This is pretty amazing, so glad you posted it. It has layer blending options and shadow/highlights, two feature I can't live without and are often missing in free editors. The menus are exactly like photoshop. And finally an API that lets you save/load PSD/images to and from cloud storage.
Really? To give just one example, if I press cmd-T in PS, I go into an editing mode where I can translate, rotate, and scale a layer with intuitive, contextual mouse controls for each. With GIMP it's broken up into separate commands. I didn't spend so much time with it, but with PS things got guessable very quickly, where with GIMP it felt like the features are just stuffed in there wherever they can fit.
That proves the point, you simply don't know how to use Gimp yet. It is called "Unified Transform", available on the default toolbar or by pressing "shift-t". So the difference is literally pressing shift instead of control, a trivial difference by any standard, and reconfigurable as well.
Yes it does prove the point. So if I look at these docs[0], this tool, not only does it do translate/rotate/scale, which are the most fundamental image transformations in 2D editing, but it also does shearing and perspective transformations which are rarely used by comparison. This tool was clearly designed from an implementation-driven perspective (just put all the affine transformations in one place) rather than a UX driven perspective (no designer places these tools together conceptually).
On top of that, this tool still sits along side other single purpose tools for scaling and rotating, which are the first results if you search "how to rotate in GIMP", so why should I even expect this tool to exist?
This is not intuitive UX which is "trivially different" to PS, this is a mess which can only be learned through laborious trial and error, or reading the documentation like a book.
Many open source projects such as Gimp have a serious UX problem. Software engineers are great at delivering efficient systems. In terms of usability they’re arrogant and inflexible. They’re two different skills and I wish project maintainers understood that.
I want to like it, but GIMP is almost unusable for me. Really hard to do even basics, and have to spend a lot of time googling how to do what I want to do.
You wouldn't expect Photoshop to be immediately usable for a newbie either. I've always been completely stumped by Photoshop, but I haven't spent enough time in it to expect otherwise.
True, but I've been using GIMP a long time - more than a decade. Used it for years longer and years before I used Adobe CS. Taken a number of tutorials on it. Will always be super clunky.
I'm a huge fan of FOSS, but open source products also have to stand on their own merits. The best way for FOSS to succeed is for FOSS products to be as good or better than closed alternatives. Otherwise they will always be relegated to a small audience of a few die-hards.
Significant portion of what kind of users exactly? Professionals upgrade their software and I could bet that 13 years old software is nowhere near of being significant. It’s the same kind of stupidity like shouting that Microsoft EOLed XP. ;-)
I’m no designer, but my previous workflows relied quite a bit on core functionality found in versions of CS going back to at least CS3. I’ve used CS3, CS4, CS6, and more recently CC. I only used CC because CS6 no longer worked on macOS, and I only used CS6 because I couldn’t get a legit older version (also student discount).
I found it to be a treadmill - the prices went up until Adobe decided that you could no longer purchase anything outright and now had to rent it. Newer versions looked prettier, but the performance and stability dropped.
I’d reckon that the vast majority of people using CC would be happy with an older version and just as productive. CC6 and later are resource hogs that are constantly calling home. Today, I’d be hard pressed to choose CC over a pirated copy or other alternative, and I’ve known a few designers that stuck with cracked copies of CS.
And I’m using Adobe software from Photoshop 6, and upgraded with each new version to gain features and performance that wasn’t available with previous releases. I wasn’t happy with cloud option, but it’s still cheaper than buying boxed versions of Adobe soft. And no, not even one professional will use CS for anything other, than amusement on old hardware.
> Today, I’d be hard pressed to choose CC over a pirated copy or other alternative, and I’ve known a few designers that stuck with cracked copies of CS.
He’s not a designer, his a pirate. If you do a professional work, you pay for tools you use. Simple as that. If you want to say, that they are pricy then use some free alternative (they existed, and are great), or cheaper pro software like from Serif.
I would be willing to bet that less than 1% of adobe users were still using cs2 or 3. Anyone doing it for a living isn't going to blink at the subscription price (if they even had to pay for it personally).
