Hoping that this answer may offer great insights on how to use Blender as an image manipulation tool even if this question is nearly a year-old.Īs a beginner, but investigated blender for any image work(3D/2D) in my opinion, blender is very useful for non-destructive image manipulation. That said, if painting is what you are looking for, you might be better off with a program designed for painting, like Krita or MyPaint. Also note that blender's painting tools recently got a nice upgrade as part of the GSoC. Painting is not my strong suit, but there have been some pretty amazing things done with blender's painting tools. And using blender's image editor it won't be non-destructive (though for something like this I'm not sure if a non-destructive workflow makes a lot of sense?). However for creating images from scratch with 2D techniques like painting, blender is probably almost certainly not the best around. The only major difference is that the images were rendered with a camera, not Cycles or some other render engine. After all, it's almost what the compositor was designed for. It's light weight, intuitive, mostly non-destructive and in most cases just as good as PhotoShop.įor something like photo-manipulation (by that I mean color grading, adding effects like vignetting, etc.), the compositor can work very well (and non-destructively). The last thing worth mentioning is that if you're on OS X, there are loads of cheaper image editors. There's also CinePaint which is a fork of GIMP with some extra features, but I can't vouch for it, as I haven't used it at all. The image painting in Blender is fine for texturing (and even there it's kinda weak compared to other 3D packages, something they'll be fixing in the upcoming releases), but would be hard to work with if you just want to do image manipulation.Įven though GIMP isn't the best image manipulation program in the world, it's really the only option at the moment (if you want something open source). However, it's not great for image manipulation, which is GIMP's primary goal.īlender as a 2D editor would actually be extremely difficult to use. Inkscape is extremely non-destructive because everything is a shape. I realize that the question is a bit broader that blender itself but I think it is fair to say that in order to do anything related to 3D, you will need, sooner or later, a good image manipulation software.Ī few people in the comments mentioned Inkscape for vector editing. So I wonder, could Blender be used as an image manipulator in an efficient way or does the compositing in blender lack features for being a great (non-destructive) image manipulation tool ? Then, what free/open source software would you recommend for this task ? For example, if you apply a color curve tool in GIMP, its effects are "merged" with the layer and you lose the ability to change the curve later on. In that regard, GIMP work-flow is mostly destructive. It may be just me but I think most people start to change their work-flow from a destructive one to a non destructive one. For the 2D side (texturing and image editing) GIMP was the default one for many years but I start to reconsider it. As a 3D/2D hobbyist myself who try to use the most free/open source software when I can, blender has become my default 3D software.
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