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Comment by insulanian | Hacker News Reader

I'm using Paint.NET on Windows and I really like it - It satisfies all my needs.

When I switched to Mac, I was searching for something similar, but in the end decided to use Gimp. However, the thing is just incredibly slow. I have MBP 13 Retina and it takes 6 seconds to apply simple "bucket fill" on an image 3000x4500. Is this normal?

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Gimp does seem to slow down a lot if an operation would affect a lot of pixels. That's a 13.5 megapixel image, if you're editing a 5MP image, full-canvas operations are much faster. But also, try zooming in on your new 13.5MP image and using a reasonably sized brush, say 20.0 (px?) to paint on it - it's pretty responsive. But if you switch to a gigantic, 200 (px?) brush, it gets a bit laggy (but still fraction-of-second laggy, not multi-second laggy, at that scale).

I haven't used any of these heavily, but they come up often. Over the past few years I've heard a lot of good things about Krita[1] as an alternative to Gimp. I've found both Pixelmator[2] and Acorn[3] to have enough of the features to replace Photoshop for basic needs.

[1] https://krita.org/en/download/krita-desktop/ [2] http://www.pixelmator.com/mac/ [3] http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

Add Affinity Photo to that mix too. It won Apple's Best App Of 2015 award, and is made by Serif (who have a long history of developing photo software, especially on Windows). I have Photoshop CC too, but I use Affinity Photo more often now due to its speed. And as a Photoshop plugin developer, I'm really happy with its strong support for Photoshop plugins - it actually seems more compatible than some versions of Adobe Photoshop Elements.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/

Krita is a great program, but it's designed for digital painting rather than image manipulation.

I also have 13" rMBP. With Pixelmator app filling a 3000x4500 with a solid color, or even a gradient, is nearly instant.

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