this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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So, real talk, be completely honest with me - how usable is GIMP these days? I’m not trying to pick a fight, I think it’s great that GIMP exists, but while I may not be a professional artist, I am a developer with an interest in graphical design and I would say that I am an advanced user of the Adobe Creative Suite tools - the main three that I use being Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
I would be willing to learn to use GIMP to replace Photoshop, and Inkscape to replace Illustrator, for example, but only if they’re actually good enough to put to real, productive use.
I need my tools to get out of the way and let me work. If it crashes and loses my work EVER, then it is completely beyond consideration for me. If it’s good enough for light users but not really ready for professional use, then I don’t think I can really consider switching.
I do not use any of the 3D or AI features of any of those tools, if that helps.
I would really appreciate your opinions and advice. Please don’t be optimistic - I know it’s hard sometimes to be critical about open source software because of our ideological beliefs, but please try your best to be realistic.
Oh, and if you’re going to just tell me to try it, please try to contain that impulse. It would be a huge undertaking for me to relearn basically everything about how I work with these tools, so if I went through all that just to find that I couldn’t actually make use of them because they’re not ready yet, it would be a huge waste of time and energy, both of which I have in quite short supply these days.
Thank you so much for your time :)
Inkscape: Completely capable. I know many people who have used it instead of illustrator professionally for years.
GIMP: Depends on you. As someone who learned GIMP long before ever learning Photoshop, I find Photoshop unintuitive and frankly stupid. So it's all about what you learned on. But GIMP relies on spending a few minutes setting it up for your own use case. Literally every window can be moved to anywhere. You can have whatever windows you want open all the time, or hidden behind right clicks, etc... Your tabs and tab groups are completely customizable to how you want to work. BUT the rub is that you have to be interested in doing that. GIMP is trashed for having a bad default UI because the expectation is that it doesn't have a default UI. My GIMP would look entirely different from someone elses because I use different tools that I want front and centre than someone else might. If you're not interested in that and just want something that you can learn a "default" setup and go with it (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that) than you're better off sticking with Photoshop.
As for Krita, whatever else people are telling you, Krita is NOT a replacement for GIMP if you're doing design work. What it brings to the table in terms of having built in Vector capabilities it negates by having a very limited and basic suite of selection tools. Something that would take you two seconds in PS or Gimp to band select, paint the foreground, feather the selection, shrink it, etc... takes five extra steps in Krita because Krita is a drawing program not a graphic design program; what few "advanced" selection tools they've introduced is tacked on and hidden between three or four extra steps because it just wasn't designed to have them at first and they were added later.
Just because it looks nicer out of the box than Gimp, doesn't make it better. I've tried replacing Gimp with Krita because i like the KDE suite of apps in general. But I was pulling my hair out trying to do even a basic composition using it's archaic selection tools.
Thanks for the really comprehensive reply. The feeling I’m kind of getting from these comments is that neither GIMP nor Krita is really capable of acting as a replacement for Photoshop yet. I know that GIMP is capable and fully featured, but when I last tired it, I could not bear how much it crashed or locked up, and like you implied, the default UI is absolutely fucking garbage. Being totally honest, I don’t think it’s defensible how bad it is - Photoshop lets you customise the UI way, way more than you probably think, it has easily half a dozen preset layouts for different tasks/workflows.
Krita looks quite nice, giving it a quick look, but like you said, it’s very obviously designed for painting and not design. Not all design can be done in vector format unfortunately!
Maybe I will get around to giving GIMP 3 a shot and trying to figure out how to use it. I want an open source replacement to the Adobe suite so, so badly. But I feel like I just can’t make the huge compromises required for that, yet.
I would agree with that. But in all of their defence I'd add that they're not trying to be. They are their own pieces of kit with their own roadmaps and goals.
The biggest frustration people from Photoshop have is that the expect Gimp or Krita to be a clone of Photoshop with feature to feature parity, and that's never been the goal of either program.
Photoshop has spent decades basically merging the features of most of their products, so that it's now basically a photo editor with features of Illustrator and a suite of advanced drawing tools. The only replacement for that would be a hypothetical program that combines Gimp, Krita & Inkscape. But that's never been the goal of any of those programs. They're separate kit and as far as I'm aware always will be.
I've used GIMP for decades and it's never crashed on me. Krita and Inkscape are also great imo. I've used photoshop. It's fine. I really think issues with the UI are mostly just an issue of what you're used to. I see exactly the same thing with people switching to Blender or Vi uses trying to use any otherr editor in the world
I actually really enjoy GIMP as an alternative to Photoshop. My biggest problem with it is that Photoshop keybinds are muscle memory, and for whatever reason GIMP has everything totally different so I almost always end up having to hunt down what I'm after.
I've heard there are ways to get it 1:1 but I've never been able to figure that out. Admittedly, I haven't looked too hard either.
Its very easy to use and my goto image editor, but I say that from a position of familiarity of having learned where everything is and what all the keybindings are over many years.
In contrast, Krita seems like a far better image editor, but because the interface is bewildering to me, I've shied away from it.
Regarding the interface: Krita is heavily designed to match artist workflow around the world. Here's the complexity:
Different region, ages, and level of professionality have entirely different of common/standard app.
A lot of comic artist or illustrator that delves in anime/manga/ACG style in Asia use Clip Studio Paint as their main software. People from Western gaming industry often used Photoshop or Procreate. Teenager in Asia often use ibisPaint. PaintToolSAI for lightweight and customizable interface. There's Rebelle for replicating traditional realistic painting.
Krita tried to cater to all of these people, not just "Photoshop users" that mostly just for image editing.
I'm surprised to hear GIMP crashed on you, I don't think I've ever had it crash on me.
To be fair, it was probably some hardware issue. I had endless problems with my old Nvidia GTX 580 which I would have been using at the time. And yeah, it was quite a while ago :P
In my experience, Inkscape can be used as a professional replacement for Illustrator. It has never crashed on me. There may be some limitations, but nothing super inconvenient or something there isn't a workaround for.
GIMP, on the other hand, is a mixed bag. I believe Krita is a much better candidate to be used professionally than GIMP. GIMP has an objectively bad UI, has weird quirks for very simple tasks, and is prone to crashes. I use GIMP for simple image editing and Krita for more complex projects. GIMP 3.0 is their best chance to fix their reputation and I'm hopeful it will deliver.
If you don't have time to try them yourself, follow creators who use them and check their workflow. I recommend Davies Media Design on YouTube for great videos on Inkscape especially.
Edit: No program is completely immune to crashes, it's good practice to routinely save projects no matter how stable or unstable the program is.
It is my understanding that Inkscape does not support the CMYK colorspace and is thus a non-starter for any work that involves printing.
That is true. IIRC, Krita is the only one of the 3 that has native CMYK support.
I've been using gimp's 3.x branch since 2016 or so (after getting a hidpi display) and gimp itself since the early 2000s, both for personal stuff and for work. I'm typically editing existing photos and images to clean them up, apply effects, make new clean images from pieces of existing ones, etc, and for my uses it's great. Also, having been using it for so long, I actually really prefer the ux to Photoshop (especially since they added an option to use it in single window mode).
I've seen videos showing some of the features it's missing for certain types of things though, and while there are hacky scripted ways to emulate them, you might find it lacking if you're expecting those particular features.
I'd recommend looking up tutorials on YouTube for things you frequently do and see how much work it is and what the final product looks like. You could up the playback speed to save time since you won't be following along with gimp yourself.
Honestly it's better but still a mess of design choices. For open source graphics editor check out Krita.