This is Jehan Pages, the top developer behind GIMP, a free open source photo editor. Adobe executives hate Jehan. Because of his hard work, Adobe lost millions of dollars
Design lead here. I know photoshop like the back of my hand, but I also know Pixelmator (Mac only), Sketch and Affinity. All are very nice interfaces, one-time, or major version licenses, and smaller, responsive dev teams.
There are compromises in all software, but my team uses Pixelmator and Affinity because we’re a small company and it won’t hurt their design skills to know more tools besides the Adobe suite.
Gimp for a long time had shitty shortcuts and was quite unfriendly to Mac users (the REAL
vendor lock-in in the design world btw). Him is just too slow to load, and ugly to look at, similar but less so with Inkscape.
Big firms might be harder to change, but it’s possibly and there are really good alternatives that Adobe probably worries a little about. Unfortunately they aren’t FOSS for the most part.
GIMP had some shitty shortcuts, sure. But so did PS.
As an example of better shortcuts - you could get a rectangular selection by pressing "r", which is an example of a very simple and straightforward UI language. You could then adjust that selection with handles without needing any chords or modifiers, zoom in with the number keys or scroll wheel, etc.
You could open a tool, like the colour picker, and switch to a different window without the app going beep and telling you "no", which is what PS traditionally did.
You could open the app and load an image in 1/10th the time it took for PS to start which made it way nicer to use. When I was using PS I generally left it open all the time because of its sluggish start, which meant it was sitting hogging resources all day.
What I'm saying is that your personal workflow and the general UX of whatever software you're used to using is always the thing you're going to use as a point of comparison, and if your expected shortcut is different it doesn't mean it's worse.
true that it wasn't good for mac. I gave up apple/mac and their increasingly shitty overpriced products 10 years ago. Since then Linux has come a long way and so has GIMP. Good enough to kill Photoshop? Not any time soon, but good enough for professional use certainly and good enough for new artists to start on. Install G'MIC and it's so much better.
Right? I hate the phrasing in this headline. Adobe isn't somehow "owed" those millions so it's totally backwards to call that a loss. Fuck that noise.
They're a business, they should earn their revenue by fostering a healthy competitive environment and then winning through innovation and customer loyalty. Not the monopoly licensing and subscription lock-in BS they've been doing for decades.
Yes. Bluebeam Revu can do everything Adobe Acrobat can do (better imo).
Acrobat is still a product of Adobe, which is why I brought Bluebeam up.
I know this thread is about GIMP vs Adobe Photoshop, but OP of this comment thread said that Adobe has a monopoly over every business use. Not the case in the construction world
Bluebeam is so powerful that I feel the way it's used in some construction companies is like how corporate uses excel. In that it has gone beyond what it was initially intended for and has become the primitive around which they work.
Adobe has lost basically nothing. Because Gimp is still ridiculously underpowered compared to Adobe Photoshop (let alone the rest of the suite). That is perfectly fine since the vast majority of users don't need those capabilities. But the people who do (e.g. professionals)? There is really no other choice.
I disagree. GIMP and photopea get really slow on larger files that photoshop can handle with stability. I've really, really tried to move to GIMP, beyond just learning different hotkeys. I keep falling back to Photoshop.
Do execs really hate him? Competition validates the marketplace and your product. Plus they can afford to develop more features than the open source community can produce in the same amount of time. So they can always argue you are paying for the additional features.
(Disclaimer: I use Gimp a lot and Adobe not at all)
Tbh, the people who use Gimp and the people who use Adobe are two separate crowds and neither Gimp nor Adobe are the only tools in town.
If I'm not going to pay for a photo editing tool and Gimp would cease to exist, I'd just download another free tool and call it a day.
If I'm a professional relying on Adobe Photoshop, the existence of Gimp does nothing to me. Photoshop plus Lightroom costs ~€25/month. For a private person that's a lot. For a professional that hardly matters. If I pay €1000+ rent for a studio+office, paying €25 isn't that big of a deal.
Or to put it the other way round: If our hypothetical professional saves just one hour of work per month due to using Adobe tools over Gimp or another software, it's cheaper for them to use Adobe. Because time literally is money when you are self-employed.
"Professionals" is one of those words, you know, like "consumer" or whatever, that does a lot to hide what's really going on.
I'm a professional who used to use GIMP all the time for my work. I'm not less of a professional because I didn't like Photoshop, in fact, I used to use PS at previous jobs but gave it up because I prefer the GIMP interface (yes, I'm that person) and didn't need the other bits. "Professional" just means you do it as a job; it doesn't indicate what that job is, and different people have different use cases.
GIMP's UI and UX are just terrible. I forced myself to use it for months but it never felt like anything ever got easier to do, it's just so unintuitive. Nevertheless, I thank the devs for all their work, it's great great tool
I used PS from v3 (I think?) to CS2 (ish?) before switching to GIMP. I thought the interface was weird until a designer at my job showed me where I was getting confused. So I've been a semi-regular G user for the last million years and every once in a while I offer to help my partner with something in PS and honestly I take so long to get anything done because I can't find it in the PS UI.
But it does take money away in other ways. I use GIMP for work which could easily pay for Adobe if I asked them. We just don't need to since we aren't doing any high-demand tasks.
Corporate has a strategy to win those customers back, in all such industries, buy out your competition and enter into a shittrust with remaining competitors, agreeing to both maximize revenue rather than compete for favour.
Anti trust has been dead, courts have been captured, customers have no choice, stonk goes back ups.
I used to steal profit from Safeway all the time! I should have put those tips intended for me as an individualdonations to the corporation in the till as was policy. So naive and selfish.
I used Photoshop professionally for nearly 30 years. I retired and don't need it anymore, so now I use GIMP on Linux for the few personal projects I want to make.
GIMP's interface leaves a lot to be desired. One example, in Photoshop the Channels tab shows all the channels and includes any masks you make, they look and work similarly to the layers, and it's intuitive--when you learn one, you know the other. GIMP doesn't work that way, in fact I've yet to make sense of the channels.
Also, typically one would expect filters to only be applied to a selected layer and even to a selection within that layer. Some GIMP filters apply to the whole image, flattening my layers, and creating new ones. Fortunately, these are made in a new document, so you don't lose anything, but the filter cannot be applied to a partial image, you'd need to pull the result back into your original image and mask out the part you wanted. Very strange.
I could go on about how selecting works and doesn't work, but I won't.
No, Adobe has not "lost millions" due to GIMP, they haven't lost a cent. People who use GIMP were either never going to pay Adobe a cent, or already have and are using GIMP now, for similar reasons to my own. Virtually no one uses GIMP professionally at any volume of interest to Adobe.
It's a good and useful tool, but it's severely lacking compared to Photoshop.
Adobe pretty much encouraged piracy up until about a decade ago, that way they got schools to train (for free) potential future customers in their way to use design software.
TBH I don't understand why they have gone with the subs model they currently have, its kind of cutting the blood line from their future customers.
Competition is always a good thing, FOSS competition is the best thing in my opinion.
This guy is a hero, but not because he is trying to fuck Adobe but rather he is helping free design software from (massive) cost which most people cannot afford.
I think JetBrains's approach is nice. You can subscribe monthly but anything you e subscribed to for 12 months you get a perpetual fall back license for. Unless I'm missing something specific it's a win for everyone.
There are student subs, which are super cheap. Wouldn’t be surprised if schools/universities would get free licenses. After all, this is how they can attract new paying customers, as you correctly stated
I’d suspect it was much the same reason as why Apple decided to kill FCP and rebrand iMovie instead. Professional users are inordinately more expensive in tech support costs
But FCP X is amazing. It's the one thing I really miss having a Mac for and it's so disappointing that nobody else has even attempted to replicate it. It's leaps and bounds ahead of everybody else. Calling it a "rebranded iMovie" shows either a complete lack of awareness of literally anything about it, or an incredible intellectual dishonesty that doesn't even seen to serve a practical purpose.
It's also…not subscription based. Or wasn't in 2018 when I last had a Mac.
They announced a subscription plan today, funnily enough.
But no, FCPX was a huge fuck you to the professional market. And yes, FCPX is built on the iMovie codebase rather than FCP7.
On release:
0 backward compatibility with FCP7 projects.
Support for tape ingest removed.
Multicam editing removed.
No external monitor for playback
Unable to export to Color and other post packages, breaking the whole professional workflow.
Could only be installed manually via the App Store.
And the worst part of all this was Apple abruptly withdrew FCP7 on launch day. So if you were a post house working on a big job and needed a few extra licences, fuck you. If you needed any of the lost features, fuck you. We’re talking companies that plan upgrades a year or so in advance to minimise disruption, and they suddenly faced having to make do with no more licences, or to suddenly switch to Avid with all the pain that causes.
FCPX was suitable for prosumers, who would ingest, edit, mix and grade in the one package. It was not compatible with the way the industry works, and by removing FCP7, Apple signalled that they were no longer interested in the pro market.
Yeah nope, if the same product is available for free then the only way to prove a "stolen sale" is if someone had previously paid for the subscription and then cancelled to use the free version of the same product.
Anything else is just the hand of the free market doing it's thing. If Adobe executives are malding because someone made a cheaper (or free) alternative then they have two honourable routes available:
Add more value to their products to convince people their price tag is worth it.
Reduce the price they charge.
But they'll literally do anything else but those two, including astroturfing messages like "open source software is piracy", so stop spewing corpo bullshit!
I guarantee that Adobe definitely sees every download of GIMP as a lost sale. That's corporate mentality.
I worked for many years in the music business, starting back in the days of the "Home Taping is killing music" campaign. I know for a fact that music executives saw the sale of every blank tape, and later, every download, as a lost sale. You could explain that it wasn't really a lost sale, because that consumer probably wouldn't have bought it anyway, but they didn't like hearing that. If someone was listening to it, even if it was just curiosity, that was a lost sale.
They didn't feel that way about radio stations or libraries, two places where people could get music for free, but somehow, borrowing a friend's album, and taping it so you could listen to it a few times and decide if you wanted to buy a clean copy, infuriated them.
I knew the people at the top who were going after the downloaders. They were mean, nasty, greedy people, who were stealing way more from their own artists than consumers were ever stealing from them, so I never had a single concern about downloading whatever I want.
These days, artists hardly make any money from recordings. Unless you are buying the music direct from the artist at their shows, then you are just feeding an evil record company. Pirate the records, pay for the shows and merch, and if you want to own a physical copy, buy your music direct from the artist.
Do that long enough, and record companies will die.
And for a while, people using tapes to make field recordings were supposed to pay more for the blanks to offset the supposed lost sales of the unrelated music industry.
The record industry wanted a special tax on blank cassettes, to offset the costs of home recording, which they would distribute as they saw fit, but they never got it.
If there had been a tax, it would have gone straight into the exec's pockets, and no artist would have ever seen a dime.
There are probably some people who decided to use GIMP instead of Photoshop, some people who simply pirated Photoshop, and some people who bought Photoshop anyway.
It's difficult to quantify the degree to which the existence of GIMP caused lost sales for Adobe. I started using GIMP instead of a high-seas Photoshop version, so I still haven't spent a dime!
I followed your advice and got Jehan Page's face tattooed on my face. My wife left with the kids because of it and man, does this rule. Thanks for the sage words dude.
What many people don't think about is that open source / free software is anti-billionaire software.
Since all software is bits, and it's free and easy to copy bits, to make money from software, a company needs to build a "moat". A moat is something that protects your company from people choosing alternatives. Open source software is built without a moat, so that anybody and everybody can access it. And, if you build with the GPL anybody who builds something based on your software is forbidden from building a moat of their own.
This means that it's really hard to get rich building free / open source software. But, it also means that in any area where there is free / open source software it's much harder for fully commercial, closed source, for profit companies to make big profits. Enshittify too much and people will just switch to the alternative, even if the alternative is significantly less stable, not as easy to use, is lacking features, etc. Piss people off too much and they might actually invest engineering money on improving the open source alternative.
Adobe is a big company with their fingers in many different pies. Photoshop is only one of their products. Gimp alone can't do much to hold Adobe back, but it does limit what they can do with Photoshop and still expect to make money from it.
Software licensing will eventually be relegated to the “dustbin of history”, hopefully it won’t be after humanity emerges from a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
Yeah. Software licensing is artificial scarcity, trying to make the new world of bits seem like the old world of objects so that people who knew how to make money with objects can still make money with bits.
I agree that it's artificial scarcity, but I don't think the conversation is going to fully be able to move to removing that scarcity until we find a way to handle the people who rearrange the bits actually living in a world of objects and totally authentic scarcity.
It's the same dilemma we have with authors and musicians. Even if it can be infinitely copied the people who make it still need to eat, and not just be able to find a way to eat, but to reliably and predictably eat which makes donations and crowd funding iffy at best.
As a user and contributer to open source, I'm loath to put up any defense of something that irritates me more often than not. As a person who makes a living working on the closed side I can honestly say I would probably not be in the field if there wasn't as much ability to make a living in it.
It will probably take something like universal basic income. Also, before copyright etc. a lot of art was created when a patron paid the artist for their work. In modern times, a single individual patron has been replaced by a bunch of them using Patreon. In addition, some people (not enough) are employed to work on open source software. It's similar to a patron kind of arrangement because someone is paying for the "artist" to work, even though the thing the artist produces can't be owned by the employer.
I think if you combine all those various things the need for "intellectual property" goes away. But, the people who currently make money from IP are going to fight tooth and nail to keep it.
Are not the copyleft licenses the opposite of artificial scarcity, not just affirming that opposite, but also affirming to not impose that artificial scarcity later on, as a condition?
Even permissive licenses start from an absence of artificial scarcity. Even if though later on, forks can add their artificial scarcity.
Yes, that's the distinguishing feature of the GPL. The ironic thing is that the only thing that gives the GPL its power is the thing it's trying to fight. If IP laws didn't exist, the GPL would be unenforceable, but it would also be unnecessary.
to make money from software, a company needs to build a “moat”.
No. There are other ways.
I've paid more for Free Software licensed software voluntarily than I ever did for proprietary software with its moats. Largely because they have no moat.
And has that made the people selling that software rich? No.
My point is that to get rich making software you need a moat. You can still make a bit of money without it, but it will be a fraction of what you can make if you can use intellectual property laws to make sure you don't have to worry about competitors.
Red Hat doesn't even exist anymore. They're nothing more than an IBM subsidiary. Canonical is hardly rich. It may be influential in the free software world, but in terms of market cap, they're half the size of "A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp". Have you ever heard of A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp? I hadn't until I started looking for software companies comparable to Canonical.
NGL, I paid out the ass for PSCS3 waay back in 2007 - Universal binary.. PPC AND Intel installer - and FWIW, I'm still using it. In point of fact it's why all my Macs are dual boot with Mojave (32-bit support) so I can continue to install and use it. Homegirl is no how, no way gonna rent what I should be able to own.
(As Adobe no longer has the CS3 activation servers online, if you've still got an installed, activated, instance of the PSCS3 kicking around somewhere, copy the actual application itself out to a backup location.. so when you use the installer in a system capable of running it, you can swap the newly installed, inactivated copy out for the activated one you have in backup. Just do NOT try and launch the program before you do the swap.. This works for PC copies of CS3 as well as Mac..)
Personally, I can recommend a VM for that reason. Activate it once and then just copy the VM over to a new PC, Backup location, etc. Turn on internet access for it when activating, turn it off and leave it disabled for the rest of your life. Worked like a charm for me.
I'm still using cs3 as well. For what it's worth, I just checked and it's still out there to be had. I have the master suite, which I could not find, but pscs3 itself is still alive out there.
Years back, I tried the trial version of CS6 and just about lost my mind when it came to finding where tools had been hidden in the submenus.. but the biggest "oh hell no.." was whatever they had done to the print profiles. No matter what setting or profile I used, the images were oversaturated. Even tried importing from CS3 - nope. I gave it up pretty quickly at that point.
Yep, same here. Mojave on an old MacBook with a complete CS5 suite lets me continue to use what I paid for.
I didn't have a still-running copy like you did, so instead I disabled all network access and used my existing install media/licensing to activate offline, then before restoring network I went through and blocked every single executable at the firewall, esp anything having to do with updates or the licensing module. Now it doesn't matter whether there is internet access or not, everything is stable and it doesn't phone home.
The blocking was a pain in the ass, no lie, but I can restore the firewall settings from time machine if ever needed, and meanwhile I have a working, unshittified CS5 that is not constantly trying to move my data up to the cloud or give itself legal rights to my IP. It's lacking some newer features probably, but it does what I need.
I'm going to pass your instructions along to a friend still using CS5 on the same Mac he installed it on, though. It's a great strategy.
IIRC, I discovered it when I retired my Mirror Door Drive G4 and bought a MacPro. At the time I wasn't online and couldn't get the fresh install to activate and on a lark, because it WAS a universal binary, I just copied over the application from the G4.
It worked, but was a bit janky, so once the internet got sorted, I did a clean reinstall of CS3 and activated it as normal.. I still have the G4 with the CS3 on it, and also copies of the install I did on the MacPro.
Also, with the CS3 and the OSes later than El Capitan, you need to get the JavaForOSX.dmg from Apple. It won't launch otherwise.
The great thing about CS3 is that even if I try to have it update, it doesn't. I used to run it with all the Adobe "phone home" addresses blocked in my system's hosts file. Now I no longer have to even do that. Nothing's there online. It will launch Bridge but when it gets to the Adobe Stock Photos and accepts the certificate, it connects to their servers and promptly quits.
A few of the replies here, those making those replies, could do with having someone introduce them to the concept of "put up or hack up", and getting into a Free Software philosophy mindset, and out of a consumer mindset.
GIMP's free software. Free to use, study, share and change... You the user are empowered. Even if you yourself lack aptitude (beyond just having never tried), you can still seek the services of others, be it those you pay to implement what you want, or, form a community of like minded individuals with similar needs to be met, and from there, start to make it as you want. These days, even LLMs can help curate the software into forms more suited to your needs. ... That is, where that's not already happened, or where there are reconfigurations you were simply not aware of, because it had not occurred to you to search for such, having been conditioned to stay in the box by the consumer mindset the corporation curated in your mind. It's refreshing to get out of having your mind curated by the corporation, and into using your mind to curate your software.
Either the user controls the software, or the user is controlled by the software and those who control the software.
It's a different philosophy. Not just a different platform for you as a "consumer". You're not a cash-cow for the corporation, with Free Software. You can contribute. Scratch those itches yourself. You may find others share the same itch. Giving back, is a much more rewarding experience than just hoping daddy corporation will give you what you want while you continue to atrophy your abilities.
And giving back comes in all forms. Writing docs, answering questions, helping out new users, fixing bugs, or just spreading the gospel of said FOSS software.
I like to point out to folks that pre-google Youtube was built on ffmpeg. You can set up streaming servers on it and all kinds of stuff. So who is stealing from whom... the pattern is theft from open source, not the other way around.
some open source projects have very unpleasant communities around them, GIMP is not one of them. very easy to get into and everyone is extremely helpful and friendly.
Before I retired last year, I was web developer for a community college. We had a graphic artist, but frequently I needed to just do a quick resize or change format for a web image. GIMP got the job done without the resource gluttony of PS.
Yeah, it's complicated to make a circle in gimp, but it is very doable.
You can constrain the shape tool to make circles, or you can use a 100% strong brush to make a circle as large as you want at the spot you want it, and then use the select tool to shrink that circle and then erase the infill.
But there are dozens of other free and open source alternatives that are so much more powerful and easier to use. Krita, Affinity, Photopea.... I could go on and on.... Like why does Gimp exist any more? Who is it for?
Jehan Pages, you have bestowed my life with an abundance of badly edited memes and given me a trade that can I be proud of (making badly edited memes in Gimp), thank you.
Maybe you mean a more "brush and canvas" interface without complexity and distraction. I'm an artist that uses gimp. They are both great, Krita is just made with ease of use and emulation of irl tools in mind. GIMP can do emulation stuff too, but it can also do tons of other things, even video fx and animation.
These features come from maintained modules or scripts that can be added if desired. There is a tiny bit of animation support in plain GIMP, mostly for working with animated gifs.
Honestly the GIMP interface is way better than it used to be (5-10 years ago?). The old multi-window design always frustrated me but with the single-window tab view it feels much more normal.
This. I assume the people complaining about the UI fall into two categories: people who haven't opened GIMP in years and people who want it to be a photoshop clone.
Clearly that's their problem not GIMP's
The ads are shit, but I’m inclined to let the ads run because the entire app is built by one Ukrainian dude who basically cloned the creative suite himself.
What a bastard. Consider the plight of the multinational corporation. They are ashen faced in the C-suite mumbling lamentations, 'number go down' and 'shareholder value'.
Lost what money? People choosing not to buy your stuff isn't "lost income". Tell C-Suite to stop projecting everyone and their dog using their shit and take care of the users that they have.
Nah, I'm fine with them squeezing as much money as possible out of there customers. That only creates pressure to look for alternatives. Just like all the AI nonsense added to windows nobody wants making people look for alternatives.
I have no sympathies for the suckers giving money to adobe.
You could try typing the term used to refer (usually derogatorily) to a person with an injury or deformity in their lower extremities, or the term used as a synonym for hobble.
What a weird thing to worry about in a world where some of the most recognizable products have silly, unserious names like Google and Twitter, and where the slogan for one of the most popular media players of all time is "it really whips the llama's ass"
Google and Twitter are not on par with "gimp". I also didn't say I was worried. I just noted that it makes people take the software less seriously when I advocate it as a free, open source replacement for Photoshop, which has a very respectable reputation and a business-like name. Being called "gimp" makes people doubt that it's a professional quality product.
In Mint right now if I hit the menu and type "photo" I get five options and GIMP is one of them. But it doesn't say GIMP on my screen, it says "GNU Image ..." next to the icon.
If I type "image" then GIMP is second in the list after photo viewer.
Normally though I just hit super - g - i - m - p - ENTER. Because I wanna run GIMP damn it!
I mean I can't say it has had an impact on ESRI, but I for one have been boycotting ESRI and their products for over 10 years. I've moved entire teams and departments away, and was only able to do so through a combination of QGIS/ R/ Python. There are still some gaps to fill, but because geospatial is such a smaller world to begin with (than photoshop), I feel like QGIS maybe has had more of a "percentage" impact at breaking through on ESRI than GIMP has to photoshop.
My first job out of high school was doing GIS mapping for the National Wetlands Survey with a stereo scope, high altitude infrared, and topo overlays. I was comparing old data to new observations and manually drawing the identified bodies of water onto mylar over the topo. After that, I'd write the labels and lines on a second mylar overlay.
All of this was then given to a digital mapping team that plotted everything a using specialized mouse. That was 25 years ago, give or take.
The GIS software was so insanely expensive back then. To see something of this caliber for free is impressive.
I love QGIS so much. I use it professionally every day. The city I've worked for has used it for years.
We are about to bit the bullet on a few ESRI seats mostly for interoperability with some of our consultants and easier use of REST servers and stuff, but we're getting the absolute cheapest licenses because all the spatial analysis tools thay cost thousands extra per license are free in QGIS, and I can still use it.
I’m still rolling with the universal binary copy of PSCS3 that I bought in 2007 to use on my PPC G4 mac tower. Dual boot to macOS Mojave 10.14.6 for that sweet 32–bit support. Adobe went to the rental model because of isers such as myself. Old tools that work and do what I need have no reason to be replaced.
Someone asked me yesterday what products besides Adobe's there were for his elderly cousin to merge PDFs, or extract pages. I proposed a few options, so I'm technically helping to lose money for Adobe. I'm doing my part 😁
Linux comes (at least on Mint and Ubuntu) with the poppler-utils suite of tools. you can merge, extract pages, even rip all the images out of a pdf in source quality. very useful.
yes, I hear you. I have dreams of a publicly funded linux distro with accessibility and security (for elderly dudes and the like) the main design focus. My rebuilt federal government would develop this.
I'll be honest I've tried gimp and found that I'm terrible and not interested in making or editing any form of digital media. I've also tried Photoshop. Paint is more my speed fast and ugly.
Adobe hasn't lost anything, they have tied up "design" for any business use. Its a total monopoly.
Yeah, this is kinda BS.
Adobe don't care. Nearly every design firm is going to ask you about your Adobe experience, so you can use their Adobe software.
Maybe some of their designers will use GIMP. But that's like saying your office also uses libre office and Linux. Which is extremely rare.
Design lead here. I know photoshop like the back of my hand, but I also know Pixelmator (Mac only), Sketch and Affinity. All are very nice interfaces, one-time, or major version licenses, and smaller, responsive dev teams.
There are compromises in all software, but my team uses Pixelmator and Affinity because we’re a small company and it won’t hurt their design skills to know more tools besides the Adobe suite.
Gimp for a long time had shitty shortcuts and was quite unfriendly to Mac users (the REAL vendor lock-in in the design world btw). Him is just too slow to load, and ugly to look at, similar but less so with Inkscape.
Big firms might be harder to change, but it’s possibly and there are really good alternatives that Adobe probably worries a little about. Unfortunately they aren’t FOSS for the most part.
GIMP had some shitty shortcuts, sure. But so did PS.
As an example of better shortcuts - you could get a rectangular selection by pressing "r", which is an example of a very simple and straightforward UI language. You could then adjust that selection with handles without needing any chords or modifiers, zoom in with the number keys or scroll wheel, etc.
You could open a tool, like the colour picker, and switch to a different window without the app going beep and telling you "no", which is what PS traditionally did.
You could open the app and load an image in 1/10th the time it took for PS to start which made it way nicer to use. When I was using PS I generally left it open all the time because of its sluggish start, which meant it was sitting hogging resources all day.
What I'm saying is that your personal workflow and the general UX of whatever software you're used to using is always the thing you're going to use as a point of comparison, and if your expected shortcut is different it doesn't mean it's worse.
true that it wasn't good for mac. I gave up apple/mac and their increasingly shitty overpriced products 10 years ago. Since then Linux has come a long way and so has GIMP. Good enough to kill Photoshop? Not any time soon, but good enough for professional use certainly and good enough for new artists to start on. Install G'MIC and it's so much better.
Right? I hate the phrasing in this headline. Adobe isn't somehow "owed" those millions so it's totally backwards to call that a loss. Fuck that noise.
They're a business, they should earn their revenue by fostering a healthy competitive environment and then winning through innovation and customer loyalty. Not the monopoly licensing and subscription lock-in BS they've been doing for decades.
My kids keep screwing Nintendo. The other day I saw my kid grab a Lego, he slid it on the table and then made it jump over an orange.
I'm waiting for the letter from their lawyers.
All monopolies (including Adobe) should be seized by the workers, and then split into different companies and collectivized by the workers. Seriously!
In the construction world, Bluebeam is a good contender to Adobe.
Still corporate though
For PDF editing, there's so many good open source products.
Absolutely no reason to be using Adobe just for PDFs. Waste of money.
Which ones do you have in mind, if you don't mind me asking?
I would LOVE to have a FOSS Bluebeam
Isn't that for pdf editing?
Yes. Bluebeam Revu can do everything Adobe Acrobat can do (better imo).
Acrobat is still a product of Adobe, which is why I brought Bluebeam up.
I know this thread is about GIMP vs Adobe Photoshop, but OP of this comment thread said that Adobe has a monopoly over every business use. Not the case in the construction world
Ah right, got you.
Bluebeam is so powerful that I feel the way it's used in some construction companies is like how corporate uses excel. In that it has gone beyond what it was initially intended for and has become the primitive around which they work.
Look... I like gimp a lot and Jehan is a G.
Adobe has lost basically nothing. Because Gimp is still ridiculously underpowered compared to Adobe Photoshop (let alone the rest of the suite). That is perfectly fine since the vast majority of users don't need those capabilities. But the people who do (e.g. professionals)? There is really no other choice.
Yeah, that title's last sentence is just a straight-up lie, lol
I disagree. GIMP and photopea get really slow on larger files that photoshop can handle with stability. I've really, really tried to move to GIMP, beyond just learning different hotkeys. I keep falling back to Photoshop.
Do execs really hate him? Competition validates the marketplace and your product. Plus they can afford to develop more features than the open source community can produce in the same amount of time. So they can always argue you are paying for the additional features.
(Disclaimer: I use Gimp a lot and Adobe not at all)
Tbh, the people who use Gimp and the people who use Adobe are two separate crowds and neither Gimp nor Adobe are the only tools in town.
If I'm not going to pay for a photo editing tool and Gimp would cease to exist, I'd just download another free tool and call it a day.
If I'm a professional relying on Adobe Photoshop, the existence of Gimp does nothing to me. Photoshop plus Lightroom costs ~€25/month. For a private person that's a lot. For a professional that hardly matters. If I pay €1000+ rent for a studio+office, paying €25 isn't that big of a deal.
Or to put it the other way round: If our hypothetical professional saves just one hour of work per month due to using Adobe tools over Gimp or another software, it's cheaper for them to use Adobe. Because time literally is money when you are self-employed.
poor artists blame their tools.
"Professionals" is one of those words, you know, like "consumer" or whatever, that does a lot to hide what's really going on. I'm a professional who used to use GIMP all the time for my work. I'm not less of a professional because I didn't like Photoshop, in fact, I used to use PS at previous jobs but gave it up because I prefer the GIMP interface (yes, I'm that person) and didn't need the other bits. "Professional" just means you do it as a job; it doesn't indicate what that job is, and different people have different use cases.
GIMP's UI and UX are just terrible. I forced myself to use it for months but it never felt like anything ever got easier to do, it's just so unintuitive. Nevertheless, I thank the devs for all their work, it's great great tool
I used PS from v3 (I think?) to CS2 (ish?) before switching to GIMP. I thought the interface was weird until a designer at my job showed me where I was getting confused. So I've been a semi-regular G user for the last million years and every once in a while I offer to help my partner with something in PS and honestly I take so long to get anything done because I can't find it in the PS UI.
Did you reconfigure it much?
There are preconfiguration packs that make it more like photoshop if you want. Gimpshop I think one is called.
I didn't, I will check it out but that is still terrible UX if you need to mod the program to make It intuitive
Have you tried PhotoGIMP?
Photogimp is just lipstick. There are root design choices that create the problems.
This is like movie companies saying that me pirating a movie cost them money.
Absence of a free thing isn't going to magic some money into my wallet with which to buy your thing, I'm still broke AF.
My gramma totally screwed Intel. She never used a computer in her entire life.
Intel execs must HATE her
But it does take money away in other ways. I use GIMP for work which could easily pay for Adobe if I asked them. We just don't need to since we aren't doing any high-demand tasks.
Why are they entitled to it?
They're not? They don't have to be entitled to something to lose money on it.
Im talking about money. If the money isn't theirs they can't lose it. You can't lose money that isn't yours.
They kind of do, though?
Because of Adobe's hatred and abuse of their users, Adobe lost millions of dollars.
Corporate has a strategy to win those customers back, in all such industries, buy out your competition and enter into a shittrust with remaining competitors, agreeing to both maximize revenue rather than compete for favour.
Anti trust has been dead, courts have been captured, customers have no choice, stonk goes back ups.
Amen for the GNU GPL. Changed the world. Gave us an out.
Maybe stonk against megacorps
Man ain't nobody lost money because of Gimp. Flawed argument aside, at least Blender could be in for a shout
Last year Blender got a shout out at the Oscars from the makers of Flow.
And Inkscape, fuck Adobe :)
Now that's a more reasonable contender than GIMP
I used to steal profit from Safeway all the time! I should have put those
tips intended for me as an individualdonations to the corporation in the till as was policy. So naive and selfish.Adobe didn't lose money. You can't lose money you never had.
Have you ever heard of the term "Lost Profits"?
Yes and it's a made up term right next to my Unrealized Lottery Winnings
I put that one right next to 'Wasn't good enough'
Weren't they the band with the lead singer who turned out to be a paedo?
I used Photoshop professionally for nearly 30 years. I retired and don't need it anymore, so now I use GIMP on Linux for the few personal projects I want to make.
GIMP's interface leaves a lot to be desired. One example, in Photoshop the Channels tab shows all the channels and includes any masks you make, they look and work similarly to the layers, and it's intuitive--when you learn one, you know the other. GIMP doesn't work that way, in fact I've yet to make sense of the channels.
Also, typically one would expect filters to only be applied to a selected layer and even to a selection within that layer. Some GIMP filters apply to the whole image, flattening my layers, and creating new ones. Fortunately, these are made in a new document, so you don't lose anything, but the filter cannot be applied to a partial image, you'd need to pull the result back into your original image and mask out the part you wanted. Very strange.
I could go on about how selecting works and doesn't work, but I won't.
No, Adobe has not "lost millions" due to GIMP, they haven't lost a cent. People who use GIMP were either never going to pay Adobe a cent, or already have and are using GIMP now, for similar reasons to my own. Virtually no one uses GIMP professionally at any volume of interest to Adobe.
It's a good and useful tool, but it's severely lacking compared to Photoshop.
Affinity is free now, it's pretty good. I don't know how long that will last though.
Affinity is hard to use coming from PS because I'm not used to it yet. I should take a course online.
I find Affinity pretty easy coming from Adobe, with some caveats like RGB channels and some masking stuff
Really? It's almost the same for me. I wonder if it's because I quit Adobe a long time ago.
It's almost the identical interface...
I'm a novice user and I find it confusing with the vector and pixel. Also the masking confuses me. Transforming layers is also different.
If pirating Photoshop counts as a lost sale then so does downloading GIMP.
If so, this man is one of the greatest software pirates ever.
Adobe pretty much encouraged piracy up until about a decade ago, that way they got schools to train (for free) potential future customers in their way to use design software.
TBH I don't understand why they have gone with the subs model they currently have, its kind of cutting the blood line from their future customers.
Competition is always a good thing, FOSS competition is the best thing in my opinion.
This guy is a hero, but not because he is trying to fuck Adobe but rather he is helping free design software from (massive) cost which most people cannot afford.
More designers, better art to my mind.
The subs model ensures regular and predicable quarterly revenue, which means easier forecasting of growth, which means happier shareholders.
I think JetBrains's approach is nice. You can subscribe monthly but anything you e subscribed to for 12 months you get a perpetual fall back license for. Unless I'm missing something specific it's a win for everyone.
There are student subs, which are super cheap. Wouldn’t be surprised if schools/universities would get free licenses. After all, this is how they can attract new paying customers, as you correctly stated
I’d suspect it was much the same reason as why Apple decided to kill FCP and rebrand iMovie instead. Professional users are inordinately more expensive in tech support costs
But FCP X is amazing. It's the one thing I really miss having a Mac for and it's so disappointing that nobody else has even attempted to replicate it. It's leaps and bounds ahead of everybody else. Calling it a "rebranded iMovie" shows either a complete lack of awareness of literally anything about it, or an incredible intellectual dishonesty that doesn't even seen to serve a practical purpose.
It's also…not subscription based. Or wasn't in 2018 when I last had a Mac.
They announced a subscription plan today, funnily enough.
But no, FCPX was a huge fuck you to the professional market. And yes, FCPX is built on the iMovie codebase rather than FCP7.
On release:
And the worst part of all this was Apple abruptly withdrew FCP7 on launch day. So if you were a post house working on a big job and needed a few extra licences, fuck you. If you needed any of the lost features, fuck you. We’re talking companies that plan upgrades a year or so in advance to minimise disruption, and they suddenly faced having to make do with no more licences, or to suddenly switch to Avid with all the pain that causes.
FCPX was suitable for prosumers, who would ingest, edit, mix and grade in the one package. It was not compatible with the way the industry works, and by removing FCP7, Apple signalled that they were no longer interested in the pro market.
Yeah nope, if the same product is available for free then the only way to prove a "stolen sale" is if someone had previously paid for the subscription and then cancelled to use the free version of the same product.
Anything else is just the hand of the free market doing it's thing. If Adobe executives are malding because someone made a cheaper (or free) alternative then they have two honourable routes available:
Add more value to their products to convince people their price tag is worth it.
Reduce the price they charge.
But they'll literally do anything else but those two, including astroturfing messages like "open source software is piracy", so stop spewing corpo bullshit!
Holy shit… did Adobe actually say FOSS is piracy?!? I couldn’t find anything, got a source?
Or 3, the common alternative for monopolists, Buy the competing startup, cannibalize a few of it's best features and end of life it.
I guarantee that Adobe definitely sees every download of GIMP as a lost sale. That's corporate mentality.
I worked for many years in the music business, starting back in the days of the "Home Taping is killing music" campaign. I know for a fact that music executives saw the sale of every blank tape, and later, every download, as a lost sale. You could explain that it wasn't really a lost sale, because that consumer probably wouldn't have bought it anyway, but they didn't like hearing that. If someone was listening to it, even if it was just curiosity, that was a lost sale.
They didn't feel that way about radio stations or libraries, two places where people could get music for free, but somehow, borrowing a friend's album, and taping it so you could listen to it a few times and decide if you wanted to buy a clean copy, infuriated them.
I knew the people at the top who were going after the downloaders. They were mean, nasty, greedy people, who were stealing way more from their own artists than consumers were ever stealing from them, so I never had a single concern about downloading whatever I want.
These days, artists hardly make any money from recordings. Unless you are buying the music direct from the artist at their shows, then you are just feeding an evil record company. Pirate the records, pay for the shows and merch, and if you want to own a physical copy, buy your music direct from the artist.
Do that long enough, and record companies will die.
And for a while, people using tapes to make field recordings were supposed to pay more for the blanks to offset the supposed lost sales of the unrelated music industry.
The record industry wanted a special tax on blank cassettes, to offset the costs of home recording, which they would distribute as they saw fit, but they never got it.
If there had been a tax, it would have gone straight into the exec's pockets, and no artist would have ever seen a dime.
They did not "lose" any money; they never had it
What they lost is potential customers
The "losing money" argument is the same they use against media piracy.
Oil piracy though, no biggie so long as it's a big government doing it.
Right?
If I had no intention on buying your product, you didn't lose money.
If I pirate your product, you still didn't lose any money as I still had no intention on buying your product.
There are probably some people who decided to use GIMP instead of Photoshop, some people who simply pirated Photoshop, and some people who bought Photoshop anyway.
It's difficult to quantify the degree to which the existence of GIMP caused lost sales for Adobe. I started using GIMP instead of a high-seas Photoshop version, so I still haven't spent a dime!
I should mail this guy $5. Or, like, an edited image of a $5 bill with his face on it.
Why not both?
I followed your advice and got Jehan Page's face tattooed on my face. My wife left with the kids because of it and man, does this rule. Thanks for the sage words dude.
All within a span of two hours? Damn.
My entire family is dead now and I have Jehan Page's name in LOTR Elven script tattoed around my butthole.
Ah, the ring of power
All within a span of three minutes? Sheet son, you get things done.
What many people don't think about is that open source / free software is anti-billionaire software.
Since all software is bits, and it's free and easy to copy bits, to make money from software, a company needs to build a "moat". A moat is something that protects your company from people choosing alternatives. Open source software is built without a moat, so that anybody and everybody can access it. And, if you build with the GPL anybody who builds something based on your software is forbidden from building a moat of their own.
This means that it's really hard to get rich building free / open source software. But, it also means that in any area where there is free / open source software it's much harder for fully commercial, closed source, for profit companies to make big profits. Enshittify too much and people will just switch to the alternative, even if the alternative is significantly less stable, not as easy to use, is lacking features, etc. Piss people off too much and they might actually invest engineering money on improving the open source alternative.
Adobe is a big company with their fingers in many different pies. Photoshop is only one of their products. Gimp alone can't do much to hold Adobe back, but it does limit what they can do with Photoshop and still expect to make money from it.
Software licensing will eventually be relegated to the “dustbin of history”, hopefully it won’t be after humanity emerges from a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
Yeah. Software licensing is artificial scarcity, trying to make the new world of bits seem like the old world of objects so that people who knew how to make money with objects can still make money with bits.
I agree that it's artificial scarcity, but I don't think the conversation is going to fully be able to move to removing that scarcity until we find a way to handle the people who rearrange the bits actually living in a world of objects and totally authentic scarcity.
It's the same dilemma we have with authors and musicians. Even if it can be infinitely copied the people who make it still need to eat, and not just be able to find a way to eat, but to reliably and predictably eat which makes donations and crowd funding iffy at best.
As a user and contributer to open source, I'm loath to put up any defense of something that irritates me more often than not. As a person who makes a living working on the closed side I can honestly say I would probably not be in the field if there wasn't as much ability to make a living in it.
Software patents can fuck off though.
It will probably take something like universal basic income. Also, before copyright etc. a lot of art was created when a patron paid the artist for their work. In modern times, a single individual patron has been replaced by a bunch of them using Patreon. In addition, some people (not enough) are employed to work on open source software. It's similar to a patron kind of arrangement because someone is paying for the "artist" to work, even though the thing the artist produces can't be owned by the employer.
I think if you combine all those various things the need for "intellectual property" goes away. But, the people who currently make money from IP are going to fight tooth and nail to keep it.
Are not the copyleft licenses the opposite of artificial scarcity, not just affirming that opposite, but also affirming to not impose that artificial scarcity later on, as a condition?
Even permissive licenses start from an absence of artificial scarcity. Even if though later on, forks can add their artificial scarcity.
Yes, that's the distinguishing feature of the GPL. The ironic thing is that the only thing that gives the GPL its power is the thing it's trying to fight. If IP laws didn't exist, the GPL would be unenforceable, but it would also be unnecessary.
Which is, sadly, where we are right now
Heading there but plenty of room to get worse
No. There are other ways.
I've paid more for Free Software licensed software voluntarily than I ever did for proprietary software with its moats. Largely because they have no moat.
And has that made the people selling that software rich? No.
My point is that to get rich making software you need a moat. You can still make a bit of money without it, but it will be a fraction of what you can make if you can use intellectual property laws to make sure you don't have to worry about competitors.
suse, canonical, mozilla, redhat, the linux foundation, all seem rich to me.
Ok, but you're wrong.
If only I was free enough to code the end of software companies.
Red Hat, Canonical and others disagree.
Meta is probably the biggest example of profiting from open source
Oh i wasn't even going into the "rip-off open source without giving anything back" territory, quite a lot of tech companies are guilty of that.
Red Hat doesn't even exist anymore. They're nothing more than an IBM subsidiary. Canonical is hardly rich. It may be influential in the free software world, but in terms of market cap, they're half the size of "A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp". Have you ever heard of A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp? I hadn't until I started looking for software companies comparable to Canonical.
Switched to GIMP from Photoshop probably 15 years ago. Adobe didn't lose any money, however, I've always pirated from those greedy fucks.
Annnd well they should lose millions!
NGL, I paid out the ass for PSCS3 waay back in 2007 - Universal binary.. PPC AND Intel installer - and FWIW, I'm still using it. In point of fact it's why all my Macs are dual boot with Mojave (32-bit support) so I can continue to install and use it. Homegirl is no how, no way gonna rent what I should be able to own.
(As Adobe no longer has the CS3 activation servers online, if you've still got an installed, activated, instance of the PSCS3 kicking around somewhere, copy the actual application itself out to a backup location.. so when you use the installer in a system capable of running it, you can swap the newly installed, inactivated copy out for the activated one you have in backup. Just do NOT try and launch the program before you do the swap.. This works for PC copies of CS3 as well as Mac..)
Personally, I can recommend a VM for that reason. Activate it once and then just copy the VM over to a new PC, Backup location, etc. Turn on internet access for it when activating, turn it off and leave it disabled for the rest of your life. Worked like a charm for me.
If you're going to run windows in a VM, then what's the point? Why not just run one OS?
Not for one application, while all other programmes run on GNU/Linux.
I'm still using cs3 as well. For what it's worth, I just checked and it's still out there to be had. I have the master suite, which I could not find, but pscs3 itself is still alive out there.
Which is good!
Years back, I tried the trial version of CS6 and just about lost my mind when it came to finding where tools had been hidden in the submenus.. but the biggest "oh hell no.." was whatever they had done to the print profiles. No matter what setting or profile I used, the images were oversaturated. Even tried importing from CS3 - nope. I gave it up pretty quickly at that point.
Yep, same here. Mojave on an old MacBook with a complete CS5 suite lets me continue to use what I paid for.
I didn't have a still-running copy like you did, so instead I disabled all network access and used my existing install media/licensing to activate offline, then before restoring network I went through and blocked every single executable at the firewall, esp anything having to do with updates or the licensing module. Now it doesn't matter whether there is internet access or not, everything is stable and it doesn't phone home.
The blocking was a pain in the ass, no lie, but I can restore the firewall settings from time machine if ever needed, and meanwhile I have a working, unshittified CS5 that is not constantly trying to move my data up to the cloud or give itself legal rights to my IP. It's lacking some newer features probably, but it does what I need.
I'm going to pass your instructions along to a friend still using CS5 on the same Mac he installed it on, though. It's a great strategy.
IIRC, I discovered it when I retired my Mirror Door Drive G4 and bought a MacPro. At the time I wasn't online and couldn't get the fresh install to activate and on a lark, because it WAS a universal binary, I just copied over the application from the G4.
It worked, but was a bit janky, so once the internet got sorted, I did a clean reinstall of CS3 and activated it as normal.. I still have the G4 with the CS3 on it, and also copies of the install I did on the MacPro.
Also, with the CS3 and the OSes later than El Capitan, you need to get the JavaForOSX.dmg from Apple. It won't launch otherwise.
The great thing about CS3 is that even if I try to have it update, it doesn't. I used to run it with all the Adobe "phone home" addresses blocked in my system's hosts file. Now I no longer have to even do that. Nothing's there online. It will launch Bridge but when it gets to the Adobe Stock Photos and accepts the certificate, it connects to their servers and promptly quits.
LOL! Too funny!
Adobe has moved on and it's pure bliss for me.
A few of the replies here, those making those replies, could do with having someone introduce them to the concept of "put up or hack up", and getting into a Free Software philosophy mindset, and out of a consumer mindset.
GIMP's free software. Free to use, study, share and change... You the user are empowered. Even if you yourself lack aptitude (beyond just having never tried), you can still seek the services of others, be it those you pay to implement what you want, or, form a community of like minded individuals with similar needs to be met, and from there, start to make it as you want. These days, even LLMs can help curate the software into forms more suited to your needs. ... That is, where that's not already happened, or where there are reconfigurations you were simply not aware of, because it had not occurred to you to search for such, having been conditioned to stay in the box by the consumer mindset the corporation curated in your mind. It's refreshing to get out of having your mind curated by the corporation, and into using your mind to curate your software.
Either the user controls the software, or the user is controlled by the software and those who control the software.
It's a different philosophy. Not just a different platform for you as a "consumer". You're not a cash-cow for the corporation, with Free Software. You can contribute. Scratch those itches yourself. You may find others share the same itch. Giving back, is a much more rewarding experience than just hoping daddy corporation will give you what you want while you continue to atrophy your abilities.
Put up or hack up. ;)
And giving back comes in all forms. Writing docs, answering questions, helping out new users, fixing bugs, or just spreading the gospel of said FOSS software.
.... Y'all should check out Krita.
MyPaint too.
And others.
Imagemagick's not to be scoffed at either.
The ffmpeg of imaging.
I like to point out to folks that pre-google Youtube was built on ffmpeg. You can set up streaming servers on it and all kinds of stuff. So who is stealing from whom... the pattern is theft from open source, not the other way around.
some open source projects have very unpleasant communities around them, GIMP is not one of them. very easy to get into and everyone is extremely helpful and friendly.
The GIMP user would never have paid Adobe for Photoshop anyway.
If anything, it actually helped people get into photo editing and ended up using Photoshop at their work.
Before I retired last year, I was web developer for a community college. We had a graphic artist, but frequently I needed to just do a quick resize or change format for a web image. GIMP got the job done without the resource gluttony of PS.
Ive used gimp since 2010. Its so good. I used to be a lot better at it back in university than I am now. But it still use it all the time.
I know quite a few professionals that use GIMP and Inkscape just so they arent locked into the adobe ecosystem and monthly/yearly fees.
Such a horrible product name.
Yeah, Adobe is just mud
But can he make a circle?
With that kind of attitude, I hope your name is Rick Brewster. Does your million+ user image editing software make circles?
Yeah, it's complicated to make a circle in gimp, but it is very doable.
You can constrain the shape tool to make circles, or you can use a 100% strong brush to make a circle as large as you want at the spot you want it, and then use the select tool to shrink that circle and then erase the infill.
Jfc. Who is this program for?
It's for people that don't want to give Adobe money.
It's for people who want to image bash without paying $20 a month for the privilege.
It's for people who don't mind putting up with quirks in order to support free software and the free expression of creativity.
It's for people like you and people like me and anyone else who feels like using it.
But there are dozens of other free and open source alternatives that are so much more powerful and easier to use. Krita, Affinity, Photopea.... I could go on and on.... Like why does Gimp exist any more? Who is it for?
Lets make it billions!
Jehan Pages, you have bestowed my life with an abundance of badly edited memes and given me a trade that can I be proud of (making badly edited memes in Gimp), thank you.
Legend.
There's also Krita if you're more of an artist
Maybe you mean a more "brush and canvas" interface without complexity and distraction. I'm an artist that uses gimp. They are both great, Krita is just made with ease of use and emulation of irl tools in mind. GIMP can do emulation stuff too, but it can also do tons of other things, even video fx and animation.
Sounds like feature creep to me tbh.
These features come from maintained modules or scripts that can be added if desired. There is a tiny bit of animation support in plain GIMP, mostly for working with animated gifs.
What are some other good open alternatives to GIMP?
Having been in the design trade for 20 years, I’ve mastered countless design applications, but GIMP’s UI is something I have always struggled with.
My goto these days has been photopea when I need something fast and free… but it’s not open and it’s ad supported.
Here, you can filter by OS and license.
https://alternativeto.net/software/gimp/
Honestly the GIMP interface is way better than it used to be (5-10 years ago?). The old multi-window design always frustrated me but with the single-window tab view it feels much more normal.
This. I assume the people complaining about the UI fall into two categories: people who haven't opened GIMP in years and people who want it to be a photoshop clone.
Clearly that's their problem not GIMP's
Try Krita, it doesn't do everything GIMP does but depending on your workflow it might do the trick for you.
Thanks. I’ll check it out.
I've heard PhotoGimp
mentioned as a more familiar UI, for those moving over from locked-in software.
Actual website --> https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP
Spam site
https://phtogip.com/Idk it its new but the photgimp dot com link is rouge and directs you to spam. I believe this is the real one https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP
Thanks for heads up about the spam.
I've changed the link.
Isn’t JavaScript technically open source? Does photopea use WASM? Maybe there’s a way to self host and remove ads?
The ads are shit, but I’m inclined to let the ads run because the entire app is built by one Ukrainian dude who basically cloned the creative suite himself.
I'm so thankful to people like Pages who work hard on free alternatives.
photogimp allowed me to abandon photoshop entirely, I vastly prefer my new adobe free workflow
What a bastard. Consider the plight of the multinational corporation. They are ashen faced in the C-suite mumbling lamentations, 'number go down' and 'shareholder value'.
This is a cool fun fact, but it's not really an interesting picture. Should've been posted in Today I Learned or something instead of Pics.
Millions of dollars? That's not much.
Exactly.
Lost what money? People choosing not to buy your stuff isn't "lost income". Tell C-Suite to stop projecting everyone and their dog using their shit and take care of the users that they have.
the entire anti-piracy premise is they do. The music industry insisted it lost $140Bazillion because people didn't buy their product.
Nah, I'm fine with them squeezing as much money as possible out of there customers. That only creates pressure to look for alternatives. Just like all the AI nonsense added to windows nobody wants making people look for alternatives.
I have no sympathies for the suckers giving money to adobe.
Gimp, and millions of dollars are entirely immaterial to Adobe.
The truth hurts on this one sadly.
The weirdest part is the name. Is there any way I can use the software without typing that BDSM term?
Click on the icon? No typing required.
For what it's worth, I've been at enterprise sized places that had GIMP on their standard software catalogue, no one cares about the name.
I mean renaming the program from the files
GIMP is open source, so you probably can. The GIMP repo has info on setting up a dev environment.
I'd think you'd need at least some technical skill. There was a fork called Glimpse purely for the name change, but I can't find any trace of it now.
You could try typing the term used to refer (usually derogatorily) to a person with an injury or deformity in their lower extremities, or the term used as a synonym for hobble.
What?
Gimp. A word used to refer to someone with a lower extremity injury or deformity, or a synonym for the word "hobble"
I prefer it if the software is called like "GNULook"
Yeah, it makes it sound silly and non-serious to people I've introduced it to who know nothing about open source and Linux etc
What a weird thing to worry about in a world where some of the most recognizable products have silly, unserious names like Google and Twitter, and where the slogan for one of the most popular media players of all time is "it really whips the llama's ass"
Google and Twitter are not on par with "gimp". I also didn't say I was worried. I just noted that it makes people take the software less seriously when I advocate it as a free, open source replacement for Photoshop, which has a very respectable reputation and a business-like name. Being called "gimp" makes people doubt that it's a professional quality product.
In Mint right now if I hit the menu and type "photo" I get five options and GIMP is one of them. But it doesn't say GIMP on my screen, it says "GNU Image ..." next to the icon.
If I type "image" then GIMP is second in the list after photo viewer.
Normally though I just hit super - g - i - m - p - ENTER. Because I wanna run GIMP damn it!
I doubt Adobe execs know who he is, and if they did they wouldn't care. They don't talk in "millions" lol
Here’s to another million 🥂
Just wait till you hear about QGIS
Really cool.
I mean I can't say it has had an impact on ESRI, but I for one have been boycotting ESRI and their products for over 10 years. I've moved entire teams and departments away, and was only able to do so through a combination of QGIS/ R/ Python. There are still some gaps to fill, but because geospatial is such a smaller world to begin with (than photoshop), I feel like QGIS maybe has had more of a "percentage" impact at breaking through on ESRI than GIMP has to photoshop.
My first job out of high school was doing GIS mapping for the National Wetlands Survey with a stereo scope, high altitude infrared, and topo overlays. I was comparing old data to new observations and manually drawing the identified bodies of water onto mylar over the topo. After that, I'd write the labels and lines on a second mylar overlay.
All of this was then given to a digital mapping team that plotted everything a using specialized mouse. That was 25 years ago, give or take.
The GIS software was so insanely expensive back then. To see something of this caliber for free is impressive.
Was it MapInfo?
I cannot recall. Sorry.
I love QGIS so much. I use it professionally every day. The city I've worked for has used it for years.
We are about to bit the bullet on a few ESRI seats mostly for interoperability with some of our consultants and easier use of REST servers and stuff, but we're getting the absolute cheapest licenses because all the spatial analysis tools thay cost thousands extra per license are free in QGIS, and I can still use it.
all adobe needed to do was make one time purchase software and not subscription. The CC model is insane
I’m still rolling with the universal binary copy of PSCS3 that I bought in 2007 to use on my PPC G4 mac tower. Dual boot to macOS Mojave 10.14.6 for that sweet 32–bit support. Adobe went to the rental model because of isers such as myself. Old tools that work and do what I need have no reason to be replaced.
Someone asked me yesterday what products besides Adobe's there were for his elderly cousin to merge PDFs, or extract pages. I proposed a few options, so I'm technically helping to lose money for Adobe. I'm doing my part 😁
Linux comes (at least on Mint and Ubuntu) with the
poppler-utilssuite of tools. you can merge, extract pages, even rip all the images out of a pdf in source quality. very useful.Yeah you get a lot of options on Linux. I used
pdftklast time.Unfortunately the parameters here were, "elderly dude" "needs GUI" and "on Windows" :-(
yes, I hear you. I have dreams of a publicly funded linux distro with accessibility and security (for elderly dudes and the like) the main design focus. My rebuilt federal government would develop this.
Gimp was nice but the color balance always made images look dirty.
Are you sure you're using gimp and not a VCR?
Omg Just shot milk out my nose.
I like it, we need more posts like this. Thank you :)
This troll again?
based
Good lad.
Isn't this called, "competition"?
I wish this were all true. I love having GIMP, and Sumatra for that matter, but let’s not pretend that Adobe product doesn’t have greater advantages.
Keep up the good work surrounding free and open source, but let’s remain real about it.
Big Ups JEHAN PAGES!
also big ups RawTherapee FOSS for RAW image edits.
Saved me cheddar
I'll be honest I've tried gimp and found that I'm terrible and not interested in making or editing any form of digital media. I've also tried Photoshop. Paint is more my speed fast and ugly.
How about MyPaint? :)
Or Pinta?
Or you just prefer something simple like like mtpaint?
Mspaint I make some really bad mockups with it works great.
Yeah, so, something like mtpaint...?
I hear microsoft are putting AI slop in mspaint.
Good time to move to free software without abusive spyware bloat clutter interfering?
Work computer I can't install shit on
you could try booting a live linux usb/dvd. ;D
Connecting a USB drive to my computer would be a very quick way to get fired.
Gimp, Paint.Net, VLC...
A little bit of hope for a future more like Star Trek and less like Wall-E.
I think it's because I suck at Photoshop to begin with and using both tools incorrectly.
But thwy arent gwtting more money feom you and losing future sales feom new versions. Fuck subs.
I think I'm in love.
the only thing gimp in my life is my leg.
They did not lost anything. Stop using this fucking misleading shittalk.
GIMP is unusable for me, is just very intuitive[edit: unintuitive of course]. I prefer photopea.
Unintuitive?
Yes 😂 I blame the phone...
Gimp is not that good compared to photoshop. If you want to use for commercial and business purposes better to pay and use photoshop.
Nah man, Photopea if you really want that.
Damn that's a dry delivery for Lemmy
What a lame post.
Yes you are
from your comment history:
You should listen to yourself more often.
What a lame comment.