Cool Guides

I've always heard good things about Darktable as an alternative to Lightroom, but I do not have experience using it so irdk.

Alternatively there is always the high-seas version of Adobe CC. I wouldn't be too concerned with the ethics of it seeing as this is Adobe we're talking about 🤮.

been using Darktable for years now. had the same trouble with it as people going photoshop to gimp have at first, because my brain was all in lightroom. once i sat down and watched some videos of people explaining their own darktable process and experimented new workflows. it became everything lightroom was, but without the constantly scolding me about bumping my subscription adobe did.

Calling that Free Software was a bit of a poor choice by the author of this graphic

Yes it's freemium, but it's very usable for free. I'd estimate 95% of non professional users don't care for the difference between free and paid. Also if you want to pay it's a perpetual license for the current version, not a subscription like increasingly common.

It's competitive with Adobe in terms of features and usability UX/UI, perhaps even better than Adobe in some parts.

It's probably the best choice if you want to do video, movie maker and the like are to weak for your use case, and your not an ffmpeg magician. Because you can download it for free and get used to it quickly, and it can likely do everything you want for free. Except GPU rendering.

I believe that it is free for non-commercial purposes.

I'm sure for anyone who has real work to do, GIMP can't come close to Photoshop.

But I grew up using GIMP and got some pretty impressive results with it. Now that I have Adobe CC access and have been using Photoshop through that, I am perpetually confused on how to do x, which I know how to do in a couple clicks in GIMP.

Again, I'm sure that'd go doubly so for someone who started with Photoshop since it does have an objectively cleaner UI.

Yeah, I think you can argue for Krita, but it isn't fully there for everything photoshop does.

I paid for Affinity Photo 2 and that does the trick for photo editing at a reasonable price. I really wish Gimp was up to it. Blender is really showing up most of the rest of that list, and of those Photoshop is where I think the biggest opportunity would be for a Blender-quality Gimp rework or alternative.

I'm no through-and-through AI hater (I use AI in certain situations where it is helpful), but I feel like this is not going to be an area where an AI is going to give much insight that's reflective of reality.

It'll likely moreso compare feature-sets for each, which will make GIMP look far better than it probably should to Photoshop. GIMP is robust and has plenty of features. It is in its user experience, UI, and the quality of each feature where it fares much worse.

Mind you, this is coming from someone who likes GIMP, grew up using it, and feels more at home with it than Photoshop. It's just all-around not as good.

It is not just you. I started using gimp and later switched to Photoshop and it was such a great productivity improvement after just a few minutes.

I’ve used both Gimp and Photoshop. I’m not super skilled in any of these, but Photoshop feels the most natural to use. I’ve never figured out a good workflow for Gimp.

It’s a shame, because functionality wise Gimp is quite competent. It’s just the UI that’s crap.

Yea, Shotcut should be there.

Yeah I pay Figma way too much every month for my team holy hell.

It's infuriating what basic features Penpot is still lacking and it trips you up all the time if you're used to working with Figma, but what's already in feels pretty good.