Hi, I’m thinking about purchasing Photoshop, but I wanted to get opinions from people who know about this. I currently use Gimp, and this usually works for what I’m doing, but from the few tutorials I’ve watched on CGcookie, I have come to understand that Photoshop is much more advanced. Currently, I use gimp only for post-processing, and occasionally tweaking displacement textures, but many people on this site use Photoshop for painting textures for their models also, not to mention people who paint pictures with Photoshop. I’ve tried painting in Gimp, and it hasn’t worked very well. Is Photoshop essential for a non-professional?
I think it depends on what you want to do with it.
Gimp has plugins to add futures (for free).
I think you should wonder what it is that you realy miss, ask in the forums of gimp if it can be done in ways you dont know of currently.
Ask around at krita too.
The things i used to look for to adjust photos, are these days all available in opensource sotware (like content aware fill).
Sometimes photoshop is a little ahead, but i wonder if you get a good value for your money since most is all available elsewhere for free.
I don’t know how do you mean ‘painting textures’.
For the rest: everything depends on your workflow; there are dozens of image editing tools with editing functions for general purposes.
There are also some what exceeds PS in some functions (like PhotoLine with Multi-Layer EXR handling).
But: if you plan to use Quixel Suite, you will need PS.
As alternative I also recommend Serif PhotoPlus, too (has free version).
No, photoshop is not essential if you’re not a professional. Probably not for a professional either. I’ve used it “professionally” at some of my old jobs, where I could’ve made do with other apps like Krita or gimp just as easily. Plenty of other stuff around nowadays, free and paid. Paid still cheaper than photoshop. Try krita, do a tutorial or two by David Revoy or pick up the muses dvd which is a tutorial about how to use pretty much every aspect of Krita.
Is not essential if you’re not making a living out of this. And even then, I would recommend Photoshop ONLY if you’re also using more programs from the suite like Illustrator, After Effects and Premiere, the Dynamic Link feature is awesome in the way it connects all the packages.
That’s where having the Adobe programs really pays off.
Also, if you’re not doing any graphic design, you’re perfectly fine without Photoshop.
I switched to Krita for painting and texture creation, however there are features which need better implementation…
Krita needs a simple grayscale > normal map converter
Photoshop can save/load selections while Krita needs to convert them to Transparency mask > to Selection Mask (which can fill up on the layer view with too many layers - workflow problem)
Photoshop can transform a selection (only selection not contents) while krita can only scale a selection with parameters.
In Photoshop you can directly manipulate a channel (Cut / Copy / Paste / Invert / Transform) in Krita you assign a blend mode to the layer which copy the layer contents to the channel ( Copy Red / Copy Green / Copy Blue ).
You can paint on Alpha channel in Photoshop even if your file doesn’t have a transparent layer.
Photoshop has a Content Aware fill function which can quickly fill empty areas with contents from other part of the image. Neat stuff…
Krita is superior at brush controls and brush color blending. Ps Mix Brush system doesn’t compare, standard brush system is dated.
Krita transform tools match Photoshops, if not superior.
These are the things which come to my mind, correct me if I made a mistake or missed something. Technically you won’t miss anything if you don’t have ps. I been using ps more than 15 years so I keep it around, even though I use Krita for everything.
Krita is quickly becoming a wholesale replacement for photoshop for my workflow.
All is not perfect. Krita’s text tool is hot garbage, but using inkscape in conjunction with Krita for text actually works quite well and non-destructively.
That being said, inkscape suffers from horrible performance, but has good tools and can be wrangled to perform decently.
If you work in your own world, Krita (for painting) + Inkscape (for text and design) + Gimp (for photo editing) can get just about any job done. The only area where you NEED Adobe is if you work in an environment where you need to work with files created in Adobe apps (most professional work environments, unfortunately). The open source apps have very questionable I/O, and it’s simply an insurmountable roadblock if you need to get a paying job done.
Wow, I didn’t expect so many comments so soon! Thank you everybody. I actually have never tried Krita, and had only barely heard of it, but since so many people use it here, I’ll give it a try.
The reason why most people use Photoshop is because most of its users have had it for years. It’s their first photo editor. So when you encounter it like in video tutorials as a side app, you kinda get influenced by it. In reality, it’s not the only app that does the same thing. I use Paint Shop Pro, for example. I bought a version of it when it was still owned by Jasc. Corel bought it and I bought a one version of it. Through the years I’ve developed a fondness to open source apps and gradually switched to them, Libre Office, Inkscape, Gimp, Krita, etc. All of them have Windows versions. Several months ago I switched to Linux, so everything is open source for me now. (The transition wasn’t easy especially for a Windows long-time user like me.)
Going back to Gimp and Photoshop, I suggest you should search what you find missing in Gimp. Most times the features you’re looking for are already there. There will always be differences in workflows, but the result is the same. When it comes to painting, most people use Krita. Others who want to spend money use Corel Painter.
Photoshop is my first image editor, but I’ve also used Gimp a lot. I just did not like Gimp’s UI and i had a lot of problems with the advanced add ons that did not work in Gimp or caused some random errors. My opinion: for Photoshop you find help easier and ideas / tutorials. For Gimp you find a lot of features, but not everything industry standard features that Photoshop offers.
To be honest I think Photoshop runs circles around GIMP - while GIMP is free I think it is not really that good of an application in certain areas. Ok for some home use.
What makes Photoshop so good is the long acceptance in the industry, the color management and repair tools.
I actually don’t think it is that good of a drawing / paining tool
But here is how I would see it:
For sketching SketchBookPro kills them all.
For photo retouch Photoshop kills them all.
For texture creation or basic image editing GIMP is quite sufficient.
For painting Painter or Krita rules them all.
If you are on OS X look at Pixelmator or Affinity Photo both cheap around and below 50$.
On Windows look at Photoline very nice Photoshop replacement and honestly better in some ares. Also around 50$ I think.
oh man, I forgot they freed that. cs2 was my JAM for years. I’m afraid I might have gotten a little too used to cs5 by this point though.
If you are just starting out, I don’t think it is essential, but once you get used to it, it’s hard to transition out. As others have mentioned, Krita will cover a fair bit of use cases, but it doesn’t do it all. I really really want to like gimp, but it’s so rough around the edges that it makes it hard to love it. It’s fully capable of a lot of the hotness that PS offers. Content aware fill was available as a plugin for gimp before photoshop had that feature, but it’s so much more awkward and painful to use than in photoshop.
I don’t think it is essential as it used to be, but I do believe that you should learn it anyway because you might eventually be asked to use it and it helps to already be familiar.
I agree about most of the above, except on Linux I don’t have so much problems with Gimp - but try out Photoline if you can, heard a lot about it being wiorth the money.
Essential? No. It is not essential unless you are touching up photos for a living (in which case I would classify it as an essential tool).
On the other hand, it is incredibly useful with a plethora of resources for learning & making the most of the software. The thing to remember is that whilst GIMP & Pixelmator (for instance) can do much of what Photoshop does - there are holes in the functionality they offer and it is often easier/faster to accomplish one’s aims in Photoshop even where the functionality overlaps.
