Now might be a good time to start getting familiar with Krita and/or GIMP. They will have different workflows and might not fit well in every situation, but reducing reliance on user-hostile corporate terms and closed, poorly-defined file formats is likely to be worthwhile in the long run.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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I use Gimp for all my Cyanotype negative making in my photography hobby. It hasn't asked me even once to see if it likes what I'm doing. It just does the thing I want it to do and waits for more.
I use Photoshop 5.5. Most of the features added since then are useless to me.
Yeah, say that to professionals whose workflow rely on the thight integration and features of Adobe's software. I'm sure migration to a piece of crap software with a S&M name that can't even do CMYK will work great.
Affinity is a good alternative still, at least until Canvas implement the subscription model (which I still believe they will do).
It can do color separation. I do that for cyanotype and carbon negatives. It's a little round about that someone programmed for it. That's the benefit of opensource. If you know how, you can make it quak like a duck and look like a cow. If you want it to bark but don't know how, just search to see if someone has done it or if someone will help you do it.
As a side commentary, a friend of mine owns a Cessna and flies around it. He also flies around it. And he can fly the Cessna too. Anyway, if you ever took a look at the dashboard of a 737, it looks nothing like the Cessna. But both fly pretty good. So if you wanna fly all the time without the captain telling you what peanut to chew when, then get your little Gimp plane and fly. Otherwise, you wanna do the same as the rest of the sheeple, just find your seat and ask the attendant to do the art for you while you watch how its done out the side window. I'm sure you can get paid the big bucks for that. Being sarcastic ofcourse, plus how can you concentrate with the darn open hole where the safety door used to be.
the man is being downvoted but is right. at least suggest affinity or krita.
anyone who ever did image editing professionally knows how bad gimp's workflow is.
the man is being downvoted but is right.
No, they are being snidely combative, both in tone and by disingenuously suggesting that their cherry-picked class of users somehow invalidates the fact that these other tools work very well for many people.
That is not being right. That is being a self-absorbed jerk.
at least suggest affinity or krita.
I did.
Yes, I am being a jerk because GIMP gets routinely thrown around as a Photoshop alternative,which is not. You say I cherry picked a user base, but who are the people that actually pays to use Adobe Cloud? I assure you that they are mostly professionals, because the subscription is expensive.
Now, the "many people" don't need Photoshop. In fact, there's no reason they should even install it. But people say "Photoshop" and hear "GIMP" as alternative, and this should stop because the app is objectively bad. There's Krita, there's Photopea, there's Darkroom, there's myPaint, there's even Inkscape. Anything is light years ahead that thing, yet it's recommended again and again like a sad joke made to inflict pain on its users.
GIMP is not a good tool. Stop using, stop recommending it.
It all depends on what you use it for. There are many valid criticisms of GIMP but the name is such a silly one. It stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program.
If you're a professional, then you use Photoshop. But for the vast majority of people GIMP is perfectly adequate. I've done so much on there over the last 2 decades. I've done construction drawings, forged documents, removed people from pictures, used it to make it seem like pictures of receipts were scanned, etc
I repeat, "cloud" is just someone else's computer.
Louder for those in the back, please.
Officially they say it's to comply with law and that they're not using that data to train AI.
That kind of panic is bound to happen when people start wondering what cloud services can do with their stuff.
The answer is simple : in theory, everything. Abuse will happen. Say no to SaaS as much as you can.
Say no to SaaS as much as you can
I love GIMP and I will die on that hill (yes, fully aware of the things it lacks, thank you). But for those who use Adobe products, from what I can tell, the answer is that they have no choice in the matter. Adobe is just that ubiquitous in that industry that you either use it or you don't work in that profession.
With Adobe dipping into AI stuff, I have an underlying fear they're going to become as ubiquitous in that domain as well, that people trying to compete with them just won't be able to. And then we will have the same problem in AI with Adobe as we have with Digital Image Editors and Adobe.
I love GIMP and I will die on that hill
Thank you for saying that out loud. I always find the GIMP hate to be phenomenally ridiculous. I love GIMP too.
The biggest problem GIMP has is the name. We need activists to decry the name as ableist or something. I’m sure it was a hilarious joke at the time, but anyone who had seen Pulp Fiction has a pretty strong mental image when they hear the name. They ought to just drop the P and call it GIM. Then it can be a fun play off GIF. Is it pronounce Ghim or Jim?
The biggest issue with GIMP is its weird UX choices. They should just make it more like Adobe's UX. I know there's tools that bring it closer, but the fact still is that they do some really dumb shit when it comes to experience decisions. Like if I want to change the font of what I'm typing, it works like this...
I have to TYPE in the font I want, no dropdown, and the font selection toolbar off to the side just straight up doesn't apply to what I've typed or selected... and this is AFTER I ran one of those GIMP retrofit tools that tries to make it more in line with Photoshop.
Seriously, I've used Photoshop since 5.5 (not CS 5.5... FIVE POINT FIVE in 1999), and I STILL have to watch a tutorial for almost every single action I could intuit in 5 seconds from Adobe's garbage malware tool.
That being said... the one important thing that GIMP is not... is Adobe garbage malware... GIMP just has a janky UX that no one's going to bother fixing b/c the tool is free so no complaining!
And in any case, just like with Blender coming on to the scene in earnest like a decade ago to end Autodesk's defacto monopoly with its $$$$ per year licensing scheme for proprietary 3D modelling tools... with Adobe rapidly getting worse, and just like with Unity's "pay us per install" debacle made people jump ship to Godot - never to look back... I'd bet that GIMP is going to begin accelerating its improvement... or that Krita will do the same and overtake it in popularity.
...And once that happens, Adobe is cooked. And it can't happen soon enough.
I think Blender, and to a lesser extent Godot, were able to start making leaps and bounds like that due to funding as well. My memory is hazy on it but I recall probably 5-ish years ago the Blender foundation got a massive capital boost, and Godot has seen a lot of big name donors recently due to the Unity debacle. As far as I know, that hasn’t really happened for GIMP yet. I used early builds of both Blender and Godot, and the difference is night and day with how much they’ve managed to mature. GIMP on the other hand looks and feels largely like it did in 2010 IMO.
I have you beat then! My first experience with Photoshop was either 2 or 2.5 on my Mac IIci in 1992-93. All that means is that I’m likely older than you. We bought the Mac to run pagemaker after a failed attempt to use it on Windows 3. I started using Illustrator around the same time. I still use it, but mostly I’m throwing my money away on CC because I don’t have the skill necessary to care about AI stealing my work.
I agree with you about the terrible name. It also doesn’t betray its purpose. Photoshop… hmm something to do with photos? Ok. It makes sense. GIMP? It’s… what, now?
But I disagree that making everyone wonder how to pronounce GIM is the solution 😆
When folks talk bad about GIMP.
It‘s also interesting how a lot of stuff in their terms of use that people complain about has already been in it for a while. The AI stuff really just put much needed attention to how awful Adobe has been for a long time.
Affinity V2 is 50% off right now (75% if you upgrade from V1). You pay once and keep that version indefinitely. And yeah yeah I know Lemmy users will complain it‘s not open source but it‘s definitely the closest you can have to Adobe‘s core suite.
Too bad they've been recently acquired by Canva :(
They said they will not change the business model. Can we trust them ?
If I had a nickel for every time a company kept that promise, I'd owe money
I'm hoping. I've been a Serif customer since the 00's. Not much we can do except be very vocal, and remind Serif and Canva that if they go the Adobe route, they'll risk becoming irrelevant. Difference is their power.
Is canva very enshittified?
Thank you for the info! Otherwise I would have missed the deal. The affinity suite is the best thing since Photoshop 5.0
Thanks for the heads up. I rarely have a need for photoshop these days, but I grabbed the iPad only version of Affinity Photo just in case as it was so cheap in my region.
I’m sure it’ll get some use. Once or twice a year I try using a combination of smartphone apps to do some editing as I can’t be bothered dusting off my old slow laptop. So this will be cool. And it still runs on older hardware. iOS 15 is still supported!
I see at leat one limitation, Adobe action scripts are not supported.
Oh there are even more limitations, especially when it comes to their Photoshop counterpart Affinity Photo. There is nothing on the market that does the work as well as Photshop, but Affinity comes the closest by a long shot.
Affinity Photo is also superior to Photoshop in many ways. Depends on what industry you're in.
Fuck Adobe. I have never and will never give them a cent. And I truly hope “piracy is theft” is for real, so I can take my beloved PS and Illustrator out of their grubby little hands.
I'm still running Photoshop CS 4 and don't have any issues.
Who remembers Macromedia Fireworks?
The entire macromedia suite was so good. I had so much fun and learned so much as a teen.
I used Director.
Welp I'll just have to Gimp along then.
What's stopping you from using a copy of Photoshop you found on the high seas which doesn't have all this weird stuff? Ideally use libre software but if need be, you could use high seas Photoshop too right?
If you're using pirated software for business, your business will get fucked real hard real fast.
Heavily depends on what you do and how big you are
Good luck!
When it's for work, no, don't do this. https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/forever-21-gets-caught-pirating-photoshop-adobe-sues.208453/
When it's for personal and you don't agree with the pricing or whatever... Just use something else. There is plenty of choice out there.
True. I think someone said this too when I was talking about using mass activation script for windows
Is that why the company is gone now?
Adobe can only do this because it's anti-libre software, we don't control it. Next time, check the software doesn't fail to come with a libre software license text file, like AGPL.