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Lots of great suggestions here already
I haven't seen mobile editing mentioned yet:
ImageToolbox for a very good Android image editing tool
Fossify Gallery for some quick editing tools built into the gallery
While not directly for editing, Tidy on android allows for AI search locally
Termux for any CLI edits (imagemagick, etc.)
I prefer:
Krita, I use it for everything, I hate gimp, it feels so bad
I second Krita. I've used gimp for years but recently tried Krita and now I rarely open gimp anymore on purpose.
My biggest complaints with krita are around it not being easy to align objects and the text tool could use some love. Other than that, it feels like a great photoshop replacement
Yeah, text tool is just awful but I feel like I heard that they're working on an update quite some time ago ...
I didn't think either were noticeably worse than in gimp for my use, but you might be comparing to a higher bar (or your use is more intricate than mine), lol.
I have quite liked the ability to turn on snapping for lining things up, and managed recently to freehand a very nearly perfect hexagon with it's help... But I really wish there were some options for drawing polygons though... Even mspaint has the option to draw some basic shapes like stars and arrows and various polygons with just click and drag.
In general I feel like its probably KDE's best software package outside of its DE. Know of any other super good KDE apps?
Okular is pretty great, I can't find a package that does good annotation of PDFs built on GTK.
I use Okular all the time. I am so dense I didn't even realize Krita and Okular were both developed by KDE...
No worries, it's pretty hard to keep track when their naming scheme is "it has a K in it"...
Ouf, :(
I did say I was dense... lol
Except for the also outstanding KDE Connect which could just be called Konnect.
Okular is great. Kate is amazing. Kdenlive is BY FAR the most advanced FOSS video editor. I'd easily put Kdenlive above Krita, but that's because of my particular use case.
Krita looks more like a drawing and animation solution, whereas GIMP is an editing / manipulation solution. Or can Krita be used as an editor, too? I'm going to download later and give it a shot, but just wanted your opinion so I have better expectations.
i use it as an editor even though thats not really its use case. i just feel like gimp is far too clunky, it just feels "off" to me in comparison to photoshop
That makes sense. Thanks for the input!
I heard about Graphite the other day. It’s nowhere near finished, but very promising. Hopefully, it becomes the FOSS of Photopea. https://editor.graphite.rs/
That's more of an inkscape replacement than a gimp/photoshop one. It's mostly about vectors, not raster images.
It tries to do both.
I have used darktable, but doesn't seem to fill your need as it is more a lightroom replacement than Photoshop https://www.darktable.org/
Pinta.
It's like a Linux version of Paint.net
I don't think its 3D rotation capabilities are as good, though.
GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, Upscayl, ImageMagick, Background remover AI
GIMP and Inkscape. I use GIMP for all kind of image editing off course, and use Inkscape to create logos and icons. Both great tools. I wish GIMP had a few basic shape tools too and non destructive editing. Soon we get non destructive editing in early future, but basic shape tools will be added in a later future.
I have Krita installed too, but for general purpose editing and want to replace GIMP with it. Because Krita adresses some issues I have with GIMP, but it does not feel good in editing to me. Maybe I'm just not used to it, even after years of trying over and over again. It has extensive vector layers and non destructive editing, great, but the font tool sucks.
I also have Upscayl installed since a while, to play around with upscaling images. First it was nice, but over time I'm no longer happy with it. Especially with higher end resolutions, the image contain unnatural and wrong parts that stand out.
For background removal I use GIMP. Its a manual step with the integrated background removal tool, but you have to mask areas as foreground and background. If the image is not low quality and the boundaries are not too fuzzy, then it works well "sometimes". But I assume you ask for a more easy to use and more automated tool, preferably an AI tool right? I have such a tool bookmarked, its a browser online tool, but never used it so far: Background remover AI
As other tools, I use commandline converter and editor ImageMagick! Its nice to be able to script simple stuff and bulk edit them (20 thousand and more in a few minutes), such as crops from screenshots. Or at work I could create simple text based images out of a text file (it was for my shop back then... long time ago :-( ).
GIMP for most general stuff, Krita for painting and 2D animation, Aseprite for pixel everything.
I forgot about Asesprite! Thats a great tool.
Aseprite was originally licensed under GPL but later made propretary. The fork of the last GPL version is called Libresprite but it doesnt have much activity, I dont think.
Well, it still is OSS and one can still compile from source code. Or you can buy your binary. Never heard of Libresprite but looks fine if you absolutely want FOSS.
Krita has tools for 2D animation? I need to look into that.
Aseprite
Software that should have been around for the Amiga
I've been meaning to get into some image generation type things too. The best self hosted tool I know of is InvokeAI. I'm sure there could be a whole other post (or other community) about image generation tools.
I'd be interested in another post on that topic :)
Darktable for raw image processing
With ChaiNNer you can remove background, upscale (local), it's a lot more flexible and compatible with models than Upscayl, also a little bit more complex (node based, not as complex as comfyUI). You can upscale an image with a face model and use other model for everything else in the same image.
I use Gthumb for simple edits (croping, resizing, rotating...).
I used to use GIMP, but Krita has gotten advanced enough to where it can replace it for most things (at least that I would use it for).
dd if=/dev/zero of=image.png bs=1k count=1024 conv=notrunc
A very useful tip for technical images (i.e., lab report/research): export whatever graph you created as .svg, and do some prettifying touches in InkScape. It is faaaar easier than doing it in code.
Also, always export the .svg, even if you're not gonna use it. You never know when you want to do a very small correction, and it will save you quite some time.
I love use tools like mermaid or plantuml. But Ive always faught with formatting (or gave up) instead of editing after the fact. Great idea?
In the same vein, I use draw.io to make architecture diagrams and flow charts.
Image removal and AI tools have an overlap, for sure. RemBG is pretty effective, which runs in many of the environments with Stable Diffusion. Bria is a recent improved model for RemBG, which I've had some good success with. It's not perfect, but it cuts out a lot of the work.
I use kolourpaint to make memes
My daughter and my sister 🤣🤣. I have 0 art in my body, so they do all that for me. I could say I have a great AI driven FOSS process in place, lol.
Image is a broad word. I would say in order of usage per year it would be Darktable, Inkscape, Hugin, GIMP, Krita… but these obviously serve different purposes.
GIMP is alright. Mostly I stick to it because Krita's dependency on QT means it looks and works differently from everything else in my GNOME environment.