I've been running into the problem that 8 bits per colour channel is just too little in 2019. You get banding so quickly after certain combinations of operations, I can just feel the bits getting lost in the noise. You can see it by the histogram getting gaps and spikes. Especially with colour curve corrections.
It's getting harder to get modern quality images out of GIMP.
Also some tools that are available in Photoshop, like the many ways to smart select, or to crisp up a selection.
I almost only use GIMP any more for cropping and scaling, anything else, even if the feature is available simply lacks in quality of result.
I used to think the curve bend effect was pretty neat, to do certain types of distortions. But it doesn't do subpixel/anti-aliasing. Then WHY is it still even in there? It's not really that useful and it uses an ancient processing technique that really leaves wanting a lot in image quality.
I haven't tried the other tools mentioned in this thread, but I'm going to give them a try, hopefully they are better.
Krita is amazing, I switched to it from Gimp and it was a breath of a fresh air. Can't really say the same about the Gimp though, it is a bit redundant given how dated its UI is and how mature Krita is already.
Correct - GIMP is (largely) focused on photo editing, while Krita is (largely) focused on digital painting. Although GIMP/Photoshop definitely support a digital painting workflow with custom brushes and the like - it's just not the primary focus.
I would not say so. Gimp is (arguably) a very long evolution of an mspaint that copyied many tools and workflow from a Photoshop, Krita is an attempt to re-implement Photoshop from scratch.
I wouldn't say Krita is not suitable for general editing, because Photoshop is also dual purpose tool - it is an industry standard both for digital artists and general photo manipulation.
"Arguably" in the sense that you just decided to claim something that has no relation to reality? Like Ghostbusters 2 was "arguably" the highest grossing movie ever made in Albania by a crew of chipmunks?
Gimp starts off as an emergency last minute replacement project for two undergrads at Berkeley that does basically the same thing as Photoshop. It wasn't ever anything like Microsoft's Paint.
Here's a concrete example, something completely absent from your "argument":
Old Photoshop from that era defaults to a single RGB layer. To turn it into an RGBA layer (e.g. for drawing objects with a transparent background) you need to rename the layer. Not very intuitive but Photoshop users learned to do it. In early Gimp 0.x releases how do you turn the initial single RGB layer into an RGBA layer? You rename it. This is not a coincidence.
In contrast in mspaint there are no layers, there is no RGBA mode.
I love those drawn looking animation videos for games like
The Burdens of Shaohao https://g.co/kgs/419Tq1 but are there any video game examples where those tools would be beneficial? My video game knowledge is not wide enough. Blender I can definitely see.
The amount of hand-drawn animation that went into Cuphead is a marvel.
There a bunch of really interesting examples just using Ubisoft's UbiArt framework such as Rayman Legends, Child of Light, and Valiant Hearts.
Speaking of Ubisoft and open source, Ubisoft originally announced UbiArt as an engine/framework intended to be open sourced. It's a shame that Ubisoft never followed up on that promise.
Supposedly it hasn't been used for a game since 2015 because it was "hard to use", but that seems more of a reason to open source it, perhaps to see if community interest could help where internal-only work struggled. A lot of open source starts hard to use and takes a village to make it better. (Blender, also mentioned here, might just be a poster child of that, too.)
As far as I know it's still used for Just Dance series. It definitely was when I worked on JD2016 and I don't think the engine was changed after that. And yes, in my (personal) opinion UbiArt was extremely difficult to use compared to some other engines within Ubisoft nowadays.
And yes, speaking of Ubisoft and open source - Sharpmake is a build management solution used by a lot of projects within Ubisoft and it was open sourced some time ago. Worth having a look.
Having grown up during the heyday of (good and terrible) flash games I can't stand the kind of vector art style that games like Hollow Knight have - it looks unprofessional to me, to the point where I'd rather play a worse game with pixel art.
I know Hollow Knight is fantastic, but it reminds my brain far too much of amateurish flash games.