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The History of Photoshop
Gammu writes "For the past fifteen plus years, Photoshop has turned into the killer app for graphics designers on the Mac. It was originally written as a support app for a grad student's thesis and struggled to find wide commercial release. Eventually, Adobe licensed the app and has sold millions of copies." Achewood's Chris Onstad also offers a different take of how it all went down.
...Oh :(
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I think it was less Adobe's licencing of the product than simply their tacit approval of its widespread warezing that lead to the rise of Photoshop. Despite it's obscene price, Adobe have never seemed interested in curbing the rampant pirating of this particular product.
The reason is obvious of course. Better for Johnny the budding graphics designer to get familiar with "'Shopping" than take the legal route and become familiar with the like of the Gimp, etc. Personally, I think Adobe themselves upload the lastest hacked copies of Photoshop to the usual places.
May the Maths Be with you!
Eventually, Adobe licensed the app and has sold millions of copies.
... well, it doesn't have much. Bridge? ACR? All of the related products like Lightroom? The HISTORY of it is a little academic, at this point (both literally and figuratively).
*sigh*
It's not like Adobe didn't put a LITTLE bit of work into it over the years, you know? They didn't just license it, they've - for all practical purposes - completely rebuilt it over and over. If they hadn't, that which they licensed would have been totally eclipsed by products like Corel's PhotoPaint, etc. CS3 has about as much resemblance to the initial product as
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Looking back, it seemed a bit crazy that the Mac wasn't colour for many years. Especially given the competition.
Maybe we would all be using Macs if they at least had a 16 or 256 colour display a few years earlier.
Photoshop is put on a pedestal as being THE ONLY program you should use to edit images.
I was wondering why that is?
Is it because graphics designers who do large print are used to using Photoshop and do not see a point in switching to an unknown program?
Is it because there are no alternatives that have the features they need?
Are free programs such as the GIMP just not on par? I have used Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and GIMP but I don't really see why Photoshop is hallmarked as the best. That being said I am not a graphics expert so I was wondering if someone who is and used these programs for more then 5 minutes could give me a good answer.
Because it's not.
For one thing Photoshop has a lot of commercial plugins available for it. Generally when professionals say they use Photoshop they mean they use Photoshop and a lot of plugins that just aren't available for other graphics programs like GIMP.
Search slashdot.
You'll find many people asking the same question. And, many people answering it.
Do we really need to go through this particular issue AGAIN?
I guess the itty bitty little article on the history of Photoshop was all right, but the linked comic really stunk. Aside from lousy grammar and poor sentence flow, it just wasn't funny.
Your message is written with such a serious tone, and I'll bite.
Do a slashdot search for any of the following terms, and you'll quickly be drawn into threads about why :
* GIMP;
* CMYK;
* Plugin xXx will do what you're looking for;
* But it won't do it in 32-bit colour with customized colourmap support unless you compile it yourself and since I use gentoo I'm still waiting for KDE to finish compiling;
* Yur momma is teh BOM in bed;
* Hitler used Photoshop;
* Suck a cock and die.
I always read those threads, mainly because I am interested in German history and human psychology. I couldn't give a rat's ass about Photoshop or graphic design.
Photoshop is a graphics program? I thought is was just another religion.
The gimp lacks adjustment layers and other stuff that makes the workflow in PS easier. There's also the fact that ever increasing numbers of graphic artists learn from photoshop tutorials, they know which buttons to click but rarely understand the underlying concepts.
Nearly everything can be done in the GIMP (or cinepaint) if the operator knows what they're doing. If you are doing prepress, then Scribus has excellent CMYK support.
The technical arguments are mostly bunk, the workflow issue isn't.
Isn't it over $600 now (street price)? That's insane.
I find ulead's Photoimpact 10x easier to use and only $50
http://www.ulead.com/pi/
It can do virtually everything photoshop can do and also load/save psd files
A considerable empire and fortune have been built around PhotoShop. Adobe had sold 3,000,000 coppies by year 2000. I presume they have sold about as much since. I wonder how the creators were rewarded and what they think of the monster. Here are some questions the article raises but does not answer:
I'm relatively sure they don't come around here and fanboy dis GIMP.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You know, it runs on Windows too.
FC Closer
I do graphic design for a living, and there are a number of areas where The GIMP is lacking - but the big issue is in color space allowances. No CMYK support means no worky in the print world (unless your press uses RGB). I have to be able to not only convert an image to CMYK, but also control the colors to an extreme - I've had to remove all the color plates from the shot, increase the black plate to compensate, and then paint in spot red (for our press, that is 100% magenta, 50-60% yellow) over certain parts. Plus, the integration into the other parts of my work (working in InDesign/Illustrator for ads) is purely delightful.
Plus, CS2's RAW image importing is.. well.. I love it. Can't even begin to describe how great it is to use it's interface to import raw photos.
I still use the GIMP regularly - for minor stuff - at home. I still prefer my copy of Photoshop 6, though, for anything with any involvement.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
Jesus, I'm used to Dupe stories, but Dupe comments from just a few days ago!??! http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/05/01 36220
Bark less. Wag more.
When you're paying $500 for a paint program, you're making DAMN SURE no one else you're interacting with can get away with something cheaper.
Questions like this are just begging to create an argument, but I'm going to give you my perspective. The primary advantage of using photoshop for me is familiarization. I'm not going to complicate things by explaining layering and color mode compatabilities, there are solutions to those. The key here is that I am lazy. I don't want to search for tools and addons and plugins that offer features that exists elsewhere in a standard installation.
My other reason for preferring photoshop is that if you use any of Adobe's other quality design programs, it is all familiar and often easily interchangeable. Illustrator, Premier, or even just making funny little animated pictures with ImageReady, I feel better using software that I recognize as part of a family. Its probably the same reason I prefer MS Office. See item #1 about being lazy.
It has been ten years already that Clayton Christensen's book "The Innovator's Dilemma" was published. In that book he compared the evolution of several businesses, such as computer disk drives, excavating machines, and department stores.
The conclusion is that there is no fixed point separating "professional" equipment from "entry-level". Systems that are designed for amateurs or small businesses will evolve and become adopted more and more widely by professionals, until the old "professional-level" manufacturers go out of business.
What do the Gimp, Linux, 3.5 inch hard disks, and backhoe excavators have in common? They were created for amateurs, but are now used by many businesses. Perhaps there are some huge databases where 3.5 inch disks won't do and there may exist some mines where cable-actuated mechanical excavators are still used, but they are becoming less and less common.
If I were a Photoshop designer I would at least make an effort to learn how to use the Gimp. At least that seems the prudent thing to do.
Then why the frell are you posting a comment at all?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
They say its the reason the iPhone is gonna be so good
...in ten years.
In 1988 or 1989 I was able to try a Macintosh II (big desktop form factor with about 6 expansion slots). Thing had a pretty serious graphics card driving a 17" monitor at full color (or what looked like full color, it certainly was more than 256) and had a flatbed scanner connected to its SCSI port. This was way above and beyond any of the newer PCs I had used at that time. And, IIRC, the Mac II came out in 1987, although I don't know what graphic card options were available for it at release. Oh, those were the good old days... a 17" monitor was generally a huge cube of a beast, those old Macs ran Aldus PageMaker and Aldus Digital Darkroom. I didn't actually even hear of Photoshop until about 1993.
I think the answer can be found by looking at Adobe's 3 beautiful office towers in San Jose, California...4 /Adobe_HQ.jpg
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/6/6
And also, while there are sound reasons to migrate off Windows that have nothing to do with price (Viruses, arbitrary obsoleteing of formats, etc, etc, etc). And even with all that motivation, people still aren't willing to learn anything new. There's not really any huge reason to migrate off of Photoshop except price. The issues that tend to annoy users of photoshop (like Adobe's glacial pace of implementing substantial updates, like support for use of more than 2 cores.), just aren't that bad. Thus Adobe continues to thrive, and nobody really even complains that much.
"I think it was less Adobe's licensing of the product than simply their tacit approval of its widespread warezing that lead to the rise of Photoshop."
Or maybe like slashdot's always reminding us. "Give in, you can't fight us."
I wouldn't say better. Aside from OS X being more intuitive, it has features like Exposé and Automator that greatly enhance the Photoshop experience.
Your question mentioned graphic design, which I think in some ways may be a bit off. That's an area in which I think Illustrator and its brethren are more important. However, I can answer the photographer's version of PSvsGIMP. I'm not a professional photographer in that no one is yet paying me to live and breathe photography, yet that's what I do. To save you trying to dig up my info here's a link to my vanity site:
http://klophoto.com/
Okay, so having established (hopefully!) that I know what I'm talking about, the reason I don't - and CAN'T - use GIMP is the lack of adjustment layers. Over 75% of what I do involves adjustment layers. They allow you to make changes to things like levels, curves, channel mixer, and much more for part of the image or the entire thing (based on masking). The reason they're so wonderful is that they're continually editable. That means no stepping back if I adjust one, then the other, and decide it's not exactly what I wanted. Also, they're layers, so I don't have to flatten an image to adjust the overall curves.
I've looked in the past and there was a lot of discussion regarding GIMP's lack of adjustment layers. I'm sure someone has said it more eloquently than I, but this is my two cents. Hope it helped.
Adobe has definitely became a Monopoly in the computer graphics design field. It's mostly Adobe Photoshop for Mac vs Adobe Photoshop for Windows. Things like Corel Draw sort of just faded away.
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The warez scene made photoshop popular. Remember back in the land of dial up where you searched through dozens of websites to find a few that had working links to applications? Back then, there were dozens of warez webmasters competing for the coolest apps and Photoshop 4 was in vogue. This was significant because all those warez runners then used photoshop to make cool graphics for their sites. Other sites drooled and so photoshop spread. As the piracy grew so did the rep, as the rep grew so did the legitimate user base.
Not that adobe will admit rampant photoshop piracy has been the best thing that ever happened to them. The real reason they and other software leaders want to shut it down is that they don't any competitor taking that freeway to success. It is in the interest of market leaders to raise the bar to market entry as much as possible.
I'm a graphic designer and have been using Photoshop since 1999. There are other programs, and some might have merit, but Photoshop is the industry standard. I personally don't see the point in switching to an unknown program, because I have become very familiar with Photoshop. I'm comfortable with it, and it works very well. I find that every time I have a complaint about something I can't do in Photoshop, it turns out that I can do it, I just didn't know how at the time. It's a capable program even in the hands of somebody who only spends 30 minutes learning a couple basic tools. If you really delve into Photoshop you can do almost anything. Like I said, I've used it for years. I'm a Photoshop nerd, and I'd be surprised if I knew even 80% of it. I'm always discovering something new that makes working with it faster and easier. I can't predict what will happen in the future. Apple has thrown in Aperture to compete with Photoshop, and eventually it, or another program, might replace it. I used to use QuarkXpress for page layouts, because it was the industry standard. Then InDesign came along and is rapidly rendering Quark obsolete.
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
I read somewhere that the PrintShop (one of the most popular title on Apple II *EVER*) was rejected by Br0derbund several times.
Maybe because it's a valid comment on how these threads usually go? And maybe, just maybe, the post doesn't really read the threads because they're interested in German history and human psychology. Maybe they *do* actually care about the subject at hand. Just a thought. ;-)
A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.
Back when Photoshop came out, it was like a Colour version of MacPaint.
Photoshop evolved and built on the ideas contained in MacPaint.
You can see this even today, where the most common tools in the
Photoshop tool palette came from the MacPaint Toolset:
- Marquee Tool
- Lasoo Tool
- Pencil Tool
- Eraser Tool
- Text Tool
- Hand Tool
they even had identical icon bitmaps
for the first several versions of Photoshop(!).
Just so y'all know, Photoshop Elements does about as much as most casual users of Photoshop need, and it's less than a Benjamin. /me is waiting for the next version of Elements which will be a Universal app based on CS3. Currently Photoshop Elements is at v.4 for Mac and v.5 for Windows. It currently has to run under Rosetta with MacIntel which makes Baby Jebus cry.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
It's most likely because Adobe knows the difference between commercial piracy of their product and some kid warezing it because he can't afford it. You can bet that graphic houses have fully paid up licensed versions for all their graphic artists because of that. They know that there's a difference between someone making serious money with their illegally obtained product and someone that just wants to be able to add "THIS GUY BLOWS" under a jpeg image of someone's face.
They've had a strong program of educational discounts for a long time, too. I'm pretty sure that they do mind that guy airbushing a hat on someone torrenting a warez version, but not enough to get bent all out of shape. They probably figure that if the guy does eventually start doing commercially viable work using it, he'll get a licensed edition as it's no longer a toy but a tool to him, and that he would then be worth going after for pirating their product.
When you are working on a $7,500 contract producing media that will cost the client over $50,000 to print you don't trust your color profiles to some unknown program.
I can tell you that companies get really, really angry when their logo color comes out wrong. Sometimes you can blame the printer, but more typically it's the designer.
Adobe products do have quirks and some features do have steep learning curves, but they all do color extremely well and are very consistent.
I don't know about the truth of your other statements, but stop spreading the lie about lack of CMYK support:
http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/separate.shtml
Maybe there's something wrong with it; tell the developers if there is. But don't say it doesn't exist, because it does.
Thanks, now have a nice day.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
I like Gimp, but that plugin doesn't sound like it provides professional CMYK support. And it looks like the project is dead:
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
I agree that Adobe has put a lot into Photoshop over the years, however, from my perspective, they are adding Word-like bloat--while the workflow additions are probably helpful to some, and whizzy filters to others, imo, most Pro users are using the base functionality added from PS2-PS5. (I started with PS2, having used Digital Darkroom prior to that). Most everything I do in Photoshop involves curves, sharpening and some layer effects, all of which can be done with PS5--the rest is just 'gilding the lilly.'
From the page you linked to
:)
This plug-in goes some small way towards rectifying the situation, using a trick with layers to fake CMYK support.
If the developer himself says it only goes some small way to fixing the problem, and fakes support, it's hard to say CMYK is supported
In the late 80's early 90's, I started using Photoshop to make cassette tape covers for my band's demo tape, but soon started using it in my school work--namely for lab reports for one of my nuclear engineering classes at the U of Michigan. I remember one professor, in office hours, asked me about my unusual computer generated sketches (other students probably just used a pencil.) I told him I used Photoshop, and he smiled and told me his sons wrote it. I recall that he wasn't so much proud that they'd produced a tool useful to many, but rather how much money they were making. He shared the amazing fact with me that they, just barely out of school themselves, make more than he does, "...well into six figures!"
Obviously, you come from outside the pro graphics world--the GIMP lacks basic functionality (such as CMYK colorspace for one), and is simply not ready for prime-time in this arena. In other words, if Johnny takes the Gimp route, he's going to find himself dealing with a bunch of issues that may be fun for geeks to overcome, but in this case, would take him away from the real task of image editing, unencumbered by software limitations. Photoshop is expensive because it's the best of breed by a wide margin, and Adobe knows it.
Um, what?
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
I never tried it, but it seems like Gimp does run Photoshop plugins as well
"Yur momma is teh BOM in bed"
Do beds even need byte order marks?
"Yur momma is SO big-endian...."
Discuss.
DON'T be fooled by cheap imatations, NO!
r own-comes-clean
_ History.mov
p -splash-screens/
Russell Brown Comes Clean, Reveals All:
"Mr. Brown said in a phone call that he wanted to make a definitive statement regarding the "official story" behind Photoshop, its development by John and Thomas Knoll and exactly how it was acquired by Adobe Systems, Inc."
http://www.photoshopnews.com/2005/05/06/russell-b
For the impatient:
http://video.photoshopnews.com/Official_Photoshop
Photoshop Splash Screens:
http://photoshopnews.com/feature-stories/photosho
Who loves you baby?
~hylas
Well, good CMYK support and reliable color workflow are two of the biggies for anyone who does graphic editing / design comping on a professional level.
It handles type (CS2 and later) better than any competitor.
It allows vector-based postscript overlays.
It allows nearly unlimited undos (history palette)
It allows (CS3 and later) non-destructive filters applied on a per-layer basis.
Channel operations and masking are vastly superior to any competitor.
It works great on 8, 16 and 32 bit images in RGB or CMYK plus any RAW format variant you can throw at it.
It's functionally identical with an identical interface on Mac, Windows and SGI (remember them?).
It has brilliantly designed backward compatibility fallbacks written into the PSD format as they've appended to it over the years.
It has really amazing gif, png and jpg optimization routines built-in via save for web.
It's snappy, responsive and very thoughtfully laid out.
It runs natively on the Mac (instead of via X11), which happens to be where the majority of pro artists spend their time.
Bottom line is, it feels extremely organic to professional artists, has the best featureset, is installed on every freelance station you'll ever sit at, and it works straight out of the box with great documentation. It's the standard.
I check out Gimp, PaintshopPro or whatever about once a year to see how the most recent versions compare. They. Just. Don't. Not for real work, unless your time isn't worth anything.
Macromedia xRes was the only serious competition Photoshop ever had, xRes had a Large File format that Adobe lacked in PS [briefly]. It was a really nice application.
3 830.html
It died an agonizing death, it became Fireworks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_xRes
http://www.adobe.com/support/xres/ts/documents/tn
~hylas
>>"Unfortunately, few commercial software companies did not see the point in Photoshop." And this didn't not not mean success for them at this stage?
Is it because graphics designers who do large print are used to using Photoshop and do not see a point in switching to an unknown program?
Yes. Your other points are also valid, but that's the crux of it. Photoshop is not an expensive program for the use most professionals get out of it. Also there are many people who have been using Photoshop for a long, long time, and the muscle-memory is so ingrained it's unlikely that any other program will be as accepted unless it's substantially better. I mean, I've been using Photoshop since something like v2.5--I know the program. Why switch?
You see the same think with emacs users. There are many text editors that are nearly the same, but very few which are substantively better, so why switch? Even though emacs is kind of arcane and unfriendly to use as compared to a clever IDE, there's a lot of inertia there to overcome.
The last significant challenge to Photoshop was a program (I forget the name) that more or less delayed image composition until the end. It was kind of like a GUI compiler for images--you'd apply these filters and whatnot, and it would show up on the screen, but it wouldn't be applied to your main image until the end. This was a great tool back when 32MB of RAM cost upwards of $1600. You'd just doodle all day, and then when you were satisfied you'd tell it to compile and go home. The machine would grind for a few hours, and then you'd have your final image.
Damn, what was that program called? Anyway, it was OBE--cheaper processors, cheaper RAM, and Adobe working hard to optimize their performance.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
"Photoshop 'n Beer: Made for each other."
Stop repeating this rubbish, CMYK only matters if you're doing pre-press and those doing lay-ups aren't using raster image editors.
PS always had terrible PNG compression, perhaps they updated it.
If you did try the GIMP as you say - several of your other points would not have been made and krita and cinepaint cover most of the others.
Good people will always do better work with bad tools than bad people can do with good.
Would you refuse to employ a carpenter if he didn't use a certain brand of wood saw?
You're the zealot.
Because it was the first graphics program that was really well known. Coke was the first well known soda. Miller Lite was the first well known light beer. Sun made the first well known workstations. Cisco made the... you get the idea. It has nothing to do with Photoshop and everything to do with human psychology.
CMYK matters if anything you work with is ending up in print. On a press. Period. It also matters if files you receive for electronic images come to you in CMYK format. Like if you receive images that have been used in a professional capacity and need to adapt them for web use. Let's not even talk about hexa- or septachrome workflows.
It's not rubbish, it's how the industry works if you want enough control over your image to come out at a professional standard.
If you can't tell the difference, by all means, send RGB files and let the press operator use their best discretion in the conversion. I hold my work to a higher standard, and that's one thing that separates the pros from everyone else. We apply custom curves to give crushed, rich blacks (30%ish cyan mixed with 100% black or it will look weap and thin), we order matchprints, we look at our separations and we attend press checks.
Photoshop's default compression for gif, jpg and png all suck if you use Save As-> after manually indexing. Their save for web option, however, results in wonderful results if the image is suitable for the format you're trying to achieve.
Look, I've used the gimp a ton. I've used PS Pro a ton. For *basic* work, where color, workflow and clunkiness don't matter, they work as advertised. I'm not debating that. Lots of people can use either of those programs until the end of time because it fits their needs. I'm not debating that. But, what if I need to copy and paste? X11 to OS X? No go. Rough, rough, rough edges man. Basic functionality is missing without even breaching the high-end deficiencies.
If you work with RAW images, CMYK, are doing pro level retouching/compositing involving channel ops, detailed masking, fine selections, variable feathers on a selection, adding arbitrary spot color channels, working with HDRI... I could go on until the end of time, point being GIMP and PS Pro aren't even vaguely suitable for the task and Photoshop is an absolute joy to work with.
I guess the point I'm making is if you think GIMP does everything you want it to do, and you don't mind navigating the clunky interface, then great. You don't need Photoshop. It fits your needs.
It most certainly comes nowhere close to fitting mine. Let's agree to disagree on that point.
Support for actual image creation, as opposed to image manipulation is lacking in The GIMP. This is arguably by design, after all, the "IM" stands for Image Manipulation. Nonetheless, I'd like to be able to create things in the GIMP more easily. A friendly and larger vector section would be nice, too, as well as the classic complaint - a single window with docked panels. I've never used Photoshop in my life so I'm not one of those who's simply used to something else; I like to think I'm relatively impartial.
im in ur
Like it or not, PShop is the industry standard. So when you have a question about anything, there are quite a few experts who will explain it clearly to you.
One interesting bit of Photoshop history is that Donald Knuth (of The Art of Computer Programming and TeX fame) was one of the first people to use it. I don't have the book in front of me, but in Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talk About Knuth mentions that Adobe gave him access to a prerelease version of Photoshop that he used to tweak the calligraphy he published in 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated. From what he says, it sounds like he became a pretty decent Photoshopper before Photoshopper was even a term anybody would use.
--Justin
Is it because there are no alternatives that have the features they need?
Pretty much. Photoshop is light years ahead of the closest competition when it comes to professional graphic design work. Amateurs and hobbyists a lot of times only deal with the filters, as those - for the occasional user - are the most whiz-bang parts of Photoshop, and the easiest to use to impress fellow forum-goers with your l33t Photoshop skills. And GIMP has pretty good filters, too. But move into the professional printing world, and the real meat of Photoshop is in a lot of the less-glamorous stuff: How it handles CMYK, spot colors, color profiles, levels, color curves, alpha channels, etc. There really is nothing comparable in the field, and it's been that way for more than a decade. I think GIMP suffers from the fact that most of the people working on it only used Photoshop for web-display work. So, those are the only features they're really making much of an effort to copy well.
GIMP is great for overlaying "O RLY" on pictures of owls, and rendering lens flares on anything you can find. I'd even put it above Paint Shop Pro. I use it a lot for quick-and-dirty RGB jobs, if I don't have Photoshop readily available already. It's really a great product for being free. But it still doesn't come close to Photoshop.
mainly a marketing tool, designed to suck money from consumers wallets into the manufacturerers. sometimes it does seem to mean a better thing (there must be 100 threads on /. about how gimp is really NOT photoshop)
but many times, professional merely means high priced, perhpas with features that NO ONE really needs
most of the "pros" I know use whatever is lying around - they are good enough that they don't need to get suckered into buying exspensive gold plated gagdets.
I figure they think they're rich. Did you RTFA?
And BTW, I love that "M$ is teh bad" offtopic. You just can't help yourself, can you?
The GIMP with that plug-in supports CMYK about as well as Windows NT 3.1's POSIX subsystem supported Unix programs.
The GIMP has no professional-level CMYK support. So from the perspective of a graphics professional, it doesn't have CMYK support, even if you can box-check the feature from a software marketing standpoint.
CMYK is becoming irrelevant in modern colour-managed workflows.
you sound more like a geico caveman..
Tom and his wife are still in Ann Arbor - I understand they donated some digital video equipment to the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce last month. There is an elementary school in town called "Summers-Knoll" - apparently Tom had something to do with its genesis - I pass by it every day.
I love how Tom's story has a kind of Wozniak quality to it...
Makin' money, makin' friends, makin' whoopee and wearin' Depends
For me (amateur photographer using PS CS3 as a digital darkroom) it's the lack of color management and 16-bit editing in GIMP. Also, the UI is atrocious, although I'm sure it might be ok if I hadn't invested years in learning and using PS already.
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
Everytime Photoshop is mentioned here (or Indesign or Illusrtator for that matter), sooner or later someone will jump up and claim that the GIMP can do aynthing that Photoshop can and will then go on to make increasingly bizarre claims about how GIMP is going to support CMYK anyday now and (in the last Photoshop claim in the /. article by the guy who was looking for cheap alternatives to the Adobe suite), by some people even claiming that you don't need CMYK for print as sRGB is somehow better than the various ISO CMYK profiles worked out by industry professionals. I wonder if these people have ever heard of spot colours and how trying to emulate those in RGB for print is not going to work out too well. But to get back on topic...
Graphic professionals usually quote the quality CMYK workflows as the reason why PS is better than the GIMP, but in reality the reason is quality alone.
The Adobe applications have, IMHO, amongst the highest quality of any apps I've ever seen out there. The apps consistenly produce the same quality results throughout the suite. The interfaces are very well thought out (the big changes in CS3 are the biggest in 7 years) and Adobe reserves a lot of time for quality control which ensures that when I use one of their apps in my job (I use almost all of them, PS, AI, ID, Acrobat), I can be fairly certain that they won't crash and that the results will be acceptable for print and the web. Added to that Adobe really pays a great amount of attention to detail, such as the quality of scaled images, which while many others support bicubic scaling these days, almost none do it with the same quality as PS does. And the list goes on.
There's nothing wrong with the GIMP and it is a bloody amazing tool all things considered. But someone would have to pay the GIMP contributors to spend more time taking care of details in the app to bring it up to PS' quality.
Tom work's on hard 2-D graphics stuff, most recently camera RAW; I would assume also put in a bit on LightRoom
John just won his second Oscar at ILM, h's a luminary in a different field.
Oh boy.
does it run on vista, too?
I hear that vista locks photoshop out - to push ms paint as new industry standard...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
I was always under the impression that Aldus Photostyler was a predecessor to Photoshop--apparently it was a separate product and a competitor--this is surprising.
By the way, I _still_ use my copy of Aldus Photostyler 1.1 (1990 vintage) which fits on a floppy and has worked perfectly on every version of Windows (from 3.1 to XP Pro) without a hitch [except for the long filenames and the program's insistence on saving JPG files with a *.JIF extension, which I have taken care of with a hex editor]. It does everything important I'd want from Photoshop, and does so much faster.
I'd love to find out some day which developers were responsible for the code behind Photostyler (and what approach they used) to make it so robust...
I use CMYK all the time for non-prepress, as you do; additional uses include extracting keys and masks. It isn't all about prepress by any means. Nor all about Photoshop; Photoshop is missing a lot of things I use regularly, particularly in the area of layer flexibility. HSV and similar modes also allow for adjustment of shadows and other luma-based detail independently of saturation and hue, I use them all the time. RGB is way cool, but it certainly isn't the end of the road.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
...and if even half the people who scream "CMYK! CMYK! CMYK!" every time the word 'Gimp' is mentioned have ever set foot in a print shop, own a printer, or even know what CMYK stands for, then I'm Mr. Ed.
CMYK is becoming irrelevant in modern colour-managed workflows.
Ah, someone who really knows what he's talking about. You know, using variables is becoming irrelevant in modern programming languages...
That Achewood strip was beyond lame.
Pretty bad analogy.
I'm a prepress geek, I used to run a drum scanner and do a lot of CMYK colour correction--I don't any more, nobody wants to pay for it (at least, in regular commercial printing), heck the customers think their low-res gifs from the internet look fine when printed out.
The RGB workflow is taking over with tagged images and RIPs (or software such as InDesign, etc.) that use the output device's profile for CMYK conversion.
Most digital printers (laser printers, etc.) get better results when you feed their RIPs RGB. Photo printers expect RGB data.
So, what was your point exactly?
I'm inclined to agree that CMYK is becoming irrelevant in the midrange, quick-turnaround market that is often being output on toner-based digital presses. Most of those systems that I've come across prefer the source PDFs be in sRGB color space, even though they output in CMYK.
For higher-end stuff, though, CMYK + spot colors + aqueous + die cuts / embossing etc still are where it's at.
It's funny to me that the whole CMYK issue always comes up as one of the major Photoshop vs. Gimp bullet points, but it's really a matter of quality control on the output to me, personally, and that I guess I've just got higher standards for what I think is acceptable product. Maybe I'm a dinosaur (at the ripe age of 32). Time will tell. I know how to cut rubylith, make photostats and set type manually and I was there at the very very beginnings of true DTP (newspaper job at 16). Skills that aren't directly applicable anymore except for the metaphors they use in all the apps (red transparent overlay for masks, anyone?).
One of the side effects of a PDF based workflow is that increasingly the guys running (whatever) press you end up on aren't color geeks, they could give a crap about trapping and they certainly aren't fully trained in every major desktop app like yesteryear. Everyone only wants PDFs now and they're turning things around incredibly quickly (generally speaking). Getting fiddly or geeky with the color, trapping, coatings etc costs them money. I think that the market's baseline quality has dropped in exchange for lightning quick turnaround.
I think that puts even more responsibility back on the artist/agency to do a lot of the quality control that the press operators used to handle... they used to *know* if their curves were off. These days, a matchprint or Iris doesn't mean a thing because everyone's presses are utterly out of whack.
So, maybe I'm a craftsman, or maybe I'm a dinosaur, but to this day and while I'm still able, I'll overlay my seps, look at 'em with a lupe and attend every press check that the margin allows for. And I'll mix my rich blacks to 45/20/20/100 on coated stock if I want them to really pop, because the guys on the press sure as hell aren't going to do it for me anymore. And that requires CMYK in my app and color workflow that I trust.
--d
Parent's signature used to be a line bragging about how photoshop only has 20 layer blend modes and his software has 85 (or something akin to that). He has since changed it, why I am not certain, but likely because he took a lot of flack from ./ users trying to tell him that having a shitload of layer blend modes does not a great image editing app make.
I've look at his software, and if he was positing it as better or more useful than photoshop (to the average industry professional), I believe he is mistaken. The UI is absolutely attrocious. Fyngryz-- I know you're going to take this as a personal attack, just as i've seen you take other similar comments as a personal attack, but I assure you it isn't. Your UI is not good, that's a plain fact. The behind-the-scenes execution of your software may be amazing, but I'll never know because the UI is so offputting. You need to hire a good UI designer-- the money you spend will be more than made up for by an exponential rise in sales.
Perhaps I'm wrong, maybe he isn't referring to his own app though. If so, go ahead and name a single program that is better than photoshop-- notbetter from a technical standpoint that it might have more layer blend modes, but better in that it has more layer blend modes, and is also equivalent or better in all other areas (UI, platforms it will run on, etc). Lord knows lots of people (myself included) dislike adobe, and we'd readily spend our money elsewhere if something better existed. But it doesn't, hence why PS is *the standard* in the industry.
Lastly, this REALLY isn't an attack on you. So resist the urge to call me a useless AC or whatever, and re-read what I wrote-- there might be painful things there, but there is also some good advice that *MIGHT* make your app *BETTER* than photoshop.
So... you are here for marketing research? Product placement? Undercover?
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
I was in film school with John Knoll, who was really into special effects even then. At the time, there was no CGI, so many of PhotoShop's metaphors originated with the optical and photographic techniques used to perform, say, blue-screen traveling mattes. I remember seeing "this cool software my brother and I are working on" on a Mac II at ILM, doing a feathered, alpha-blended photo composite (giving a third eye to a photo of a baby) in the late 80s. At the time, the software was used to do background blending and stitching for CGI sequences in "The Abyss".
I have written on professional computer graphics software in the last few years, use the GIMP regularly in my applications-development work, and think PhotoShop still kicks it all 'round the block for fit and finish as well as raw capability. I agree with the earlier comments on Clayton Christensen, but don't think a product that tries to duplicate the market leader is the important one. I'd say perhaps that Picasa would be a better example there, quietly chomping away at the low end of PhotoShop's features for crop, scale, rotate, color-correct etc.
... or they use NO plugins and have a few thousand .psd documents that don't open properly in the GIMP.
.docs is "special," try operating in an environment where only 100% compatability is Good Enough.
Nevermind fonts or vector support or CMYK - I'm talking basic blending modes and masking. If you think OpenOffice support for word
The photoshop jpeg exporter is utter shit. GIF support is fine but there's only so many ways you can screw up an indexed color palette. Fireworks (now owned by Adobe) blows the Photoshop and Imageready exporters clean out of the water. I've been using it as my default image optimizer since version two and I've never gone back. I'll periodically check Photoshop's results against Fireworks and regardless of version, photoshop-exported jpegs have a larger file size and look crappier (blockiness, color quality, etc) compared to the results I get from Fireworks.
No, the Gimp UI is ass any way you cut it. It's the big-boned, severely overweight, retarted cousin of the Photoshop UI. "Big" and "Clunky" might work for FOSS peoples who occasionally need to futz with images from their cameras or to optimize logos (or slap text on a lolcat or whatever), but it's nowhere near elegant enough for production useability by artists who live in Adobe apps.
And yes, you can "customize" it. Something FOSS peoples absolutely love, something artkids absolutely hate (fine when you're learning from scratch but once you've got some experience, you expect your vector app to behave like the vector app you learned and you expect your image editor to behave like the image editor you learned and if they don't there's no real reason to switch - there's a reason web browsers all handle more or less the same).
When you need a paintbrush, you need a paintbrush, not a swiss army knife with 497 unrelated functions, 32 of which combine to form a perl-scriptable paintbrush - but only if you compile it with the right version of GCC.
It really is NOT CMYK support, sorry. It is basically a conversion of RGB files to a 4-channel multichannel document that may or may not be approximately what some CMYK channels would look like. There's no conception within the GIMP application of what those channels represent, so it isn't really supporting anything about the color space.
To put it in perspective, it's a bit like saying your hex editor can also be a word processor. Yes, it can open the files and be readable, but there's several fundamental concepts missing.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I think you're thinking of Live Picture, but Aldus Photostyler was quite popular even after LP disappeared, and it was on a par with Photoshop overall until it died and was mostly rolled into Photoshop.
I actually did quite a few professional jobs in Painter back in the mid 90s, using the "recording" feature in a way like LP used to work. I'd do a whole page at 50-75dpi while recording, then play it back on a 266dpi image overnight and have a (MASSIVE!) 50-100MB file waiting in the morning. Now I'm lucky if I can archive an afternoon's work on a DVD
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
My guess is that you are still probably in the upper percentage range of users. My guess is that by far what most users do is Image Manipulation. By the way, have you tried Gimpshop? It supports PS plug-ins and on Windows at least, has a plug-in available to make the interface a Single window. It's primarily a fork of the interface to make it more like Photoshop however, so you might not like it.
iPhone! in a webcomic!
c ulates/index.php?i=3/ [www.particulatescomics.com]
http://www.acs.appstate.edu/~cg47742/comics/parti
Actually most graphic programs support PS plugins - at least Corel Photo-Paint, Paintshop Pro, Painter and Fireworks do, but I'm sure there are others.
Photoshop does a few things very well - much better than its competitors, that is manipulating photos in a way a photographer understands. In other areas, it falls behind PhotoPaint for example.
It's here: http://www.achewood.com/
I check out Gimp, PaintshopPro or whatever about once a year to see how the most recent versions compare. They. Just. Don't. Not for real work, unless your time isn't worth anything.
Much of your post makes sense, but this sentence doesn't. It seems that you are inferring that the only thing that wouldn't waste your time is if it worked exactly like Photoshop so you wouldn't have to relearn anything.
I work in GIMP a lot. Trying to do anything in photoshop seems like a waste of time to me because I have to do things differently and not how I'm used to.
- Black and white print
- Color print
- World Wide Web
- Motion pictures
- Video games
So as far as I can tell, GIMP is unsuitable for one of these fields. But it still doesn't come close to Photoshop. Does GIMP approach Photoshop Elements?Sounds like your customers are idiots and your work exlusively in low-end ghetto shit.
I work with video and I encouter more and more people every day who don't give a fuck about quality. What is the world going to look ilke in 20 years? Will there be anything of any quality left anywhere? Will people even know what a "craftsman" is or that they even existed?
Free Hans!
You know, I'm the CTO of a pre-press shop with 30 employees, and we often deal with way larger amounts of money you talk about. At the moment I'm working on a web-to-print project for a major car manufacturer which will be used to have around 1600 dealerships customize, order and distribute brochures that will be distributed by TNT Germany-wide. We're talking about 35,000,000 copies here. That's business as usual for us, and we're a small shop. Forget those $57,500. The cost of a failure can easily propel into the millions. I'm sure the majority of players in the advertising chain deal with much larger numbers than those you quoted on a regular basis.
That said, you're *so* spot on. A wrong logo color or even the "haptic sensation" of the paper can drive clients *really* mad. So you just don't fiddle around with something like the GIMP, you just buy the CS Suite licenses you need and have them paid off the same month you purchased them. Because, you know, there's always someone like me between agency and the printer, and you can bet I make sure that I deliver the data with the correct colors (actually, it's even a profession of it's own here). Usually that means PDF X/3, too, so if the colors come out wrong, I can just pull out the PDF I sent and show that the logo color indeed is set to the correct Pantone 12345, and therefore demonstrate that it's clearly the printer who fucked it up. Things like that happen regularly, and decide whether you keep getting those projects in the future.
To sum it up for all those morons who think because the GIMP is good enough for them, it should be good enough for everyone:
You don't put people's jobs, and therefore the income of themselves and their *families*, at risk for those ridiculous few thousand bucks the CS suite costs (updates are quite cheap BTW). Period. This is the Real Business World(TM), and if there's a relatively cheap, proven toolset that does everything you need and much more, I'll use it. And that's what everyone does and why Adobe have sold so many copies.
And spare me the "But it's Free Software!" You go ahead and tell that to the people who lose their jobs. I'm sure their children will cheer in joy because at least, they support Free Software.
Excuse the rant but seriously, I'm getting tired with all those know-it-alls who don't know shit about actual professional work, or business decisions. I'm sick and tired of those perpetual, unchanged discussions everytime the topic Photoshop comes up. It remembers me why I don't read the dot much any more.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
To me, PhotoShop was the color version of ImageStudio.
And where does the "Image" program fit into this? That was like a watered-down Photoshop. Is ImagePro it's more worthy incarnation?
-- Boycott Shell