this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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So, real talk, be completely honest with me - how usable is GIMP these days? I’m not trying to pick a fight, I think it’s great that GIMP exists, but while I may not be a professional artist, I am a developer with an interest in graphical design and I would say that I am an advanced user of the Adobe Creative Suite tools - the main three that I use being Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
I would be willing to learn to use GIMP to replace Photoshop, and Inkscape to replace Illustrator, for example, but only if they’re actually good enough to put to real, productive use.
I need my tools to get out of the way and let me work. If it crashes and loses my work EVER, then it is completely beyond consideration for me. If it’s good enough for light users but not really ready for professional use, then I don’t think I can really consider switching.
I do not use any of the 3D or AI features of any of those tools, if that helps.
I would really appreciate your opinions and advice. Please don’t be optimistic - I know it’s hard sometimes to be critical about open source software because of our ideological beliefs, but please try your best to be realistic.
Oh, and if you’re going to just tell me to try it, please try to contain that impulse. It would be a huge undertaking for me to relearn basically everything about how I work with these tools, so if I went through all that just to find that I couldn’t actually make use of them because they’re not ready yet, it would be a huge waste of time and energy, both of which I have in quite short supply these days.
Thank you so much for your time :)
I've been using gimp's 3.x branch since 2016 or so (after getting a hidpi display) and gimp itself since the early 2000s, both for personal stuff and for work. I'm typically editing existing photos and images to clean them up, apply effects, make new clean images from pieces of existing ones, etc, and for my uses it's great. Also, having been using it for so long, I actually really prefer the ux to Photoshop (especially since they added an option to use it in single window mode).
I've seen videos showing some of the features it's missing for certain types of things though, and while there are hacky scripted ways to emulate them, you might find it lacking if you're expecting those particular features.
I'd recommend looking up tutorials on YouTube for things you frequently do and see how much work it is and what the final product looks like. You could up the playback speed to save time since you won't be following along with gimp yourself.