To be fair
- GIMP is really good
- GIMP is hella complex to use
For example there was a (now enshittified) tool on Android called “image attacher” or something, for making a long image from 2.
This is probably also pretty easy with some CLI tool.
I actually took the time to learn “how do I attach 2 images together” in GIMP.
Or “how do I create a textmarker”.
And the stuff works, but its just very complex.
attach 2 images
- Open 1 image
- “open” “open as another layer” the second image
- your canvas is as big as the first image. Guess how big it has to be when fitting them next to each other
- know that there is a difference between “layer surface” and “canvas” for whatever reason
- in the menubar, find the canvas options
- find where to resize the canvas and make it bigger
- click on the surface layer of the other image and move it so it fits where you want it
- use “merge downwards” to make the 2 layer one. BE CAREFUL TO NOT USE ANY IMAGE PARTS
- use the crop tool
- crop the new combined images to the wanted size
This is sooo manual and seems very hacky. The difference between canvas and layer make no sense to me. The enlargement is “eyeballing”. The cropping too. There is no snapping when placing next to each other. There is no “dynamically increase canvas size” option afafaik.
text marker / highlighter
Something with brush, make it bigger, yellow, reduce the opaqueness, change the paint mode to “only make darker”
GIMP is like using
catawkandtailto write an office document lol. It works but it is damn technical.But if you know how to do it, you know how to do it.
See, this is exactly my point in my other comment above. I could do this in about five seconds with Corel PhotoPaint.
- Make a new document that’s arbitrarily large.
- Import both (or all 3, or all 10, or however many) images. (Images can be batch imported.)
- Snap the first one to the top left corner.
- Snap the others below it. Their corners and edges will click together if you have alignment guides enabled. 4a. Optionally resize any of the images by just typing in the value you need in pixels, in the toolbar when it’s selected. If you need to know the size of any other image, just click it and it’ll tell you. It’s not even in a menu.
- Crop tool (D) to knock the oversized canvas down to whatever size you need. Again, you can just type this in, in pixels, and it’s not even buried in a menu.
- Export, post, accumulate lulz.
Export to a flat format (.jpeg, .png, .gif, whatever) and your output will be flattened. You don’t need to think about layers or merging or layers being bigger than the canvas or not. There is no, “Be careful not to XYZ.” What you see in the preview is what the output will look like. Period. You can even apply your monitor’s color calibration to it or the color profile of any other output device (printer, a different monitor, etc.) on the fly if you are a big enough nerd.
You can do this in an even simpler dumber way in CorelDRAW!
- Import the images. Images can still be batch imported.
- Arrange them however you want, snap them together, whatever.
- Lasso them all and export.
That’s… literally it. You don’t have to crop, you don’t have to trim, or layer, or anything. You can specify the dimensions of the output file in the export window before you hit save if you want it to be different than the original. Your arrangement doesn’t even have to be rectangular and it will still work.
I also likely did too many steps. You dont need to merge layers on GIMP. It will also just get flat but I dont know if the cut feature would work.
It VERY likely does.
But having guides everywhere, snapping, is really important.
I could do this in about five seconds with Corel PhotoPaint.
that is because you are familiar with corel photopaint. i could do that faster than you in gimp, because i am familiar with gimp.
and yes, using tool capable of doing lot of complex tasks takes more time to learn than some single-purpose tool that is optimized to do one task (and even then you have to learn how to use it). that is like wondering that learning to pilot aircraft takes longer than learning to ride on a bicycle.
Yea, bit gimp is particularly difficult to learn. A few years ago, when I first needed something more complex than paint.net, I of course first downloaded gimp because it’s free. It was difficult to use, to say the least. But sure, I didn’t have any experience with more complex image editors. However, just to see what the difference is, I also downloaded Photoshop and didn’t have any trouble at all. Everything I needed to do was easily understandable and the UI was very easy to use. I haven’t used any once of them before and I haven’t used Gimp since. (Also tried krita btw, only found it mildly easier to use than gimp, still miles behind Adobe).
That isn’t to say, that professional OpenSource software can’t be intuitive and well designed. Today I used kdenlive for the first time because premiere didn’t support the codec+container combo I need and it was a very pleasant experience. A very familiar interface, if you’ve used any video editor before. I didn’t go in-depth but it didn’t immediately alienate me like gimp did.
This is probably also pretty easy with some CLI tool.
This is one of the few image tasks I do on the CLI xD
Stack two images horizontally (left and right)
convert a.jpg b.jpg +append horizontal.jpgStack to images vertically (top and bottom)
convert a.jpg b.jpg -append vertical.jpgImages not the same dimensions? Use gravity to align them at the center and make the unused space transparent
convert a.jpg b.jpg -background transparent -gravity center +append horizontal.pngI will make a dolphin context menu from that!
Attach two images? That’s concatenation! Use cat!
This is a joke, is it? Can you literally just cat the image files next to each other?
It’s a joke (afaik), cat only works for stuff like tar archives. Can’t figure out what to use for text files though.
You use cat. It literally just appends the bytes of the two files to each other. It just so happens that the tar format can work with that
You can also use cat to append some video file formats together, but honestly use ffmpeg.
it’s also damn slow and destructive if you’re trying to fit it into a true professional workflow with deadlines. i work with programs like it professionally and I only use gimp when i find myself on a random computer that doesn’t have anything else. it’ll get the job done, pretty much any job, but it might be very slow and painful. as someone who DEFINITELY knows how to use gimp, i understand the op they’re clowning more than i understand the 1 peer i know that’s actually managing to make money with a fully foss workflow. I also happen to know he largely doesn’t sleep to accomplish it.
gimp and darktable and similar projects are great, but workflow efficiency is what they do after they finish adding features. that just never happens. it’s not the exciting work.
Just run photoshop on linux.
Is there an equivalent for lightroom?
Darktable
Sorry not looking for a replacement, just how to run it :)
I am pretty sure it would run in the same wine setup, but nobody bothered to set it up as an install script yet, so you’d need to do some manual dirtywork.
Tried a few times to run it but with no avail, however il try to give this a go.
Linux just needs more competition in the image manipulation space.
There isn’t even a real photoshop competitor in the broader market, but you want to further split the hobbyist devs effort on linux as well?
Affinity Photo
First google search result:
Photoshop undoubtedly has the edge over Affinity Photo with more tools, features and functionality for performing a range of advanced editing tasks. These include AI-powered tools, more Layer controls, masking options, 3D image creation and video support to name but a few.
And this sentiment is echoed by a wide range of opinions further down the search results.
It may be a competitor in the technival sense, but not in the practical one, where a photoshop user would realistically be able to switch to it.
First google search result
if you agree with the opinion that’s fine, but why would you admit to posting SEO spam? XD
Is anything I quoted untrue?
Since I haven’t used Affinity Photo myself - I can only rely on the opinions from the internet. I have read a handful, inclusing reddit, but only quoted the one that conveyed my general findings in a concise way.
If Affinity lacks features that photoshop users commonly use, my argument holds, no matter where the info comes from.
Is anything I quoted untrue?
You basically quoted thin air: “more features […] for a wide range of advanced editing tasks”. You probably know more than what’s written there, but from my perspective I haven’t learned one concrete feature that PS offers over Affinity. It’s typical SEO spam, which rewards swaths of text with little to zero information density.
This person still uses Google too haha.
I use affinity photo and it’s an acceptable replacement.
Can run on Linux via Bottles! I do not have much experience with it, but I got it running with this guide from 2022:
I dunno if it was you asking the question or not but ^^;; if you want some decent replacements for gimp I recommend krita, it’s more Photoshop like and honestly it’s my go-to however there is also photopea which is a browser editor that I heard is actually pretty good, and if you’re on Mac or Windows (if so I dunno why you’d post here XD) I recommend the Affinity suit, it’s cheaper than Photoshop and it’s a one time payment instead of a subscription.
A person shows up in a room full of random people. Punches one in the face and starts swinging at everyone else. People instinctively start to defend themselves and, as they are more numerous, overwhelm and badly wound the instigator. OP walks into the room, “everyone in this room is so violent, look everyone, they are so violent”. People outside the room hearing OP, “yeah, I bet anyone like them is just as violent”.
Also it’s funny that there is a dropdown with font previews in GIMP, despite this guy’s statement. Admittedly, it’s in an odd place (on the left of the font input box, rather than on the right, and doesn’t have a dropdown icon, but a font preview), but it’s there. It took me three clicks to find it.
I just tried it out. Picked a font I liked, right clicked the text, selected Filters -> Light and Shadow -> Drop Shadow, set offsets and blur to zero, grow to 10, opacity to 1, and boom, I had text with a stroke effect. I’m not sure why this guy had so much trouble. Maybe it’s cause I come from a CSS background, and that’s exactly how you would add a stroke effect in CSS.
Took me all of two minutes to make that, and I’m not a GIMP wizard.
Wow! I have been looking for gimp alternatives or specific ways of doing things on gimp, compared to photoshop and most answers have been very honest and helpful!
Even gimp development team are open for suggestions but won’t consider them before releasing version 3 that should release ‘very soon’
Online forums have not changed since the dawn of the online forum. Tho. Just look at any online forum (and dare I say a Lemmy forum). Same shit, different decade or even century or millenium! Just look at me. I’m drunk and bored and playing with my phone while watching crappy movies. Only time i turn to an online forum. Because i know better.
Don’t say Lemmy is a forum.
last time I argued that people got irrationally angry.
I don’t know, forums were much smaller back in the day. You could find a good community, because it was possible to organize one. But I don’t think that’s possible at today’s scale.
I’ve never found a “good community” IR or online. Since, like, when I learned how to say my first words, which was in the late 1970s. What I have found is a lot of bullshit about creating community and communities. People are mostly in everything for themselves. It makes sense. You can join a community and leave one. To summarize: Communities exist in the imagination.
I’m annoyed no one ever bothers to mention this:
because it’s illegal
oh my god. youre telling me now!?!
nuh uh you see, there is a disclaimer
DISCLAIMER: Please use this software only if you have an active Photoshop subscription. I’m not responsable of any use without subscription.
all is good and legal here officer!
Cool crime in my book. Fuck Adobe with a pineapple.
Cool crime in my book. Fuck Adobe with a pineapple.
Getting people out of the Adobe ecosystem fucks more with Adobe than circumventing cost to get into the ecosystem.
That’s why Adobe silently tolerated pupils and students to pirate Photoshop: They knew some of those became paying customers in the future.
Photopea dot Com is pretty solid and it’s a website not a download. Has good complexities for the non profesional that wants to do more but doesn’t need or want photoshop.
Kolourpaint is exactly like mspaint but on linux. It’s perfect for everything from simple to intermediate tasks
Let this be a lesson and next time just spend 5 to 10 minutes browsing alternativeto.net or Wikipedia’s list of image editors yourself.
alternativeto.net is a really annoyonh website with cloudflare popups though
Wikipedia then. Lazy people asking stupid questions instead of googling on their own are even more annoying.
maybe they want to gauge different opinions and reasoning. not everything has a simple definitive answer. if u dont want to answer, ignore the post.
maybe they want to gauge different opinions and reasoning.
If those people cared to google first, they’d stumble onto existing answers to the same question. Such questions get asked over and over again. Those people would know that if they cared to google first.
if u dont want to answer, ignore the post.
Same applies to answers you don’t like: Ignore them, don’t whine how toxic people are.
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often, yes, the same questions are made; but just as often the questions are set in different contexts or asked in different communities. regardless, technology and the opinions around it change, so some new discussions should be started regularly, if just to prevent information from stagnating.
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the difference between asking a genuine question and those crude responses (and similarly, your comment), is that the question has a purpose: it sparks constructive conversation by inviting people to share their opinion, and the (helpful) responses ultimately benefit the asker. whereas the responses only exist to spite those looking for genuine answers; to waste their time and put them down. to reply like that benefits you only with a sense of superiority, at the cost of depreciating and sidetracking the discussion.
before you compare this chain to a toxic comment, realize that neither of us are reiterating dogma or making attacks at the other’s willingness to learn. i’m not saying what is being said here has never been said before, just that your average reader may very well take away new perspective from both arguments. and isnt that what discussion is all about ?
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I feel like it would be helpful to include the text of their post rather than just the title:
TL;DR Sorry if this is wrong group. GIMP = Epic POS. Do not use. Please recommend a decent alternative. Don’t waste your time with GIMP help because I am done.
I hope the mods or the bots don’t kill this post right away. It’s a serious and legitimate question from a UX designer with several decades of experience, who doesn’t want anyone else to suffer what I have. I didn’t know where else to post it, so I’m trying here as a first-timer. I apologize if this is not in the spirit of the group.
I quit Adobe, can’t afford the price any more (long story). I thought GIMP could replace Photoshop. But the user interface is horrible, and the app is full o’ bugs.
Here’s the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I tried to make a meme. The font selection overlay was a tiny, pathetic, hard to read joke. Not even a font selection dropdown, let alone one that provided previews with every line item like PS does. Deep breath, continue. I type “Impact”. Red text. I backspaced and typed “Im”. All I got was Impact Condensed. (Yes, I have Impact, and have used it in PS). So I picked it anyway. Then I tried to find the outline font feature. In Photoshop, it’s a simple “choose stroke” feature. GIMP? Hello?
I want to the Web to find a tutorial where it pointed out the feature. No luck. Searched again to find a workaround / hack. Mostly crap. Found one that was current and seemed decent. Followed it carefully. GIMP crashed.
While I appreciate the thoughts of anyone who may be compelled to point out a simple workaround or feature that I missed, don’t bother. This is the last of many dozens of problems I have wasted my time working around while suffering many crashes, and I already uninstalled it.
So. Recommendations?
I think it’s also worth giving the correction that there is a font selection dropdown with previews in GIMP. It’s to the left of the font input box.
Gimp 3 might clear some of that up we will see
I hear good things about Krita.
From my amateur experience Krita is really nice for drawing, painting and sketching, especially if you have a graphic tablet, as it bundles commonly used features and makes them easily accessible.
But it is by far not a sophisticated image manipulation program such as GIMP, which comes with a plethora of more features you’ll probably not use if you’re just doing some “typical Krita stuff”.
Lmao tried to make a meme, cant because addicted to adobe.
I use gimp but OP isn’t wrong. Doing a stroke on text is mindless in Photoshop and very convoluted in gimp.
GIMP needs the Blender treatment honestly. Inkscape too. That would cover the vast majority of what I do art-wise.
What’s wrong with Inkscape? It’s meant to be a vector graphics editor
Inkscape has been a lifesaver many times, but it’s packed like a shit in a bag.
I can’t believe they still use the old file selection on windows without a path input box. I literally can not open a file from my network drive. It doesn’t even remember the last path!
The easiest workflow I found is to just copy projects to downloads for editing.Besides other things.
“several decades of experience”
skill issue central, lets’s go.
Gimp isn’t perfect. But neither is Photoshop. In fact Lightroom users grizzle that Photoshop is so much harder to use than Lightroom. It’s a different animal.
I use Pinta or Paint.Net when I want a quick edit. But Gimp has the tools for serious editing. More tools, more hard to use.
Some Gimp things, yes! should be improved. And other things are being improved as we speak. And some things can be done on a photo much easier in Inkscape.
I hope the whiners donated to Gimp development? No? Then just please step back, and think for a bit. If thinking is too hard, then just take a deep breath.
Donating to GIMP will not likely make it user-friendly enough to make me use it unless absolutely forced to. I would much rather donate to Pinta or Paint.NET or something where development would actually benefit me.
Yes. Pinta and Paint.net are often the best solution for lots of tasks. They will need help too.
GIMP has come from nothing just on donations. As I can get results as good as PS very quickly, that is quite a feat. And soon v3 will be out with more goodies.
This is always funny to me. I used it just fine for developing all the graphics for literally 5 mobile games on nothing but gimp
Congratulations! I literally used gimp to draw at least 20 smiley faces so I have no idea what people are complaining about.
Coming from Paint.NET, I first tried Photoshop and I felt its controls to be non-intuitive, so I reverted to Paint.NET.
Later, I started using GIMP and coming from someone with no experience in either of them, GIMP and Photoshop are equally non-intuitive, so whenever someone complaining about GIMP, feels like they are coming from Photoshop, I just discount their rating.
Inkscape is a vector graphics editor, which is different from GIMP.
Some were complaining GIMPs text and shapes were hard to use. I put text on images in Inkscape. Inkscape is ideal for that, having all the tools to use on top of a pasted image.
Right.
I feel like the text part is something GIMP should actually make an overlapping feature. That and basic shapes, which would make it much more useful for basic stuff.But then, I’m neither a GIMP dev nor a heavy user and I have no idea of their target audience.
If you are making memes, Inkscape is what you are using most of the times. Though the lack of 2 click and 1 drag cropping, makes me feel a bit frustrated (still, you can crop).
Linux users try not to be Apple fanboys but replace popular Apple product with popular Linux product challenge (impossible)
Photopea
