Blender Developed Photo Editor
Hello Blender Team, This idea is likely to be shot down immediately, but despite this, I want to pitch something that could provide a great service to your community. Having used Blender for over half a decade, in tandem with other image editing programs, I find myself at a point where I would like to take my whole workflow to something as free and open and Blender is. The problem? There just isn't an ideal solution. The current landscape for professional level photo image editors is bleak. The GIMP team is lagging behind all other mainstream solutions. The mainstream / corporate solutions are also often lacking in features, subscription based, or not to be trusted with perpetual licenses. I believe now is the time Blender should take a step into the ring. Blender is a tool that already capable of a great many functions, but one that lacks the final step of many artist's workflows. If Blender was to produce an image editor, a great many artists would also be able to finally take their feet directly out of the corporate hell currently brewing around us. I'm imagining a future where we can get out of the bleak landscape of program hopping, ever rising subscription pricing, and the cognitive dissonance of supporting unethical and profit driven intuitions. Additionally, a solid Linux based image editor, would allow for a great many of us to finally jump ship from Windows and MacOS. I hope that the Blender team considers bringing on members who can build out an image editing solution which can help us finalize the work we do in Blender. In addition, if Blender is to take on this, I would immediately raise my monthly donation to help provide fund for such a feature.
2 Comments
A strong, modern and FOSS photo editor that challenges the proprietary market would be amazing, and a lot of artists would benefit from it.
When it comes to Blender. Would it benefit from stronger photo editing tools? Sure, but it has no business trying to be a competitive photo editor, and if I had to choose between having a dev spend the next 6 months on photo editing features or literally anything else on Blender's development roadmap , I would choose the latter.
If the existing FOSS image editors already struggle, it's largely because this kind of software is complex and takes years to a dedicated team to build and maintain such projects. Blender’s own developers are already overloaded with long-term work that’s actually in line with what people expect from a 3D creation suite like Blender, which is also its own kind of complex software that takes years to build and maintain.
From that perspective, asking the Blender team to also create and maintain even just a simple bare-bones photo editor would spread already thin resources even further. Blender has plenty of unfinished priorities in its own domain.
There are already multiple photo-editing projects with their own existing development teams, user bases, fundings and roadmap. I’d personally love to see more support and contributors go toward existing FOSS image editors instead. That's a more realistic path to improving the ecosystem as a whole.
The unfortunate thing is, these FOSS image editors have always been beyond bare bones as possible. It seems that these projects simply focus on being "good enough" for the hobbyist, and despite having roadmaps, are seemingly way to slow to the punch. I think Blender is quite proficient in many things, and raster image editing would be a logical expansion point, especially when we already have a pretty nice video editor. Shrug .