Actually if you try GIMP 2.9 there are loads of feature in it. but it is not yet available in the distribution channel, it is still in beta, although you can use it without any problem. It has high bit depth support, good painting tools, and yesterday they added a new blend mode called passthrough to improve psd compatibility. See not a stangnant or dead project. Just because the reddit user is ignorant and not competent enough to look into the development going on in the project, doesn't mean it is dead.
Those are the stuff that Krita already supported more than a decade ago, and Affinity Photo started some while ago, but still ahead of GIMP. On the open source world, Krita is slowly becoming on it way to becoming the standard raster application, and their brush tools can be used for image-editing with g'mic, and yes you will find people who prefer Krita for image-editing given it has things GIMP is missing out on and a lot in common with GIMP. (Krita selection tools are not very good, but workaround exists to not touching Krita selection tools, and you can extract hairs with intrusive background in Krita (with a lot of pain, and patience of course) Unlike GIMP, Affinity Photo and Krita supports nondestructive editing, and those two programs are way behind Photoshop in terms of feature engine rather than feature set. Heck, Krita supports CMYK, LAB, XYZ, and so on, but I'd imagine most people just stick with RGB, and those who use Krita for image-editing strongly benefits from using LAB when using tools to fix up images. It's not really wrong to call GIMP a stagnant project given it history and how it fares in comparison with its "competitors" and their history, but I will say that it is definitely in a better position these day, and it is definitely recovering.
That partly may be because opensource projects don't have a PR or marketing team, somehow we fall short in communicating or generating the buzz. May be learning from libreoffice marketing team or blender foundation may help?
I think we can learn from other projects and see how we can get there, but the earlier the better. The more the delay, the less the potential of revenue. And yeah, that issue with open source project is not really a simple problem. Nothing is in reality.
On 8/8/2017 11:49 PM, Raghavendra Kamath wrote:
Actually if you try GIMP 2.9 there are loads of feature in it. but it is not yet available in the distribution channel, it is still in beta, although you can use it without any problem. It has high bit depth support, good painting tools, and yesterday they added a new blend mode called passthrough to improve psd compatibility. See not a stangnant or dead project. Just because the reddit user is ignorant and not competent enough to look into the development going on in the project, doesn't mean it is dead.