But now none of the open source software can compete with AI generative fill, AI denoising, and now AI rotation.
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.
$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.
Plus they are industry standards so people expect those files at the end of the project.
Unless everything is exactly the same (even the default file format) you’re still going to be better off with “what everyone uses” because you have to share content, and one mistake of sending a GIMP file instead of a PSD isn’t really worth the savings.
Where the open source stuff shines is where you have 10,000 employees who need minor image editing once a month or less; then you can save millions by using GIMP et al.
It’s possible to have a complete open source image setup - https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/about/index.html has done it, for example (and the issues he experiences are worth reading).