I used Photoshop for 8 years, including for web development, before switching to Gimp.

Gimp is good enough for everything one needs in web dev, is free, and has a vital feature Photoshop lacks: the ability to run on a Linux workstation. When developing software intended for Linux servers the value of having a Linux workstation to easily do local development cannot be understated.

> I used Photoshop for 8 years, including for web development, before switching to Gimp.

> Gimp is good enough for everything one needs in web dev, is free, and has a vital feature Photoshop lacks: the ability to run on a Linux workstation. When developing software intended for Linux servers the value of having a Linux workstation to easily do local development cannot be understated.

Precisely. You're a dev for whom GIMP is "good enough". If you were dissatisfied you might make a new tool, but since GIMP suffices, you happily use it and see no reason for anything else.

Meanwhile, artists and designers who work in Photoshop day in and day out - the people comprising the bulk of Photoshop's actual market - overwhelmingly reject GIMP, and they don't generally have the capability to make a new tool, so they stick with Adobe.

At the risk of making an imperfect analogy, imagine you wrote a French textbook. French teachers overwhelmingly rejected your textbook and didn't use it in their classrooms. But at the same time, other language professionals sometimes found it helpful for small things like double checking the conjugation of some obscure verb, and they'd defend it because they found it useful. Is your French textbook a success? I'd say no. I'd say you're not only failing your primary market, but you're lulling fellow professionals into a false sense that there's sufficient tools out there for that market, which is doubly harmful.

> Meanwhile, artists and designers who work in Photoshop day in and day out - the people comprising the bulk of Photoshop's actual market - overwhelmingly reject GIMP, and they don't generally have the capability to make a new tool, so they stick with Adobe.

That's because Photoshop was early and is an industry standard, so you're going to have to learn it anyway. There's no incentive to learn GIMP because it's not going to cut you out of a job, and there's no incentive to move your shop to GIMP because all it's going to do is eliminate the massive bulk of the labor pool that is unfamiliar with it.

Also, if you do print, the color situation in GIMP is not good.

But the self-congratulation here is silly. The market chose Photoshop because it was the only choice. The market didn't place it in its position, it largely began the market. The reason people choose to use it is because they are choosing to eat, not because they think it's better.

People who think it's intuitive or straightforward are very different to me. The GIMPs feature organization is far superior to PS imo, it's just lacking a couple of very large features that require being woven throughout the implementations of everything in the data model, like proper color management and live filtering. That's to be expected from the nature of the project, because stuff like that would normally be focused on by a team that would consult with every other team to keep systems like that consistent and debugged. Free software has to rely on individual developers to get inspired to create a system themselves, completely married to the current design, that bolts what they're doing to every component. It's hard.

But when we get it, no one can take it away from us. They could start charging by the minute to use Photoshop tomorrow.

Photoshop runs fine on Linux. I pay for it and use it in Wine. Gimp is hot trash and to add insult to injury it's responsible for birthing Gtk; it's a fool me once fool me twice thing.

What is this mutually shared meme-delusion that Gimp is anywhere close to an adequate facsimile of Photoshop?

> What is this mutually shared meme-delusion that Gimp is anywhere close to an adequate facsimile of Photoshop?

It’s not a facsimile of Photoshop but it serves the same purpose.

In my experience the people who come to GIMP expecting it to work exactly like Photoshop are the ones who are disappointed, because it’s not Photoshop. But if you use it and don’t expect to already know how to use it because you know Photoshop, it’s fine.

Precisely. "It's fine" is the problem. It doesn't need to be fine, it needs to compete with Photoshop to be a serious tool in the space it serves. And what the vast, vast majority of artists have said is that it is insufficient for that.

Can you crop a photo in it? Sure, once you figure out the placement of things.

Can you perform serious photo manipulation? Somewhat, although Photoshop takes way less cognitive cost (so more people can be more productive).

Economics of attention are important.

> Somewhat, although Photoshop takes way less cognitive cost

Does it take less cognitive cost because it’s actually easier, or because you’re used to it and you’re not used to GIMP?

To be frank, I'm a regular GIMP user and have only dabbled in Photoshop. However, I empathize with daily drivers of the software.

To address you're question: elements of both.

As a paid service, Photoshop can afford to have developer research users and improve UX. GIMP, as an open source project, is subject to the (often well-placed) whims of its developers, which does not have the same profit motive to keep users as Photoshop.

This in of itself does not guarantee less cognitive load. But certainly it is easier for a GIMP user to adopt Photoshop than it does for a Photoshop user to adopt GIMP.

Further, we could argue the status quo is as it is because GIMP is less productive than Photoshop by at least whatever Photoshop charges per month (and possibly more).

Photoshop is garbage with a randomized interface that is also trying to sell you things. People think it's intuitive because it's the industry standard and stockholm syndrome. GIMP is bad (but improving) on print color, and on non-destructive filters and layers.

The hyperbolic invective hurled at GIMP by Photoshop users is astounding. I often spend all day in Photoshop and Illustrator doing preprint and it makes me want to burn Adobe to the ground every day. I would gladly never look at PS again if GIMP got color right.

>an adequate facsimile of Photoshop

For some it apparently is. There are certainly talented designers/artists who really want an open source stack who can produce excellent results using GIMP. Would I encourage using GIMP if someone doesn't care about open source? Almost certainly not, but it can be used to produce excellent results.

I wholeheartedly disagree with the sentiment in your comment. Just because you, or a certain group of people don't like it, doesn't mean it's a bad tool. It may not serve for everyone, but for those for which it does, it works, and it does so well. Also, acting like photoshop is the be-all end-all of photo editing pushes the idea that you must be just like photoshop to even compete, which is actively harmful as it prevents people from innovating, and puts pressure on anyone thinking of even attempting such a daunting task.

Furthermore, even if I were to agree, your argument completely falls apart with the existence of Krita. Writing software like this is hard and time-consuming, which is the primary reason we haven't seen more projects of this scale, as there's been various smaller-scale tools over the years, like Pinta.

I appreciate your thoughts. I do suspect that I speak for the majority of artists and designers on this one, based on the conversations I've had with them on this and the very low popularity of GIMP in those worlds. (I'm coming from a game dev angle, for context, so I interact with artists fairly regularly. I'm also married to one!) But I certainly appreciate that GIMP may be useful for you, and I wouldn't wish to deny you use of that tool.

I love Krita; it's my graphics suite of choice for many tasks. But I can't help but think that if GIMP hadn't been so resistant to input from artists and designers, Krita wouldn't need to exist at all. It is a tool born of the lucky fact that someone wasn't satisfied with GIMP and had the technical skills to do something about it.

With respect to your comment about innovation, I'd be more inclined to agree if, y'know, GIMP had actually done any of that. GIMP is not innovative, nor competitive, and is unable to facilitate even fairly basic tasks for contemporary artists and designers like working with CMYK images. The existence of "good-enough" GIMP is a hindrance to innovation in this space.

"if GIMP hadn't been so resistant to input from artists and designers, Krita wouldn't need to exist at all"

Thats not far off at all actually.

...and I guess I should add, I still use Krita as a result of the continued overall baffle-crash of GIMPs UI and general behavior, regardless of the fact that GIMP does have a great feature-set in the abstract.

Your second sentence doesn’t make sense because their post presented a lot of good points that move the argument past a “I don’t like it so it’s bad” argument. To knock it up another notch those same points could be applied to Linux over Windows. Market (user) adoption is the only real metric to measure against. The argument I submit is that a tool like Gimp can’t be considered better if it can’t claim the market to prove it, if it was fundamentally better at its core adoption would pass the non open source leader.

There couldn't be a wrose metric for quality than market share, because it involves many different aspects of marketing and social dynamics, as well as the context of the time in which it was created. You don't need to look further than Internet Explorer for this, or in the programming world, JavaScript. Also the parent comment didn't present any points.