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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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.
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.
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)
I have to agree, Photopea really is the best alternative to PS for Linux users. It’s honestly good! I wish Affinity would consider launching a Linux Verizon, as I actually like that a lot more than PS, but that seems equally as unlikely…
So for now, Photopea seems the best option overall. One plus, being written in WASM (probably using Rust?) it’s really speedy and fast. It feels faster than Gimp anyways, which is definitely not a good statement on the state that Gimp is in…
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.
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.
Amen to everything you’re saying.
In terms of UI sometimes you think something is better merely because you learnt this way. The best example would be windows style desktop versus macos style desktop. I can’t use another desktop than a windows style one, which is why I always used kde and I always hated gnome.
Now I don’t know whether gimp is good enough or not, but it must be said IMO.
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.
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 think this is the key phrase – do you want an alternative (where you might have to learn new ways of doing things), or do you want a clone? GIMP is not a clone, but an alternative.
I also think this gets to something I was told loooooooooong ago, when I was a young lad asking what was the best computer to buy. Someone told me, “Find all the software you want/need to run, and get the computer that will run it all.”
In other words, if you need to use Photoshop, then maybe you don’t use Linux – maybe stick with Mac or (shudder) Windows.
I always love it when Linux users recommend going back to Windows as a option. It takes real maturity to admit that everything is a viable option, and sometimes especially in a professional workplace that Windows and MacOS should both be considered if Linux is limiting your workflow.
@displaced_city_mouse @Adderbox76 yeah I’m fairly OS agnostic, I hate them all…just hate Windows more which I think you might agree with considering the shuddering induced by mentioning Windows 😏 I use ChromeOS, Mac, & iOS daily bc for my uses they are least problematic. Use Win 10 for gaming but looking to switch to Linux not W11 for that and have been dabbling/learning Android & Linux. Honestly it’s a good time to be a nerd IMHO.
Photogimp is a plugin for people coming from photoshop but still may not be the exact clone
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.
A long time ago, when I was broke and decided I couldn’t afford Photoshop, I decided to invest the time in learning GIMP.
Even though I’m a UX professional, and the barely okay UX does bother me, that has turned out to be a wise investment because no matter what, GIMP is always there for me. Always!
The price never goes up. It never gets paywalled by a subscription. It never has shady license changes. It changes slowly and deliberately. I never have to convince a new boss to pay for it. I never have to wonder if it will be available for a project.
That was like 20 years ago. I don’t how much value I’ve gotten out of that initial investment, but I bet it’s a LOT.
I work with a small nonprofit that years ago was donated Photoshop. Over the years as upgrades happened, the org received new donations in one way or another to keep it current enough that it was still helpful. Even with a legit corporate donation of the software the license for it was a pain to deal with. At one point when it needed to be reinstalled it was no longer possible and I told the org to just forget about it. Last time I talked with Adobe to try to get it working, which they refused to do, I ended up telling them I would never use an Adobe product willingly again. I personally learned Gimp at that point and while I only use it from time to time it does the job and as you say, it is always there, always works, has plenty of online help and does anything that I need it to do.
Just like beingoff corporate social media, I try to use FOSS as much as is reasonable because while it may have rougher edges at times, it can actually be more reliable. I manage some servers as part of my job and over the years the licensed stuff, Windows server, Exchange, VMWare at some point will bite you back with a dead end or major costs where as Debian…
I learned Gimp alongside Photoshop ~10 years ago and it’s my preferred image editor. It does have some silliness sometimes, but overall I adore it.
One of the best things they ever did was making it one-window by default.
If not, why?
I mean, how much money is Adobe investing in Photoshop? Also I am really curious about GIMP really as bad as you and others here describe it as… I have the feeling people expect a carbon copy of Photoshop where they can use their brain imprinted workflows to achieve the exact same results. This of course is just asking for failure. You rather have to get used to GIMPs (any other FOSS program) workflows and see if you can achieve similar results and decide if the increased time spent worth it, to use a software which is free and open source or not.
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If not, why?
How many man-hours of work were already spent in the development of Photoshop, its plugins, etc? How much has that cost? On what scale of time was that spread around? How much money have designers put into them by buying licenses (now subscriptions) of Adobe’s suite?
If you want an alternative for Linux that can match Photoshop, you need to be willing to support the R&D costs that have been paid off by Adobe throughout the decades of its development. Are you willing to do it?
What we really need is Photoshop in Linux. Yeah the free alternatives are super cool and definitely fine for lighter and more occasional use, but unfortunately I just don’t think they’ll ever be good for professional and more advanced hobby usage. I really fuckin hate adobe but at the same time Photoshop just is really good. We really do need a real competitor to Photoshop though, be it paid or free because Adobes business practices are getting ridiculously bad.
I’m super glad davinci resolve exists for video editing. Obviously not 100% feee and open source, but again it’s hard to believe a completely open solution could ever compete with adobes offering as well as davinci does. It’s both super nice to use, you can use it free or pay the imo very reasonable price for the professional license, which includes free upgrades for life! And wait, it also works on linux!! Almost unbelievable. I only wish it had h264 support on Linux for the free tier, but oh well… Nothing’s perfect :)
As Linux continues to rise in popularity, we might eventually see a Linux version. But unfortunately, most design firms use Macs, since Apple has put so much money into making them good for that, so there’s little incentive for Adobe to work on making Photoshop work under Linux, even using something like Wine.
Honestly, we’ll probably never see Photoshop on Linux with all the ‘value add’ crap they’re shoving in. I don’t even enjoy using it on Windows, and spent $35 on a lifetime Affinity Photo license when it was on sale.
I’d much rather see that ported tbh, especially since they wouldn’t need to port a ton of DRM services as well.
I agree, affinity programs are really good and i’d rather see those on linux
Exactly. And even though I absolutely love love love linux,it’s unfortunately just too unpractical for me to daily drive it on my main PC, as things like photoshop and 3D modeling software like fusion 360, are just too unstable on linux, despite the amazing efforts of projects like wine. They are pretty damn close and I’m sure they will eventually be perfect or at least almost so, but untill then I’ll have to run Windows on it (which I also don’t hate as much as some do, as I believe it also has its pros like the almost unparallel backwards compatibility, as we’ll as it’s negatives).
I also game and I’m so so happy that Linux is as close as it is to making gaming perfect on linux. I play like literally two games that eather didn’t work perfectly, or not at all on Linux, when I ran fedora on my main machine for over 6 months a few months back. It really is amazing what things like proton have done to Linux gaming.
I’ll keep occasionally trying how linux does for my main PC, and until I find it to be good enough for me I’ll keep running it on my home server and secondary laptop. Last time I tried it was damn close, I’m really expecting it to be only a couple years untill I move to linux as my main OS.
I had the same experience moving from GIMP to Photoshop. 😂
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Erasing the white around an object is crazy easy in GIMP. select color, delete. done. That’s one task that is easier in GIMP then in Photoshop in my opinion.
If I want to erase the white around an object
Funny, this is literally one of the primary examples of something that GIMP did better than Photoshop (at least back when I was actively using GIMP a lot). GIMP has the “color-to-alpha” tool that allows for backgrounds to be faded into transparency (including converting the border of that object into translucent pixels that don’t have the hint of the old background), which I remember being the easiest way to remove sky or other background from an object, and to place that object into a new background or other image.
I’m guessing that in the 10 years since, Photoshop has a bunch of those AI tools that can do that specific function almost automatically. But GIMP does do that specific task pretty well.
It’s true but programmers will tell artists that we’re just too lazy to learn a new UI lol.
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The other comments here just explained two simple ways to do it in GIMP, so it kinda sounds like the programmers are right
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.
It mostly depends on what features of Photoshop you use. If you use most of them, there’s no real alternative imo. If you only use a subset of its features, then GIMP, Krita, Photopea or Pinta may become viable alternatives for your use case.
Or Inkscape or Blender. Deforming text on along a curve isn’t really something I’d use anything try to be Photoshop for TBH.
Maybe try photopea?
Came to post this. I use photopea to do photo edits at work
When internet connection is great… photopea is… a viable alternative… sadly in 3rd world country, internet sucks… :'(
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GIMP has the closest thing to feature parity. If you’re looking for similarity of UI and workflow, you’re not going to get it. Adobe throws millions of dollars that open-source projects don’t have at streamlining their UI. UI specialists that will work for free are unicorns, so most open-source UIs are designed by volunteer generalist programmers. Which means that said UI gets the job done, but isn’t optimized for the workflow of people who don’t think like the original programmers.
Personally, I might shift the same picture through Darktable, GIMP, Inkscape, and even Scribus, depending on what I was trying to do with it. (Text on a path -> probably Inkscape, then export as PNG and import into GIMP as a layer.) Is that less convenient than performing all the operations in one program? Possibly, but since I don’t like Photoshop’s UI either, I’m willing to give up on “one-stop shopping”.
(So who, for my money, had the best UI? Probably Paint Shop Pro, twenty or so years ago when it still belonged to JASC. Of course, it was a simpler program too, and so had less junk in its interface.)
Fact is, if you’re a pro, you’ve invested years into learning Photoshop’s interface and how to get the best results out of it. You’re in the position of a baseball player who’s decided to start all over again with basketball. Any attempt to transition to other software is going to be really, really frustrating for you, and likely drop your productivity into the toilet for a few months at least. Plus, you’re going to need some features that average users don’t care about, especially if you’re preparing work for print.
I hate to say it, but you may honestly be best off running Photoshop in a VM rather than trying to move to other software, at least until you can set aside a couple of months where you have no urgent projects (if that ever happens).
There’s a script for installing Photoshop with wine on Linux: https://github.com/Gictorbit/photoshopCClinux
it worked for me
Personally, I might shift the same picture through Darktable, GIMP, Inkscape, and even Scribus, depending on what I was trying to do with it. (Text on a path -> probably Inkscape, then export as PNG and import into GIMP as a layer.)
Gotta love this adaptation of the “do one thing and do it well” principle.
Can it be a web one? If so, I’ve used Photopea in the past.
Photopea is amazing and I think it’s made by a single developer who is crazy good.
Surprised I had to scroll this far to see Photopea. It’s a fantastic alternative to Photoshop, and it’s accessible on nearly any platform since it’s web-based.
Another +1 for Photopea from me. I had been on-and-off wrestling with Wine to get Photoshop to run since I had switched to Linux, but since discovering Photopea I haven’t felt the need to bother with that. In addition to the website version, if you aren’t religiously anti-Electron, there’s a desktop app for it on Flathub.
+1 for Photopea. I found it extremely friendly coming from Photoshop, has a lot of functionalities and works great on computers where I can’t/won’t install Photoshop. YMMV though, since you want to use it as a full replacement and I used it only for simple retouching/modifications when I’m not on the desktop
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
