A real open-source, usable, photoshop replacement?
Good morning, folks! Now I’m back in germany, still busy getting used to all this luxury again, including my Ubuntu-desktop. I also have Windows installed, but for some reason i prefer Ubuntu. Anyway, I’m really missing a real, free and usable Photoshop replacement here. For me, GIMP is just a nice little tool enabling one of small edits, but not as sophisticated and well-designed as Photoshop. This is sad because it’s still a big point for many web-doing people not to switch to an open system. And there are plenty of examples where open software can beat the original, look at Open Office.
I’m convinced that there are enough people to start up a project dedicated to building a graphics suite, open, based on already existing tools. Have you heard of Scribus, a great publishing tool for Linux, free? Amazin software, and I dare to speculate that GIMPs codebase isn’t bad, it’s just some frontend stuff that is. By creating a cool team and spending some time on unifying the user interfaces among these, a great step towards permanent switching would be made.
Still, what are you’re experiences with GIMP or do you know any other, comparable tools?
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4 Comments to “A real open-source, usable, photoshop replacement?”
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Oh yes, to me this is one of the major disadvantages of linux if not THE reason not to switch over completely. I wonder if adobe is willing to lock the linux guys out.
Choose between OS X and Windows for good design, and to implement back to linux, that’s no future, that’s got to change!
hey tommy, is there any system on linux working for flash-editing?
Sure! Not the authoring tool, but actually you don’t need that anymore. I described how you set up a Flesh or Flex development environment with the free compiler mxmlc from the Flex SDK in my blog: http://southdesign.de/?p=125.
But as you see, the “native” Flash thingie either doesn’t work on linux. I don’t get why, is it just Adobe or in general software developers?
I just had to use Illustrator (mostly) and Photoshop for the last two hours for a new web design project and it was a horrible experience. It is funny how you tend to forget this experience if you don’t use the Creative Suite for a couple of weeks and just keep coming back to the same tools because there simply isn’t anything better.
The user interface and the number of steps required to accomplish common tasks is nothing short of painful. Just to give an example: export the selected layer/object in Illustrator to a fully cropped PNG with transparent background. This is something you need to do all the time when transforming a finished design to XHTML/CSS and should be a one-step process. However you need to create cropping masks, hide/unhide Layers etc. Time needed for something that shouldn’t take more than a couple of seconds: >2 minutes/Layer. Yes you CAN automate this with JavaScript, but then you will still have to crop your generated images by hand in Photoshop.
I don’t think the user interface of the Gimp is half as bad as you describe it. It’s just a matter of habits. Kind of like switching from vi to Emacs after having used the former as your primary editor for the last 6+ years. You feel a lot less productive, having to search for the commands you need at places you don’t expect them to be.
Disclaimer: I don’t think I qualify as a newbie Photoshop/Illustrator user, having paid the student price (>350€) for CS3 and also bought (!) the trial of CS4.