I wouldn't pay $1 for Photoshop when GIMP is free and open source. It's been my daily driver in a personal and professional capacity for ages, and Photoshop offers nothing special for me.
AI features. Content aware fill. Better masking / feathering tools. Layer effects and composition. Text handling by far. Vector layers. Smart objects. Dynamic link to other creative applications. Brushes x1000. Pen input. Smart selections.
DiffusionBee on Mac has AI infill on images, and the models run locally and it’s free and open source. I have to think that someone is looking at implementing that in GIMP, at least as a plugin.
I agree with you in principle, but there is one big task where Gimp can't compete: importing PSD files. Kudos to Gimp developers for the level of psd support it has, but it's not perfect (naturally).
Genuinely don’t know: can you do scripting/batch processing with GIMP? I have set up some complex workflows in photoshop using JS to manage the batch sequencing IIRC, though it was quite a while ago.
Another one I don’t know: can you embed a gimp file into a layout editor? A common workflow is to embed a photoshop file into an indesign file; you can then edit your photoshop file and have your indesign file updating automatically. This is a common workflow in several adobe products, eg I believe after effects sequence embedded into a Premiere timeline is possible/common.
You sure can. I'm not even an artist and that's the one part of GIMP I can speak for. It has its own Python library, so almost anything you can do in editor you can do programmatically, but I made a few scripts for batch processing an entire album of images.
(documentation is about as awkard as the GUI, though. You will eventually find what you need after putting in 3-5x more effort than what should have been necessary, but it's somewhere in the docs)
To be fair, singular or very small businesses in general aren't the target consumer for companies that switch to these subscription models. They are penny slots while Adobe is discussion contracts with larger studios.
I'm glad there are people willing to pay for the development of software so I'm not stuck using GIMP. It's actually a good thing when people get paid for their work, the issue here is that adobe's predatory pricing models and making it difficult to cancel.
