Typically when I’m working with photos, I’m doing graphic design type work. I’ve been using GIMP for this. GIMP is meant for raster graphics editing.
You could also use Inkscape for vector graphics, or Krita for more digital painting type work. But I know all these tools are very powerful and overlap on some use cases.
Do you use any AI-type tools? I use a image upscaler called Upscayl. It works really well and works entirely locally.
Do you know of any tools that can remove backgrounds? This would help with help with the type of graphic design I do.
What other tools do you like to use as it pertains to images?
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I use Krita every time i need to edit something. It’s more than good enough for me
Lots of great suggestions here already
I haven’t seen mobile editing mentioned yet:
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ImageToolbox for a very good Android image editing tool
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Fossify Gallery for some quick editing tools built into the gallery
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While not directly for editing,
Tidyon android allows for AI search locally -
Termux for any CLI edits (imagemagick, etc.)
I prefer:
- ImagePipe: fast edit
- Snapseed: complex edit (not FOSS)
- Aves: gallery
- Superimage: AI upscaler (RealESRGAN)
- Waifu2x NCNN: AI upscaler (Waifu2x, RealCuGAN)
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I heard about Graphite the other day. It’s nowhere near finished, but very promising. Hopefully, it becomes the FOSS of Photopea. https://editor.graphite.rs/
That’s more of an inkscape replacement than a gimp/photoshop one. It’s mostly about vectors, not raster images.
It tries to do both.
I often use imagemagick (cli) for cropping, rotating, resizing, etc.
For painting from the command line, I use sed to replace data at given offsets
sed -i '1s|^.\{10\}.\{5\}|\0*****|' image.jpgIt requires decoding the jpeg in my head to get the said offsets, but the pragmatism is unbeatable.
lmao, what?
You do the decomposition in your head to get the raw image, replace pixels, and then recompose the jpeg, taking note of the diff. That diff is what you then swap into the original with sed.
Krita, I use it for everything, I hate gimp, it feels so bad
I second Krita. I’ve used gimp for years but recently tried Krita and now I rarely open gimp anymore on purpose.
My biggest complaints with krita are around it not being easy to align objects and the text tool could use some love. Other than that, it feels like a great photoshop replacement
Yeah, text tool is just awful but I feel like I heard that they’re working on an update quite some time ago …
I didn’t think either were noticeably worse than in gimp for my use, but you might be comparing to a higher bar (or your use is more intricate than mine), lol.
I have quite liked the ability to turn on snapping for lining things up, and managed recently to freehand a very nearly perfect hexagon with it’s help… But I really wish there were some options for drawing polygons though… Even mspaint has the option to draw some basic shapes like stars and arrows and various polygons with just click and drag.
In general I feel like its probably KDE’s best software package outside of its DE. Know of any other super good KDE apps?
Okular is pretty great, I can’t find a package that does good annotation of PDFs built on GTK.
I use Okular all the time. I am so dense I didn’t even realize Krita and Okular were both developed by KDE…
No worries, it’s pretty hard to keep track when their naming scheme is “it has a K in it”…
Except for the also outstanding KDE Connect which could just be called Konnect.
Ouf, :(
I did say I was dense… lol
Okular is great. Kate is amazing. Kdenlive is BY FAR the most advanced FOSS video editor. I’d easily put Kdenlive above Krita, but that’s because of my particular use case.
Krita is nice overall, but I have some minor gripes with certain tools behaving unintuitively. May just be because I’m used to GIMP, but some simple stuff such as cropping a layer is not at all convenient.
Krita looks more like a drawing and animation solution, whereas GIMP is an editing / manipulation solution. Or can Krita be used as an editor, too? I’m going to download later and give it a shot, but just wanted your opinion so I have better expectations.
i use it as an editor even though thats not really its use case. i just feel like gimp is far too clunky, it just feels “off” to me in comparison to photoshop
That makes sense. Thanks for the input!
You can install and run Stable Diffusion locally (Pinokio is a versatile installer that can run SD and many other open-source AI tools as well). With SD you can build your own upscalers that are better than Upscayl, and do things like background removal too (in addition to prompt-based generation and such).
I have used darktable, but doesn’t seem to fill your need as it is more a lightroom replacement than Photoshop https://www.darktable.org/
Pinta.
It’s like a Linux version of Paint.net
I don’t think its 3D rotation capabilities are as good, though.
GIMP for most general stuff, Krita for painting and 2D animation, Aseprite for pixel everything.
I forgot about Asesprite! Thats a great tool.
Aseprite was originally licensed under GPL but later made propretary. The fork of the last GPL version is called Libresprite but it doesnt have much activity, I dont think.
Well, it still is OSS and one can still compile from source code. Or you can buy your binary. Never heard of Libresprite but looks fine if you absolutely want FOSS.
Krita has tools for 2D animation? I need to look into that.
Aseprite
Software that should have been around for the Amiga
GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, Upscayl, ImageMagick, Background remover AI
GIMP and Inkscape. I use GIMP for all kind of image editing off course, and use Inkscape to create logos and icons. Both great tools. I wish GIMP had a few basic shape tools too and non destructive editing. Soon we get non destructive editing in early future, but basic shape tools will be added in a later future.
I have Krita installed too, but for general purpose editing and want to replace GIMP with it. Because Krita adresses some issues I have with GIMP, but it does not feel good in editing to me. Maybe I’m just not used to it, even after years of trying over and over again. It has extensive vector layers and non destructive editing, great, but the font tool sucks.
I also have Upscayl installed since a while, to play around with upscaling images. First it was nice, but over time I’m no longer happy with it. Especially with higher end resolutions, the image contain unnatural and wrong parts that stand out.
For background removal I use GIMP. Its a manual step with the integrated background removal tool, but you have to mask areas as foreground and background. If the image is not low quality and the boundaries are not too fuzzy, then it works well “sometimes”. But I assume you ask for a more easy to use and more automated tool, preferably an AI tool right? I have such a tool bookmarked, its a browser online tool, but never used it so far: Background remover AI
As other tools, I use commandline converter and editor ImageMagick! Its nice to be able to script simple stuff and bulk edit them (20 thousand and more in a few minutes), such as crops from screenshots. Or at work I could create simple text based images out of a text file (it was for my shop back then… long time ago :-( ).
I’ve been meaning to get into some image generation type things too. The best self hosted tool I know of is InvokeAI. I’m sure there could be a whole other post (or other community) about image generation tools.
I’d be interested in another post on that topic :)
Darktable for raw image processing
With ChaiNNer you can remove background, upscale (local), it’s a lot more flexible and compatible with models than Upscayl, also a little bit more complex (node based, not as complex as comfyUI). You can upscale an image with a face model and use other model for everything else in the same image.
I paid 700 for Adobe Photoshop each month, and pay extra 10 each time to unlock when I open the program.
I made a very generous donation to Krita a week ago, which was $10. They seemed happy about it.
A very useful tip for technical images (i.e., lab report/research): export whatever graph you created as .svg, and do some prettifying touches in InkScape. It is faaaar easier than doing it in code.
Also, always export the .svg, even if you’re not gonna use it. You never know when you want to do a very small correction, and it will save you quite some time.
I love use tools like mermaid or plantuml. But Ive always faught with formatting (or gave up) instead of editing after the fact. Great idea?
In the same vein, I use draw.io to make architecture diagrams and flow charts.
