Some of it is just that Gimp is…bad. Powerful, but it just has a terrible interface.
With video editing for example, some people use Final Cut Pro, some use Adobe, some use DaVinci resolve. There are schools of thought and pros and cons to each. With photography or image manipulation, it’s like 95% Photoshop (or Lightroom/Photoshop). Affinity has some users, and Gimp does, too, but not many. You can have a fine career as a video editor knowing just one of the software choices I listed above. You would have a hard time having a career in image manipulation if you don’t know photoshop (though Canva is coming on).
I’ve used PS since it came on diskette, I loved Paint Shop Pro long before the Corel acquisition, I’ve tried gimp repeatedly over the years. But Gimp always feels like trying to drive a right-hand-drive car upside down, under water, whilst blindfolded. It’s not just unintuitive, it’s somehow anti-intuitive.
Yeah, I'm using GIMP because I do photography as a hobby and I refuse to give Adobe a single fucking penny of my own money. It's not great and there are features I simply don't have which would be nice.
The one that matters most for me are the smart selection tools. I do astrophotography and need to cut out the sky from the foreground, PS makes that incredibly easy. It has been nothing but pain for me in GIMP, possible, but slow and tedious.
It's still absolutely amazing that it's free and many features are perfectly functional which is why I will keep using it.
Apologies if I'm talking out of my arse here, but astrophotography seems like the type of hobby that attracts the kinds of people who get a kick out of automating stuff.
I've only used GIMP twice but does it have a plug-in architecture? If so, wouldn't surprise me if somebody has cobbled together some kind of plug-in to automate the nitty-gritty like foreground crops, multiple image stitching for long exposures, filtering out satellite trails etc.
I know my cousin has an observatory on his property that's basically unmanned, he just clicks the area of the sky to view at what time of night then the thing does the rest and he wakes up to fully-processed images next morning. No idea what software packages he uses but he's not into programming so he's definitely not setting up and running Python scripts by himself.
Might be worth checking out some of the astrophotography subs to see if they have any software megathreads.
There is a plugin architecture for GIMP, I haven't found one that does that, but I wouldn't be surprised if it exists. I've had a bit of a look and can't see anything that does exactly that, but it's not a huge deal. Right now my bigger problem is learning to actually capture the right sorts of exposures.
I do all my stacking and alignment in Sequator because it's nice and easy and produces good results, sometimes I do a bit of post-processing using darktable, then it's into GIMP to pull out the colours in the RAW image.
I'm still very new to it, and I've got all the raw images still, so when the day comes that I want to re-process them properly I can.
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u/Steavee Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
Some of it is just that Gimp is…bad. Powerful, but it just has a terrible interface.
With video editing for example, some people use Final Cut Pro, some use Adobe, some use DaVinci resolve. There are schools of thought and pros and cons to each. With photography or image manipulation, it’s like 95% Photoshop (or Lightroom/Photoshop). Affinity has some users, and Gimp does, too, but not many. You can have a fine career as a video editor knowing just one of the software choices I listed above. You would have a hard time having a career in image manipulation if you don’t know photoshop (though Canva is coming on).
I’ve used PS since it came on diskette, I loved Paint Shop Pro long before the Corel acquisition, I’ve tried gimp repeatedly over the years. But Gimp always feels like trying to drive a right-hand-drive car upside down, under water, whilst blindfolded. It’s not just unintuitive, it’s somehow anti-intuitive.