Artists got an unpleasant surprise when they opened Photoshop this week, as they were shown a pop-up window asking them to agree to new terms of service. Among the changes: Adobe now says it has the right to access customers’ content through “automated or manual methods.”
Now it’s true that when we use cloud services, we sacrifice a certain amount of privacy. And it’s not unusual for social networks, for example, to claim similar rights — when you share your photos on Facebook, you’re also giving Facebook the right to use those photos. But we’re not talking about your personal Facebook or Instagram photos; Photoshop is used by many, many professional artists for their livelihoods. They might also be working on sensitive or confidential material.
The moment you upload your data to some company cloud you no longer have control over it. They can use however the want it.
The biggest issue with GIMP is its weird UX choices. They should just make it more like Adobe’s UX. I know there’s tools that bring it closer, but the fact still is that they do some really dumb shit when it comes to experience decisions. Like if I want to change the font of what I’m typing, it works like this…
I have to TYPE in the font I want, no dropdown, and the font selection toolbar off to the side just straight up doesn’t apply to what I’ve typed or selected… and this is AFTER I ran one of those GIMP retrofit tools that tries to make it more in line with Photoshop.
Seriously, I’ve used Photoshop since 5.5 (not CS 5.5… FIVE POINT FIVE in 1999), and I STILL have to watch a tutorial for almost every single action I could intuit in 5 seconds from Adobe’s garbage malware tool.
I think Blender, and to a lesser extent Godot, were able to start making leaps and bounds like that due to funding as well. My memory is hazy on it but I recall probably 5-ish years ago the Blender foundation got a massive capital boost, and Godot has seen a lot of big name donors recently due to the Unity debacle. As far as I know, that hasn’t really happened for GIMP yet. I used early builds of both Blender and Godot, and the difference is night and day with how much they’ve managed to mature. GIMP on the other hand looks and feels largely like it did in 2010 IMO.
I have you beat then! My first experience with Photoshop was either 2 or 2.5 on my Mac IIci in 1992-93. All that means is that I’m likely older than you. We bought the Mac to run pagemaker after a failed attempt to use it on Windows 3. I started using Illustrator around the same time. I still use it, but mostly I’m throwing my money away on CC because I don’t have the skill necessary to care about AI stealing my work.