a painful admission

The cover for WRAITHSHARD: PYRE & FORGE was the first cover I did in Photoshop CC instead of the GIMP, and while it really, really, really, really pains me to admit this, Photoshop is better than GIMP.

There’s nothing wrong with GIMP. But Photoshop is better at a lot of things, and numerous techniques take like half as many steps in Photoshop as they do in GIMP.

This is vexing to admit because Adobe software has been causing me problems for a long time, going all the way back to the first versions of Adobe Reader back in the 1990s. In fact, I’ve had problems with Adobe software in the 1990s, the 2000s, the 2010s, and the 2020s, which means I can say I’ve had problems with Adobe software across the span of four decades! 🙂

This problems included Adobe Reader getting so bloated it crashed when PDFs tried to open. Or Adobe Flash crashing browsers. Or Adobe Flash refusing to work when it got out of date. Or Adobe Flash crashing when it tried to update. Or Adobe Updater crashing when it tried to update itself. (This really happened many times.) The various incompatibilities between the different versions of Creative Suite. The convoluted way licensing for Creative Suite worked in computer labs, and how sometimes it would stop working at random for no discernible reason.

And the pricing was the worst of all! Creative Suite was expensive. When Adobe switched to the Creative Cloud model, it got even more expensive.

But! You do get value for your money for Photoshop. At this point it really is a very well refined and mature product. Also there really is a lot of excellent documentation available for it, which is sometimes hard to find for GIMP.

So while I think many people can get by with Paint.NET or the GIMP, I am forced to concede that Photoshop really is the best in class.

-JM