GIMP development - What’s the point? | Hacker News Reader

GIMP development - What’s the point?

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181 pointsunwind139 comments

People whining about GIMP not being as good as PS don't appreciate what life was like on Linux before GIMP existed, or how primitive GIMP was when it first came out.

GIMP has advanced leaps and bound over what it once was.

I remember for ages PS fans were complaining about how GIMP had a multiple window layout, and how unnecessarily complex that was, and they wanted a single window layout. So the volunteers who work on GIMP eventually came out with a single window layout.

I'm not a PS user, but I heard that around that time PS changed to a multi-window layout. Whether that's true or not, now I hear complaints from some users that GIMP is not any good because it doesn't have a multi-window layout (not realizing that changing it to multi-window layout is as simple as unchecking "Single-window mode" under the "Windows" menu). Give me a break!

Some people will never be satisfied and will never appreciate the hundreds or thousands of man hours of free work that GIMP developers have poured in to this product.

Could it be improved? Of course! Anything can. Should they strive to make it better? Yes. Feature requests and help are great. But indignant insults coming from people who didn't pay for the development of the product, who don't contribute any of their own time to make it better, and who clearly don't appreciate the massive achievement that GIMP is just take the cake. GIMP developers must have skins of steel to put up with this crap year in and year out.

For professional use, how does modern GIMP compare to modern PS?

It can't. If you work in the industry you'll be expected to use a specific format (.psd). I'm pretty sure you can't open a file created with the latest version of Photoshop in Gimp. The graphic design industry is one of these industries that have been completely monopolized by a single vendor.

I liked Macromedia approach with Fireworks, which didn't require the software in order to preview what a project looked like since it used PNG format. All Macromedia tools have since then been flushed down the toilets by Adobe. There is something Macromedia achieve with the notion of "community" that Adobe was never able to do.

> I liked Macromedia approach with Fireworks, which didn't require the software in order to preview what a project looked like since it used PNG format.

PSD shares this preview functionality. You can open a PSD just fine in Preview on OS X, or with ImageMagick you can do: convert my-psd.psd[0] out.png

> I'm pretty sure you can't open a file created with the latest version of Photoshop in Gimp.

I'm pretty sure you can, and you can see all the layers and stuff. Editing though, if I remember correctly, is either extremely limited or non-existent.

Still, when someone gave me a psd I had little hope of opening it at all, yet GIMP displayed it perfectly. That exceeded expectations already, just too bad that I couldn't edit. But then again, it's better than buying an expensive product line just to view a file.

> The graphic design industry is one of these industries that have been completely monopolized by a single vendor.

Exactly, which is one which is one of the reasons I'm a big fan of GIMP and Paint.NET for when people simply don't need photoshop. They often don't, but ask for it anyway, get used to it and then want to keep using it. This is about adults as well as teens who are still in high school and who might later go on to work as designers, and then can only work with photoshop.

Fireworks was great. I still have a copy somewhere for those tasks that Paint.Net isn't quite good enough for.

Every time I try to use Photoshop or GIMP, it feels like it is just too complicated for what I'm trying to do, and I don't have the time to invest in learning where they've hidden my cheese.

I recently tried PS for the first time after using Gimp for almost 20 years. My images I work with are about 40"x40" at 600-1200 dpi.

First impressions was that PS was a somewhat faster (about 25%) for certain operations like duplicating layers and it's interface was intuitive after using GIMP for so long, but the advantages I saw aren't enough to convince me to switch on OSX.

I've used PS for ~5 years for hobby work, but I've also spent a fair amount of time in GIMP while using Linux.

GIMP is missing some rather powerful tools that PS has, one being content-awareness. In PS, you can remove a section from a bitmap, and have the space filled automatically based on the surrounding image. It works incredibly well, and the technique is used in a number of tools.

PS also works much better for shapes/paths than gimp, given its superior set of effects that can be added to shapes.

There's also a few not-so-important bells and whistles, like the photomerge script in PS, which makes it really easy to generate a panoramic image.

Overall, GIMP works great for simple projects, but it's missing so much of the functionality of PS that I honestly never use it if I have the option to use PS.

>GIMP is missing some rather powerful tools that PS has, one being content-awareness. In PS, you can remove a section from a bitmap, and have the space filled automatically based on the surrounding image. It works incredibly well, and the technique is used in a number of tools.

That's false, GIMP had that before PS itself.

It doesn't. GIMP's support for nondestructive editing is very primitive, which might be the biggest issue. In terms of tools PS is far more comprehensive and flexible.

GIMP is more like Paint.NET than Photoshop.

How does lack of support for non-destructive editing make GIMP "more like Paint.NET"?

Not even close. GIMP was actually the first editor I learned on. But the minute you start using Photoshop it's pretty apparent that you can never go back.

On paper they may look similar, but GIMP in no way touches the amount of options and features available to a designer out of the box in a pro software. Even just manipulating a single asset seems to take twice the work in GIMP. Imagine a PS file that is hundreds of layers deep.

And last I used it, support for anything print related was abysmal in GIMP. I don't even have to think about color profiles in Photoshop, but GIMP gave me the sense I had to build everything myself.

GIMP is kind of in this ugly duckling space where I feel the feature set is not acceptable for a professional designer, but the UI is too overwhelming for a non-designer. And you can tell by the quality of work that the average user is either pretty amateurish, or who design is the second thought.

I use Photoshop regularly (over 18 years) and earlier this year I gave GIMP another honest 2-3 week try. There are some big conceptual differences, but the small things like it not remembering what folder you last loaded images from slowed me down too much.

A lot of "professional" apps have these kinds of problems. MS Word 2013 refuses to remember the folder where you last exported a PDF; each time you do it, you have to navigate there or give a full path. These sort of thing is more or less easily fixed if someone does the grunt work. Chances are the app internally has a nice object for representing a persisted global variable such as an option; it just has to be actually used as the value of the path when opening that dialog.

And follow-up, why is it so hard (for volunteer contributors) to implement those missing features and functionality?

My hunch is that if there were more unicorns (amazing designers/illustrators who used GIMP and had the capacity to write code for it), you'd have more progress in this realm.

For example, Figma (non-open source) is doing stuff that myself as a designer, I find very subtly innovative for a browser-based graphics program. Sure, they are actual company which can devote more resources to the product, but I think it helps that some very talented designers are using it and thus, can give feedback and suggest new features with engineers to support the effort.

Similarly, I'm sure a lot of open source projects have thrived because the contributors are active users whose skillsets (coding) overlap with the project.

Gimp = Photoshop 4

and I use Gimp a couple of times a week.

It's perfectly usable for professional work. There was a recent question on the GIMP developer thread asked by the head of a company to find out if GIMP was right for their graphics department. Their artists demanded a bunch of things that they were sure GIMP didn't have, or couldn't do. This was my response, having successfully replaced Photoshop with GIMP quite a few years ago:

3 Single row Marquee tool 4 Single coloumn marquee tool -Draw a rectangle selection across the canvas from end to end where you want the 1px selection. -In the rectangle select dialogue, scroll down to the "size" and enter "1" for the width or height

5 Polygonal lasso tool -The default mode for the lasso tool in GIMP is polygon. Click and drag for mouse mode. -Moreover notice you can move points you have already put down simply by dragging them where you want them (better than Photoshop in this way).

6 Magenetic lasso tool - Try the Scissors Select tool.

7 Quick Selection tool - Try the Foreground Selection Tool

11 Perspective crop tool - Select area to be cropped with lasso tool - Image > Crop to Selection - Use Perspective Tool to adjust

13 Color Sampler tool - Windows > Dockable Dialogues > Colors

14 Ruler tool - Try the Measure tool.

15 Spot healing brush tool - Try the Heal Tool.

13 Patch tool - Filters > Enhance > Heal Selection

14 Content aware move tool - make selection - Copy selection - Filters > Enhance > Heal Selection - Paste selection ... (I have no idea why you'd need a separate tool for this. ;P)

15 Red Eye tool - Filters > Enhance > Red Eye Removal

18 Color replacement tool - Use "Select by Color Tool" - Colors > Color Balance / Hue Saturation / Etc. - Additionally: Colors > Map > Color Exchange

19 Mixer Brush tool - GIMP will acquire brushes that include background color mixing in the 2.9/3.0 release - Check out Krita.org for an illustration program to rival Photoshop or Painter X

21 Pattern stamp tool - Select Clone tool - Scroll down in tool settings to "Source", and choose "pattern"

22 History Brush tool - Open another copy of your current working document from your last save point - select the Clone Tool - In your save point document, ctrl-click on the area to paint from - Switch back to your current document and paint as you like

23 Art History Brush tool - Not implemented, feel free. :) - Check out GMIC. It contains a wealth of interesting painting effects for GIMP.

25 Background eraser tool - Can be achieved with resynthesize as above, but if you must have it in an eraser tool form, feel free to implement.

26 Magic eraser tool - Fuzzy Select tool (Wand icon) - Layer > Mask > Add Layer Mask (check the "Selection" radio button and the "Invert Mask" checkbox and Click "Add")

32 Dodge tool 33 Burn tool - Try the Dodge/Burn Tool. ;P

34 Sponge tool - Try the Blur/Sharpen Tool

36 Free form pen tool - Try the Ink Tool

37 Add anchor point tool 38 Delete anchor point tool 39 Convert point tool

  - All Integrated into the Paths Tool.
  - Check out my 30 second runthrough of the Paths Tool and related functions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sgI8rCRLbQ

41 Vertical type tool 42 Horizontal type mask tool 43 Vertical type mask tool - Not implemented, these would be neat, but to be honest the Text tool needs a serious overhaul anyway. - Check out Inkscape.org for vertical text, and a much better and more versatile vector text system, and easy masks that don't need separate tools. Turn any text into a mask in two clicks.

44 Path selection tool 45 Direct Selection tool - Windows > Dockable Dialogues > Paths - Click on the first empty box beside your path to show it. It's now selectable with the Paths Tool.

46 Rectangle Tool - Feel free to impliment. This would be useful. - See Inkscape.org for a current solution that works great.

47 Rounded Rectangle tool - If you impliment this, please make it part of the rectangle tool. There is no point at all to having separate tools. :P - Inkscape.org again :) It's like Adobe Illustrator.

48 Ellipse tool - Feel free to impliment 49 Polygon tool - Paths tool already does this. I don't know why Adobe made a separate tool for this. It's unnecessary clutter. :)

50 Line tool - Paths tool... (hit b to end your line and start a new separate one)

51 Custom shape tool - Would be cool to see in GIMP - Check out the Polygon and Star Tool (Inkscape.org)

53 Rotate view tool - View > Rotate (also Ctrl + Shift + Middle Mouse Button)

58 Masking - Really? Gimp has more Masking options than the Carnival of Venice. ;P - Check out Quick Mask and Layer > Mask > Add Layer Mask - Also check out Mask to Selection, and Selction to Path.

59 Mode change in to CMYK - Feel free to try to impliment, but read this first: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CMYK_support_in_The_GIM... - Check out Scribus for conversion into CMYK (FOGRA 27 is the default, but you can add your own color profiles if that's not working for you)

Hope it helps. :)

-C

> I remember for ages PS fans were complaining about how GIMP had a multiple window layout, and how unnecessarily complex that was, and they wanted a single window layout. So the volunteers who work on GIMP eventually came out with a single window layout.

Ironically enough, Photoshop itself used to have a multiple-window layout, in its Unix versions: http://i.imgur.com/Lzlbyp9.jpg .

(That's an IRIX system, see author's explanation at https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/5377kv/4dwm_sgi_i... )

I wouldn't be surprised if that were where Gimp got its inspiration from.

I remember this. I used to have an SGI O2 and had PS3 installed. It was multi window, which was incredibly annoying, but it was pretty much how most IRIX UI worked back then.

I did one of my first paid graphic design assignments on it. It was an A2 poster for a circus, and I remember it took forever to render filters – blurs in particular! These days you can do all your work on low resolution copies and just apply the transforms to higher resolution when you need it, but you couldn't then. Or at the very least, I didn't know how to.

The suspense in waiting for that progress bar to reach the finish line...

I remember this. It was 1995, and I ran Photoshop 3.0 on my SGI Indigo2 R10000 at work. I remember it being fast and very slick.

I used GIMP in 1996 and it was great! I got it going on a Sun Sparcstation 20 running Red Hat 2.0 Linux.

You had a SPARCStation 20 with Linux on it? Facepalm.

The very first SPARCstation I bought also had Linux on it. I promptly ordered Solaris 7 from Sun for $50 (which is how much redhat CD's cost back then), played with Linux until my Solaris 7 kit arrived in the mail, completely wiped away Linux, installed Solaris 7, and never looked back. Seeing that

  UNIX System V Release 4.0

was such an awesome feeling. I was thrilled. My very own Solaris machine. I actually owned a Sun! I walked out, my whole body shaking in excitement. It was surreal. Before that, a Sun workstation was a mythical system, something one only saw on a poster, or got to log into along with 1,250 other users at the computer center, but never see in person. And you actually ran Linux. What a waste of good hardware.

Solaris was definitely head and shoulders above Linux back in the early days. But, in retrospect, it might have been a very good move to use Linux and get familiar with it, and especially to contribute to its development, as Linux turned out to be the future (thought not so much on Sun hardware).

But, in retrospect, it might have been a very good move to use Linux and get familiar with it, and especially to contribute to its development,

Linux might be all the rage now, but it won't last forever. I grew to intensely hate GNU/Linux precisely because I grew up on Solaris, and when I had to work on Linux extensively, it just made it painfully obvious how bad Linux is. Even to this present day, I work with Linux daily and it still isn't anywhere close to Solaris in terms of correctness of operation, reliability, or virtualization capability, let alone post mortem analysis. Even performance on Linux is a lie, as to get the same levels of performance as illumos does on the same hardware, Linux has to forego reliability guarantees. For example, check out how the GNU/Linux kernel handles the fsync(2) system call, and how it miscalculates system load because of wio (wait on input/output). And that is just the tip of the iceberg. I haven't even begun to scratch the surface.

I was very happy and content with Solaris - it is a superb server OS, it is reliable, and it has served me extremely well, especially since I had virtually no incidents caused by the fault in the OS, but by misconfiguration by others. Under these circumstances, I had no incentive whatsoever to help with GNU/Linux, especially when Solaris became the free, open source illumos project. I certainly won't help Linux when I want SmartOS to succeed it (SmartOS is based on the illumos source code).

But the biggest irony is that GNU/Linux can be made to run almost as reliably as Solaris / illumos - by running it inside of an lx-branded zone on SmartOS, because then the SmartOS hypervisor makes it more reliable because of ZFS and no memory overcommit, for instance. That's what one would call a proverbial slap in the face to GNU/Linux. (Even though one is running Linux, the kernel is actually illumos, that's why the thing is high performance and reliable.)

Indeed, it's literally 10 years younger than PS.

IMO it's the classic attitude of "everything should work because I don't care" as if code was writing itself.

Sorry to say I don't think GIMP is the best example of a great FLOSS project.

Many other projects are very competitive (or better) than commercial options but GIMP is not even close.

They just released support for 16bit/32bit/c color last year which is needed for so many scenarios.

The unified transform tool mentioned as a highlight is really a pretty simple thing to code.

They are 5-10 years behind what you get in PS for $10/month. It's a killer for any professional have tools that far behind their peers.

The UX has always been poor and unnecessarily complicated. I resent the implication it's the user's fault for not taking time to learn. There are many examples of complex professional systems that prove a decent UX is still possible.

Edit: [Deleted]

I'm sorry, but I don't find the tool intuitive. I ran into issues using it. I installed fresh copy and tried steps commenters suggested and it worked well. However this was not my experience a mere two days ago.

I'm by no means a pro but I can crop an image using gimp in less than 2mins and that includes figuring out where the tools are (I only open it whenever I upload images I guess every third month.)

Don't know what you're talking about? Cropping and scaling take one click and mouse drag or menu selection respectively.

What are the problems you encounter?

I usually end up at the point where the image is highlighted, but I can't get it to actually crop for some reason. Knowing about the exacto knife (from another comment) made it a lot easier.

Cropping is a "HUGE pain"? Are you kidding me?

1. Rectangle select.

2. Image -> Crop to selection.

How much simpler can you get?

Exactly. I found myself using GIMP for exactly those "quick" scenarios because PS, especially before CS6, was just bulky and overcomplicated.

GIMP: Roughly select something, zoom in to make it pixel-perfect, see the size of the selection in the bottom left, and just drag until it fits your need.

PS? Roughly select something. Figure out the size of the selection. Zoom in. Dig into the menu.. Transform selection? Adjust. What's the size now? .. Nope, thanks. I am done 5 times over in GIMP by the time I did that.

I get that GIMP is not perfect, but some people treat like the PHP of graphics software.

Complaining about php is like complaining about an axe:

Yes, it might hurt incompetent people but the people who master it have a truly nifty tool at their disposal.

Complaining about PHP is sanity of someone who learned more than one language.

As someone who has coded in c, java, javascript (before it was cool), perl, python, visual basic I still see a clear niche for php even though I don't use it anymore.

Indeed. It's just that it's not a good language (like Visual Basic).

> PS? Roughly select something. Figure out the size of the selection. Zoom in. Dig into the menu.. Transform selection? Adjust. What's the size now? .. Nope, thanks. I am done 5 times over in GIMP by the time I did that.

Photoshop has a separate crop tool. It gives you a region with handles so you can make fine adjustments before pulling the trigger. You can crop to selection in Photoshop, but it's not the primary way of doing so.

"Why not just use selections the way GIMP does?" you might ask. Well, why not just split the functionality the way Photoshop does? Both approaches are valid. Complaining about one or the other because it's not the way you are accustomed to do things is at best unproductive.

(Edited to add: And I gather GIMP has a crop tool, too, and has done since at least 2.4, which was released in 2007. So maybe it's just a matter of learning to use the tool at hand? I mean, don't get me wrong - there's a whole lot I don't like about GIMP! I won't use it unless I have literally no other alternative, including Paint.net and command-line transforms via ImageMagick. But I do try to avoid complaining about problems it doesn't actually have.)

You can get simpler in GIMP: just use a specialized Crop tool instead of Rectangle Select.

I accidentally closed the tool box and couldn't figure out how to get my selection to actually crop. I just installed a version so I could reproduce but it's working flawlessly now...

That's weird. I'm not a regular user of GIMP at all, but cropping and scaling are pretty much the main things I do use it for, and it's pretty simple and easy. The crop tool is the one that looks like an Xacto knife blade, and the scaling tool is right there in one of the main menus.

Shift-C.

Shift-C is only intuitive if you know the actual short cut. So how do you find out about it? Google.

Agree! The discoverabilty UI in gimp is horrible, it's like the first time you accidentally ended up in Vi and didn't know how to even do basic shit like writing text or closing the application.

For basic image editing just use Pinta on linux and Paint.net on windows. Unless you are a professional designer they will cover 99% of your use cases.

> The UX has always been poor and unnecessarily complicated.

I'm afraid a lot of photoshop ease-of-use boils down to :

More tutorials are available for PS

Those who complain already have an existing investment in learning PS

I started using both at about the same time and I found PS more annoying except for one thing, -the multi window UI (which is now fixed).

Those

GIMP, Inkscape, Blender and other open source art production tools have a big chicken and egg problem. To really improve, they need more professionals using them and a part of them should be developers or willing to chip in by other means. But because there are issues (education included) that are deal breakers for pros, you can't expect it to get better quickly. The situation is much worse for art production tools (than e.g. programmers' tools), because a smaller portion of professionals in the field are also capable programmers.

This is a pretty sad situation and I can't how it would change, apart from giant (in open source terms) donations that would allow a developer-year or few full-time.

I've long wondered how to address this "different itch" problem. People in a position to contribute code don't have the same itches or desires as those who don't, vs a DBMS, IDE, wiki, http server, etc.

I would think that you could find a well-known artist who would be willing to consult on improving a product, especially if they got to have someone implement their pet features the way they want them to be implemented. But the question is - are the tools good enough to even get there or are there so many missing or poorly implemented features that it would be a full rewrite (at least of the UI) to even start?

Not all open source art production tools, though - Krita seems to have carved out a niche community of happy artistic users, probably because there's room for tools that take a different approach to Photoshop.

> There are many examples of complex professional systems that prove a decent UX is still possible

...and Adobe PS is not one of them!

People tolerate its UX/I because the functionality is unequaled and, after you commit to visual and muscle-memory all the shortcuts and locations of commands and options, you can be extremely productive despite the UX/I.

Also, people coming from the "physical arts" category are kind of used to horrible UX/I... I mean, the "UX/I" of a paint brush is pure horror story, even if you use acrylic paint... so the "suffering leads to great art" mantra when applied to tools too, carried into the digital world, makes artists pretty "masochistic" which pairs well with Adobe products' UI "sadism" :)

That makes a good point. A lot of software being pushed out is targeted to beginner users and is broken in terms of encouraging users to to continue using it. We've gotten rid of "Advanced" settings and giving a deeper way of using the tool.

I'm not suggesting that we should leave all tools and products completely unusable unless you're a level 20 night elf. However, reward your frequent users.

Totally agree PS has its own UX issues. My personal favorite: different key combinations for the first time you undo and the second time you undo.

…That's actually one of the things I like about Photoshop—you can just press Ctrl-Z repeatedly to look at before/after a change. Sure it's odd, but there's a reason it's the way it is.

>different key combinations for the first time you undo and the second time you undo.

That's not what's going on. Ctrl+Z is an undo/redo toggle, Ctrl+Shift+Z steps back in the document history. You shouldn't do Ctrl+Z followed by a series of Ctrl+Shift+Zs. Just do Ctrl+Shift+Z.

You're just undoing the undo.

"people coming from the "physical arts" category are kind of used to horrible UX/I... I mean, the "UX/I" of a paint brush is pure horror story"

How would you improve on the UI of a physical paint brush?

Unsuccessfully, I'd wager.

A self-washing brush with a paint-injection system coupled to a digital paints mixer? Add a system to only harden the paint when a special wavelength UV light is shined on it (maybe include the "hardening lamp" in brush's head?). Add away to switch between jet-mode (spray can paint) and brush mode, and you get a graffitty artist's wet dream.

Joke aside, with paint and anything physical you got constraints of physics and chemistry. And anything too sophisticated will be expensive and prone to breaking so nobody will use it. Try to make it reliable and it will have the cost of a piece from an F-35.

None of these constraints exist for software, so you don't really have any excuse to not do UX/I right.

I would argue that while the photoshop user interface is unintuitive and inconsistent, it does have the saving grace that once you learn it, you can actually do things very quickly. It definitely caters to its entrenched, professional userbase rather than neophytes.

The same is mostly true of Gimp as well. In fact I find Gimp has more intuitive ways to do a good number of tasks than Photoshop, but if you already know Photoshop the Gimp way will seem foreign.

As someone who figured out Gimp and was then asked to work on Photoshop some, I found Photoshop's methods to be awkward and needlessly complicated in places.

I am still an amateur however. I might break out the Gimp once a month or so.

I have too agree, there are software (sketch, pixelmator, etc) on Mac that just got released a few years ago that surpass gimp in basically every single function including usability.

"The unified transform tool mentioned as a highlight is really a pretty simple thing to code."

So you contributed to its development, right?

I thought we left the idea of "you can't complain about something unless you built it yourself" way behind us. That's not a constructive way to talk about anything.

I can't write a "hello world" in Clojure, but I still know it's a trivial thing to do. If someone was bragging to me about their hello world and I said "that's really simple", should they respond back "So you contributed to my hello world, right?" I'm not the one claiming I'm a great developer. I don't have anything to prove.

There's constructive criticism, which is usually welcomed, and then there are just plain complaints. Alleging that the uniform transport tool is simple to code helps no one. It just expresses the author's disdain for the accomplishments of volunteers who added a feature to a free and open source tool.

If he thought it was so simple, he could have actually spent a few minutes to help a project which everybody can see needs help, instead of sneering at it. That would have been constructive.

> a few minutes

Have you looked at the GIMP wiki's "how to build" pages lately? The build environment is quite complex, especially if you're doing cross-platform builds, and between the "work in progress" disclaimer and the fact that nobody's paid much attention to those pages this year, I have a strong feeling that following those directions as written doesn't result in a working build env.

If you're already a GIMP dev, sure, it might be a few minutes. If you're not, it's probably going to be more like a few hours, more or less depending on whether anyone who can help is paying attention to IRC, just to get to the point where you can start hacking on it at all. That's a lot of time and irritation to invest.

Before reading that email, I had a different thought about the title "GIMP development, what's the point?" In a time before touchscreen mobile devices and apps came into the picture, people who were somewhat serious about image editing would use GIMP or a pirated copy of Photoshop. There were also a few other applications, free and paid, with a much more limited set of features (but have improved over time).

With touchscreen devices and apps, image editing, or rather, photo editing, has become more about using different apps for different specific use cases, and using filters and other "preset" tweaks along with additional adjustments if at all necessary. This is nowhere close to the power that GIMP offers for someone who knows how to use it and what can be done with it. But it is adequate for most people and is easy to use. In this respect, the title question could become more widespread as people hear less about GIMP.

After reading the mail and the comments here, another thing that occurred to me about the title is that projects like GIMP, LibreOffice, etc., (and even Linux, GNOME, KDE, etc.) show themselves as phenomenal highlights of what truly free and open source software can be and serve as a great inspiration for others to embark on such really complex and multi-decade work in other areas. A GIMP developer is contributing to much more than GIMP alone if you look at side effects. It's a world that couldn't have been imagined several decades ago.

I believe the developers who have contributed to these projects and continue to do so should be extremely proud of their commitment to FLOSS and the amount of work they have put in. Yes, some FLOSS applications may have deficiencies in features, stability, performance and other areas (which many commercial applications do too). But questioning the dedication of developers or asking for the justification of efforts spent by developers who're working with the FLOSS principles is completely missing the point in the overall scheme of things, and worse, missing the benefits enjoyed by and made available to humankind as a whole.

I use GIMP exclusively. Last time it allowed me to turn SVG animation into GIF. It literally took few seconds to complete. Many people bitch about GIMP, but like in arcticle, they just trying to hide their laziness to learn new things. I've nothing against them, but one thing, most of them in my circles are using pirate copy of Photoshop instead free GIMP. Some of them arguing about RBG/CMYK missing in GIMP, but most of them does not even know that.

You can use the separate plugin to convert RBG to CMYK in GIMP. Not as good as Photoshop obviously, but I've made print ready images with it.

I doubt there are many people in the world who can tell the difference between a print printed from RGB vs CMYK. Maybe a few extremely good print professionals with perfect vision and a $4000+ monitor.

I've printed gallery quality prints from sRGB (online and at home), and nobody gives a crap.

When you have to print thousands of leaflets for a client using that client's corporate colors and, after printing, it turns out that the artwork was in RGB and the colors are not exactly those the client wanted[0], yes, you notice it. And the client always gives a crap.

Of course no one cares if you print something for your house or a friend and the color is slightly off. But in some industries something like that can cost you a big client and a lot of money.

[0] The difference can be quite dramatic, even without a professional monitor.

Even so, doesn't this just boil down to a few math functions applied to each pixel?

Why would I need something in GIMP whose effect can only be seen on paper, except as some kind of Export ... format?

Suppose I have a properly calibrated monitor, yadda yadda, I should be seeing good colors on the screen as I'm editing. When I'm done, good colors on paper can only be seen after the data passes through a professional printer provided its RGB values have been properly massaged into CMYK values. So it has nothing to do with interactive image editing.

It's almost entirely "off topic" for GIMP.

It's not so simple.

The problem: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/CIE1931x...

Colors in one colorspace may not have a representation in another. If you do all your editing in RGB and then try and convert at the end, you restrict yourself to the set of colors available in both. To get print colors that are accurate to a provided spec, you need to work in the target colorspace directly, with an editor that will approximate the colors on your sRGB monitor as best it can so you can see what you're doing.

Gimp is great if you're not a designer or exclusively a web designer. Otherwise, CMYK is a huge deal as it is the only way to go if you want to print something at a professional printer (not sure about the term).

Is there a way to add decent CMYK support to GIMP? Is it technically unfeasible, or is it something the main devs are simply uninterested in?

http://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#i-do-a-lot-of-desktop-...

there is however some cmyk support currently if you need it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GIMP/CMYK_support

Thanks for the link! So it's low priority for the existing devs (and I understand the reasons why... they make a lot of sense, actually!), but they are open to new devs helping with this. I assume it would be no small feat.

Thanks for this. I was very happy to read that they're making non-destructive editing a priority.

> Things like non-destructive editing are required by pretty much all users — photographers, designers, desktop publishing engineers, and even scientists. At the same time, CMYK is required only by a small subset of our user base. We prioritize our work accordingly.

"Only way" is a bit of an exaggeration (Most popular way for sure). I've had large print houses ask for RGB files so they can control the CMYK conversion on their end (usually in cases when you're trying to get as close as possible to an RGB match).

I use Krita, except for a time when it had issues with my graphics tablet and I switched to Gimp. I think Krita is the proof that there's no good reason for Gimp to be as unusable as it is: Krita is free, has all the features I've ever felt the desire to try in an image editor and more (though I probably wouldn't bother loading up a GUI just to convert an SVG to a GIF), has the missing colourspace support, is exceedingly scriptable in a standard way (rather than requiring its own specific way of doing scripts), and does all this via an ordinary, sensible GUI that works the way you expect. Somehow the gnome world seems to have much better marketing than the KDE world (particularly in the US), but I'd urge people (especially people who aren't doing enough image editing to justify a big investment in learning a tool) to check out Krita.

I agree. Krita feels so much more intuitive to get into than GIMP. The current 3.0 version feels very buggy on my Mac (osx 10.11.6) though (and the older versions do not like my tablet).

Krita and GIMP are two different tools.

GIMP sort of fits the PS replacement

Krita is a painting program - Corel Paint

I love Krita but I liked it when it was more of a rasta editor before the remake into a painting program also. I support every kick starter Krita has made.

> Many people bitch about GIMP, but like in arcticle, they just trying to hide their laziness to learn new things.

The other way to look at 'laziness to learn new things' is that these people are choosing to do something else with their time - something that they presumably value more highly than learning GIMP. For most people, the set of such things is huge. GIMP is usually just a means to some other end, and there's nothing particularly noble or enlightening about learning yet another piece of software.

Personally speaking, I've used GIMP off and on since before it had either layers or GTK. (It was once Motif.) That said, a few years ago, I got sick of the time it was taking for relatively basic operations, installed a $30 copy of Pixelmator, and haven't looked back. Part of the problem with open source consumer software is just that: it has to compete with commercial alternatives and most of the time lacks the resources to do so in an effective way.

Stories about an eloquent, suave believer enlightening a misguided, clearly-in-the-wrong naysayer may sometimes be true, but never very convincing.

> In this case, I opted to give the fireworks/show. My weapons of choice this time included the unified transform tool, the handle-transform tool, and the warp transform tool

Which prompts the leering, misinformed troglodyte to consider the error of his ways, to "imagine the possibilities". Ahh, man.

Having used GIMP and Photoshop, the practical point of GIMP development, in my view, is to provide a baseline for other graphic editing software: i.e., your product's quality cannot drop below what GIMP offers.

It's also a decent, free and Free product in its own right, even if flawed. Just being Free makes it better than Photoshop for me. Calling it the "baseline" is pretty dismissive. It's better than Photoshop in some aspects.

Even if it was the baseline, here's the point of GIMP development: to make it a truly great alternative to Photoshop and similar proprietary tools. Even if you never quite achieve it, even if the target keeps moving, it's reason enough for continuing development.

I didn't take "baseline" to be dismissive, but rather a description of GIMP's venn-diagram overlap with Photoshop. They both make different choices for different reasons, but ensuring that proven useful features eventually land in that overlapping region is a valuable contribution to OSS and proprietary software.

> Having used GIMP and Photoshop, the practical point of GIMP development, in my view, is to provide a baseline for other graphic editing software: i.e. your product's quality cannot drop below what GIMP offers.

I think that this is one of the important things that Open Source software does, generally - it provides a steadily rising baseline of functionality that is freely available to everyone.

LibreOffice is another product that's often considered not as good as the leading proprietary product, but as long as it exists and gets better with every release, it will benefit everybody, including Microsoft Office users.

Agreed 100%. The best Open Source products motivate and inspire.

I like that perspective. They're the 'Public Option' that keeps the commercial offerings on their toes :)

I tend to agree with you. GIMP is a very important project in my view because it provides legal, cross-platform access to a baseline of image manipulation tools. The above-and-beyond feature set is fantastic, but not the reason why I love it.

I suppose this isn't directly related, but following the theme of OSS alternatives to commercial software... after being ignorant of the OSS desktop application world for a few years, two cross-platform projects have blown my mind recently with their feature sets and level of polish:

Natron - https://natron.fr/ - Node-based video compositor. I've used it to add some dumb special effects to videos.

Godot - https://godotengine.org/ - Unity-like game engine and IDE with export to all non-console platforms. I've used it to make some dumb games.

Natron and Godot have been added to my bookmarks.

Thank you for sharing, my good man. I will playing with them later to see how the next generation of OSS desktop apps have improved.

I appreciate GIMP for what it is, and use it on the occasion that I can't quickly do what i need with ImageMagick or pixlr. But I'd gladly pay for Photoshop and other Adobe tools if they compiled natively on linux.

One problem with the characterization implied in [a,b] is that it ignores the impossibility of opening a file correctly and completely that was originally compiled in a tool that's been the industry standard for well beyond my own years (I got started on Photoshop 4 in 1996 - the first Windows release, and before then, Paint Shop Pro).

Literally not a single designer I've worked with in the last 15 years as a professional has ever even considered using GIMP (most don't know it exists). So if they want to send me their "source", it's in a PSD. And said source is going to be huge with layer effects / cropping / transitions, and all sorts of advanced Photoshop-specific things applied.

And I'll open that file in GIMP - I try at least once a year - and it will show maybe 5-10% of the layers and will look nothing like the original. And then I'll fire up Windows in a VM and actually get work done.

As for starting my own projects in GIMP, I fall squarely into group "a", and I feel no shame for it.

    a) User has tried GIMP, but didn't take time to learn enough to get past things that aren't obvious.

    b) User has heard that GIMP is hard to use, and is not an adequate tool for professionals.

You blame GIMP for not opening PSDs correctly, but note that it's not an open format and it's not a standard. GIMP developers can do nothing but try to reverse engineer support for it.

You're absolutely right. The bar I'm setting is probably too high, but it's not set from anything beyond my desire to get work done. Literally: "nothing personal, but I can't use this"

That is not too high a bar to set for an application that's billed as, among other things, a tool for professionals.

PSD is not an open format but it is most definitely an industry standard, and being unable to support it properly makes GIMP an inferior replacement for professional graphics work because of that.

You can go through a convoluted process to get the documentation for the standard from Adobe (Someone where I used to work did this so we could add support for PSD to a game engine). I'll concede that that's unpalatable, and that it's probably something you need to do regularly as PSD does get updates.

I'll also concede that its considerably easier to open a pdf for display vs for editing, and maybe all the info for the latter isn't there in the docs. Its also not a fun format to work with as its grown organically over many, many years.

All that said, GIMP usually bungs up the colors which makes it pretty unsuitable even for opening a psd for view. This shouldn't be acceptable at all.

(Sorry, I haven't had enough coffee yet to make this into a coherent point instead of a few random thoughts...)

"You can go through a convoluted process to get the documentation for the standard from Adobe"

I doesn't look complete to me (there's lots of things just marked 'obsolete' that, I guess, one will encounter in the wild, and things like "Macintosh printer record" that I fear you'll have to dig up tech notes from the '80s for), but it seems that has improved a bit, as there is information available for free at adobe.com now, whereas you needed to sign an NDA to get the SDK before: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-apps/photoshop/fileformatashtml... (via http://www.adobe.com/devnet/photoshop.html)

For the completeness, the famous "PSD is not a good format" rant: http://codepad.org/DidDsbjF (it is not available at Google Code anymore).

The reply from Adobe: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/05/some_thoughts_about_the...

They both explain, why expecting 100% PSD compatibility is unrealistic.

Hey, I'm C.Rogers, the original poster of this thankyou note that's got everyone bashing GIMP against Photoshop... which entirely misses the point of it. People seem hell-bent on comparing GIMP to Photoshop, saying they don't compare. Well, it's easy to say that isn't it? I came from 13+ years of Photoshop experience, with about 7 of those used in the professional world. I've since packed on another near decade using GIMP (at first in conjunction with Photoshop), I have since replaced Photoshop entirely in my professional work, and I use it every day. The biggest thing stopping professionals from using GIMP is the erroneous notion that it can't be used for the same professional tasks as Photoshop. I'm half tempted to start a YouTube channel called GIMP SUCKS, and fill it with screencaptures of my graphics work done entirely in GIMP. That's not just magazine adverts, that's billboards, that's convention booths, it's over 100 new products of my own design, and nearly 20,000 product photos. So please, if you have something specific to complain about, go post a bug report, or a wishlist item like a decent human being. Repeating over and over that GIMP can't replace Photoshop for professional work doesn't make it any more true. Here's some eye-candy for the nay-sayers: https://goo.gl/UwxEGp

What's the point?

It's a helpful question for narrowing your focus, but at the end of the day, there isn't always one, and it needn't be a lofty philosophical goal.

Did the MDL team need a point to develop Zork? Did Thompson need a business reason to write UNIX? Did the AI lab ever justify extending TECO far beyond its original intent, into the first version of EMACS?

Sometimes, although not all the time, "because I can" is reason enough.

"Because I can" is of course a valid reason, but having a better goal is more motivating, especially if it's a team instead of a single person.

I believe GIMP does have a better goal than "just because", and in my mind it is achieving it. I'm not a graphics designer and therefore I have the luxury of not being locked-in with Photoshop's advanced features; therefore all my image manipulations are done using GIMP, Krita and/or Inkscape. I congratulate all those teams on a job well done.

Oh, of course. It's just that I don't think that "what's the point?" is as significant a question as many believe it is.

Surely the 'point' of GIMP development is that the market leading tool (Photoshop) is closed source, not available on Linux, and relies on its dominant market share to make people pay monthly for it?

I LOVE GIMP!

GIMP is a great competitor to photoshop. It misses a lot of the shortcuts that photoshop has introduced to make editing easier/quicker but I've always been able to do everything I needed to do even if it takes more steps.

What the opensource community is missing is a sketch alternative. Application developers have moved to it for rapid design and photoshop has taken the backseat.

GIMP is not comparable to sketch. Sketch has changed the way the design world thinks / works.

Gimp is wonderful software. It's really amazing all of the work that's been done with it.

I fully respect all of the work developers have put into open source art creation tools/libraries. Blender, Gimp, InkScape, Krita, G'MIC etc. are incredible pieces of software and if more people spent time to explore, celebrate and contribute to these efforts there is no way any commercial product could keep up.

There's an excellent book published by No Starch Press that's full of ways to use GIMP. It's excellent because it is as comprehensive as the older Adobe Photoshop books that people used to buy.

Here's a link for convenience:

https://www.nostarch.com/gimp

There is a great lesson in this. The temptation to upgrade, improve, add, and tweak is very strong, but putting those things through the "what's the point" test could really help focus on what's important.

GIMP is wonderful and I've gotten away without using Photoshop because of it for over 10 years. Sure, I'm not a graphics designer, but GIMP really isn't made for professional graphic designers. I just wish that the plugin community around GIMP didn't slow down so much, and that GEGL would eventually be 100% implemented(meaning actual CMYK, non-destructive filters, etc). I know that GEGL is kinda there, but it's not fully there still after over 6 years. What may give GIMP a huge edge over Photoshop one day is if it can be ported to the browser with Emscripten.

I prefer Photoshop for the UI, but boy are those Elsamuko plugins something.

A big thanks to the GIMP devs for providing us with a powerful image editor! It's one of my favorite tools on Linux. I'm currently using it for gradient generation and texture editing for a game. Obviously PS is king in this domain, but the "point" is that many people don't need the full corporate lab when the garage workshop will do.

I would like to give another try of GIMP later today.

I remember the first time I tried GIMP. The user experience wasn't good. After knowing you had to double click a button to toggle it, I immediately dropped GIMP.

I also had bad experience with gdk as a developer. I remember it didn't have an installer on windows, and it needed so many dependencies. Getting all the required dlls was a huge pain. Whereas Qt is always nice and easy with good documents.

gdk didn't seem to have a native mac backend. It needs XQuartz, which I don't like. I don't want to install X windows on mac, doesn't make sense. The fact that gimp is under gnome worried me.

Doing image processing software is difficult, but making the ui of it should be relatively easier. GIMP might be strong at processing images, but its ui was really messed up I think.

But I will try again to see if there is any improvement.

I am a Krita fan. It's taken the throne of all my graphics creation and modification needs. https://krita.org/en/download/krita-desktop/

Long time GIMP user here. I use GIMP because my Solaris 10 install came with it, and for no other reason (I also used it on IRIX). Some software is just so bad, that it cannot even be given away for free; GIMP is one such example, as the interface is horrible.

I am surprised nobody talked about Text tool and action recording.

I also use Photoshop CS2 (which Abobe started giving away about 3-4 years ago), and oh boy is its Text tool much more advanced. CS2 was released in 2005 and the latest version of Gimp (2.8.10) still cannot compare :( From my point of view, working with text is a pain in Gimp :(

Also, action recording - I think it is a highly valuable feature for anyone who processes at least 1 photo a week. It seems now so inefficient to repeat the same 4-5 steps again and again and again.

the point of developing gimp is to eventually change its name.

I've used gimp for years and only recently did I discover that Script-Fu is actually an embedded Scheme. Happy day for automation.

Yeah, people blab about how Photoshop is better, but can it be programmed in Lisp? Yeah, didn't think so.

"because I know such comments usually come from one of two places"

I would expect such comments to usually come from c) User feels the industry uses Adobe and, even if GIMP matched up feature for feature, it's pointless to learn it. I don't like to think that way myself but I've certainly felt that way at times.

Or possibly from d) User has actually attempted to use GIMP in a professional context and found it severely lacking. But that's not something a just-so story can easily answer, so I'm not surprised to see it excluded here.

To be honest, the name is really embarrassing and immature. I've always felt weird when I used it, and I don't like mentioning it in conversation as a result. Krita has momentum and many other advantages, not least of which is an appealing name.

Maybe if he could sit down with every potential user of GIMP I could sympathize. But the truth is when I sit down to do anything in GIMP, my frustration grows and grows. I've spent dozens of hours using it and it still leaves me in agony every time.

Lot of very fancy photographers use GIMP exclusively. It's more about the workflow (and marketing). If you're used to GIMP, you won't find Photoshop all that easy and vice versa.

Not sure what he's talking about (Warp stuff) since I'm a GIMP amateur, but he should make a YouTube video of his finest 3-minute GIMP presentation then.

Gimp source code is pretty old. Adding stuff like 16/32 bit support is not easy.

On other side Krita is newer, uses QT, is developing faster etc..

I'd like to see these features demonstrated too, without meeting a gimp developer. Maybe they could do a better job of that.

These are brand new features of the new, unstable, development version of GIMP. There hasn't been a lot of time to make tutorials on them yet. I still found a video tutorial one warp transform tool[1], but it's in German. It looks simple enough not to even need a tutorial, though.

The GIMP team could always use some help in developing tutorials. So if you want to volunteer, I'm sure your help would be appreciated.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHWft62sj44

GIMP does suffer from a Pied Piper issue. The developer shouldn't have to teach a user how to use his program.

gimp has handled all my image processing needs for a two? decade(s) and done it easily, thanks.

The GIMP team doesn't seem interested in working with professional designers, and professional designers are too content with Photoshop to work with the GIMP team.

Just use Photoshop. Cowboy up and buy the fucking software.

> In such cases I have to push down my annoyance with the tone

Don't. This would have deserved a rude answer.

After all these years GIMP still sucks. They waste time on developing features of low importance, while critical ones are still not solved.

Prime case: opening RAW files. The current suggested workflow is to use a 3rd party plugin UFRaw. Would you like to see the process of installing it on Windows?

http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/Install.html

(Ctlr+F for "MS-Windows for geeks")

And then I see arrogant posts like that, claiming that GIMP is perfectly capable. It absolutely is not. GIMP will become popular when GIMP developers start thinking about the modern photographer's workflow. Till then people will keep pirating Photoshop.

What is critical to you is not to me, and vice versa. E.g. I have never in my life needed to work with RAW files. I have also never in my life needed to manipulate graphics on Windows.

I understand that is frustrating, but this is one of the challenges of open source - the contributors can make choices without caring about attracting customers.

Which is absolutely their right--but then they don't get to post smug messages about how people are just too dumb to understand how great their project is.

I see a lot of messages justifying why GIMP meets the needs of so very few, but none of that changes the fact that GIMP seems to meet the needs of very few.

> GIMP will become popular when GIMP developers start thinking about the modern photographer's workflow.

GIMP is for image editing. Not for photography.

Use darktable if you want a FOSS application for a photography workflow. (it can open RAW files)

Similarly Krita is for creating digital art. It's main goal is not to be an image editor.

I haven't used a direct image editor in a very long time and I don't think I'm missing anything.

Digital Fusion is free. Houdini Indie is $200. Nuke is available for linux. These are all node based work flows that don't destroy anything. You don't have to undo because you create a graph of operations without changing your source directly. They aren't useful for painting directly with a tablet, but anything else they do very well at.

Did you mean Design Fusion, from Blackmagic?

It used to be Digital Fusion before Blackmagic bought it.

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