Hello, what software do you use and for what purpose?
I personally use this:
• LibreOffice - for office purposes;
• Notepad++ - simple and good FOSS notepad;
• Blender - 3D editing and stuff, you know;
• Substance Painter - painting 3D models;
• Substance Designer - creating materials, but I don’t use it often;
• Quixel Bridge - I use it as an asset library;
• ZBrush - sculpting;
• Marvelous Designer - cloth simulations;
• Marmoset Toolbag for baking;
• VLC as video player. I used MPC-HC before it died, and I liked it more in many ways;
• PureRef for refs;
• Krita / MyPaint for casual painting, I am not a painter but sometimes it’s fun to just run Krita and play with brushes;
• PS for image editing;
• ShareX for screenshot making;
• OpenBroadcaster for videocapture;
• VirtualBox for virtual machines and testing;
• Rufus - I use it for iso burning;
• Davinchi Resolve - video editing;
• qBittorrent as torrent client;
• Firefox / Tor as web browsers;
• SumatraPDF for PDF, djvu etc reading;
• 7zip for unpacking;
This is 99% of software I use.
I ask about it because of these reasons:
Recently I asked about image viewers and someone recommended me a hidden gem of image viewers - Imageglass, and man why didn’t I know about this software before?
I am looking for Photoshop replacement, I tried to use GIMP but I don’t like how it looks and there are a lot of negativity about it. Is there a good image editing software? I heard about Affinity software, what can you tell about it? Is there something else?
Currently I am looking for: batch image converter / editor software, I used nomacs for the purpose but I replaced nomacs with Imageglass for now. Is there a good and light image editor / converter with batch functions?
I am also looking for video converter.
And the main reason is: I like testing software and if there is something better I might switch my current software to it or just add it to my usage.
Thank for you answers in advance!
Currently I use AF alongside an older version of PS, since I still like the brush engine of the later, and in general the memory management of PS is a lot better. But affinity on the other hand has features wich outplay ps on many levels (like editing panoramas).
Years ago before I had PS at hand I used a combination of two / three cheap photo editing software alongside each other. (PS Elements beeing one of them, but I don’t know how good it is today, even then newer versions of it started to dumb down the interface).
This kinda works, and for some things its even better than a ps only workflow.
There three drawbacks with a multi-app workflow I have to point out.
You are slower with a multi app workflow.
If you get hired, it needs some time to reaccomondate to a ps-only workflow (menu searching, PSE at that time for example had some stuff at different places wich slowed me down immensely when I needed to work in a ps only environment).
Exchange with native ps files might be a problem (Although Affinity does it quite well)
Some people swear on Photoline might be worth to take a look at it and see how well it clicks for you.
but again all imho, this might not be the best workflow for you.
Everything I can afford / can grab my hands on
(Got more soft at hand, than I’m able to learn…but I want to get a general knowledge across the board)
as for free “hidden” gems these free ones might be usefull to you: https://darbyjohnston.github.io/DJV/
image sequence player…
personally I use my old AE version for it nowadays, but before that, this was an valuable tool, especially on weaker pcs…not sure how the actual version is performance wise
I have some other miscellaneous stuff, but this is what I use for 99% of my work. I don’t use anything that requires a subscription or costs an arm and a leg anymore. I’m just stubborn that way.
Affinity Photo - Image editing
Affinity Designer - Vector image creation/editing
Affinity Publisher - Print/publishing
Blender - 3D work
DaVinci Resolve - Video editing, simple compositing
Fusion - Advanced compositing
Clip Studio Paint - Painting
Quixel Bridge and Mixer - Materials and Texturing
Audacity - Audio editing
DJV - Image sequence playback
XnView or InfranView - Image viewing
Visual Studio Code - Text editing
But fusion is embedded inside DaVinci Resolve, no?
Why do you use clip studio paint?
Hm… Second post with this software. I know that visual studio is paid microsoft owned ide for programmers. This is some kind of rip off or what? I checked - it’s free and open source, hm…
If you haven’t tried the latest version of gimp (2.10) then I recommend trying it again. There were many improvements to the UI and tools (Single window mode by default, searching filters using the / key, symmetrical painting, etc…).
You can also use python or script-fu to perform batch operations. There’s even a graphical addon for this type of thing that I haven’t personally tried, but judging from the video, it looks good:
@Bob_JP mentioned it for image viewing but I use it a lot (IrfanView Thumbnails) mostly for batch renaming but also sometimes for batch image editing (meh). I also use Audacity.
Xara for all my image design (vector based images) and GIF/Flash/AVI animations.
Handbrake for converting video formats.
On1 Photo for my photos (was a great value a few years ago but the price has slowly gone up. Still cheaper by far than PS)
The Fusion embedded in Resolve is fine for most things, but the stand alone version has some advanced features and workflow options that the embedded one doesn’t.
Clip Studio Paint is a great and very versatile painting app and it’s not terribly expensive.
Visual Studio Code is not an IDE. It’s an advanced text editor optimized for coding that Microsoft released and open sourced.
If you’re looking for a good PS replacement, I’d recommend Affinity Photo. It’s not quite on par with PS yet, but it’s getting there pretty quick. I’ve completely replaced PS with it for image editing.
InfranView is really handy for batch image conversion and renaming.
Yes, I’ve heard the affinity products are good replacements for photoshop and illustrator, everyone keeps recommending them. However, I use a linux system and they don’t have a native version for linux.
I could buy the windows version and see if I could get it to run through wine, but I have no need to do that. Gimp, is comprehensive enough to suit my needs. The last version of photoshop I used was actually version 7, so gimp far exceeds what I expect to have for most things. Between gimp and krita, I don’t think there’s any need to really buy software for photoediting. I heard that performance for these programs isn’t as good on other systems though.
Renzatic
(Professor Emeritus Billy H. Wafflesmith XIV Esq.)
12
I run a fairly slim selection:
Blender
Substance Painter
Quixel Mixer
Affinity Designer
Affinity Photo
OneNote
VS Code for those rare moments when I dabble with code.
And on rare occasions, I’ll dip my toes into Inkscape.
Renzatic
(Professor Emeritus Billy H. Wafflesmith XIV Esq.)
13
From what I’ve read, you can run the Affinity suite through Wine, though it’s difficult to set up, and very, very finicky. As much as I normally like them, I’d be hard pressed to recommend them to a Linux user right now due to that.
