I’m starting this off by saying that I’m looking for any type of reasonably advanced photo manipulation tool, that runs natively under Linux. It doesn’t have to be FOSS.
I switched to Linux, from Windows, about three years ago. I don’t regret the decision whatsoever. However, one thing that has not gotten me away from Windows entirely, is the severe lack of photo editing tools.
So what’s available? Well, you have GIMP. And then there’s Krita, but that’s more of a drawing software. And then…
Well that’s it. As far as I know.
1. GIMP
Now, as someone migrating from Photoshop, GIMP was incredibly frustrating, and I didn’t understand anything even after a few weeks of trying to get into it. Development seemed really slow, too. It’s far from intuitive, and things that really should take a few steps, seemingly takes twenty (like wrapping text on a path? Should that really be that difficult?).
I would assume if you’re starting off with GIMP, having never touched Photoshop, then it’d be no issue. But as a user migrating, I really can’t find myself spending months upon months to learn this program. It’s not viable for me.
No hate against GIMP, I’m sure it works wonders for those who have managed to learn it. But I can’t see myself using it, and I don’t find myself comfortable within it, as someone migrating from Photoshop.
2. Krita
Krita, on the other hand, I like much more. But, it’s more of a drawing program. Its development is more focused on drawing, and It’s missing some features that I want - namely selection tools. Filters are good, but I find G’MIC really slow. It also really chugs when working with large files.
Both of these programs are FOSS. I like that. I like FOSS software. But, apart from that, are there really no good alternatives to Photoshop? Again, doesn’t need to be FOSS. I understand more complex programs take more development power, and I have no problem using something even paid and proprietary, as long as it runs on Linux natively.
I’ve tried running Photoshop under WINE, and it works - barely. For quick edits, it might work fine. But not for the work I do.
So I raise the question again. Are there no good alternatives to Photoshop? And then I raise a follow-up question, that you may or may not want to answer: If not, why?
Thanks in advance!
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GIMP has its share of issues, just like any other software. but it’s biggest issue is that somewhere down the line general users got this idea in their head that it was supposed to be a Photoshop clone.
So they go into it with certain expectations and then get frustrated when it doesn’t work that way. People like me, who actually learned GIMP before PS, obviously didn’t go in with the same bias and therefore have a much better grasp on it.
Gimp is not a Photoshop clone. it’s its own piece of kit with it’s own design and feature decisions that some may like and others may not. That’s life. The developers have no obligation to follow any other software design scheme any more than Sony is obligated to follow LGs TV UI. They’re not clones, they’re alternatives.
if you think Gimps only function is to copy Photoshop, you’re in for a bad time. If you want to use gimp as an ALTERNATIVE and go in without the bias, you’ll likely learn your way around a LOT faster.
I’m not excusing Gimps failings. far from it. but I AM saying that half the issue is the Photoshop users thinking that gimp only exists to copy everything from their precious Adobe daddy. And that’s simply not true.
Honestly I feel like this attitude is the reason GIMP’s UX suffers. They’re so determined to be “not like photoshop” that they’re unwilling to fix some of their more boneheaded UI decisions out of fear that they’d be seen as copying photoshop.
That’s not exactly my impression from following the design conversations through the years. They’re more approaching decisions from the angle of what they think is best, their philosophy is to plainly ignore what others do and follow their own direction. Of course taking inspiration from Photoshop might sometimes be a good thing, if it doesn’t conflict with the GIMP way of doing things.
I’ve noticed in recent years some newcomer devs have had discussions on how to design their contributions, mentioning Photoshop and other alternative ways and there were just conversations about the merits of the different approaches that could be taken and what would fit the GIMP best, without bias.
Anyway, I wasn’t aware that GIMP UX suffers, I’ve never used anything else and am happy with it. It seem logical to me, obviously with fewer features than Photoshop but how much can a couple of guys do and they’ve had to refactor most of the GIMP for 3.0, but that’ll open up for a lot of functionality being added moving forward…
Anyway, I wasn’t aware that GIMP UX suffers, I’ve never used anything else and am happy with it.
My argument here is that by never having used anything else, you wouldn’t necessarily realize how much better other UX choices could have been.
That said, I do have to give the devs some credit, as they have fixed two major issues, by adding single-window-mode and unifying the transform tools. Having each transform be its own separate tool was just awful UX IMO.
The biggest remaining UX problem, in my opinion, is the way GIMP forces layers to have fixed boundaries. Literally no other layer-based image editor has fixed layer boundaries, because it makes very little sense as a concept. Layers should solely be defined by their content, not by arbitrary layer properties set in a dialog box.
I once heard it explained that gimps programmers goal was to make a program that can edit pictures. Their goal was not to edit pictures.
People like me, who actually learned GIMP before PS, obviously didn’t go in with the same bias and therefore have a much better grasp on it.
Speaking for myself, I can say that’s true. To the point that even if I’ve got access to both, my default would be GIMP.
Agree, partly.
I’ve migrated to a lot of different programs since switching to Linux: Premiere to Resolve, 3DS Max to Blender, to name a few. And I never expected the switch from Photoshop, which I so dearly love, to whatever good alternative that exists - to be easy. I’m willing to put in the time to learn GIMP, if only it hadn’t such glaring and prominent issues that make it really difficult to use.
I’m not expecting a clone. I’m not expecting the UI to be the same. And, I’m willing to learn this program from the ground up. But I want a consistent experience - an app that works. For me, GIMP gets in the way a lot; making things unnecessarily difficult just for the sake of being “different”.
I don’t mean to hate on GIMP. It works very well for people who like it. But we all have different preferences when it comes to software, and in the end - It’s just, not a good alternative for what I prefer. I’m willing to learn something new, but from my experience, GIMP will have (and has) a lot of icks that I just need to “put up with” to be usable. Especially efficiency. GIMP does not feel efficient, like at all. Might be because I haven’t learned it, but even Resolve felt efficient the first time I used it.
I don’t have the same experience with Krita whatsoever. And sure, maybe Krita is a little closer to Photoshop than GIMP is, but I much prefer Krita’s overall experience much more than GIMP - even if it’s missing some more advanced features.
I will stick to Krita, most likely, as that’s what I find myself most comfortable with. But it’s been interesting to hear what everyone else’s experiences are.
Photogimp is a plugin for people coming from photoshop but still may not be the exact clone
I think one of the most insidious things about Photoshop is that it is a powerful, complex program. Using it is a skill. Which means that even if you think you are getting the better of Adobe by pirating their software, you are still building your own skills with their program, which is so full of features that classes can be taught about using it. In the end, that’s a win for Adobe and their proprietary software, because if you end up getting good enough to make money from that program, you will end up finding yourself in a position where you eventually pay them, or work for someone who does. This is to the detriment of any other photo editor, of course. You won’t care about how good GIMP or anything else is, much less fund it, because you won’t want to use it, because you know Photoshop.
If I had deep wallets I would love to start funding GIMP for development and rebranding. But I don’t have that kind of cash to push around :P
I’ve read that part of why GIMP is the way it is is because it’s meant to be a testbed for the GTK UI library, so features are added to use new UI elements as much as they are to aid photo manipulation, and in some cases it’s considered preferable to use a weird widget so it’s got a test case rather than whichever widget leads to the best UX. I don’t think I’ve ever looked for a more definitive source than a Lemmy/Reddit comment, but it’s at least consistent with my experience of using GIMP.
Gtk started as the Gimp Tool Kit but I don’t think there has been any real connection for ages. We’re taking about 1997 or something.
Guy that made the Pantone port after that whole fiasco also made the pinkest pink and blackest black paints money can buy. His company is currently developing an alternative to Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, aaaand… I think Premiere?
It’s being developed under the brand “Abode”
Haha! I checked the Kickstarter and I absolutely love the whole thing! Doesn’t look like it’ll be for Linux, though (It says “PC and Mac” on the kickstarter), but I’ll definitely follow the progress of this.
I’m just hoping Linux is supported, and if it is, not being built in Electron would be a huge bonus
I read that as “adobe” and thought you were kidding lmao
Link to the project:
There’s also
Looks like a cash grab tbh
Adobe’s annual revenue is over 18 billion dollars Gimp has one developer who is almost full time and various part time contributions. One answer is that Linux support would be both non-trivial and would only add 1-3% to revenue for a multi platform editor. There WAS a reputably professional editor bloom.app at one point but it seems to have died.
GIMP is beyond stale and it’s frustrating to see people recommend it as an “alternative” to Photoshop when it’s about as actively developed as X11. The fact it’s making rounds on FOSS news channels/sites because they ported the UI to GTK 3 (Which was replaced by GTK4 3 years ago now) is really a sign of how bad the project has gotten.
Photopea is a near feature-for-feature clone of Photoshop, designed around the superior UX and UI of photoshop, and all within a webapp that leverages hardware acceleration. All done by a single person. The downside is that it’s a proprietary webapp that costs money to use without ads clogging half the screen.
And you know what? I STILL prefer Photopea to GIMP, after using the latter for years. GIMP is old, slow, and pretty much dead in the water and I’m certain that they’d have produced 3.0 faster if someone had rewritten it over a weekend instead of trying to port the godawful mess of tech debt that must be going on inside the GIMP project atm.-
Photoshop getting better support via WINE/Proton is more likely than GIMP ever returning to its hay-day of being a true competitor to PS.
Downside of Photopea is it’s not open-source (mainly because the creator needs ad revenue to run it, but I digress)
Prompt move to GTK3 and now 4 adds very little value to gimp. Using it as benchmark is completely useless. If I understand correctly there are major changes happening under the hood and the effort may not have much effect until the work is finished.
I know there’s a config file for GIMP that make it more like Photoshop, called PhotoGIMP. It’s on GitHub.
Nothing currently can compete with Adobe Photoshop. Unless they port it to linux. It would take open source devs serious time to catch up to Photoshop development. Plus without making millions of dollars for decades, the development of another application of that scale and complexity would be a serious undertaking. That said GIMP as you know is probably the best “alternative”. For me I just dual-boot and use windows for basically Adobe Suite. All other times I use linux. However I learned GIMP a long time ago so I am comfortable using it for what it can do, and I’m probably faster in GIMP than PS. I am not a professional graphic designer etc. though.
One of the main reasons my wife hasn’t taken the Linux plunge is Photoshop support and a lack of feature-complete alternatives with sane UI design choices. We would gladly pay for a Linux version of Photoshop at this point.
It"s dawning on me now as I write this that Proton could be the secret sauce that slays this monster. Has anyone tried adding Photoshop as a non-Steam app to the Steam client, lately?
Proton is designed for games. Have you tried just using regular wine? I bet if you google “wine photoshop linux tutorial” tons of them will pop up
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It looks like you already find what they alternatives are, but as you noticed they’re not Photoshop. They work differently so you’ll need to develop a different set of skills to used them.
If what you want is to use Photoshop, the best is to install Photoshop itself with Wine.
I hear you. I hate Photoshop, glory to Photoshop and all that. You can download a Windows 10 iso for free. Fire it up in Boxes or whatever VM software you have and enjoy unadulterated Photoshop. Sure, you’re running a whole bloated OS and emulating hardware for just one app, but disk space is cheap, and you can disconnect the virtual nic if you don’t want it online.
It’s not a native app, but have you tried photopea?
After some time living with Gimp/Krita etc. you will learn to do the things you did with Photoshop. It does takes some time and research/learning. I was real comfy with PS and do miss it but the more I’ve gone without, the more I’ve found ways to tackle the things I need to do with alternatives.
GIMP is made that way on purpose.
It can do lots of magical things, but it seems like the developers tried to make it as different as possible just for the sake of being different.
I’m sure that if you bring up something to a developer of GIMP that “isn’t like Photoshop because it’s buried under 4 menus”, the only thing the developer will do to address the issue is release an update that then buries the feature under 5 menus.
They got their weird software with its weird name and they are PROUD of how weird it all is.
All I can suggest with it is to keep searching Google or YouTube on how to do things with it.
I’ve mostly used Affinity and GIMP over the years. Although my work just got me Photoshop so that I can explore some of its “smart” AI stuff to help with some things.
but it seems like the developers tried to make it as different as possible just for the sake of being different.
They might actually be trying to avoid getting sued by Adobe.
Are there no good alternatives to Photoshop?
If you want “Photoshop but not named Photoshop”, then no. If you want something that actually fits the definition of “alternative to”, then yes: Gimp.
