Hacker News Reader

Comment by ktzar | Hacker News Reader

I just wish it got features that were in Photoshop in the early 00s. Adjustment layers, basic effects as part of the layers ...

View on HN

The thing that always irritated me about GIMP is that any functionality gaps between it and Photoshop would always be summarily dismissed as “oh no, you’re just used to Photoshop”.

It looks like it may have been fixed now, but I distinctly remember GIMP having separate tools for “scale”, “move”, and “rotate”, each of which had slightly different UIs. People didn’t find that confusing because it was “different from Photoshop”, they found it confusing because that’s a terrible UI.

I think you are talking about the Unified Transform tool in GIMP. It's been around for 6 years or so, but we only made it part of a stable release two years ago.

I really wish that people would see there are possibilities beyond that dated system.

Feel like we're doomed to the ideas of the Photoshop team from 20 years ago.

Right? Data structure wise, layers are a stack. We've got fancier things we could use to generate images.

What about a digraph? A node graph editor for compositing would be pretty cool. It'd get you kind of what you have in blender / unreal / unity's vfx graph / shader graph.

I like the push for everything to be non destructive, but it'd be cool if I could, in a reduced input "live" kind of way, see before/after choices -- so I can make adjustments like an optometrist.

I make a lot of texture masks for interactive 3d stuff, the digraph approach would be nice if it let me bitpack things in a more complicated way into color channels than what's possible now.

Maybe what I'm actually asking for is more photoshop-y like tools in blender?

I think if you go too far down this path you end up with a tool that’s utterly incomprehensible to the majority of your user base. Layers may be simplistic, but they’re relatively easy to understand.

With layer groups, it's rather more a tree than a stack. A full DAG approach might be interesting.

Weeeeeellll, GIMP is based on an image processing engine that is built around direct acyclic graphs. We are still not sure how much of that we will expose to users when the time comes to work on non-destructive editing. But it's a possibility.

Can I apply a drop-down shadow to a layer in GIMP, move that layer around and disable or tweak (color, distance, fade, orientation, etc.) the drop-down shadow as will in a non-destructive way for the underlying image/pixels ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com