I'll die on the proverbial hill that the absolute worst instance of this has always been GIMP, which could have perhaps eaten Adobe's lunch MANY years ago.
It was and perhaps still is, a solid competitor to Photoshop, but any unfamiliar grownup is, quite reasonably, going to never ever ever trust anything to do serious work with a name like that.
Agreed. Also, that fu king mascot, Wilber?, that chihuahua looking thing didn't help normies without a sense of whimsy take it serious.
It really conveyed the image of cheap and shoddy. The drab looking logos, the name, and the weird looking poodle: all that just made it harder to take serious.
I used GIMP before I ever used Photoshop. My experience was the opposite. I think that means the UIs are different, but there is no one that is objectively better, it's just a matter of what your expectations are, which are set by whatever you learned first.
As for CMYK support: why do designers even need to use this? Sure, not every RGB is the same, and it took some while before we even got sRGB as some standard, but the same goes for CMYK: every printer has its own profile. I had the displeasure of trying to get the CMYK profile of a "professional" printing company that only accepted files in CMYK, and they didn't even know which profile their printers used. Ideally you would send a RGB file including the display profile your screen uses, and then the printing facility converts that to whatever CMYK they need.
Of course there are also special colors or effects outside of RGB/CMYK that you might want to use when printing something, that's something else.
GIMP has god horrid UX, there's no way it could have eaten Adobes anything.
There's lineage of FOSS apps that stick by the "we're not X, we're different from X." mantra.
The discomfort, frustration and unintuitiveness you're feeling from using our app? It's just you!
No, that's not bad design and bad UX! its simply because we are different! We aren't X (Photoshop), we just do things differently here!".
We've implemented a number of items from the issue posts once consensus was reached, and we hope more people will participate and help improve GIMP further.
I agree GIMP is a bad name, but is it really a 'solid' competitor to Photoshop? My impression has been that it was never close to being competitive on features. I've only used either of them very briefly so I may be wildly wrong though.
IIRC, it was too expensive to make Gimp support non-RGB color spaces needed for professional image editing.
I use it semi-regularly and it does a great job for me, and most of UX is clear and obvious (high DPI support is lacking). But I haven't used Photoshop since the 90s (or Aldus PhotoStyler before it was acquired by Adobe ;)).
I think it could have been -- which is to say, I think a better name earlier on could have well been what could have gotten more contributors etc etc. Network effects and such.
> which could have perhaps eaten Adobe's lunch MANY years ago.
That "perhaps" is doing a whole lot of work in that sentence. GIMP has never, even now, been a serious competitor to Adobe's products for professionals. To suggest that if they simply had a better name they would be the top dog is laughable.
Be careful. The language police have already got rid of "master". They were eyeing up gimp for a takeover or rename but I don't think it got very far. Perhaps all their energy was spent on removing the slavery from git.
It's about professionalism. It's a tradeoff. I see both sides of getting rid of e.g. "master;" but GIMP is so well beyond. Even if you make the argument that it's not offensive you're still stuck with a name that absolutely connotes "this thing is not going to be good at things."
It was and perhaps still is, a solid competitor to Photoshop, but any unfamiliar grownup is, quite reasonably, going to never ever ever trust anything to do serious work with a name like that.