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Comment by Santosh83 | Hacker News Reader

GIMP is a general image editing software while Krita focuses quite specifically on digital painting and art, so it is not surprising that you find it more ergonomic for drawing.

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I don't to digital painting and art and I still prefer Krita. Although prefer is the wrong term, I despise GIMPs botched, unituitive and cumbersome UI so much, I'd rather code a figure in html/javascript and canvas or svg, before I'd use GIMP. Krita on the other hand is relatively nice to use.

Initially it took some getting used to Gimp, but that was years ago, when I had not used any GNU/Linux distribution and was still a Windows XP user. Now I find Gimp's UI actually pretty logical and everything has its place. Not sure what people talk about when they complain about Gimp UI. Perhaps you can shed some light on the details you do not like?

It's been many years since I've used it the last time but I can remember that even the simplest tasks required googling and actively remembering how they were done because nothing was intuitive or logical. And the layer system was virtually unusable, I couldn't figure it out. In Krita or inkscape, the UI just makes much more sense so they are not as infuriating to work with.

That was my initial feeling about GIMP when I first tried to use it years and years ago. After many false starts and head scratching, the logic of it finally sunk in and now I find it pretty straightforward and logical. You just have to find a way to get over the very frustrating hump of understanding its basic design. But if all your needs are met by a program that doesn't demand that initial investment, all the better.

> I despise GIMPs botched, unituitive and cumbersome UI so much

Btw there is a new fork of GIMP, called "Glimpse" [1], that tries to improve the UI. Their first release was just a re-branded GIMP, but maybe they'll get something done someday.

https://github.com/glimpse-editor/Glimpse

Yep, https://alvinalexander.com/gimp/gimp-how-to-create-draw-circ...

Alternately:

Select circle brush, set outer size, paint circle, set inner size, erase circle.

Not that the UI isn't terrible.

How do you align the centres doing it that way? Carefully watch the pixel coordinates in the status bar?

Edit:

Simpler than this or the linked instructions is to use the Ellipse selection tool with shift to select a circle, then do Edit > Stroke Selection.

Still pretty wacky.

One of the recent features I most love in Gimp is "/" to search through the commands.

(More and more graphics programs are adopting it.)

Once you're used to it, you can create the ellipse selection and type "/stroke"...

I guess that unless the Gimp developers change their mind and allow for vector drawing inside of Gimp, it's as comfortable as it can get...

even for simple photo cropping / transformation and adjusting brightness / contrast, Krita has a much better UI

Krita is nice to use, but for simple things I find Gimp's filters more useful. It now has much better scaling filters than Krita and the colour adjustment filters are useful, especially colour temperature adjustment and auto white balance I use a lot. Also some aspects of Gimp's UI are still superor, for example some filters in Krita only allow adjusting the parameters using text boxes, where in Gimp you can use a slider to interatively adjust each parameter with the mouse.

regarding the colour adjustments what do you think of G'MIC ? It integrates quite well in both GIMP and Krita and all the filters can be edited easily with sliders / text boxes / etc..

G'MIC is extremely useful and the algorithms in it seem very high quality. Indeed it works great in Krita does make up the difference for the most part, though I don't think it directly replaces the examples I mentioned in Gimp that I like, for example I can't see a generic scaling filter in there. I'm not sure it has a colour temperature adjustment specifically, either.

> GIMP is a general image editing software while Krita focuses quite specifically on digital painting and art

AzPainter is one more app which focuses quite specifically on digital painting and art.[0]

[0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/wiki/Tutorials

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