Techokami

the UI for those specific processes is so unspeakably bad that i once got in a fight with the devs in a bug thread over it and left in disgust when they acted like it was somehow not objectively terrible

the best part is it's true

we can also work in about how the project isn't really worked on anymore and point to it still using GTK2 as proof people should move to something more current

it's not good for anything 😭

eh gimp is fine

I've only ever used GIMP and it seems good enough for those things

I've gotten deep enough into it to know that serious editing starts getting really fucked really fast but the few times I've stuck my head into photoshop my reaction was "how the fuck does any of this work?"

None of that is to say anything good or bad about either program, just how my experience with them has gone.

increasingly these days i see ppl clown on it. which is probably deserved? but what do ppl use instead anyway. i made a workflow in it many years ago for image editing but i’m not married to it and it’s not really updating anymore (how long have they been working on version 3 now??) and it has a lot of annoying quirks so. the only other thing i’ve tried is paint.net and i hated it

this actually struck a nerve before I realized it was bait. But also, coming from someone who has never used photoshop (or an adobe product in general), what is the issue with the UI other than relying on an older UI library?

I remember in college when i tried to learn how to make pictures look like manga, Photoshop was a bit better at doing it. That's one specific case where photoshop has the edge and there's probably a few more. GIMP has UI issues, but alot of my issues with using GIMP in my early days was i didnt really know what anything in a graphic editor program was supposed to do.

I know GnuI is less convenient on some stuff, especially layers, but nothing i would consider unusable, especially if your main purpose is shitposting or some basic flyers.

My biggest frustration with GIMP is that it has no answer to the question of non-destructive editing. I want to import a JPEG, crop it, rotate it, maybe apply a filter to it, and then save the metadata representing those edits, not a blob of affected pixels. I want this so that I can reproduce the same (or similar) edits on another image later, or maybe the same image at a different resolution or aspect ratio, or maybe so that I have the option of tweaking an effect part-way through the chain at a later date without having to store a text file alongside the XCF describing the set of operations I performed to produce it (and then having to recreate the whole layer from scratch when I want to make changes).

I've never seriously used Photoshop, but I understand its capabilities in this area are bundled up in the “smart objects” and “adjustment layers” features.

These days, I do a lot of my image editing in Inkscape, because it supports this sort of approach pretty well. I mostly only use GIMP for rescaling images (pretty nice to be able to control the interpolation algorithm) and pixel-pushing the transparency layer of PNGs (because manually optimizing PNG compressibility is definitely not obsessive beyond reason).

ask a woodworker to explain why one chisel is better than another

the user interface is, without a doubt, its largest and most damming weakness. it screams "designed by an engineer", as in it was designed by somebody who doesn't actually know what people use tools like photoshop and gimp for, but instead just built things within the confines of the UI toolkit they had.

as much as i dislike adobe and their products, their user interface system is genuinely impressive, and extraordinarily customizable.

The thing about GIMP is that GIMP is in fact "like Photoshop", it's just that it was patterned on a version of Photoshop so old that even the "I WILL NEVER UPGRADE" people have forgotten about it. It's essentially retro software at this point.