Thanks for the really comprehensive reply. The feeling I’m kind of getting from these comments is that neither GIMP nor Krita is really capable of acting as a replacement for Photoshop yet. I know that GIMP is capable and fully featured, but when I last tired it, I could not bear how much it crashed or locked up, and like you implied, the default UI is absolutely fucking garbage. Being totally honest, I don’t think it’s defensible how bad it is - Photoshop lets you customise the UI way, way more than you probably think, it has easily half a dozen preset layouts for different tasks/workflows.
Krita looks quite nice, giving it a quick look, but like you said, it’s very obviously designed for painting and not design. Not all design can be done in vector format unfortunately!
Maybe I will get around to giving GIMP 3 a shot and trying to figure out how to use it. I want an open source replacement to the Adobe suite so, so badly. But I feel like I just can’t make the huge compromises required for that, yet.
neither GIMP nor Krita is really capable of acting as a replacement for Photoshop yet
I would agree with that. But in all of their defence I’d add that they’re not trying to be. They are their own pieces of kit with their own roadmaps and goals.
The biggest frustration people from Photoshop have is that the expect Gimp or Krita to be a clone of Photoshop with feature to feature parity, and that’s never been the goal of either program.
Photoshop has spent decades basically merging the features of most of their products, so that it’s now basically a photo editor with features of Illustrator and a suite of advanced drawing tools. The only replacement for that would be a hypothetical program that combines Gimp, Krita & Inkscape. But that’s never been the goal of any of those programs. They’re separate kit and as far as I’m aware always will be.
Thanks for the really comprehensive reply. The feeling I’m kind of getting from these comments is that neither GIMP nor Krita is really capable of acting as a replacement for Photoshop yet. I know that GIMP is capable and fully featured, but when I last tired it, I could not bear how much it crashed or locked up, and like you implied, the default UI is absolutely fucking garbage. Being totally honest, I don’t think it’s defensible how bad it is - Photoshop lets you customise the UI way, way more than you probably think, it has easily half a dozen preset layouts for different tasks/workflows.
Krita looks quite nice, giving it a quick look, but like you said, it’s very obviously designed for painting and not design. Not all design can be done in vector format unfortunately!
Maybe I will get around to giving GIMP 3 a shot and trying to figure out how to use it. I want an open source replacement to the Adobe suite so, so badly. But I feel like I just can’t make the huge compromises required for that, yet.
I would agree with that. But in all of their defence I’d add that they’re not trying to be. They are their own pieces of kit with their own roadmaps and goals.
The biggest frustration people from Photoshop have is that the expect Gimp or Krita to be a clone of Photoshop with feature to feature parity, and that’s never been the goal of either program.
Photoshop has spent decades basically merging the features of most of their products, so that it’s now basically a photo editor with features of Illustrator and a suite of advanced drawing tools. The only replacement for that would be a hypothetical program that combines Gimp, Krita & Inkscape. But that’s never been the goal of any of those programs. They’re separate kit and as far as I’m aware always will be.