I’m looking for a raster image editor.
Though it can be simple, like MacPaint from 1988, or not-that-simple, like modern Adobe Photoshop, I would prefer something inbetween.
Regarding Gimp: I know about it but don’t like its UI. Let’s discuss other apps here.
Acorn and Pixelmator come immediately to mind. How far off the mark are they as far as UI?
(I use Pixelmator Pro a lot. I’d still recommend getting it even with the Apple acquisition news, but, I should mention that caveat.)
Neither of them are open-source. As you can see in the title of the thread, I’m looking for an open-source app 
Sorry, jumped straight to the body where it’s not mentioned. How do you feel about Krita? It’s more of a painting app but has photo tools. GPL 3.
There really isn’t much beyond GIMP if you’re looking for FOSS specifically. A good raster image editor is a pretty involved piece of software to develop and maintain. Couple that with the fact Adobe has such a strangle-hold on things and you’re not going to find a lot of developers with any sort of desire to develop a fully-featured Photoshop/Lightroom/GIMP alternative, for free, that very few people will ever care to use. The best you’re likely to get are software that specialize in certain aspects of photo-editing, primarily focused on doing a small number of things really well as opposed to being a “one-stop-shop” type of editor. The one’s that are interested in working on a fully-featured photo editor are probably going to gravitate towards GIMP anyway because it’s such an established entity, and why put all your effort toward something almost no one will ever use when you could instead put your efforts towards improving what is objectively the most legitimate FOSS competitor to Adobe in the space.
GIMPs UI really isn’t that bad man. At the end of the day any editor is going to wind up being an intricate collection of sliders and options used to optimize a variety of photo-editing tools to work in the precise manner you want them too. GIMP really doesn’t take any longer to get used to than Photoshop, and it’s UI is highly customizable so a day’s worth of effort is all that’s required to configure something that works incredibly well for you. You can even change the icons and make the whole UI look more modern, or at least something resembling software released in the current decade.
GIMP is everything you’re looking for an there are an insane amount of resources surrounding it, so I feel like you’re best bet is to force yourself to use it until one day you realize you don’t hate using anymore. Regardless, you’re options are extremely limited.
Yeah, isn’t that bad. I cannot even select text in text field using Command-A. And the whole user experience feels like that.
Thanks, will give it a try. Though it seems it is the same “quality” as Gimp. See, I have two input sources on a Mac: English US and Russian. The macOS itself uses English user interface. And what I see when I try to open a file in Krita? A mix of English and Russian filetype descriptions. Sorry for sounding rude, really nothing personal here, I’m simply very tired these days, but heck, isn’t it just disgusting? Why people who create free software never often don’t care about aesthetics?
Sounds like, based on your replies, an open-source solution is not for you. Pixelmator and Acorn are your options if you want a fit-and-finish level that works for you.
Not sure what’s going on, there. It looks like those types have Russian translations. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/KDE/krita/a3045a8e6fa0dc855772fcef2aadd0c01c06e2c2/po/ru/krita.po
It could be worth contacting the project or some of the individual Russians’ email addresses about what you’re seeing, if you’re interested enough in using Krita.
I don’t agree open source is or should mean ugly and inconvenient. IINA is open source and neat. Closed-source Sublime Text, though it costs money, is used by a lot of people for free, and is polished. If the app is ugly or has bad ui/ux, the free license or low price isn’t a justification
I like it, thanks a lot. For very simple use cases, one can also try Paintbrush.
It doesn’t have to be, but UI/UX is a rather specialized set of skills - and the standards for it (let alone OS-specific domain knowledge of things like interface bugs!) are different on every platform. Couple that with the fact that the functionality typically comes first (i.e. “before the UI”), the fact that people are donating their limited free time to these projects, and the fact that they might not even agree about what the UI/UX should be, and an app of any complexity is almost certainly going to have jankiness in places.
Regarding your examples, IINA is Mac-native. In other words, they’re only worried about Mac UI libraries. That’s not true for GIMP. And while IINA looks nice, it isn’t a media player per se - it’s (functionally) a nice GUI wrapper around an already-robust open-source player. In other words, the dev(s) who made it are likely fundamentally UI/UX people.
And of course Sublime Text is paid software. You can use it for free, but there’s definitely a revenue model there - $100 for a license. Add substantial revenue to a project and there’s much more incentive to polish it up.
If you’re looking for something that’s not obscenely expensive on Mac that’s awesome, Affinity photo lets you work with raster images.
I would venture to add that most projects are in need of volunteers to keep them maintained, much less work on aesthetics.
Today I learned that Gimp had a Mac App. Huh.
Absolutely. The open source idea that “anybody can look at the code,” “anybody can contribute,” etc. is true in theory - but in practice most projects don’t have a super-robust developer community.
And to many entitled users who like to complain …
If you’re looking for something that’s not obscenely expensive on Mac that’s awesome, Affinity photo lets you work with raster images.
The problem is not just the price itself but the Visa and Mastercard don’t operate here in Russia no more. To pay for an app, I would need to buy a bank card issued by a foreign bank, which is not only expensive but also “fragile” way — the next month the card may stop work, and that’s it.
That sucks. Wishing you the best of luck getting something figured out.
Your comment reminds me of the uproar around Heartbleed & everyone realizing the lack of resources that the OpenSSL dev community had despite it being widely used.
Also, this xkcd: xkcd: Dependency
