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Comment by laserlight | Hacker News Reader

So, GIMP gets CMYK support, a basic image processing feature, 24 years after it launched, and meanwhile there's this other front-page thread [0] in which the author argues that GIMP is a competitor to Photoshop. What a joke.

[0] Time Till Open Source Alternative. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32624461

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Most people do not use CMYK much in Photoshop. CMYK is much more useful in a tool like Adobe Illustrator. It is a nice feature but for a pretty niche segment.

AFAIK, anything to be printed requires CMYK support for decent results --- otherwise there's no control over printed colors. Printing might have gone out of fashion in recent years, but for the better part of the two decades it hadn't been the case.

Most companies/consumers only need professionally printed stuff like that rarely though, and when they do they go to see a printing professional who will do the necessary conversions for them.

For web use, app use, or other display-based use, RGB (and related) is usually enough, and that’s what people have been using the GIMP for.

> So, GIMP gets CMYK support, a basic image processing feature

Um, nope. CMYK is not basic. Rotation and scaling are basic. Gaussian blur is basic. Levels/Curves are basic. CMYK is advanced stuff.

> ...the author argues that GIMP is a competitor to Photoshop

It gets worse. He claims that OpenCascade, a 3D solids construction engine, is the alternative to AutoCAD, a 2D drafting program.

I'vd been a happy gimp user for many years, the lack if CMYK color support never bothered me. Calling gimp a joke because of it is doing it injustice.

The joke is considering GIMP a Photoshop competitor. It simply isn’t. That doesn’t mean GIMP is not of value, of course.

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