In my toolbox GIMP is a very important tool, it replaced Photoshop, when I moved to Linux. However, I had some complaints, I missed the correction layers for example. Another drawback was that adding effects to a text required it to be rasterized first, so changing the text after it dropoed shadow, was impossible.
I could live with those limitations, but hey, they are limitations anyway!
So I frequently doubled a layer (as a backup just in case) before applying an effect.
Now that need seems to end!
GIMP 3.0 just got released, which addresses my main complaints compared to PS.
The appimage seems to work fine on Debian, I hope it will land soon in the backports repo.
The new GIMP is splendid!
All superlatives! I’m so thankful for this release
I’d tend to use InkScape for something like that - it can do drop shadows dynamically and you can edit the text…
But if GIMP 3 now has that feature - you’re laughing!
If I want to use GIMP 3 - I guess I’ll have to snap, flatpak or appimage… Downloading it now…
Drop shadow was just an example.
Inkscape is indeed a great tool for vector graphics, but with bitmap images GIMP is my go-to tool.
My joy was a bit too early
Some of the text visual parameters can be adjusted, but distorting it still requires to rasterize before… So this update is a defnitely good step, and the image filters, like graduation curves, saturation, white balance temperature (these are I use most frequently) can be really applied non-destructively.
I use both - but more so InkScape - I like the cropping (“Set Mask”) of imported bitmaps feature in InkScape… i.e.there’s a lot of bitmap stuff you can do in InkScape…
