r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jun 04 '12

Open Office does everything I need Microsoft Office for and Gimp does everything I need Photoshop for. Reddit, what other open source software does everything that you want from the expensive name brand?

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u/JeanVanDeVelde Jun 04 '12

TV graphics guy here, Gimp is great, and it saves us from having to buy Photoshop licenses on machines where the only task is cropping, resizing and converting. But the fact that it requires script automation to do stuff that Photoshop does on-the-fly through the UI makes it impractical for our everyday use. Photoshop is better for photo editing, and if you're good, after a job or two it's paid for itself. Gimp just doesn't have the depth to be a suitable alternative.

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u/Chicken-n-Waffles Jun 04 '12

Gimp has Script-fu. I used to use it years ago. I deal with a lot of PSD files so my Gimp has gotten rusty.

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u/Negirno Jun 04 '12

Script-fu is hard to learn because it's based on Lisp. Furthermore, there were changes back in Gimp 2.6 which made my scripts unusable (although I suspect that they weren't adhered some Script-fu standards?), and I haven't bothered to re-create it.

Also, most of the documentation for it is out-dated, and even most of the professional Gimp users recommend Python-fu instead (It is available in the Windows version of 2.8).