This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Courtesy to Twitter user XdanielArt (date of publication: 8 June 2024)
As much as I am loath to admit it, nothing comes close to feature parity with Photoshop. All the others are pretty replaceable, but if you are a professional who depends on a lot of the really advanced features you’re going to have a hard time replacing it. GiMP isn’t even close tbh. I admire the work they’re doing but they are a decade behind PS.
Good news is that is not most people.
But that's what makes GIMP special. There's some users who feel that Photoshop has stopped being relevant for some uses among those users. GIMP may be a decade behind but it could be swimming in what people remembered best about Photoshop before its enshittification and retains that kind of nature.
Makes sense!
What's your opinion on Affinity (Designer/Photo)?
If you’re getting down and dirty with color correction, object removal/replacement, and just depend on a lot of plug-in’s for your sauce, Affinity is lacking. Most people who use photoshop, however, do not need all that. Affinity is a solid program that definitely works for prosumers and below, as well as some professionals (depending on use case).
And I get it’s not popular to talk about but Adobe has fully embraced AI and some of their tools are legit. I don’t use it, but some folks really like firefly.
I have no clue what most of these abbreviations refer to 😅
I have no idea what any of those things really does and it's way too much to learn given how much GIMP and Krita do
What's the Audacity/Tenacity deal?
Apparently Audacity has been bougth by a company which subsequently did crap with it. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/s9isqj/help_tenacity_a_fork_of_audacity_after_its/
Not sure how good Tenacity currently is
So happy to see my beloved Paint Tool Sai on here! 😃 Really good list. Didn't know there were so many alternatives
I’m no layout expert, but I did do some desktop publishing about 15 years ago 10 min in Scribus had me tearing my hair out. Installed InDesign and, while it’s still not easy to catch up on the modern capabilities, it was worlds ahead.
GIMP is just fine for casuals. It’s not close for professionals.
Truthfully I think that one major issue with open source programs that don’t have corporate involvement is that people who are great at code don’t always have the same skill in UI/UX. However, with support and a larger community, great things can happen. The barrier is getting that adoption level. If more people casually use the product and contribute financially or in code, it will help tremendously.
I used to do layouts for children’s books back around 2010. The company used pagemaker still. I tried scribus, and the books I did manage to finish produced pdfs not usable by the print shop. I ended up buying a copy of CS5.
Now I use affinity suite, I am still learning it all.
A newer alternative to After Effects: https://pikimov.com/
It's still got a ways to go, but it's off to a good start.
Are there any good alternatives as far as PDF creation goes? Creating fillable forms, not just editing? I have some users I can’t shake from Acrobat Pro.
Sorry, there just are no alternatives to Photoshop, with Affinity Photo being the closest replacement nowadays, to the classical PS functions. Affinity Designer feels the same for Illustrator.
What about Krita? Not sure exactly what Adobe product it would be an alternative for though. I know a lot of what people use it for used to be done with Photoshop, but I think Photoshops core demographic is a slightly different use case. Also Inkscape as an Illustrator alternative?
For drawing/painting yeah, krita is comparable, especially if you set the presets to be similar to ps. I haven't tried krita with photo editing much though
I really like this layout, it's easy to read
This graphic is missing Bitwig in the AU section. Definitely worth mentioning since it runs on Linux/OS X/Win.
See, my problem with these types of resources is if you have to list more than one thing per thing the landscape may not be there for a full replacement.
That's not a hard rule, I do think some of these are a better first choice, or a better-for-some applications first choice. I'm just often frustrated by the way these things are communicated.
if you have to list more than one thing per thing the landscape may not be there for a full replacement
And it would be even less if there had to be only one thing per thing.
One of the strengths of the FOSS metacommunity is the variety in designs and results. Big Corpo abuses economies of scale and locks you in with a "one shoe fits all solution" because they under the table also chisel and file your feet; FOSS has (largely) no such restrictions so they can afford to try things and see what results and, more importantly, what evolves. Not everything has to be a copy of corporate, and we shouldn't act as if it had to be.
Woof, I don't know if I can pick up what you're putting down.
Particularly for professional use nobody is trying to have fun and exciting new solutions for UI or functionality every week. Industry standards get to be industry standards for a reason. It's useful to be able to just go hire someone that knows how to work on the software platform you're working and your clients are working and your providers are working.
For casual home use, go nuts, I don't mind. And there is certainly room for multiple things to remain relevant at once, especially if the concepts are close enough that crossing over is trivial or easy.
But I don't need to edit video in seven different pieces of software, I need to get the video edited. And if I need three people editing video I need them all to be editing video in the same thing, or at least in things that are perfectly interoperable. Standards aren't a corporate imposition, even if corporations benefit greatly from lobbying themselves into becoming the standard.
File format standards certainly, and OSS generally embraces those (at least if they're non-proprietary), but UI doesn't have to be standardized. On the other hand though not everything needs to be a unique snowflake. UIs should take the things that work well and experiment with what doesn't.
Lets also not pretend that proprietary apps don't screw around with UI design just as much. I can't count how many times now Microsoft has redesigned the UI of something that was perfectly fine and didn't need redesigning only to end up making it worse.
Sure, I can agree with that.
The problem with OSS tends to be that engineers are more willing to work on it than UX designers and it's quite rare for them to have the lead on that area. Forget convention, just on quality. There are exceptions (hey Blender!), but not many.
More often than not what you get is some other paid upstart hit some big innovation and then that propagates and sometimes it gets to open source alternatives before it does to fossilized, standardized professional software.
I do think there's some value in having UX that makes it easier to jump back and forth, though. Especially if your positioning is "I'm like this paid thing, but free". The easier you make it for the pros to pick up and play the easier you can carve some of the market and the more opportunities you give to newcomers learning on the free tool to migrate to the paid tool if the market demands it.
I think part of the problem is that "good" UX isn't a single thing but a continuum. It's very dependent on the skill level of the user. Often what makes a good UX for a newbie is a bad UX for a power user and vice versa. OSS tends to attract power users and particularly the ones working on some software in a particular area tend to be domain experts. That in turn can lead to designs optimized for very advanced use cases that end up being frustratingly opaque to an "average" user or even worse a newbie.
Blender is an excellent example of this. It's regarded as one of the best 3D programs out there but it's far from a simple piece of software to pick up. What saves it is that all the commercial alternatives are just as obtuse as it is and so the ground level expectation is that it's going to be complicated.
Likewise many OSS and Linux tools expect or even require CLI usage which while great for power users putting together scripts and pipelines are often opaque and unintuitive to someone who is still learning the domain.
This focus on power users leads to turning newbies away and funneling them towards the commercial offerings where they then get used to their quirks and limitations of those apps so that when they do eventually become power users the quirks and limitations of the OSS alternatives feel strange and off-putting to them.
For sure. Good UX is not "simple" UX. Professional software doesn't need to be flashy and clean, but it does need to be efficient and usable.
Bad UX is bad UX, though.
I bring up Blender because Blender vs Gimp is my favorite example of how FOSS can find a very functional alternative AND compete with the paid side with no compromises... but also of why it often doesn't.
Blender is for power users, but it's well designed enough you can dabble with it or follow a tutorial and have fun doing it. Gimp will make you hate the very act of opening a file and trying to make the most basic crop on it even if you're a Photoshop master.
Yeah I just want a tool to get my shit done and get paid
Well, on the other hand, it's by far not always the case that the program one person is currently using is already the best choice for their use case. For example, in the process of degoogling, I've begun using a lot of programs that are actually better for me than the ones I previously used (e.g. Notesnook > Google notes). Of course there's friction/effort involved in finding the best replacement, but there's just no way around that if the goal is to get away from the defacto standards.
lol. coreldraw is fucking terrible
I've never used Photoshop but I have used Photopea and people tell me it's exactly the same: https://www.photopea.com/
