[thelist] [Gimp-user] GIMP vs Photoshop

Will willthemoor at gmail.com
Wed Jan 13 12:55:35 CST 2010


On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 6:14 AM, Sarah Adams <sarahwbs at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Maybe it's me but they both seem woefully inadequate as web design apps.
> I
> > mean, they both work and obviously lots of people have done incredible
> work
> > with both (and fireworks) but they all lack web focus. No pre-flight for
> > web, no concept of relative font sizes, no concept of the cascade, no
> help
> > with sprites, no notion of a hover state... fireworks gets pngs pretty
> right
> > but GIMP and PS fail pretty badly though cs4 is moving in the right
> > direction. At least GIMP doesn't cost you a vacation to hawaii.
>
> Maybe I'm just being dense, but I'm really not sure what a lot of this
> means. Why would a graphics editing program need to deal with relative
> font-sizes? What on earth does it have to do with the cascade? (assuming
> you mean the "cascading" part of CSS?) How do you propose it help with
> sprites? Or with a hover state? Also, what's wrong with the way it
> creates PNGs?
>
> I'm still somewhat of a PS newb, so feel free to educate me :)
>
>
Well, that's just it - it's a great graphics editing program, not a great
web designing program.

If it were aware of the cascade and/or some sort of DOM, you could have
things like link text, set a hover state for that link text and then have
all other things set as link text display it's hover state - without
creating 25 new layers.

I dream of an design app where I set a base font size and then set the rest
of my type based on that font size (illustrator may do this, not sure). When
I'm finished, I click something like "prepare for web" and it generates a
report that shows what all of my type sizes are in %s or EMs. This sort of
stuff has existed for the offset print industry for years and PS is great at
it (creating plates, font notes, registration marks....) - I just want to
see the same level of detail in an app for the other place these documents
end up: the web.

The cascade is a bit of a dream where a layer folder has certain properties
and the children of that folder inherit those properties. If you have a comp
with 6 drop shadowed buttons, you make your buttons, add the layer fx and
then copy and paste that effect to the other 5. Need to change it? do it 6
times. Flash has had the concept of library items and inheritance since
1945, it'd be cool to see it in a web design app.

For sprite help, something like http://spriteme.org/ or
http://spriteme.org/just built in. Made from layers or slices or
whatever.

PS's png compression has never been as good as
http://optipng.sourceforge.net/ or
http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/Fireworks is better but I still
get more smashing results from optipng.

Ever try to paste a hex color into PS with the hash still on it? #ff0909?
it's awesome, just says no (cs4) or cuts off the last character (cs3).
annoys me every.single.time.

I don't mean to detract from what photoshop is amazing it - editing photos.
It's a remarkable bit of software. It's just not as web aware as I'd like.
Sure, fireworks can do animated gifs but... ohai 1999. We need a modern web
design application.


More information about the thelist mailing list