But thwy arent gwtting more money feom you and losing future sales feom new versions. Fuck subs.
I would argue Adobe lost more money from pirated Adobe apps than GIMP
Isn’t this called, “competition”?
Gimp, Paint.Net, VLC…
A little bit of hope for a future more like Star Trek and less like Wall-E.
I’ll be honest I’ve tried gimp and found that I’m terrible and not interested in making or editing any form of digital media. I’ve also tried Photoshop. Paint is more my speed fast and ugly.
How about MyPaint? :)
Or Pinta?
Or you just prefer something simple like like mtpaint?
Mspaint I make some really bad mockups with it works great.
Yeah, so, something like mtpaint…?
I hear microsoft are putting AI slop in mspaint.
Good time to move to free software without abusive spyware bloat clutter interfering?
I think it’s because I suck at Photoshop to begin with and using both tools incorrectly.
Adobe hasn’t lost anything, they have tied up “design” for any business use. Its a total monopoly.
Yeah, this is kinda BS.
Adobe don’t care. Nearly every design firm is going to ask you about your Adobe experience, so you can use their Adobe software.
Maybe some of their designers will use GIMP. But that’s like saying your office also uses libre office and Linux. Which is extremely rare.
Design lead here. I know photoshop like the back of my hand, but I also know Pixelmator (Mac only), Sketch and Affinity. All are very nice interfaces, one-time, or major version licenses, and smaller, responsive dev teams.
There are compromises in all software, but my team uses Pixelmator and Affinity because we’re a small company and it won’t hurt their design skills to know more tools besides the Adobe suite.
Gimp for a long time had shitty shortcuts and was quite unfriendly to Mac users (the REAL vendor lock-in in the design world btw). Him is just too slow to load, and ugly to look at, similar but less so with Inkscape.
Big firms might be harder to change, but it’s possibly and there are really good alternatives that Adobe probably worries a little about. Unfortunately they aren’t FOSS for the most part.
GIMP had some shitty shortcuts, sure. But so did PS.
As an example of better shortcuts - you could get a rectangular selection by pressing “r”, which is an example of a very simple and straightforward UI language. You could then adjust that selection with handles without needing any chords or modifiers, zoom in with the number keys or scroll wheel, etc.
You could open a tool, like the colour picker, and switch to a different window without the app going beep and telling you “no”, which is what PS traditionally did.
You could open the app and load an image in 1/10th the time it took for PS to start which made it way nicer to use. When I was using PS I generally left it open all the time because of its sluggish start, which meant it was sitting hogging resources all day.
What I’m saying is that your personal workflow and the general UX of whatever software you’re used to using is always the thing you’re going to use as a point of comparison, and if your expected shortcut is different it doesn’t mean it’s worse.
true that it wasn’t good for mac. I gave up apple/mac and their increasingly shitty overpriced products 10 years ago. Since then Linux has come a long way and so has GIMP. Good enough to kill Photoshop? Not any time soon, but good enough for professional use certainly and good enough for new artists to start on. Install G’MIC and it’s so much better.
Right? I hate the phrasing in this headline. Adobe isn’t somehow “owed” those millions so it’s totally backwards to call that a loss. Fuck that noise.
They’re a business, they should earn their revenue by fostering a healthy competitive environment and then winning through innovation and customer loyalty. Not the monopoly licensing and subscription lock-in BS they’ve been doing for decades.
My kids keep screwing Nintendo. The other day I saw my kid grab a Lego, he slid it on the table and then made it jump over an orange.
I’m waiting for the letter from their lawyers.
All monopolies (including Adobe) should be seized by the workers, and then split into different companies and collectivized by the workers. Seriously!
In the construction world, Bluebeam is a good contender to Adobe.
Still corporate though
Isn’t that for pdf editing?
Yes. Bluebeam Revu can do everything Adobe Acrobat can do (better imo).
Acrobat is still a product of Adobe, which is why I brought Bluebeam up.
I know this thread is about GIMP vs Adobe Photoshop, but OP of this comment thread said that Adobe has a monopoly over every business use. Not the case in the construction world
Ah right, got you.
Bluebeam is so powerful that I feel the way it’s used in some construction companies is like how corporate uses excel. In that it has gone beyond what it was initially intended for and has become the primitive around which they work.
For PDF editing, there’s so many good open source products.
Absolutely no reason to be using Adobe just for PDFs. Waste of money.
Which ones do you have in mind, if you don’t mind me asking?
I would LOVE to have a FOSS Bluebeam
Look… I like gimp a lot and Jehan is a G.
Adobe has lost basically nothing. Because Gimp is still ridiculously underpowered compared to Adobe Photoshop (let alone the rest of the suite). That is perfectly fine since the vast majority of users don’t need those capabilities. But the people who do (e.g. professionals)? There is really no other choice.
Yeah, that title’s last sentence is just a straight-up lie, lol
I disagree. GIMP and photopea get really slow on larger files that photoshop can handle with stability. I’ve really, really tried to move to GIMP, beyond just learning different hotkeys. I keep falling back to Photoshop.
Do execs really hate him? Competition validates the marketplace and your product. Plus they can afford to develop more features than the open source community can produce in the same amount of time. So they can always argue you are paying for the additional features.
(Disclaimer: I use Gimp a lot and Adobe not at all)
Tbh, the people who use Gimp and the people who use Adobe are two separate crowds and neither Gimp nor Adobe are the only tools in town.
If I’m not going to pay for a photo editing tool and Gimp would cease to exist, I’d just download another free tool and call it a day.
If I’m a professional relying on Adobe Photoshop, the existence of Gimp does nothing to me. Photoshop plus Lightroom costs ~€25/month. For a private person that’s a lot. For a professional that hardly matters. If I pay €1000+ rent for a studio+office, paying €25 isn’t that big of a deal.
Or to put it the other way round: If our hypothetical professional saves just one hour of work per month due to using Adobe tools over Gimp or another software, it’s cheaper for them to use Adobe. Because time literally is money when you are self-employed.
GIMP’s UI and UX are just terrible. I forced myself to use it for months but it never felt like anything ever got easier to do, it’s just so unintuitive. Nevertheless, I thank the devs for all their work, it’s great great tool
I used PS from v3 (I think?) to CS2 (ish?) before switching to GIMP. I thought the interface was weird until a designer at my job showed me where I was getting confused. So I’ve been a semi-regular G user for the last million years and every once in a while I offer to help my partner with something in PS and honestly I take so long to get anything done because I can’t find it in the PS UI.
Did you reconfigure it much?
There are preconfiguration packs that make it more like photoshop if you want. Gimpshop I think one is called.
I didn’t, I will check it out but that is still terrible UX if you need to mod the program to make It intuitive
Have you tried PhotoGIMP?
Photogimp is just lipstick. There are root design choices that create the problems.
“Professionals” is one of those words, you know, like “consumer” or whatever, that does a lot to hide what’s really going on. I’m a professional who used to use GIMP all the time for my work. I’m not less of a professional because I didn’t like Photoshop, in fact, I used to use PS at previous jobs but gave it up because I prefer the GIMP interface (yes, I’m that person) and didn’t need the other bits. “Professional” just means you do it as a job; it doesn’t indicate what that job is, and different people have different use cases.
poor artists blame their tools.
This is like movie companies saying that me pirating a movie cost them money.
Absence of a free thing isn’t going to magic some money into my wallet with which to buy your thing, I’m still broke AF.
My gramma totally screwed Intel. She never used a computer in her entire life.
Intel execs must HATE her
But it does take money away in other ways. I use GIMP for work which could easily pay for Adobe if I asked them. We just don’t need to since we aren’t doing any high-demand tasks.
Why are they entitled to it?
They’re not? They don’t have to be entitled to something to lose money on it.
Im talking about money. If the money isn’t theirs they can’t lose it. You can’t lose money that isn’t yours.
They kind of do, though?
Because of Adobe’s hatred and abuse of their users, Adobe lost millions of dollars.
Corporate has a strategy to win those customers back, in all such industries, buy out your competition and enter into a shittrust with remaining competitors, agreeing to both maximize revenue rather than compete for favour.
Anti trust has been dead, courts have been captured, customers have no choice, stonk goes back ups.
Amen for the GNU GPL. Changed the world. Gave us an out.
Maybe stonk against megacorps
Man ain’t nobody lost money because of Gimp. Flawed argument aside, at least Blender could be in for a shout
Last year Blender got a shout out at the Oscars from the makers of Flow.
And Inkscape, fuck Adobe :)
Now that’s a more reasonable contender than GIMP
I used to steal profit from Safeway all the time! I should have put those
tips intended for me as an individualdonations to the corporation in the till as was policy. So naive and selfish.
Adobe didn’t lose money. You can’t lose money you never had.
Have you ever heard of the term “Lost Profits”?
Yes and it’s a made up term right next to my Unrealized Lottery Winnings
I put that one right next to ‘Wasn’t good enough’
Weren’t they the band with the lead singer who turned out to be a paedo?
I used Photoshop professionally for nearly 30 years. I retired and don’t need it anymore, so now I use GIMP on Linux for the few personal projects I want to make.
GIMP’s interface leaves a lot to be desired. One example, in Photoshop the Channels tab shows all the channels and includes any masks you make, they look and work similarly to the layers, and it’s intuitive–when you learn one, you know the other. GIMP doesn’t work that way, in fact I’ve yet to make sense of the channels.
Also, typically one would expect filters to only be applied to a selected layer and even to a selection within that layer. Some GIMP filters apply to the whole image, flattening my layers, and creating new ones. Fortunately, these are made in a new document, so you don’t lose anything, but the filter cannot be applied to a partial image, you’d need to pull the result back into your original image and mask out the part you wanted. Very strange.
I could go on about how selecting works and doesn’t work, but I won’t.
No, Adobe has not “lost millions” due to GIMP, they haven’t lost a cent. People who use GIMP were either never going to pay Adobe a cent, or already have and are using GIMP now, for similar reasons to my own. Virtually no one uses GIMP professionally at any volume of interest to Adobe.
It’s a good and useful tool, but it’s severely lacking compared to Photoshop.
Affinity is free now, it’s pretty good. I don’t know how long that will last though.
Affinity is hard to use coming from PS because I’m not used to it yet. I should take a course online.
I find Affinity pretty easy coming from Adobe, with some caveats like RGB channels and some masking stuff
Really? It’s almost the same for me. I wonder if it’s because I quit Adobe a long time ago.
It’s almost the identical interface…
I’m a novice user and I find it confusing with the vector and pixel. Also the masking confuses me. Transforming layers is also different.
If pirating Photoshop counts as a lost sale then so does downloading GIMP.
If so, this man is one of the greatest software pirates ever.
Adobe pretty much encouraged piracy up until about a decade ago, that way they got schools to train (for free) potential future customers in their way to use design software.
TBH I don’t understand why they have gone with the subs model they currently have, its kind of cutting the blood line from their future customers.
Competition is always a good thing, FOSS competition is the best thing in my opinion.
This guy is a hero, but not because he is trying to fuck Adobe but rather he is helping free design software from (massive) cost which most people cannot afford.
More designers, better art to my mind.
The subs model ensures regular and predicable quarterly revenue, which means easier forecasting of growth, which means happier shareholders.
I think JetBrains’s approach is nice. You can subscribe monthly but anything you e subscribed to for 12 months you get a perpetual fall back license for. Unless I’m missing something specific it’s a win for everyone.
There are student subs, which are super cheap. Wouldn’t be surprised if schools/universities would get free licenses. After all, this is how they can attract new paying customers, as you correctly stated
I’d suspect it was much the same reason as why Apple decided to kill FCP and rebrand iMovie instead. Professional users are inordinately more expensive in tech support costs
But FCP X is amazing. It’s the one thing I really miss having a Mac for and it’s so disappointing that nobody else has even attempted to replicate it. It’s leaps and bounds ahead of everybody else. Calling it a “rebranded iMovie” shows either a complete lack of awareness of literally anything about it, or an incredible intellectual dishonesty that doesn’t even seen to serve a practical purpose.
It’s also…not subscription based. Or wasn’t in 2018 when I last had a Mac.
They announced a subscription plan today, funnily enough.
But no, FCPX was a huge fuck you to the professional market. And yes, FCPX is built on the iMovie codebase rather than FCP7.
On release:
- 0 backward compatibility with FCP7 projects.
- Support for tape ingest removed.
- Multicam editing removed.
- No external monitor for playback
- Unable to export to Color and other post packages, breaking the whole professional workflow.
- Could only be installed manually via the App Store.
And the worst part of all this was Apple abruptly withdrew FCP7 on launch day. So if you were a post house working on a big job and needed a few extra licences, fuck you. If you needed any of the lost features, fuck you. We’re talking companies that plan upgrades a year or so in advance to minimise disruption, and they suddenly faced having to make do with no more licences, or to suddenly switch to Avid with all the pain that causes.
FCPX was suitable for prosumers, who would ingest, edit, mix and grade in the one package. It was not compatible with the way the industry works, and by removing FCP7, Apple signalled that they were no longer interested in the pro market.
Yeah nope, if the same product is available for free then the only way to prove a “stolen sale” is if someone had previously paid for the subscription and then cancelled to use the free version of the same product.
Anything else is just the hand of the free market doing it’s thing. If Adobe executives are malding because someone made a cheaper (or free) alternative then they have two honourable routes available:
-
Add more value to their products to convince people their price tag is worth it.
-
Reduce the price they charge.
But they’ll literally do anything else but those two, including astroturfing messages like “open source software is piracy”, so stop spewing corpo bullshit!
Holy shit… did Adobe actually say FOSS is piracy?!? I couldn’t find anything, got a source?
Or 3, the common alternative for monopolists, Buy the competing startup, cannibalize a few of it’s best features and end of life it.
-
I guarantee that Adobe definitely sees every download of GIMP as a lost sale. That’s corporate mentality.
I worked for many years in the music business, starting back in the days of the “Home Taping is killing music” campaign. I know for a fact that music executives saw the sale of every blank tape, and later, every download, as a lost sale. You could explain that it wasn’t really a lost sale, because that consumer probably wouldn’t have bought it anyway, but they didn’t like hearing that. If someone was listening to it, even if it was just curiosity, that was a lost sale.
They didn’t feel that way about radio stations or libraries, two places where people could get music for free, but somehow, borrowing a friend’s album, and taping it so you could listen to it a few times and decide if you wanted to buy a clean copy, infuriated them.
I knew the people at the top who were going after the downloaders. They were mean, nasty, greedy people, who were stealing way more from their own artists than consumers were ever stealing from them, so I never had a single concern about downloading whatever I want.
These days, artists hardly make any money from recordings. Unless you are buying the music direct from the artist at their shows, then you are just feeding an evil record company. Pirate the records, pay for the shows and merch, and if you want to own a physical copy, buy your music direct from the artist.
Do that long enough, and record companies will die.
And for a while, people using tapes to make field recordings were supposed to pay more for the blanks to offset the supposed lost sales of the unrelated music industry.
The record industry wanted a special tax on blank cassettes, to offset the costs of home recording, which they would distribute as they saw fit, but they never got it.
If there had been a tax, it would have gone straight into the exec’s pockets, and no artist would have ever seen a dime.
They did not “lose” any money; they never had it
What they lost is potential customers
Right?
If I had no intention on buying your product, you didn’t lose money.
If I pirate your product, you still didn’t lose any money as I still had no intention on buying your product.
There are probably some people who decided to use GIMP instead of Photoshop, some people who simply pirated Photoshop, and some people who bought Photoshop anyway.
It’s difficult to quantify the degree to which the existence of GIMP caused lost sales for Adobe. I started using GIMP instead of a high-seas Photoshop version, so I still haven’t spent a dime!
The “losing money” argument is the same they use against media piracy.
Oil piracy though, no biggie so long as it’s a big government doing it.
