Adobe sucks, so why do I keep getting back to Photoshop?

I like GIMP. It’s an amazing piece of free software. It comes with tools like Intelligent Scissors that allow you to easily draw a selection around your subject, much like the Quick Selection tool in Photoshop. GIMP also has Foreground Select, which roughly compares to Object Selection in Photoshop. Even the useful Content-Aware fill in Photoshop exists as a plugin in GIMP.

The problem is that all of these come with a learning gap.

Intelligent Scissors only works with good contrast, and even then, the official documentation suggests using masking tools. You need to have a good concept of these two terms first. The Foreground Select tool is a confusing multi-step process that’s hard to follow and requires me to follow a video explanation somewhere else several times. The Content-Aware plugin for GIMP is an abandoned project that hasn’t been updated to work with the more recent versions of the software, and its installation documentation on Linux requires more research on installing old libraries and Python.

Meanwhile, Photoshop’s help is very effective: short videos whenever you hover over a tool to tell you what it does, complete with the keyboard shortcut if you have one set up. There are video tutorials from the company, not to mention many professional folks who create tutorials. GIMP has one or two people worth following on YouTube, which couldn’t supply the help I needed. It’s a complaint I had before about Darktable, which eventually got me to switch to Lightroom.

As a technical writer who needs to explain tech stuff to people daily, I believe documentation is one of the areas free software suffers from the most. There’s usually a small crew of basement geniuses who write out an amazing tool, but their documentation amounts to technical jargon on Github which means nothing to others. These people write tools for themselves, not for others to use.

I understand the problem. A person who writes a program for free doesn’t have the time and resources (or the experience necessarily) to also write instructions. The same is true at my job: the techies tech, the communicators communicate. The importance of the latter is not often obvious. But if you invent a time machine, and you’re the only person who knows how to use it, does it really matter? If a tree falls in the forest…

And yet there would be that person who would read this post and think help is just a Google Duck Duck Go search away. They will find five or six results and link them to this post, suggesting help is just a quick search away. It is not, not for me. Think about it: what is more likely, that I searched and still couldn’t figure it out, or that I didn’t bother to search to begin with?

The gap exists. Those in the know are so used to jumping over it they don’t even notice it’s there anymore. I know because I do the same thing to others all the time.

I’m grumpy and tired, and when I sit down to work on something, I don’t always want to invest a couple of days' worth of research just to get a certain thing to work. When it has to do with free software, there are a few places things work, and that’s because there’s a community around those who can explain and document things to others. Take Emacs for example. When I started, it was this video by an ordinary guy who explained what the software does in an ordinary way that got me hooked. This dude spoke a language I could understand.

This is why Adobe wins me over time and time again. Their software is good but far from amazing. The company, as an entity, is shit. The privacy factor, which I care for, does not exist. But I can learn it and use it without investing a week’s worth of research on old posts in forums, Github, and Linux chat rooms.