Instead of the GIMP limping along behind PhotoShop, both dragging their decades-old legacy baggage, monolithic architectures, 1990s pricing models, etc., into the foreseeable future, I wish we had something more like Octave, SQLite, or Python: a powerful, faceless dev platform on which to build graphics-processing apps.īasically, a runtime that holds a GPU-optimal image model (raster layers, vector layers, non-destructive edit management, multi-session undo, etc.), a set of APIs for sending memory-protected commands to the model, and a growing standard library of routines that have proven useful (network comms for offloading some processes or results to "the cloud", input/output codecs, CSS3, whatever). Who knows, maybe some day someone will come along and help you implement the parts that seem so hopeless to you. Look at the lists, see what you can implement, and don't be disheartened by the parts that seem impossible to implement. There are many people out there who will appreciate your work, sometimes even the people who compiled these lists. So, to the OpenNote developers and to anyone else implementing a FAIF replacement I say this: don't let these giant lists of features and suggestions about how you'll never be competitive grind you down. And that there exist many other people with different lists of sine qua nons who will use the free as in freedom alternative you're working on because they have different needs. Why work on something that will forever suck and not be a competitor, and can't implement the full list of features because we don't have the giant budget of our non-free competitor?īut then I remember that people are typically more flexible than they appear to be when they write these lists, and you'll discover that they may do without some of the features that they list, at least in some circumstances. And it doesn't have a few features that I find incredibly invaluable as an Evernote user:Īs an Octave developer, I frequently hear exactly the same things about Octave vs Matlab, and if I listen too closely, I find it disheartening. > it has a ways to go before it will actually be a competitor. If you don't see yourself as a user of those features though, give it a shot. If some of your heavily used features are on that list, it might not be worth switching over to Gimp. This in conjunction with Layer Comps (also something missing in Gimp right now) can really help in switching between two or more alts.Ī great way to see what Gimp is currently missing in comparison to Photoshop is to look at the development roadmap ( ). If you have style swatches, it can be really easy to do fast mockups using this. Layer effects (while often overused and gaudy) can be really helpful for design work - need to change the color of an icon that's raster art? Just drop a color overlay on it. The inability to add a mask to layer groups is a big one for me. There are some minor features too that bug me. The source edits will propagate to all the copies automatically. If I'm defining a user control for a design mockup, and I need to make a change to that control, in Photoshop all I have to do is edit the singular smart object source. Smart objects are another huge feature it's missing - not only the ability to downscale losslessly, but also the ability to edit all replicates at once. Non-destructive editing is the biggest thing GIMP is missing in my opinion, but supposedly the move to GEGL will allow them to start development on this (. The bigger the userbase it has, the better off it will be.īut don't think that it's going to replace Photoshop in the near future. If that's all you use, then great, by all means switch over to Gimp. Look at his parity instructions - every feature is found in Photoshop Essentials. He isn't using the functionality that Photoshop provides, he's using the functionality that Photoshop Essentials provides. "I spend about 90% of my time in Lightroom and only 10% in Photoshop." This was posted to reddit a couple weeks back, and I'll repeat the same comment I made there.
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