chunkyhairball
The most immediate thing I can’t find on that list that I need and have run into recently is better single-channel editing. For example, by default you can’t just edit a channel’s alpha/transparency. This makes it very difficult for me to do additive masks. There are ways to do this, but they are much more difficult for me.
One I ran into yesterday, and doesn’t seem to be on the list is an inability to edit gradients in a live manner. Clicking ‘Edit this gradient’ brings up the gradient palette, but most of its menu options simply don’t respond.
There are lines in the roadmap list about improving the tool palettes, but nothing pertaining to these issues.
In the past, I’ve attempted to submit feature requests for selection handling, only to have those requests ignored, or in one case being directly told, ‘That’s not something we’re interested in working on or accepting patches for.’ Investigating others’ requests led me to understand that was a very common thing to hear from the GIMP team.
That was about three years ago. I’d LOVE to know that stance has changed, but hearing ‘Yeah, we’ll never do that,’ is the point at which you start looking for other projects to try to use and help with.
I’m… very frustrated with GIMP and its development team. I really badly need a good raster editor and GIMP is just not that editor. The GIMP team tends to discourage suggestions and volunteer work that does not originate from within their group, so I don’t have a lot of hope of that changing.
Photoshop on WINE can be made to work, but it’s a terribly bad solution for many reasons.
I certainly don’t want to recommend either of them the way I do other applications and OSes in my list. Even the ones I mention that have frustrations are things I’m still willing to use (and enjoy) on a daily basis.
LEX writes in another reply:
Dump Gimp. Krita is the way.
Krita is great. It’s not perfect, and doesn’t provide some functionality I personally need. However, the Krita team really does seem intent on improving it and making it a better application, and that shows in its development and featureset. In time, I hope to completely replace anything I have to go back to GIMP or PS for.
Inkscape simply eliminated any dependence I had on other vector editors like Visio or Illustrator. It’s amazingly good. I’m hoping that Krita gets to that same place in the future.