Honestly I don’t really care that you - or anyone else - believe what I say or not. What I said was right, I gave the necessary information for you, corrected the mistake. If someone wants additional stuff to back it up (because believes more in a blog where the blogger could pull infos out of his ass), it is a free world: do that. It is not my task to make the homework if you or anyone else don’t believe me.
The most authentic source for these kind of infos is the developer. You saw right, I’m not native English speaker and I used ‘letter’ instead of ‘mail’. I don’t think that it requires too much effort to guess what I meant, but that was definitely my bad, I took the responsibility for that.
Anyway, I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings; but to be honest, this whole situation was like when i read on a forum that someone wants a serial/crack for Blender.
Calling someone as an asshole is rude. Not doing the homework instead of others isn’t. See the difference.
I use DrawPlus from Serif (also PhotoPlus) and I’m pretty pleased after using Corel for like 10 years. I was never a fun of AI (I never felt it as comfortable), but DrawPlus was just a very-very good choice. It has flaws, but overall it is a very usable app. For some tasks I use Inkscape (which is something I don’t like at all because of it’s creativity-killer GUI); together they offer a very strong solution for vector drawing.
Eventually, I would say that Krita and Photoline would become a combination that can replace Photoshop due to their rapid development and the tendency for their developers to listen to the users.
Too bad for GIMP, the developers there had their chance to really get a volunteer team together and turn it into something truly potent, but they got caught up in software ideology and they now have a tough uphill road to follow if they are to remain relevant (despite ‘some’ purported signs of them taking user feedback more seriously).
I would definitely say at this point to buy Photoshop if you have the money (it’s not going to come cheap, but it will give you everything and the kitchen sink in terms of 2D and photo tools). Also be sure to really have a reliable income in place because you now pay by the month forever instead of having a permanent license you can keep forever (if you get to where you can no longer afford it than you can say bye bye to the application and possibly your files).
I have the monthly subscription, it’s about $10 a month and comes with Lightroom which I don’t use.
I would be very happy to find an alternative, specifically because I am migrating away from the Windows environment and Photoshop seems to be one of the last hold-outs.
With that said, I haven’t found anything so far that really replaces Photoshop properly. Krita is getting there, and I have to spend more time with the very newest update of GIMP, but so far, for my money, Photoshop is not easily replaced.
There are a myriad of shortcuts and quick workflow methods (that are not readily apparent to most normal users) that are just not found out of the box with the other packages. I hope this changes soon (or that Adobe makes a GNU/linux port) but either way, this is going to be one of the most difficult parts of my gradual transition to full on GNU/Linux computing.
Ace as much as I envy GIMPs work I feel they just miss managed their product. Good FOSS apps have good reputations like Inkscape. GIMP outside the fan group just has a disastrous reputation. I feel GIMP today is like what Corel Draw was in the late 90th.
Before the OS X apps I never heard about Serif apps for windows but they seem as free apps to be pretty solid.
If you can’t paint in GIMP, you probably won’t be able to paint in Photoshop either. Painting is a skill that is developed through practice.
For photo-texture type work, I can’t really think of anything I could do in Photoshop that I couldn’t in GIMP, but Photoshop has a lot better non-destructive editing options, has a significantly less clumsy workflow, and performs really well even at very high resolutions. Basically I can usually get something done faster with a lot less effort in Photoshop than I can in GIMP, but I can still produce high quality stuff with GIMP.
I’d grab an Adobe trial and see if you think it’s worth adding to your toolbox or not.
I can paint in gimp, but I think what I was missing was the advanced brush controls. I’ve now looked at tutorials and speed-painting videos of both Photoshop and Krita, and it looks like Krita has very good brush controls. The only problem is that I don’t have the right version of Mac for Krita to work. I’ll see what I can do.
‘Before the OS X apps I never heard about Serif apps for windows but they seem as free apps to be pretty solid.’
I always have mixed feelings about Serif apps. While it is an old company, it somehow just never get to my sight. I have some of their apps (PagePlus/DrawPlus/Craftartist/PhotoPlus) and there is incredible potential in their apps, but sometimes very basic and obvious things are missing (or terribly implemented) like ‘inset/bevel’ and they don’t really listen to their customer base in development. Also they have a very aggressive DM strategy; although it means that you could buy their products for like 30% of the original price on ‘sales’.
But: overall they offer very handy tools on very good prices. From photographer approach PhotoPlus is a very valuable piece with a PS-like GUI, running lots of the PS plugins. For an amateur photographer it is almost perfect (I personally can’t stand GIMP).
DrawPlus with its bitmap-brushes and bitmap patterns/effects is a very capable tool, too.
CraftArtist is a marginal story, PagePlus is a good one (for my needs), but is also marginal for me.
If you have any money at all to spend on painting software, you can get Paintstorm Studio (on sale right now for $19 USD). It’s pretty solid and it’s got a ton of advanced brush controls. www.paintstormstudio.com
I bought it back when it was $20, and it’s a pretty great app. You can get some very painterly looks with it. The brushes to me feel a little more like Photoshop or Krita than a painting “simulation” app like ArtRage (also worth looking into, btw).
I never said that the GIMP is officially ready for prime-time, but it would be foolish to suggest that the GIMP’s situation is impossible to fix either.
If their dev. team isn’t able to full off some magic of their own, a new team determined enough can come in, fork the project, rename it, and make it into something that GIMP wished it could be. I say determined because creating a successful fork is usually harder than it looks (noting how Cinepaint couldn’t make it despite a solid vision).
