But now none of the open source software can compete with AI generative fill, AI denoising, and now AI rotation.
To a Linux user, yes. To a professional, it was always a cruel joke, it was never close, even a few years ago. It's like saying Notepad++ is a functional IDE, or Kdenlive is a functional replacement for DaVinci Resolve.
I cannot stress this enough: Actual professionals do not think GIMP is a viable replacement, in any way, and never have.
Most of the ai image generation stuff I've seen from adobe feels late to party in terms of what you can do with open source tools. Where they do compete however is with tight integration, and I guess that's what matters the most to users in the end.
There are plugins for gimp that let you do image generation, inpainting and other things.
As far as what the post shows, it looks very much like current models that generate novel viewpoints of an object, but for illustrations. It might be doable to fine tune this for illustrations and simply vectorise the new viewpoint again. Though this will destroy any structure previously held in the object.
All I'm saying is that we have the tech to do even more than what adobe is doing, we just haven't put it nicely together yet.
Some would say that GIMP, Inkscape, and Darktable aren't really competitive yet because they haven't had enough investment. If we invested in them enough, and managed them well, they could be like Blender.
GIMP has been in development since 1995. Photopea was initially released in 2013, has been solely developed by one person, and is a far-and-away better Photoshop competitor. The projects themselves are mismanaged. GIMP should (frankly) be abandoned and completely reset, in my opinion, as being a failed attempt at salvaging old code forever. Wisdom is knowing when to keep pushing - and when to give up.
I don't doubt they will put prices up, just boring they don't need to.
So I would love if GIMP started shipping these awesome plugins by default to pick up the pace!
That, by itself, would be a complete deal breaker for professional work.
There's plenty more deal breakers remaining.
This is a common pattern across many fields. The truly top-end companies are always running ahead of open source.
But that doesn't mean it's a permanent situation. It just means you're looking at it from a point in time where the commercials got there, and open source hasn't yet. Open source will get there, and then Adobe will be ahead on something else.
I've played a bit with "comfyui" over the past few days, a bizarre name for an AI image generation power tool. (And other things, but I have no experience there to know how good it is at those.) It drips with power. The open source world is not generally behind on raw capability. As is often the case, open source's deficiency for generative fill for instance is that A: it offers too much control, too many knobs (e.g., "which of several dozen models would you like to start with?"), and while that's awesome if you know what you're doing, it is not yet at the "circle this and click 'remove'" yet, and B: the motivation and firepower to integrate this all into a slick package is not there. I can definitely do an AI generative fill with open source software, but I'll be exporting an image into comfyui, either building my own generative fill program or grabbing some rando's program online who may or may not be using compatible models or require me to install additional bespoke functionality into comfyui, doing my work, and re-exporting it. The job is done, but it's much more complicated, and most people don't care about the other extra capabilities this workflow yields so for them it's just cost.
It's a very normal pattern in the open source world. Nothing about the current situation particularly gives me cause to worry specially about it.
To be concrete, here's a YouTube video that's to the more advanced side of what you can do in the open source world, which is probably still ultimately simplistic compared to what some people do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijqXnW_9gzc That entire series is worth a look, and there's more it doesn't cover. You can get incredible control over these tools in the open source world, but it involves listening to some guy on YouTube trying to explain why you might to sometimes use a thing called "dpmpp_2m_sde_gpu"... not exactly normie-friendly.
Ex - I can absolutely get exactly this same rotation feature using open toolchains, they just haven't been nicely consolidated into a pretty package yet.
So to recreate the same thing adobe is doing here I currently have to:
1. Use the 3d-pack in comfy-ui to get stack orbit camera poses for my char (see: https://github.com/MrForExample/ComfyUI-3D-Pack scroll down to stack orbit in the readme)
2. Import those images back into the open source tool manually.
Is it as convenient? Nope - it requires a lot more setup and knowledge.
Is it hard to imagine this getting implemented in open source? Also nope. It's going to happen, it just won't be quite as quick.
Programmers making things for other programmers will always be forgiven as long as it works. Programmers making things for the general population will not be forgiven to the same extent if at all. As soon as someone releases something that is polished, it will be used even if it doesn't work as well.
There’s always been a significant gap in capabilities once you looked past the surface.
I find this sentiment is common among FOSS advocates who don’t actually professionally use those tools.
I am definitely an advocate for free tools closing that gap, but I both design content professionally and contribute to OSS projects to close that gap. So I feel quite confident in saying that gap has always been large when compared to the Adobe suite.
The only people who would actually equate them are people not professionally using these tools everyday.
Even paid apps like affinity designer are a fraction of the functionality of Illustrator.
Again, a great product but people are just dead wrong if they compare them as an absolute.
And as we all know, this is why the iPhone has been so successful despite bringing Android-like features years after they were launched.
See example: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/9606161/53874756-0...
$80 CAD/mo for the whole suite minus the substance stuff (prices are regional). For the average freelancer in Canada, that’s not a consequential barrier to entry. That’s <$1k for a year for everything.
If I charge a rate of something like $40/hr, that’s two hours in a month? <2% of revenue. Am I going to risk spending that much extra time fussing with something else for 2% more $$?
Meanwhile Blender gets a lot of investment because the competition is much more expensive. CA$305/mo for Maya and I need to augment it with an adobe subscription for any non-3D work.
While someone who just needs a functional vector graphics editor and is not being paid to use adobe software might prefer inkscape. Speaking from personal experience, there.
What Adobe does is wrap those things in an easy to use app, and then charge for it, and hopefully not change their licensing again to grab everyones shit again.
Regarding the scheduler (dpmpp) sure adobe doesn't tell you those things, but thats because they found one that worked, removed the options and packaged it up with a bow, comfy and a111 and forge etc, are more complex because they give you EVERYTHING and let you have at it. There are frontends that wipe all that away but they arent successful because like the linux world, people in opensource want to be able to tinker with all the internals and shit, which is why opensource tends to see some groundbreaking optimizations, like taking the Flux model from requiring 30+gb of vram to run to running on 6gb of vram lol
It really couldn't
It's wishful thinking at best and delusion at worst. I see it constantly on hn on many threads. I suspect hn incents that kind of language because people on hn like being pandered to.
