It might not be an obvious one but GIMP.

Adobe are ripping off my work and violating my clients privacy if I use Photoshop to process their images. So I use GIMP instead.

Jolly good, carry on!

I had that in the beginning too. Once you’re used to the basics you’ll find that most of what you’ve learnt does transfer though.

I think part of the problem, at least for me coming from 20 years on photoshop, was searching for “how do I do this advanced technique in GIMP” before learning the basic layout/structure/tools etc.

YMMV but I highly recommend watching an hour or two of an introductory GIMP course. It’s what made it click for me.

Good idea for a video.

It definitely took me some time getting used to GIMP after nearly 20 years as a photoshop user but I’m very glad I did.

I’m very tired and got mixed up for a moment about which of you was the bot and thought “Awesome! A bot that points out when someone is being continuously negative!”

I hope someone makes a bot like that. That would be a good bot to have.

Here in the UK (and elsewhere I’m sure) there is public funding for the arts. It’s recognised as being good for culture but that it also stimulates the broader econony. In that way it is treated as a public investment with expected public (and private) returns.

You can easily install most of those services on YUNOhost - in fact I have a bunch of them running on a cheap VPS. All open source. It even comes with email and XMPP out of the box. I had no hosting experience beforehand and I rarely have to touch it these days. I would want more resources if I had 10 people using the whole Nextcloud suite every day but if you wanted to go the VPS route I’m sure you could easily do it for less than €5/month/person. You can run it on your own hardware as well.

I haven’t tried it yet but Calibre Web looks like what you need. A good write-up on it here. Looks like you can enable uploads from your phone.

Great resource - very accessible 👍

This is excellent software.

Yeah, as a user I’m starting to regard this as a classic developer pitfall. It’s the same with everything I guess - when you work on something for long enough your perspective and reason for doing it evolves.

If FOSS users and developers mixed more and had more time to offer everything would work and flow better: UX/UI, documentation, install scripts etc.

We are our own departments: Speak up and be more specific, users! Take a couple of steps back, developers!

So safety in numbers and resources I guess. When it comes to community plugins/extensions e.g Firefox, Ardour, GIMP etc, do you have an impression of whether developers of the main program include anything in their code to prevent abuse?

Do it! It’s madness that YUNOhost is not more well-known, considering what it does.

Check out YUNOhost - it’s pre-configured for you and designed for beginners. Mine’s been running for about three years on a VPS with no problems and I had no previous experience with self-hosting.

Definitely keep your files backed up locally though. No server is invincible.

Part of me just wants to use GNOME Web and be done with it.

I þink þat’s probably exactly what þey’ll do.

If you’re new to self-hosting I highly recommend you look at YUNOhost. All of those apps are available on it.

GIMP 3 is the bees knees 💪

There are some great plugins coming out for it now as well. I highly recommend checking out Batcher, which you can use not only to batch convert files but also to apply sets of adjustments including from G’MIC. Really powerful and useful tool with granular control.

There’s also a really good frequency separation plugin and of course Resynthesizer.

Great times to be a GIMP user.

You’re right that Photoshop has features incorporated into it which GIMP doesn’t. It’s worth remembering though that although GIMP follows the unix philosophy of not trying to do everything it does do a lot to interoperate with other software. For example, if I want to open a RAW file directly from GIMP, it launches Rawtherapee or Darktable for me, which processes the file and then opens it in GIMP, much the same as an Adobe workflow but more visibly two separate programs working together. And of course there are G’MIC, Batcher and Resynthsizer but they do need to be installed manually as plugins, which is not ideal for newcomers.

I think a big game-changer for some users is going to be the upcoming release of ‘Link Layers’. You’ll be able to have a layer in your GIMP project which is linked to an external file. So for example you could have a layer in your GIMP project which you are editing Krita.

I’m sure a lot will depend on what you’re working on but in my workplace the only thing really holding us back from switching to GIMP is setting correct scaling and position for printing on rolls on Windows 11. If I could get my boss to switch to Linux (probably even more amibitious) we would be done with Adobe.

I has no previous experience with self-hosting and got set up using YUNOhost