As a former Photoshop user, I found all the paradigms and ways of thinking in Gimp were just so utterly different from what I was used to. Simple things like cropping, resizing selections and layer management felt like exercises in frustration.
Tried Krita instead, and I’m immediately feeling at home and able to be productive straight away.
I’m sure Gimp is awesome but my brain didn’t like it. If anyone else is feeling the same way, give Krita a try.
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.
Krita took some adjustment for me after years of Photoshop. After I learned the workflow and keyboard shortcuts, I found that it was much better than Photoshop for painting AND completely free for life.
The fact that it’s much hyped as a painting tool was actually the reason I didn’t start using Krita earlier. Felt like it was only for artists and I’m thinking “I’m not an artist, just need to do some image manipulation” but actually, it’s fine for that too :)
That’s the weird thing about Krita: It was originally made to be a photo editor but they somehow turned it into one of the best painting tools! But there’s more!
Krita is also fantastic for vector graphics! It’s missing some of the “lower layer” features of Inkscape (e.g. metadata stuff and fine control over the generated XML/text data) but those are quickly remedied by opening your Krita-generated SVG in Inkscape for a few seconds to make the (subtle) changes you want and using it’s powerful export features.
What’s interesting is that if you do that and re-open said SVG in Krita they’ll be preserved and stay as such if you continue to modify the image. The devs did a fantastic job at that sort of thing (which, as a dev myself I know can be really hard to pull off: When you save it’s all too easy to just regenerate everything from scratch and overwrite the entire file with a completely new version, losing anything that your file exporter doesn’t normally deal with).
As a former Photoshop user, I found all the paradigms and ways of thinking in Gimp were just so utterly different from what I was used to. Simple things like cropping, resizing selections and layer management felt like exercises in frustration.
Tried Krita instead, and I’m immediately feeling at home and able to be productive straight away.
I’m sure Gimp is awesome but my brain didn’t like it. If anyone else is feeling the same way, give Krita a try.
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.
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.
Try Krita too then, if you’re interested in moving to free and open source. The paradigm is very similar to Photoshop.
Krita took some adjustment for me after years of Photoshop. After I learned the workflow and keyboard shortcuts, I found that it was much better than Photoshop for painting AND completely free for life.
The fact that it’s much hyped as a painting tool was actually the reason I didn’t start using Krita earlier. Felt like it was only for artists and I’m thinking “I’m not an artist, just need to do some image manipulation” but actually, it’s fine for that too :)
That’s the weird thing about Krita: It was originally made to be a photo editor but they somehow turned it into one of the best painting tools! But there’s more!
Krita is also fantastic for vector graphics! It’s missing some of the “lower layer” features of Inkscape (e.g. metadata stuff and fine control over the generated XML/text data) but those are quickly remedied by opening your Krita-generated SVG in Inkscape for a few seconds to make the (subtle) changes you want and using it’s powerful export features.
What’s interesting is that if you do that and re-open said SVG in Krita they’ll be preserved and stay as such if you continue to modify the image. The devs did a fantastic job at that sort of thing (which, as a dev myself I know can be really hard to pull off: When you save it’s all too easy to just regenerate everything from scratch and overwrite the entire file with a completely new version, losing anything that your file exporter doesn’t normally deal with).
The same is true when moving the other direction.
What most people find easier is the one they learned first.