Is there really no viable alternative for Photoshop on Linux?

A long time ago, when I was broke and decided I couldn’t afford Photoshop, I decided to invest the time in learning GIMP.

Even though I’m a UX professional, and the barely okay UX does bother me, that has turned out to be a wise investment because no matter what, GIMP is always there for me. Always!

The price never goes up. It never gets paywalled by a subscription. It never has shady license changes. It changes slowly and deliberately. I never have to convince a new boss to pay for it. I never have to wonder if it will be available for a project.

That was like 20 years ago. I don’t how much value I’ve gotten out of that initial investment, but I bet it’s a LOT.

GIMP has its share of issues, just like any other software. but it's biggest issue is that somewhere down the line general users got this idea in their head that it was supposed to be a Photoshop clone.

So they go into it with certain expectations and then get frustrated when it doesn't work that way. People like me, who actually learned GIMP before PS, obviously didn't go in with the same bias and therefore have a much better grasp on it.

Gimp is not a Photoshop clone. it's its own piece of kit with it's own design and feature decisions that some may like and others may not. That's life. The developers have no obligation to follow any other software design scheme any more than Sony is obligated to follow LGs TV UI. They're not clones, they're alternatives.

if you think Gimps only function is to copy Photoshop, you're in for a bad time. If you want to use gimp as an ALTERNATIVE and go in without the bias,, you'll likely learn your way around a LOT faster.

I'm not excusing Gimps failings. far from it. but I AM saying that half the issue is the Photoshop users thinking that gimp only exists to copy everything from their precious Adobe daddy. And that's simply not true.

I had the same experience moving from GIMP to Photoshop. 😂

GIMP has the closest thing to feature parity. If you're looking for similarity of UI and workflow, you're not going to get it. Adobe throws millions of dollars that open-source projects don't have at streamlining their UI. UI specialists that will work for free are unicorns, so most open-source UIs are designed by volunteer generalist programmers. Which means that said UI gets the job done, but isn't optimized for the workflow of people who don't think like the original programmers.

Personally, I might shift the same picture through Darktable, GIMP, Inkscape, and even Scribus, depending on what I was trying to do with it. (Text on a path -> probably Inkscape, then export as PNG and import into GIMP as a layer.) Is that less convenient than performing all the operations in one program? Possibly, but since I don't like Photoshop's UI either, I'm willing to give up on "one-stop shopping".

(So who, for my money, had the best UI? Probably Paint Shop Pro, twenty or so years ago when it still belonged to JASC. Of course, it was a simpler program too, and so had less junk in its interface.)

Fact is, if you're a pro, you've invested years into learning Photoshop's interface and how to get the best results out of it. You're in the position of a baseball player who's decided to start all over again with basketball. Any attempt to transition to other software is going to be really, really frustrating for you, and likely drop your productivity into the toilet for a few months at least. Plus, you're going to need some features that average users don't care about, especially if you're preparing work for print.

I hate to say it, but you may honestly be best off running Photoshop in a VM rather than trying to move to other software, at least until you can set aside a couple of months where you have no urgent projects (if that ever happens).

I think one of the most insidious things about Photoshop is that it is a powerful, complex program. Using it is a skill. Which means that even if you think you are getting the better of Adobe by pirating their software, you are still building your own skills with their program, which is so full of features that classes can be taught about using it. In the end, that's a win for Adobe and their proprietary software, because if you end up getting good enough to make money from that program, you will end up finding yourself in a position where you eventually pay them, or work for someone who does. This is to the detriment of any other photo editor, of course. You won't care about how good GIMP or anything else is, much less fund it, because you won't want to use it, because you know Photoshop.

If I had deep wallets I would love to start funding GIMP for development and rebranding. But I don't have that kind of cash to push around :P

Can it be a web one? If so, I've used Photopea in the past.

Other than Affinity, I don't know who else is competing against Photoshop in the professional space. Neither have native Linux builds.

There's also PhotoGIMP which patches GIMP to make it look like Photoshop. You can also try installing Photoshop or Affinity via WINE.

If not, why?

Neither Adobe nor Serif see Linux as a potential market. As for the open source ones, I'm guessing it's because their funding and development team isn't as big as an industrial giant like Adobe. I'm happy Blackmagic Design supports Linux to some degree and I get to have DaVinci Resolve on Linux natively. I wouldn't be on Linux if DaVinci Resolve did not work natively tbh.

Guy that made the Pantone port after that whole fiasco also made the pinkest pink and blackest black paints money can buy. His company is currently developing an alternative to Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, aaaand.. I think Premiere?

It’s being developed under the brand “Abode”

Adobe's annual revenue is over 18 billion dollars Gimp has one developer who is almost full time and various part time contributions. One answer is that Linux support would be both non-trivial and would only add 1-3% to revenue for a multi platform editor. There WAS a reputably professional editor bloom.app at one point but it seems to have died.

GIMP is beyond stale and it's frustrating to see people recommend it as an "alternative" to Photoshop when it's about as actively developed as X11. The fact it's making rounds on FOSS news channels/sites because they ported the UI to GTK 3 (Which was replaced by GTK4 3 years ago now) is really a sign of how bad the project has gotten.

Photopea is a near feature-for-feature clone of Photoshop, designed around the superior UX and UI of photoshop, and all within a webapp that leverages hardware acceleration. All done by a single person. The downside is that it's a proprietary webapp that costs money to use without ads clogging half the screen.

And you know what? I STILL prefer Photopea to GIMP, after using the latter for years. GIMP is old, slow, and pretty much dead in the water and I'm certain that they'd have produced 3.0 faster if someone had rewritten it over a weekend instead of trying to port the godawful mess of tech debt that must be going on inside the GIMP project atm.-

Photoshop getting better support via WINE/Proton is more likely than GIMP ever returning to its hay-day of being a true competitor to PS.

Gimp is really powerful. What are you missing from it?

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Nothing currently can compete with Adobe Photoshop. Unless they port it to linux. It would take open source devs serious time to catch up to Photoshop development. Plus without making millions of dollars for decades, the development of another application of that scale and complexity would be a serious undertaking. That said GIMP as you know is probably the best "alternative". For me I just dual-boot and use windows for basically Adobe Suite. All other times I use linux. However I learned GIMP a long time ago so I am comfortable using it for what it can do, and I'm probably faster in GIMP than PS. I am not a professional graphic designer etc. though.

Nothing can touch Photoshop. They pay developers good salaries to implemend new features. For people who do media prouction and photography for $150,000, they only care about time, nothing else. I will always tell them to use Mac or Windows and Photoshop to get work done in a hurry and get paid.

GIMP does not exist or is s laughing joke for people who work full time in graphic design and photo production.

If not, why?

How many man-hours of work were already spent in the development of Photoshop, its plugins, etc? How much has that cost? On what scale of time was that spread around? How much money have designers put into them by buying licenses (now subscriptions) of Adobe's suite?

If you want an alternative for Linux that can match Photoshop, you need to be willing to support the R&D costs that have been paid off by Adobe throughout the decades of its development. Are you willing to do it?

photopea.com is actually pretty great, much easier to use than gimp with similar (or even better) feature set.

if learning gimp is such a roadblock then i doubt anything will seem good to you. it really sounds like you're looking for a clone of photoshop, rather than an alternative to photoshop, and i don't think such a thing exists. any reasonably complicated software will have a learning curve to it, so you may need to pick between continuing to use windows and photoshop, or putting more time than you'd rather into learning something new.

as to why there aren't any clones of photoshop, i expect it is because it would be a lot of work, and they'd constantly be scrambling one step behind to implement whatever updates photoshop gets, so no matter how much effort was put into such a project, it'd still get viewed as a second rate copy of photoshop. if you want to make a graphics program, might as well focus on making it good and making it your own, rather than chasing adobe's coat-tails, y'know?

If not, why?

I mean, how much money is Adobe investing in Photoshop? Also I am really curious about GIMP really as bad as you and others here describe it as... I have the feeling people expect a carbon copy of Photoshop where they can use their brain imprinted workflows to achieve the exact same results. This of course is just asking for failure. You rather have to get used to GIMPs (any other FOSS program) workflows and see if you can achieve similar results and decide if the increased time spent worth it, to use a software which is free and open source or not.

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One of the main reasons my wife hasn't taken the Linux plunge is Photoshop support and a lack of feature-complete alternatives with sane UI design choices. We would gladly pay for a Linux version of Photoshop at this point.

It"s dawning on me now as I write this that Proton could be the secret sauce that slays this monster. Has anyone tried adding Photoshop as a non-Steam app to the Steam client, lately?

It's not a native app, but have you tried photopea?

After some time living with Gimp/Krita etc. you will learn to do the things you did with Photoshop. It does takes some time and research/learning. I was real comfy with PS and do miss it but the more I've gone without, the more I've found ways to tackle the things I need to do with alternatives.

Are there no good alternatives to Photoshop?

If you want “Photoshop but not named Photoshop”, then no. If you want something that actually fits the definition of “alternative to”, then yes: Gimp.

the frustration is awfully familiar, i must say.

the thing about gimp and krita is: gimp is an image manipulation software and krita is a drawing software, and as far as i can see from my so's work, photoshop is a somewhat mixture of those two. from the jump, we're not comparing apples to apples, unfortunately.

but you already answered your own question, i think.

see, foss programs aren't there to be a drop-in replacment for their closed sourced alternatives. they emerge from a need from the community. what is more, usually you will have multiple programs encompassing a single workflow of their closed sourced counterparts; meaning they are modular.

so even if there was some other program apart from these, it would have a learning curve, unless adobe open sources photoshop. so there is a viable alternative (which i know from experience) but there is a learning curve, albeit a steep one for someone coming from photoshop.

you shouldn't limit yourself, but it would immensely improve your understanding of the software if you try to recreate simple pieces of your workflow using gimp, once in a while.

GIMP is made that way on purpose.

It can do lots of magical things, but it seems like the developers tried to make it as different as possible just for the sake of being different.

I'm sure that if you bring up something to a developer of GIMP that "isn't like Photoshop because it's buried under 4 menus", the only thing the developer will do to address the issue is release an update that then buries the feature under 5 menus.

They got their weird software with its weird name and they are PROUD of how weird it all is.

All I can suggest with it is to keep searching Google or YouTube on how to do things with it.

I've mostly used Affinity and GIMP over the years. Although my work just got me Photoshop so that I can explore some of its "smart" AI stuff to help with some things.

It looks like you already find what they alternatives are, but as you noticed they're not Photoshop. They work differently so you'll need to develop a different set of skills to used them.

If what you want is to use Photoshop, the best is to install Photoshop itself with Wine.

It mostly depends on what features of Photoshop you use. If you use most of them, there's no real alternative imo. If you only use a subset of its features, then GIMP, Krita, Photopea or Pinta may become viable alternatives for your use case.

Maybe try photopea?

If you like an online one , you can use photopea.

Maybe Darktable is an option for you.

https://www.darktable.org/

I hear you. I hate Photoshop, glory to Photoshop and all that. You can download a Windows 10 iso for free. Fire it up in Boxes or whatever VM software you have and enjoy unadulterated Photoshop. Sure, you're running a whole bloated OS and emulating hardware for just one app, but disk space is cheap, and you can disconnect the virtual nic if you don't want it online.

Once I saw a video review of various Photoshop alternatives. All the guy did was just draw a face and knocked a point every time something was different then photoshop. Now changing alt+t to alt+y or what ever does take time to relearn. Which yeah it is true for him that all these programs will be slower the photoshop. But photoshop would be slower for someone that spent years learning kirta and then moved over to photoshop.

Why are the shorcuts not a simple 1 to with photoshop? Maybe language barrier, maybe just random choice from developers, maybe there is some trade or patent that photoshop has. I don't really know.

Given enough time and practice you will relearn on the short cuts, and best way to get things done with gimp and krita.

IDK if you can convince it to run on Linux, but I've been pretty happy with paint.net lately

It's basically a newer project like gimp. It's got the core abilities and appearance of Photoshop. Feature wise, it's less than gimp or Photoshop, but what it has works decently well

Most importantly for me, the UX is much better than gimp... Not as good as Photoshop, but I find stuff is usually where I'd expect it to be

Obviously it's built on .net, so theoretically it could run native on Linux... Not sure if anyone has done the work to make that actually happen

Bruhh GIMP is so hard to use but it's doing basic stuff I needed like typing text.

If I needed Photoshop or something else I would use GNOME Boxes.

I vaguely remember there are some UI overhauls for GIMP to make it look more like photoshop. Can't remember what they are called though.

I use krita plus darktable. Together they give me everything I need.

You are correct that Krita is not a photo editor on its own. But it is also not designed to be. Linux developers have less of a one tool for every job ideal. Due to not needing to compete the same way commercial developers do.

It depends on what you are doing, but there are lots of viable free alternatives. In addition to GIMP you mentioned, take a look at Darktable if you do photo editing. Any piece of complex software takes time to learn.

It might be more web design leading but my company’s designers have switched to Figma, which is web based and has allowed me to work with their files for dev on Linux.

Web based, try Pixlr. Very similar

Is there no way to run PS on Wine? Seems like that would be a compromise but I’ve never tried it.

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I want everyone who says "just use GIMP" to draw a box in gimp

I wish I could get over the learning curve with GIMP but tbh my current workflow involves a windows 10 virtual machine for Photoshop. It works for my needs without GPU pass through.

Have you tried playing with AI like stable diffusion ?

All the software developers will say "there's GIMP" and then anyone who's actually used GIMP will laugh in their face, amd now you see why so much of the open source community is such shit.