this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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So, real talk, be completely honest with me - how usable is GIMP these days? I’m not trying to pick a fight, I think it’s great that GIMP exists, but while I may not be a professional artist, I am a developer with an interest in graphical design and I would say that I am an advanced user of the Adobe Creative Suite tools - the main three that I use being Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
I would be willing to learn to use GIMP to replace Photoshop, and Inkscape to replace Illustrator, for example, but only if they’re actually good enough to put to real, productive use.
I need my tools to get out of the way and let me work. If it crashes and loses my work EVER, then it is completely beyond consideration for me. If it’s good enough for light users but not really ready for professional use, then I don’t think I can really consider switching.
I do not use any of the 3D or AI features of any of those tools, if that helps.
I would really appreciate your opinions and advice. Please don’t be optimistic - I know it’s hard sometimes to be critical about open source software because of our ideological beliefs, but please try your best to be realistic.
Oh, and if you’re going to just tell me to try it, please try to contain that impulse. It would be a huge undertaking for me to relearn basically everything about how I work with these tools, so if I went through all that just to find that I couldn’t actually make use of them because they’re not ready yet, it would be a huge waste of time and energy, both of which I have in quite short supply these days.
Thank you so much for your time :)
In my experience, Inkscape can be used as a professional replacement for Illustrator. It has never crashed on me. There may be some limitations, but nothing super inconvenient or something there isn't a workaround for.
GIMP, on the other hand, is a mixed bag. I believe Krita is a much better candidate to be used professionally than GIMP. GIMP has an objectively bad UI, has weird quirks for very simple tasks, and is prone to crashes. I use GIMP for simple image editing and Krita for more complex projects. GIMP 3.0 is their best chance to fix their reputation and I'm hopeful it will deliver.
If you don't have time to try them yourself, follow creators who use them and check their workflow. I recommend Davies Media Design on YouTube for great videos on Inkscape especially.
Edit: No program is completely immune to crashes, it's good practice to routinely save projects no matter how stable or unstable the program is.
It is my understanding that Inkscape does not support the CMYK colorspace and is thus a non-starter for any work that involves printing.
That is true. IIRC, Krita is the only one of the 3 that has native CMYK support.