Isn't the main problem for OSS adoption advertising? If you are a graphic artist and don't give a rat's behonkus about computers do you really dig until you find the GIMP(and the continual slog for documentation and understanding) or do you read graphic artist monthly with big color Photo Shop ads, Photo Shop books on B&N's book shelves, and training courses. The choice is just about made for you, in their world Photo Shop exists the GIMP doesn't.
Maybe it's the average programmer that doesn't give a "rat's behonkus" about the graphic designer?
I think most designers I've met know what OSS kinda is and are always looking for tools to improve workflow - they just want tools that work. Last time I checked out Gimp it still didn't support adjustment layers for non-destructible editing, which is pretty much a show-stopper.
Packages get used when they lead the way in a given field, most of the OSS design apps I've seen are just playing catch-up.
>> Gimp it still didn't support adjustment layers for non-destructible editing, which is pretty much a show-stopper.
Packages get used when they lead the way in a given field, most of the OSS design apps I've seen are just playing catch-up.
So which is it? Gimp isn't good enough because it doesn't provide feature for feature compatibility with PS or because it doesn't do something different? You just claimed both. It has a different workflow than PS so yeah as long as you try to keep using it like ps it is going to compare poorly.
Isn't the main problem for OSS adoption advertising?
You can't advertise without doing some marketing work. Free Software projects have to figure out who their target markets are and cater to them. GIMP is the best example because it could be split into a few different versions; one that's suitable for Photo Shop users, and another that's useful for people who haven't been "tainted" by Photo Shop.
There could be tutorials and books that make it easier for Photo Shop users to use GIMP.
If there was some cash, you could do the sleazy thing and pay people to use the GIMP when teaching graphic design classes or whatever. Heck, you may not have to pay them at all if you can convince them that the price of $0 makes the GIMP better than Photo Shop.
The trick, it would seem, is convincing them that a $0 tool with its faults and crashes is better than a stable $400 industry-standard tool 15 years in the development and that, when billing design time at $80-120/hour, the latter tool won't quickly prove its worth.
Time and time again, Gimp has proven to me that it's not the tool for doing anything but the most basic editing. I want to love it, because it's free, but I don't have the time to waste when it eats my drawings.
What could really help would be a gallery of stunning art created with only open-source tools; the trick there is teaching the artists to use the tools and making it worth their time to do so...
The main problem with FOSS graphics packages is that they aren't focused on being usable and producing beautiful-looking graphics. They're focused on being FOSS packages first, and software that does graphics second. The combination of usability (or maybe just familiarity... but still, it's the measure of the ability of a package to be used) and just really nice looking results are what put Photoshop and Illustrator ahead of GIMP and Photoshop in nearly every area. I just don't see anybody saying "look at this beautiful art I made with GIMP." I see people making lame fan art and bad gradients.
GIMP and Inkscape are not ready for prime-time. (And as always at this point: They lack proper support for CMYK, Fonts, Color-Management, Workflow in big publishing and printing shops.) Never mind the usability desaster that the GIMP represents for anyone who is accustomed to PS.
Never mind the usability desaster that the GIMP represents for anyone who is accustomed to PS.
In the interest of fairness...I just bought Adobe CS4 Web Premium (with Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.). I've been working with the GIMP and Inkscape for a good long while, off and on, and I'm still finding Photoshop and Illustrator to be incredibly hard to use and obtuse. I've been watching video tutorials, reading the docs, searching the web, and tinkering, for a couple of weeks now, and I'm still nowhere near as productive as I am in GIMP or Inkscape. Partly this is just that the Adobe products do more. This is an acceptable cost, to me, but I still find myself feeling grouchy a lot of the time because things do not work as I would expect (not just "as the GIMP or Inkscape would do it", but also in terms of discoverability...for example, sometimes I accidentally break my workspace, or whatever it is called, and can't figure out what I did or how to fix it; you can't undo workspace changes, as far as I know).
Take it all with a grain of salt, as I'm a barely functioning idiot with quite a few products that are supposed to be easy to use. iTunes, for example, is a nightmare for me; I always end up deleting my whole collection either on the device or on the computer or having something else go totally amok and I have to reboot into Linux just to recover all of my data. So, maybe Adobe software is "easy to use" like Apple software is "easy to use", and I'm just an idiot.
Stability of the Adobe stuff also leaves a lot to be desired. It's kinda like Inkscape a couple of years ago, or GIMP ten or twelve years ago (or during the 2.0 beta years). Sometimes weird things happen and it just freezes up. This may be the newer Adobe stuff; I'm usually watching a tutorial video when it happens, so maybe Air or Flex or whatever is to blame, rather than Photoshop or Illustrator. But it happens a lot when I'm watching those videos.
There are most definitely stability problems with Photoshop. You would think something that cost that much would at least be <i>stable</i>, but I suppose "serious professionals" look at feature sets and not stability.
My experience with GIMP is none, so I'm not exactly qualified to comment, but Photoshop has to be one of the biggest usability nightmares on the market today. There are strange restrictions and ambiguous error messages that don't make any sense for the novice. Once you get more comfortable with Photoshop, you realize the power and flexibility of it, but it takes a while to get there.
As someone that spent a good long while being frustrated by photoshop, I can't imagine GIMP actually being harder to use.
As frustrating and annoying as Photoshop is, GIMP is massively worse usabilty-wise across the board, and then all the features are missing too. It's a lose-lose.
I haven't found a single task where GIMP is less obnoxious. Most of the time I give up -- sometimes I'll try to use ImageMajick or PIL, other times I'll get a Mac or Windows box with Photoshop or Paint.NET
As frustrating and annoying as Photoshop is, GIMP is massively worse usabilty-wise across the board
I can't agree with you on this one. I think you're guilty of believing intuitive means "what I'm used to". We all are to one degree or another, which is why I made a point of mentioning my many years of using GIMP vs. being a beginner with Photoshop. Nonetheless, the learning curve in Photoshop is very steep; I believe steeper and longer than GIMP. Yes, it's definitely a more powerful tool, which is why I bought CS4 recently despite being comfortable with GIMP/Inkscape and able to product most things I've ever needed to produce with just a few minutes of effort (except ai and psd files). But, nonetheless, even just doing basic image editing tasks, Photoshop is pretty hard to use.
I think the only real conclusion we can come to is that complex software is hard to use for beginners.
I didn't even mention the spectre of 'intuitive', much less subscribe to its primal fallacy.
I used GIMP and several generations of Microsoft products (my family had a MSDN subscription) before I figured out Photoshop at all, and the difference is night and dusk (PS is no usability king either, just not dogshit). There's tons of opportunities for improvement over PS, but GIMP takes none of them and instead does a bunch of stupid MDI shit.
Interestingly, I find the opposite holds true for Illustrator/Inkscape -- I am baffled by Illustrator, and have never met someone (even digital art faculty) who could really wrap their head around it, much less show me the way. It's CAD-tool bad! Inkscape is awesome, and not just compared to AI (though for the first several years it was ridiculously unstable).
Nah. It is possible to make professional-quality, shiny, colorful graphics with GIMP if you know what you're doing. Sure, installing the non-default fonts (that is, not having a one-button install method) and configuring everything is what prevents most people from adopting it.
There are graphic designers who are graphic designers, and then there are web developers who are also graphic designers.
Have a look at what some "designers" are getting paid on sites like crowdSPRING.com and 99designs.com and it's pretty obvious that graphic designers who don't know code are fairly easy to find.
I think this has been why there's been such a backlash against the freelance sites by the brick-mortar "design only" firms.
The vast majority of them. Photoshop was designed from the beginning to work with print media -- it's called Photoshop for a reason.
Conversely, the people who just need to whip up some graphics don't need Photoshop; they have cheap alternatives like PaintShopPro, Paint.NET, or competing lesser-known commercial software.
