[120photo]

1) > (Oh, and to address your specific point, the designers spend exactly zero hours watching training and tutorials on the Adobe website).

Yes, most of the time when you know your tools you will not spend much time going through training material, but if you needed to there are plenty of options and not just from Adobe. If you want to learn and get started there are plenty more options.

2) > I know the open-source evangelists live in a rose tinted world where open-source automatically equals better.

I don't recall stating that OSS = better, but in many cases it is. RawTherapee may not be as easy to use compared to Lightroom of Capture One but if used properly you can achieve superior results. One closed source RAW processor I can think of that lacks much training material but achieves great results in Raw Photo Processor (better than LR of RT in many ways). GIMP is great but until they can implement Adjustment layers it will never be a good alternative to Photoshop. IMO PhotoLine is much better than Photoshop in many ways, but also lack much training material or a large budget (being developed by two brothers in Germany). I can keep going.

I should add to my original comment that the amount of training and getting a product out for users to use is major for a company to succeed. Adobe and Microsoft have done a great job at getting their products in front of students and making sure they are comfortable with their products before going into the working world.

[unfocussed_mike]

> GIMP is great but until they can implement Adjustment layers it will never be a good alternative to Photoshop.

GIMP is not great until it has adjustment layers.

In the meantime, nobody on a budget should be using Photoshop when Affinity Photo is so inexpensive (and significantly better than Photoshop in a couple of important ways).

[120photo]

Affinity is great but there is also not as much training as PS, but for the price it is worth having. One thing that Affinity and PhotoLine can do that PS can't is make curves adjustments in the Lab color space without having to change the entire document from RGB to Lab. I am sure there are plenty of other things XYZ apps do better than PS, but I will say this again, PS has so much training and tutorials out there which save you time.

To be fair to GIMP, I used PS back to when adjustment layers were not a thing. The work that team does is amazing and I give them props (though I still would love to see adjustment layers).

[unfocussed_mike]

> One thing that Affinity and PhotoLine can do that PS can't is make curves adjustments in the Lab color space without having to change the entire document from RGB to Lab.

Yeah, this is super-useful. Also the layer blend curves are amazingly useful, particularly combined with live filter layers. And it can do LUT inference (e.g. from HALD CLUT images). I use that all the time.

> To be fair to GIMP, I used PS back to when adjustment layers were not a thing.

So did I, but GIMP has existed for almost as long as adjustment layers in PS! And for all that time they've refused to prioritise something that IMO is transformative in photoshop; it's the basis of non-destructive editing.

[120photo]

I look into what it going on from time to time, they are in the process of moving from GTK v2 to v3. Apparently it is not a easy transition but when it is done (GIMP v3) implementing adjustment layers and other new features should not take as much effort. I am going off memory so don't quote this as fact.