Not a graphic designer, so, truly asking out of curiosity: what are the QoL things and essential features in Photoshop? I've been slumming it with GIMP for years now and not felt anything very obviously missing, but again I'm not a pro.
Re:Anthropic IPO
by Forgeties79 on Thursday November 12, 2026 @09:29AM
(#50467840)
Compatibility issues, which can be a huge deal partially due to near-vendor lock in. If you historically been on Photoshop, bringing your working/former projects into another software is not easy, which matters because revisiting work is common.
Not all tools are non-destructive in GIMP. Things like raw support, smart objects, retouching, etc. all either are super thin compared to Photoshop or require workarounds/a lot of manual effort. There are just lots of tools you expect in Photoshop that either don’t exist or exist in an inferior form. I can’t elaborate too much because I don’t really touch Photoshop much these days, but I work with people who do and worked in production long enough to know the expectations. GIMP is great but Adobe is a massive company with deep pockets, it’s hard to keep up. Their user experience is miserable but the tool itself is just far more robust
I'm not sufficiently skilled with Photoshop to gauge how well this replaces it, but you may be interested in this supposed clean-room reimplementation of Photoshop: https://github.com/storytold/photocraft
Re:Anthropic IPO
by Forgeties79 on Thursday November 12, 2026 @03:14PM
(#50473490)
Heard about this! Haven’t had a chance to check it out yet. I’m sure once I have an actual project that needs me to roll up my sleeves with Photoshop I’ll give it a shot. I probably should have mentioned it in my original comment as a possible option
But…
Photoshop is king. Everything else is behind by a solid decade. If you’re a professional the $40 a month or whatever it is now means nothing to you as well. It has the professionals are all on it, and because the price isn’t astronomical, that’s what everyone else uses who needs to use that kind of program more than once in a blue moon.
Premier? Replaceable. Lightroom? Pretty replaceable though still somewhat ahead. Photoshop? There’s only one Photoshop. And as much as I’m loathe to give Adobe any credit, it’s the best by a mile. There are too many essential features in QoL things that other programs are missing.
Luckily my department doesn’t need it, but if we did, we would simply have to accept Photoshop.