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What real world work can be done in Photoshop but not GIMP?

It isn't that GIMP lacks features Photoshop has, it's that Adobe has focused on making work easier at the professional level. It simply has smarter tools and systems that are designed to help streamline workflows. Content aware fill is a decent example: GIMP has a plugin that can do the same task, but it's slower, not as effective, and doesn't come out-of-the-box. Sure, content aware fill isn't a necessary tool, and GIMP has its own version, but Photoshop's is faster and better. And in the real world, that matters more than straightforward feature parity.

I'm absolutely no fan of GIMP*, but for most people's needs it's absolutely got the tools necessary to do the job needed. But when your entire career is working with digital images** having that extra power and efficiency in your workflow makes a huge difference. And some of those benefits happen to pan out for everybody.

*I'm no pro, and Photoshop would mostly be wasted on me. I use Pixelmator for image editing.
**Print support is a red herring, since GIMP isn't concerned with it, so it's not worth bringing up beyond this footnote.

Heck, even if you want to get an equivalent of MS Paint

OMFG!!! You're holding-out MS Paint as an example of "Software not available on the Mac"????

Seriously?!? I've used MS Paint for years, and believe you, me, I wouldn't hold it up as a shining example of ANYTHING...

Besides, this Search seems to show SEVERAL highly-rated Freeware examples of Paintbox software for OS X. In fact, the first one I looked-at from that MacUpdate search, "Paintbrush" is not only Open Source and Free, but is pretty-much an equivalent to MS Paint. So, What's YOUR problem that you can't seem to find anything suitable?

And BTW, NEWSFLASH: NOT EVERY PIECE OF SOFTWARE HAS TO COST ZERO DOLLARS TO BE WORTHWHILE!!!

If someone feels like they deserve $5, $10, or $20, AND YOU LIKE THE SOFTWARE, FFS, PUT A CROWBAR IN YOUR WALLET!!! Most of those companies have a Free Trial period, anyway (something I admit that really do wish that ANY of the "App Stores" (regardless of platform) would start allowing, though)

But, Damn! Even Pixelmator, which is a DAMN sight more full-featured than MS Paint (and in fact, is closer to The Gimp or Photoshop), is only $30, and it has a Free Trial.

If you have a Mac, Pixelmator is a very decent alternative to Photoshop.

http://www.pixelmator.com/ An amazing piece of software, and only $15! Seriously, if you have a Mac and you don't get this you are doing yourself a disservice.

Because it is profitable.
http://www.pixelmator.com/blog/2011/01/25/pixelmator-grosses-1-million-on-the-mac-app-store/

Valid Photoshop license holder speaking here.

Yes, it's great that Gimp exists and that it's free in both senses of the word.

The problem is that Gimp keeps getting compared to Photoshop, as though it's any kind of contest.

If this were a racing event, the only way you'd get Gimp up against Photoshop is to do away with the class system. They call it an outlaw race, in automotive racing.

If you want to compare Gimp to something in the commercial world, compare it to Photoshop Elements, or Pixelmator.

Can I point to apps like Acorn and Paint.Net and Pixwlmator and Krita and others instead? These are all apps that were started long after GIMP was, and yet have managed to support things like 16 bit colorspaces, and other things.

While they might not all be FLOSS, I would argue that all of them are better than GIMP because they are far more usable, have far better support for colorspaces and high bit depth, were developed AFTER the GIMP was (and in less time), and don't have insulting names. I am not kidding about the latter btw, the GIMP folk have drawn a line in the sand when it comes to the name, but they are simply wrong there (like they are on so many things). It is childish, it is insulting, and it is unprofessional.

But that isn't why I avoid GIMP, it is because of the glacial pace of development, the horrible usability, the utter lack of non-destructive editing, and so many other factors,

As the list at the start of this post, small teams can produce high quality tools. The GIMP team has been spinning its wheels (and arguing what color they should be) for years and years, and after they release 2.8 (sometime this decade?) it will still pale in comparison to Photoshop 7. And that was released a decade ago.

In the mean time I rarely open Photoshop, unless I have something really hardcore to do. 95% of the time the aforementioned Acorn does what I need. I can't say the same about GIMP.

Wow, this is just amazing and surprising news...that people still use GIMP. One word...Pixelmator.

I wonder why everyone doesn't run this, then?

Built exclusively for Mac OS X

Oh, that's why.

Wow, this is just amazing and surprising news...that people still use GIMP. One word...Pixelmator. That's a word, isn't it? It's sort of like an alligator for pixels. GIMP is well...uh...gimp.

If you want Gimp to gain ground, why does it still
feel like it is aimed at code-heads? I do not like
compiling my own programs and like apps to
install easily with a good simple installer or by
drag and drop. I do not wish to hunt around for
open source libraries which, for some reason,
are not included but are needed to run.

I've never ever compiled a single version of GIMP. Maybe you've been looking at the wrong place? Of course you can get the source code for GIMP to compile it yourself; that's the wohle point of Open Source/Free Software. However, there's no need to do so. Ready to install binaries (for Windows even with installer) are available.

Why is there not a user-friendly mac build that
installs easily and uses a native mac UI?

Maybe because using the native Mac UI would basically mean a complete rewrite of the UI code, and that's just not worth it for them?

If http://www.pixelmator.com/ can do it, why
not gimp?

From the web page I gather that Pixelmator is a pure Mac program. Of course, if you only target the Mac, it's easy (actually even the easiest option) to support the native Mac UI. Gimp is a multiplatform application, and it should be obvious that you cannot use the native Mac UI on Windows or Linux. So the option is to either write 3 completely separate UIs to be native on every OS (or maybe even 4 UIs to please both KDE and Gnome users on Linux :-)), or simply stick to one UI which runs on all targeted platforms. Also note that implementing several UIs reduces the time which can be spend on actual features.

It’s all well and good that it can open PSDs
(whose file format I hear is a bit of a nightmare),
but can it work with smart objects?

WTF are smart objects?

Can I use it to open and edit Camera Raw files
as a professional and not feel limited by the
technology?

GIMP manipulates images, not feelings :-)

No, they are far too lazy and incompetent to plan that far ahead. Steve Jobs nailed Adobe's corporate personality perfectly when he called them lazy. They just throw feces^H^H^H^H^H features at the wall and see what sticks, and if they break things in the process, they don't care. Heck, the entire Carbon API was put in almost entirely to placate Adobe because they were too lazy to port to Cocoa ten years ago. Now after giving them TEN YEARS to clean up their mess and move to new APIs, they're STILL whining that they have to rework their GUI to move to 64-bit. They've known that this was coming for a DECADE and still they whine that they're having to do actual work. AMAZING!

I spent several hundred dollars to buy CS3, only to find out after I bought it that they didn't support my machine (and didn't mention it in their specs). I had to spend three days hacking up their worthless software just to get it to install and launch on my case-sensitve HFS+ root volume.

I didn't buy the CS4 upgrade because I would have to go through the same hell. I won't be buying CS5 because I would have to go through the same hell. Until an Apple OS upgrade breaks CS3 in some show-stopper way, I won't be buying future versions of their suite. If I'm paying several hundred bucks for a piece of software, I expect it to work. If there are bugs, that's fine, but not even being able to install the piece of excrement crosses a line. I was sorely tempted to file a class action suit, but I'm just too busy to be bothered.

The worst part is that it would take Adobe less time to fix these problems than it took me to hack their piece of s**t app for myself. Yet two updates later, they STILL haven't bothered to spend two or three days of a single developer's time to fix them. Maybe it's because they don't have a single competent developer among them to do the work? After all, Apple even provided detailed directions.

Or maybe it's just because they don't care. As far as they are concerned, they own the market. They have no competition, so they have the right to make every user conform to their specifications with impunity. No matter how bad they make things for their users---no matter how many hoops we have to jump through---we'll still have to use their shovelware. Fortunately, there are alternatives. If Apple ever makes a change to the OS that breaks CS3, I'll just drag it to the trash rather than pay the crooks at Adobe hundreds of dollars for another update that won't install without hackery.

I hope for everyone's sake that HTML5 buries flash and Pixelmator buries Photoshop. The world would be a better place without companies like Adobe.

What would be the backlash if after the next OS X/Safari update, Adobe announced no more Mac support for PDF, Flash, Photoshop, CS, etc...

Well, that would mostly hit Apple's "graphics professional" customers, since most of Adobe's products are too expensive for anyone else.

Now, 10-15 years ago, that would have been curtains for Apple, since that was their market niche. Today, I suspect that Apple is more interested in the home/school/soho market, although Final Cut and Aperture are partial competitors/replacements for Adobe CS.

However, while pro users are often locked into Adobe (and, as you say, GIMP ain't Photoshop, however much it wants to be) there are viable alternatives to Adobe's "personal" products: iPhoto pretty much removes most of the need for Photoshop Elements (I've also been meaning to give Pixelmator a try) and Adobe has already dropped all but the expensive "pro" version of Acrobat from the Mac because OSX already does most of what Acrobat Standard offers in terms of creation, annotation and simple editing of PDFs.

As for Flash: dropping the Flash player from Mac might hurt Mac users. However, given that zillions of iPhone users seem to manage without Flash, and Jobs has persuaded several high-profile sites to support HTML5, so this could backfire.

Meanwhile, Adobe has been doing a pretty good job of annoying its own users cross-platform, with sky-high upgrade prices, bugs, feeping creaturism and other annoyances (such as completely changing the API for Flash Pro with every release). If I couldn't get CS at education prices I'd have been priced out ages ago.

(...and the less said about Illustrator the better - does anybody find it remotely usable? I just fire up Windows in a VM and run Xara instead - its a crying shame that the Mac port of that fizzled).

For Mac users, there are Pixelmator and Acorn. For web users in general, there is Aviary.

Just because dozens of programs has the same way of doing something doesn't mean that it's wrong. The Gimp is for gimps. Doing things differently for the sake of being different doesn't cut it.

IMHO the program with the best potential at replacing photoshop, so far, is Pixelmator.

Not forgetting on OS X Pixelmator which is a truly *excellent* piece of software

There is no replacement for all of Photoshop's functions, but the majority of the functions normal people use can be found in Pixelmator or Acorn. For added points, Acorn has a Python powered plugin interface.

Why has no one suggested Pixelmator?

It's not a complete PS replacement, but it does have enough tools to get the job done most of the time.

I like your logic.

Apple's free iPhoto application doesn't do stuff as well as you'd like, therefore the Mac fails at "getting stuff done."

Yup, that's good thinking, right there. There can't possibly be any other apps for the Mac outside of Apple, can there?

http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/
http://www.pixelmator.com/
http://seashore.sourceforge.net/

Ah, you get the idea.

And no, the iPhoto red-eye removal is not just a black paint tool. I just tried it (never use iPhoto, but was curious about your earlier claim) and it seems to try to find nearby red pixels before stripping the red out and shading them with a dark grey. I don't like red-eye removal tools at the best of times, so I'd not tried this before.

Out of curiosity, do any image editors actually recognise an eye, and refuse to use a red-eye reduction tool outside the eye's pupil? That's pretty sophisticated image recognition.

It's like the difference between The Gimp and Pixelmator.

Both do image editing (and in this case The Gimp is a more powerful tool) but Pixelmator fits in with the look and feel of OS X and works extremely well with other Mac apps. In fact look at the two websites - The Gimp's site looks like crap. Having used both to some degree and not needing the full power of The Gimp, I dumped it for Pixelmator a long time back. The UI is unbelievably far ahead of The Gimp.

If you're going to use an app for any length of time, it should be as comfortable as possible. This is obvious for cars, for furniture, for workplaces but somehow it's a debated point for software applications. Aesthetics are important, and for some reason Mac users care a lot about the concept.

That's a long answer to your somewhat troll-y question, but there it is. Mac users can certainly use apps that work on Linux and Windows, we just choose not to if something more usable exists.

But the little bit of support they give makes pixelmator for leopard 64bit by default or at least with little effort on the developer's part.

I wholeheartedly agree. We need to stop touting OO as a good substitute for Office.

Office isn't very good, and for OOo to do *worse* than it is a pretty miserable achievement. We need to get some fresh faces involved with the project to either clean things up (a la Firefox), or start from scratch to build an application that's got an overall "friendlier" appearance.

"Lack of features" isn't even the biggest issue here. Despite being much "simpler", I find AbiWord to be vastly superior to OOo, even though its featureset is comparatively limited.

The GIMP has been stumbling along for years upon years, and has never really managed to reach a state of usefulness to designers. However, in a very short period of time, two guys wrote an f---ing amazing shareware "Photoshop substitute" for Mac OS. Granted, it's not photoshop, but unlike The GIMP, or OOo, it's fast, has a good UI, and even though it lacks some of Photoshop's more advanced features, it's more than adequate for my needs.

It's not open-source or cross-platform, but seriously..... two guys wrote it in their spare time!

I'll also ignore that comment about teaching primary schoolers LaTeX. I'm a reasonably savvy university student, and I find LaTeX absolutely unusable. It's got to be one of the most difficult and convoluted pieces of software in widespread use. It's great in concept, but make one tiny syntax error, and the compiler blows up with a 2-page long indecipherable error message. Most C compliers have better error handling.

If it doesn't do what I want though I may end up getting Photoshop CS3, which you can't get running on Linux without jumping through hoops.

Before going CS3 I'd recommend giving Pixelmator a try. It isn't quite ready to replace Photoshop yet for my needs but it is a very good start and I look forward to the day it can.

As for CS3 itself I was rather disappointed with it coming from PS7 on Windows XP to CS3 on OS 10.4. The interface behaves differently from other Mac applications and the keyboard shortcuts are pretty awful and downright akward to use - not to mention there is hardly any keyboard shortcuts for many things I use frequently. Even worse is the CS3 apps aren't consistent interface or behavior wise between each other. Scroll wheel doesn't scroll the layers box in Illustrator but it does in Photoshop, cmd+` cycles windows in every app except Photoshop were it just does nothing, etc. Considering how much money it costs one would think Adobe could produce a better quality set of applications.

I wish Apple would either buy them [Adobe] or produce their own competing equivalents of Illustrator and Photoshop.

the OS X interface is awful

I guess it depends on your taste. Neither I nor many other Mac users have a problem with it.

There are a few issues that I see frequently brought up by Mac users. The following are the few I consider major and really bother me:

• Keyboard shortcuts do not exist for all menu items and navigating them quickly is not nearly as efficient as in Windows with a dedicated key for each one. The find as you type approach navigating them in OS X requires pressing one key or multiple keys together depending on your shortcuts setup to focus on the menu bar and then typing the first letter or more depending on the names of the menus starting the the same letter(s) or not, pressing return or down, and then repeating as needed. In Windows I just hold one dedicated menu key, alt, and press the underlined letter for each item in the menu which is much less keystrokes and considerably faster.
• The menu bar is fixed on the primary display which doesn't work very well when using applications on secondary displays.
• The dock has a few issues.
• The mouse acceleration curve feels very wrong.
• The lack of any appearance customization aside from graphite or aqua buttons/widgets. I find the UI very bright and all the white/off white begins to burn my eyes with LCDs even with the brightness down very low. Good thing for ctrl+opt+cmd+8 to invert the entire desktop for those long coding or reading sessions.

Despite this I still prefer OS X over both XP and Vista. I was rather disappointed that Leopard didn't so much as address even one of the issues and it seems resolution independence was dropped too. :|

I mean, the only "innovation" here is that one company is making the CPU, chipset and graphics card. You know, like Intel have been for years. But AMD make one where the graphics card is targeted at gamers. Whoop-de-fucking-do.

This guy did a great comparison of three new image editors for OS X that use Core Image. All of these apps let you move the image while using a filter dialog box.

http://jonwhipple.com/blog/2007/10/29/image-is-everything/

The three apps are Pixelmator, Acorn, and DrawIt.

MacOS X users should check out Pixelmator. It's relatively new into the arena and isn't as powerful as Photoshop, but it covers most of the basics (Including layers). I've played with it a bit and it looks awesome.

It also does full screen editing http://www.pixelmator.com/i/hp/pixelmator-fullscreen.jpg">http://www.pixelmator.com/i/hp/pixelmator-fullscreen.jpg

WItness that Mac OS X 10.4 and later come with a complete set of Photoshop clone construction tools. See Acorn, DrawIt, Pixelmator and even later versions of GraphicConverter. Adobe dragged their heels too long.

Thing is that I find funny, that its taken 8 versions to have a Draw Circle Tool in Photoshop...The Amiga Dpaint had that from Day one.

Totally different apps. Even the titles give this away: Photoshop DPaint. Photoshop didn't have a draw circle because it's not a drawing or painting application - you would use Freehand or Illustrator for that. Photoshop is for the manipulation of pre-prepared images, and it is unrivalled at this.

Of course, whether you actually need its power rather depends on your line of work. Personally, I don't. iPhoto and Graphic Converter are plenty for me, though I'm keeping my eye on Pixelmator as well. However, those tools are fine for the kind of minor photo retouching I do. To do the full Photoshop workflow I'm not kidding myself - Photoshop has no serious competitor in its field.

Cheers,
Ian

I'll believe in Pixelmator when I see it. For what it's worth, at least two of the promo images here have Photoshop CS3 tags in them.

A free program that does Core Image manipulations is LiveQuartz, which is up to version 1.6.4. I haven't used it, so can't vouch for the interface, or whether its developer is as boy-band cute as Pixelmator's.

On the OS X side of things, when OS X was updated with core image a lot of people were talking about how someone would be able to swoop in and offer a front-end to all the built in image filters that were part of core image. (you can see a list of all the filters that are part of it here. You could open up Core Image Fun House (on the OS X install disc) and play around will all the filters, and easily imagine a company making an interface for that power, offering 60% of the power of photoshop for a fraction of the cost.

Cut a long story short, someone seems to be almost ready to finally do this, Pixelmator. Cheap, neat and looks like it's easy to use. Not a real photoshop competitor, but then again most people pirate photoshop for light photo retouching and occasional messing around. This looks like it could handle what a lot of casual photoshop users want without the insane price tag.