Big GIMP fan. That being said, Adobe needs to start promoting some of their actually good stuff, like their investment in the open C2PA spec for proving content authenticity, vs constant AI crap that is the exact opposite.
That’s what big tech companies do, they buy small and promissing companies they think that once can become a competitor and then… destroy it.
The young startups just take the money and can retire early.
Has it gotten better with editing? I tried a couple of years ago and just couldn’t. It’s amazing for the 3d software. If they could make it easier to measure things, I’d use it for CAD too.
I believe i recall there being an update specifically to the video editor within the past year or two, but don’t quote me on that. They have done updates to post processing, the timeline functionality, grease pencil, and i believe some other things that would apply to video editing, so i imagine it would be easier to work with. There are cad and measuring add-ons as well, i believe some free within blender itself.
I bought Davinci, so I’m happy with that, but I’ll still check out the Blender version. I can’t really complain about it, it does so much and is free.
As far as CAD goes, they aren’t really usable to be fast in CAD. It’s super cumbersome. You should be able to move things 1" to the right or left, put things at certain heights and move around the space in an easy way. I haven’t found anything that can do that for imperial. Also, the tools for making dimensions is really bad and I don’t think there’s a way to make a blueprint unless you come up with something yourself. That being said, it’s free and it’s not their focus. They concentrate on the 3D portions.
I’ve started using FreeCAD for CAD work, I’ve used Fusion 360 for 5 years before trying FreeCAD (again, I tried it a few years ago) and it works pretty good.
It’s different and it’s taking some getting used to but it’s working out quite nicely so far.
If the units are set to inches for length. You can just type G (grab), X (or Y or Z), and 1 to move an inch in any direction. I think it used to be worse.
Unless they’ve changed it in the last 2 releases, it’s still that you have to decimal out the inches. So 1" would be .0833333. I don’t have time for that shit. It’s so easy in any other cad program from decades ago. Like I said, it’s obviously not their focus and that’s fine. It’s just on my wish list.
Maybe I’m doing too much engineering - I found Open SCAD to be way easier than Blender for making stuff, and that’s saying something because Open SCAD is quite a pain.
I can see why for engineering, it allows you to be super precise. I’m not sure the people who developed the CAD side of Blender have ever used it for anything precise or to build details and drawings of any kind. They just seem clueless, there is no other way to put it. AutoSketch used to be so great, maybe the paid version is now. That was different than AutoCAD and Revit, but I loved it.
Me too. As I said before, it’s just on my wish list. I’ve learned Blender pretty darn well. If it could do CAD in a decent way, it would be perfect. There are too many UI’s in my head as it is.
I hate the syntax in OpenSCAD. It LOOKS like something object-oriented but it is procedural, causing oh so many footguns, if one expects it to act like OOP.
I’m a mostly procedural thinker, even though I program in OOP all day long. OpenSCAD works a lot like the rest of my code: write it, try it, look at the results, curse, revise it, try it, look at the results, curse differently… you get there eventually. I do highly suggest not coding a masterpiece in OpenSCAD without visualizing the components first.
I (distantly) knew an indie software developer who was putting up a pretty good Photoshop alternative in 1996: ONE GUY alone in his bedroom was making a decent living selling a Photoshop alternative that he wrote himself. And he wasn’t exactly a super-wunderkind coder, just a guy who knew the photo manipulation space well enough to get enough customers to float selling his software for a few years - in direct competition with Photoshop.
Adobe isn’t selling magic dust ground from precious gemstones by thousands of artisans. They had a decent product that they marketed the hell out of and eventually got overly greedy.
GIMP, Krita, and many others are right up there if you haven’t been sucked into the Adobe addiction vortex.
I moved to Affinity early this year, and it has been amazing!! I was expecting a long adjustment period after decades with Photoshop, but it’s so similar that I picked it up super quick!
Just an FYI that you might want to get some practice in with some Affinity alternatives, because they’ve been purchased by Canva, and so enshittification might set in any time.
I still remember when they bought Macromedia Flash and all my animator friends and I simply couldn’t stand Adobe Flash CS3 or whatever it was called. It used more resources, crashed more often and didn’t exactly bring anything revolutionary to the table in terms of new functions.
Ok, so I’ve tried gimp in the past, but had a hard time with it. Honestly, my Photoshop skills are mostly self taught (and not all that impressive), but that’s the interface I know. How similar to Photoshop can one make the interface in gimp these days? Because that’s probably my biggest hurdle.
Gimp is a little steeper learning curve but if you already know photoshop it’s not that bad.
The tricky thing is knowing what to do when you get stuck. Luckily they wrote a manual that assumes you’re only reading the manual because you got stuck and you’re so frustrated you’re actually reading the manual.
Some brilliant people invented photoshop
It was a good product but expensive
Some asshole coke head CEO decided to make it more expensive and worse.
Fuck adobe.
GIMP 3 FTW
Big GIMP fan. That being said, Adobe needs to start promoting some of their actually good stuff, like their investment in the open C2PA spec for proving content authenticity, vs constant AI crap that is the exact opposite.
And they bought Macromedia’s suite and destroyed it.
I miss macromedia flash so bad, actionscript for life
I once built a website preloader that was so large that I made a pre-preloader for it. Good times indeed.
A flash preloader was my first real tech job! As I recall, they stiffed my last paycheck and went under later.
But it was incredibly fun and I made connections that steered my career to a new direction for the next decade.
Awesome, what’s keeping you busy these days? (If this is an account where it’s OK to share that on)
<insert outdated xzibit meme here> Agreed, the wildest of wests.
Fireworks for me. I miss that whole suite though.
Now there’s a name I haven’t seen in a while and that makes me a little bit sad.
Good I hated working in actionscript so much.
RIP Fireworks…
Fireworks had so much potential as a web design app and they threw it away.
Illustrator and InDesign were too focused on print media and Photoshop could barely comprehend anything unless it was rasterized.
That’s what big tech companies do, they buy small and promissing companies they think that once can become a competitor and then… destroy it. The young startups just take the money and can retire early.
And they bought Cool Edit and destroyed it.
And they bought Paintshop pro and destroyed it
Corel bought Paint Shop Pro and destroyed it, not Adobe, though it was an Adobe-style move to be sure.
I think he is old, like me and means aldus photostyler. Which was light years ahead of adobe in background separation.
GIMP 3, Krita, Darktable, Inkscape, Kdenlive
Blender
The people editing their images in Blender are the same people who edit their videos in Blender lol.
You say that like it’s a bad thing lol
Has it gotten better with editing? I tried a couple of years ago and just couldn’t. It’s amazing for the 3d software. If they could make it easier to measure things, I’d use it for CAD too.
FreeCAD for CAD as others mentioned.
I believe i recall there being an update specifically to the video editor within the past year or two, but don’t quote me on that. They have done updates to post processing, the timeline functionality, grease pencil, and i believe some other things that would apply to video editing, so i imagine it would be easier to work with. There are cad and measuring add-ons as well, i believe some free within blender itself.
I bought Davinci, so I’m happy with that, but I’ll still check out the Blender version. I can’t really complain about it, it does so much and is free.
As far as CAD goes, they aren’t really usable to be fast in CAD. It’s super cumbersome. You should be able to move things 1" to the right or left, put things at certain heights and move around the space in an easy way. I haven’t found anything that can do that for imperial. Also, the tools for making dimensions is really bad and I don’t think there’s a way to make a blueprint unless you come up with something yourself. That being said, it’s free and it’s not their focus. They concentrate on the 3D portions.
I’ve started using FreeCAD for CAD work, I’ve used Fusion 360 for 5 years before trying FreeCAD (again, I tried it a few years ago) and it works pretty good.
It’s different and it’s taking some getting used to but it’s working out quite nicely so far.
I’ll give that a try again. I tried that about 3 or 4 years ago and couldn’t make that switch, but I can’t remember why, lol.
If the units are set to inches for length. You can just type G (grab), X (or Y or Z), and 1 to move an inch in any direction. I think it used to be worse.
Unless they’ve changed it in the last 2 releases, it’s still that you have to decimal out the inches. So 1" would be .0833333. I don’t have time for that shit. It’s so easy in any other cad program from decades ago. Like I said, it’s obviously not their focus and that’s fine. It’s just on my wish list.
Maybe I’m doing too much engineering - I found Open SCAD to be way easier than Blender for making stuff, and that’s saying something because Open SCAD is quite a pain.
I can see why for engineering, it allows you to be super precise. I’m not sure the people who developed the CAD side of Blender have ever used it for anything precise or to build details and drawings of any kind. They just seem clueless, there is no other way to put it. AutoSketch used to be so great, maybe the paid version is now. That was different than AutoCAD and Revit, but I loved it.
I’ve always seen Blender as a 3D art tool but never as a precise 3D engineering tool. Didn’t even know Blender had CAD features
Me too. As I said before, it’s just on my wish list. I’ve learned Blender pretty darn well. If it could do CAD in a decent way, it would be perfect. There are too many UI’s in my head as it is.
I hate the syntax in OpenSCAD. It LOOKS like something object-oriented but it is procedural, causing oh so many footguns, if one expects it to act like OOP.
I’m a mostly procedural thinker, even though I program in OOP all day long. OpenSCAD works a lot like the rest of my code: write it, try it, look at the results, curse, revise it, try it, look at the results, curse differently… you get there eventually. I do highly suggest not coding a masterpiece in OpenSCAD without visualizing the components first.
It doesn’t do it natively, but it does have plugins for CAD features
FreeCAD (for less-organic modeling)
Photopea, Shotcut
I (distantly) knew an indie software developer who was putting up a pretty good Photoshop alternative in 1996: ONE GUY alone in his bedroom was making a decent living selling a Photoshop alternative that he wrote himself. And he wasn’t exactly a super-wunderkind coder, just a guy who knew the photo manipulation space well enough to get enough customers to float selling his software for a few years - in direct competition with Photoshop.
Adobe isn’t selling magic dust ground from precious gemstones by thousands of artisans. They had a decent product that they marketed the hell out of and eventually got overly greedy.
GIMP, Krita, and many others are right up there if you haven’t been sucked into the Adobe addiction vortex.
Krita is awesome with a drawing pad
And I’m not like even good at doing anything
Yeah, I got my son a draw-on monitor explicitly for use with Krita. It’s a normal PC too, but it makes Krita much easier to use well.
I use GIMP, but you can’t compare it to Photoshop. GIMP has a horrible GUI and it has very strange design choices.
The Affinity suite is comparable to Photoshop, but it’s a paid product.
I compare today’s GIMP to the Photoshop I used in the 1990s, and they’re not very different at all.
whatever happened to photopea
Photopea represent
Affinity Photo for me!
I’d prefer FOSS but…GIMP ain’t it.
Have used Photopea in* a bind in the past, it’s also pretty good especially the clone GUI.
I moved to Affinity early this year, and it has been amazing!! I was expecting a long adjustment period after decades with Photoshop, but it’s so similar that I picked it up super quick!
Another vote for Affinity. Excellent Adobe alternatives 1-time reasonable price. Such a breath of fresh air after so many subs.
Just an FYI that you might want to get some practice in with some Affinity alternatives, because they’ve been purchased by Canva, and so enshittification might set in any time.
It may enshittify, but since it’s a one time purchase and not a subscription, you can keep using your version.
Oh that’s really good.
I have been using it for the past 5+ years. It is good enough, and its perpetual license.
Bought out by Canva, I also currently love it, but I don’t expect that to last.
FUCK.
Krita is my graphics app of choice these days. But there are many alternatives that are great (like Gimp and Photopea).
So much of Krita is great and then there is the text tool which is still a heap of trash.
New update coming for that soon!
I’m fully aware of the feature that has been promised for years and is supposed to land in 5.3. I’m still using Krita, just not solely.
I still remember when they bought Macromedia Flash and all my animator friends and I simply couldn’t stand Adobe Flash CS3 or whatever it was called. It used more resources, crashed more often and didn’t exactly bring anything revolutionary to the table in terms of new functions.
I feel like I should have switched to GIMP a decade ago.
The best time to switch was 10 years ago. The second best time to switch is right now.
So the real question is whether Photoshop might ever have become successful, if Adobe hadn’t bought it.
It sure is.
Ok, so I’ve tried gimp in the past, but had a hard time with it. Honestly, my Photoshop skills are mostly self taught (and not all that impressive), but that’s the interface I know. How similar to Photoshop can one make the interface in gimp these days? Because that’s probably my biggest hurdle.
Gimp is a little steeper learning curve but if you already know photoshop it’s not that bad.
The tricky thing is knowing what to do when you get stuck. Luckily they wrote a manual that assumes you’re only reading the manual because you got stuck and you’re so frustrated you’re actually reading the manual.
Gimp3 just launched and it’s really nice.
And free.
Check out PhotoGIMP
Bluesky has a lot of artists. Posting this video here: https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc
Gimp sucks. Krita is way better.
They have different purposes.