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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

My personal experience is that GIMP is not quite at feature parity with Photoshop 3 or 4. It's definitely nowhere near Photoshop 5, and there are some features and workflows I used in Photoshop 2.5 that are missing from GIMP--just not many. The UX of GIMP also continues to be a major problem. GIMP is just the most famous alternative to Photoshop, that doesn't mean that it's a good substitute for Photoshop for most Photoshop users.

I think people who consider GIMP a good substitute for Photoshop probably haven't ever used Photoshop seriously, or have photo editing needs that fall in a very narrow range.

Companies which don't want to pay for Creative Cloud can more easily pay for one of the various alternatives--the particular alternative that works for you will be different.

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If it were only that - there are features that will never be implemented if certain utterances by core devs are any indication.

I am more a PSP than a PS guy and I really tried to use GIMP for my image editing needs on kubuntu. I even ran a pinned patched version of it fixing the save/export "bug" (Another boneheaded ideological dev decision).

A few months back I wanted to add a few straight lines to an image. In PSP these would be vector object that can be adjusted in size, color and position. In GIMP not so much. It has only the pencil tool with an alt mode holding shift that does straight lines.

However I needed to adjust the lines distance from each other slightly - What followed was a lot of cursing and repeated attempts, switching to the path tool followed by discarding that idea and switching to making a layer per line. After finishing I deleted what I had done and did the same by starting PSP 9 in WINE in about 30 seconds.

I did some googling and found the reason why GIMP lacks any useable Vector functions is that vector functions belong in a Drawing program not a Manipulation program. And GIMP is the latter. This is a paraphrased from memory quote by a GIMP dev.

That probably means that not putting any vector function in (even though stuff like the Text function really benefits from vector layers) was a decision long ago that passed into ideological canon by now and is probably a huge task to implement.

So I am currently back to using a PSP version from 1998 for editing images on ubuntu. Even though its buggy as hell. Newer version after the Corel acquisition sadly come with a DRM service that balks at wine. I have licences for a few of those I would love to use.

Ye gods, where do I even begin with this...

Vector layers was a 2006 Google Summer of Code project. It was too ambitious, it wasn't completed, whatever good bits were done got merged years later so that the code wouldn't be lost completely, and there is still no user interface for any of that.

But the sole reason this project was assigned was because people behind GIMP were quite open to having better drawing tools in the program. They just lacked the time and the motivation to work on that.

When your program is primarily intended for image manipulation and you have a crapton of requests from users to add image manipulation tools, filters, and whatnot, how else do you prioritize your work? Especially when you program's architecture turns out to be inadequate for complex features and you have to rearchitect and repurpose 800K LOC, not to mention updating it for the next generation of the UI toolkit that is a moving target of its own?

For every user complaining about not having shape tools you'll get three complaining about the UI, another two or three complaining about not having non-destructive editing, another two demanding layer styles, then an assorted group of individuals wanting CMYK image mode, LAB image mode, more use of GPU, AI features, more filters, better HiDPI support, and the list goes on. All the while you have essentially one person doing 50% of all work and a small team of people all working on small items. All the while there are free/libre applications like Inkscape that have been providing better drawing tools for years.

So I'll ask again: given all that, how else do you prioritize your work?

Good to hear that its not pure hard-headedness that caused this.

Sure, but when I look at the development of image editing tools in the 90ies then vector shapes and layer pretty much was widespread by 1998. If I were to guess then the functionality just came with support for TT Fonts and became a standard feature for image manipulation applications.

Again I tried really hard to make GIMP work for me - I still found myself hunting for the right tool icon time and time again (I think something is fundamentally wrong there but I cannot with certainty say what) This might be where the UI criticism comes from. I bet you would learn the symbols in the end and . I still got so annoyed by the save function insisting to save as some weird format I didn't want to use that I had to patch that out. But then in the end what killed it for me was the vector lines thing.

This just backs up the point the great grand parent comment made: GIMP just barely has feature parity with Photoshop 3 and even then lacks features that were in PS3. As a project GIMP is impressive and the devs do good work. Unfortunately for many end users it's useless because it lacks particular features.

> This just backs up the point the great grand parent comment made: GIMP just barely has feature parity with Photoshop 3 and even then lacks features that were in PS3.

CMYK image mode being pretty much the only missing feature from Photoshop 3.0?

I think people tend to forget all the hoops they had to jump through years ago.

Do you remember how you couldn't edit text layers until version 4.0 or 5.0?

Or how most filters and some selection tools didn't work in 32-bit mode until fairly far in the CS release series?

I distinctly and fondly remember Photoshop 4 and 5 coming out and the features they added. I used Photoshop pretty heavily from 2.5 through 7. I still use my old-ass copy of 7 for Windows today because it's got features other editors lack and I am really familiar with the UI. I don't forget having to jump through hoops in Photoshop 3. But I had to jump through fewer in 4 and pretty much none in 5 and onwards.

So GIMP not having CMYK, or any color space support besides RGB, is actually sort of amusing. Just through version 7 Photoshop added vector shapes, history brush, adjustment layers, and a bunch of other stuff GIMP still lacks. It's an FOSS project so it's not like I'm saying the GIMP developers are bad, they clearly are quite talented.

What I'm saying is GIMP today is not as capable as Photoshop from 25 years ago. It's good enough for a lot of people but useless for others. I've been hearing your arguments about GIMP for as long as it has existed. It has a lot of capability and works for your use case so that must mean it just works for everyone. It's great that it works for some people. But you can't pretend Photoshop hasn't improved faster than GIMP. If you need anything beyond basic destructive editing GIMP is just not appropriate.

> It has a lot of capability and works for your use case so that must mean it just works for everyone.

Must it mean that? Really? I had no idea! :)

> But you can't pretend Photoshop hasn't improved faster than GIMP.

That's not what I'm doing here :)

Most of this is just down to GIMP being an almost entirely destructive editor, and destructive editing just never was any good at respecting the user's time and effort. The only reason to implement destructive editing in the past has been limited computer resources, not because it's actually a good paradigm in virtually any way.

I don't think it was due to limited resources.

GIMP development started in 1995. First version of Adobe Photoshop with adjustment layers was released a year later, in 1996. The notion just wasn't there.

And the notion remained absent for close to 20 years and counting, huh?

I'm not sure what you are implying or how we got from "why it was originally designed that way" to "still not available".

If you still want talking about notions and time, GEGL as the non-destructive backend for GIMP was started by Rhythm&Hues developers in early 2000.

We could have a long conversation about priorities and availability of developers and refactoring and all the reasons resulting in non-destructive editing not yet available, if you like.

> My personal experience is that GIMP is not quite at feature parity with Photoshop 3 or 4. It's definitely nowhere near Photoshop 5

Layer Effects are the only 5.0 feature from Photoshop that GIMP doesn't yet have.

There's also a million things GIMP does better or does at all compared to all the versions of Photoshop you mentioned. I can give you examples or you can spare me the time and just admit you've seen Photoshop 3/4/5 so long ago that you don't quite remember what it was like :)

Editing the alpha channel without having to sacrifice a goat and make an altar to Baphomet.

Are we talking about GIMP or Photoshop here? :)

Probably GIMP. Last time tried to use GIMP, I spend about an hour trying to work out how to remove an alpha channel without also applying it.

I could clearly see the image I wanted in the red, green and blue channels. But because the alpha channel was filled with full transparent, all I could see outside of individual color channel mode was the checkered background. Deleting the alpha channel or converting the image format from RGBA to RGB just erased the entire image to black.

I eventually found the solution in the eraser tool, which had an erase alpha mode. I had to set it to a really large size and go over the entire image.

Would probably have been faster to just write a script in python.

Creating/editing geometric shapes...?

Vector shapes were added in 6.0.

Really? Can you make a shape then adjust it after you made it? Cause I cannot find that - as soon as I fill or stroke the vector it drops into bitmap and can only undone not adjusted.

I wrote above that Photoshop 5.0 (which GIMP was compared against) did not have vector objects, Photoshop 6.0 was the first version to have it. I'm getting a feeling that you are talking about something else here.

yes I assumed you were talking about GIMP - my bad

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