Shoutouts
Thanks to the following commenters below for additional recommendations that I added to this post!
- bruhduh
- Toes
Free Open Source Alternatives
[Visual/Graphical]
For all visual/graphical artists I would personally recommend switching from Photoshop over to
- KDE’s Krita
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- GIMP
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
[Audio]
For audio migration I’d recommend switching from Soundbooth to
- Tenacity
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
- LMMS
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
- Status: “Unverified”
[PDF]
Acrobat Reader to
- MuPDF
- Licensed under: AGPLv-3.0 or later
- F-Droid
- KDE’s Okular
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
[Video]
Premiere to
- Shotcut
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- Kdenlive
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- OpenShot
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 only
- Flathub
- Status: “Unverified”
There’s also an excellent thread started by [email protected]
The UI and shortcut keys are unintuitive. Simple tasks that would take me seconds in Photoshop take me 5 minutes in gimp. I’ll never understand that there is always one person replying like you are here.
My advice: Don’t do hotkeys. Just use the toolbars for literally everything. Can’t find the paths window? Check under the Windows dropdown. Real simple. Don’t like the organization? Click and drag the boxes to reorganize, stack em where you want.
I think for several versions it’s come as Single Window mode by default which is nice, imo.
So here’s the thing. Just about anyone in a creative field learned Photoshop inside and out. We learned the shortcut keys and relied on them to be much much faster at our jobs. So not using them feels like a huge handicap and having to relearn them would be bad enough, but there are common things in gimp that I found have no shortcut keys at all. And the ones that do exist largely don’t make sense, even when ignoring the Photoshop conventions. When I’m struggling to zoom without clicking several times, the app is the issue, not me.
I’m sorry all of you put your eggs into one basket which enshitified into an interface for babies. BTW, I’m an artist both digital and traditional. When I got my degree in science I was able to get arts degrees at the same time fulfilling electives requirements. My favorite programs are Clip Studio Paint, Gimp, Blender, and Autodesk Fusion 360, but I don’t use hotkeys for any of them, except occasionally rigging in blender, or I would be memorizing like 300+ different hotkeys.
deleted by creator
If paying all that money to use photoshop is worth not learning a different ui to you, then you are their intended customer. I’m glad you found something you like.
Dualism everywhere. Jfc
I hate adobe and it’s precisely because they fucked me. I’ll never give them another penny. I want gimp to be good but it absolutely isn’t. I would be quite happy if it were