoft Paint with some extra Photoshop LE features. It has roughly the right feature set, and a reasonable Photoshop-like UI, but it's so buggy it's useless. Components of the GUI randomly disappear. The drag markers from selection end up in the actual image. Resizing fails for moderately large images. The original developer abandoned it around 2012, and while it's getting some maintenance, it's still not very stable. Putting the current 2014 release into the Ubuntu repository might help.