Has all the features I need and you can install plugins, and I think that it's very intuitive. Used it to refine DALL-E pictures for my hobby-project.
I work on a MacBook and Paint.NET is windows-only. There's a Windows VM on my MacBook with one single reason for its existence, I'll let you guess what that is.
Right -- you have to know something that people don't ever tell you:
Photoshop is a medium as much as it is an application.
As a medium it has fundamentals, and once you know those fundamentals, you're not really chained to Photoshop.
In my experience it's the occasional users of Photoshop who have the most trouble switching to anything else, because for them it is still icons and buttons and sliders and menu items they expect in certain places.
If you've spent enough time with Photoshop and learned what is really happening, what blend modes are, how layers work deeply, switching is easier because it's much easier to recognise those same principles elsewhere.
This, I think, is why Adobe has the predatorily priced Photoshop plan and is unwilling to put true power into Photoshop Elements (which was last a "cut down Photoshop" back at version 3.0 or so).
They know that the underlying skills are portable.
This is also my experience as an occasional user. What I cannot explain is that even after more than two decades, no better open source alternative with a comparable range of functions has emerged. (Krita comes close, though.)
I’ve encountered plenty of things you just flat out can not do in gimp. The latest one is you can’t highlight text. Something incredibly basic that other programs have had since the 90s.
(7) Align screenshot layer with the new-from-visible layer.
(8) Difference layer mode.
(9) If the selection did not fit on screen, duplicate the new-from-visible layer.
(10) Merge down.
(11) Select the selection box with the fuzzy select tool. (You may need to delete the regions of the merged layer that represent the GIMP UI to do this.)
(12) Select → Remove Holes.
(13) Invert selection.
(14) Delete.
(15) Invert selection.
(16) Delete.
(17) Fill (with a block colour of your choice).
(18) Hide the layer, then goto step 2 until all of the selection is accounted for.
(19) Merge all the block colour layers together.
(20) Re-order the block colour layer under the text layer.
(21) Reduce opacity to taste.
See! It's theoretically possible to assign the desired pixel values using GIMP, therefore GIMP is perfect and has no problems at all. In fact, you can automate this with a very simple combination of AutoHotKey and Script-Fu (passing control data from Script-Fu to AutoHotKey using PixelGetColor), which is practically as good as having it built-in.
(More seriously: you can probably do gimp-vectors-new-from-text-layer, segment it into glyphs, take only the glyphs within a selection, split those into lines, find bounding boxes for those lines, and fill them with the current foreground colour, but there appears to be no way to query the current text selection from Script-Fu, so you'd have to use this with the Lasso selection tool or something.)
Create a transparent layer. Paint on it in a colour of your choice. Set layer mode to "darken only" or "lighten only" depending on your background. "Difference" is fun too.
I've been using GIMP for longer than I care to remember and I am painfully aware of what is not great in its UI, which is something that seems to have gotten _worse_ over time. This isn't one of them; to paraphrase, that's just knowing how to use basic features that GIMP and other programs have had since the 1990s.
That’s not what I’m talking about. I wanted the same effect as you get on MS Word when you highlight text. Creating a coloured background behind the text. It’s a pretty common effect on posters and similar things.
The best you can do in gimp is fill the entire text box background, but that doesn’t look good at all on multi line text where you want it to fit each line properly.
Sound like nonsense. You can clearly select text from text layers, which is what you get when you write text on a picture. I think you are ptobably describing something else and need to be more specific about what you mean by highlighting.
This might be a pretty big idea.
Since GIMP is highly scriptable afaik it should be possible to have an AI do all the work.
But as always... you would need a lot of training data.
