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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

Actually, the way I would put it is that GIMP is the perfect example of why companies hire UX designers. GIMP is textbook example of how software can technically have all the same features, but be insanely hard to use and utterly confusing to anyone without a guide. Compare it to Photoshop which does more or less the same things but anyone can naturally pick up and use.

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Can they though? I'll admit it's a long time since I've sat in front of a Photoshop window, but I remember it being just as complex to use.

Is this just partially a "what you're used to is easy & anything different is hard" thing?

What exactly makes Photoshop easier to use in your opinion? This is a genuine question - I see this asserted so often, like it's a truism, but nobody ever seems to give specific examples.

I still remember that time I tried selecting something and moving the pixels of my selection, rather than the whole layer in GIMP. I ended up having to google it and it was a 3-key combination shortcut. I don't remember how to do it in photoshop, but I'm pretty sure I didn't have to google "how to move a selection" that time I used it.

Fair. I think you’re expected to float the selection into a new layer and then move the layer, but this is such a common operation for people to want that it ought to be directly available from the Move tool.

This is how I've been doing it since forever and and at the very least didn't have to Google it.

I did not know another way existed... which also just illustrates the point.

It doesn't really, because you don't know how to do it in Photoshop either. I've been recently learning Photoshop for the first time after being a long term GIMP user, and I don't find it intuitive at all. If you didn't need google or books to use Photoshop, somebody should tell the enormous industry of websites and books sold to teach it.

Your comment seems disingenuous, because the predominant user interface paradigm in all sorts of programs (file managers, vector editors, text editors, ...) on all sorts of platforms is that when you select something, you can click and drag that selected thing.

This is a thing that is different in GIMP: that the selection specifies an area of the image which is affected by operations, rather than an object to manipulate.

"I did not know another way existed" seems outlandish. I mean, launch any paint program developed for any platform in the last 40 years; chances are you can select a rectangle and just drag it.

There is a rhyme and reason to the way GIMP does it, and you can learn it quickly, but it's going to cause complaints.

It could be that 99% of the anti-GIMP ranting is caused by this one issue.

>Your comment seems disingenuous

Your comment seems like you missed what was being talked about. In fact you appear to think I was arguing a point antipodal to what I was actually saying.

"I did not know another way existed" was referring to a second way to do it in GIMP.

Audacity has this in spades. Every annoying thing has a bizarre undiscoverable keystroke to invoke a sensible not-broken alternative.

Why they don't make the reasonable implementations the first class defaults is way beyond me... (I haven't read the mailing list/bug report threads enough to find out, if someone has insight I'd love to know. It's like they know something is what people don't want to do 99.9% of the time, they fix it, then they hide the fix; ie deleting some audio without shifting everything over - I have never wanted to shift things on delete. Not once, never. Not a single time. Why is that default?)

What's the Photoshop to Audacity's GIMP?

Sound Forge

Well moving the selection is the 3rd thing you can do, what you meant probably is moving the content of the selection. It's controlled by 3 buttons on top of the tools window, and this plus a few other things are worth spending a bit time to learn the basic concepts.

Which is a good advice for PS as well, btw.

i do remember figuring out how to move my selection without moving what's in it. it felt a little bit like gimp was playing a prank on me

In GIMP you can just cut it and paste it, and ctrl-x ctrl-v works, which are pretty much universal in every application. It creates a temporary layer for the selection, and when your cursor is over the selection you'll get the universal 4-axis pointer that means move, and when your cursor is not over it, it will turn into an anchor (whose meaning you can guess.)

>Is this just partially a "what you're used to is easy & anything different is hard" thing?

I woulnd't say so. Some programs are plainly more confusingly designed.

Back in the late 90s when I used Photoshop as part of my Project Support / Sysadmin 50/50 position, I used books that taught me how to do certain things. I think it's just that Photoshop is that much more popular so has orders of magnitude more people writing books and HOWTOs.

I disagree, I picked up photoshop at the age of ~13 and did most things mostly naturally. I've tried GIMP 4 or 5 different times at various ages and I've never been able to achieve anything without hours of effort and guides.

Photoshop has a whole industry around teaching how to use it.

They have photoshop conferences, books and magazines. Not something you expect for a piece of software that’s intuitive.

So does Microsoft Word. I think you're missing the point. Yes, Photoshop has a lot of more advanced options, but the power of UX is being able to balance basic features and advanced features. Sure someone may not be able to do insane tricks, but doing basic stuff is far more discoverable and intuitive to do.

Also in addition to other sibling comments--note that OT mentioned having been using GIMP for 20 years and still being unable to figure out anything new aside from the tutorials he studied. So being "used to" GIMP is evidently (although currently sample size 1) not enough for it to be "easy to use".

Edit. I'm not saying Photoshop is easier to use--it might be just as difficult but with better resources available people might be able to learn it better.

I used PS and many other 3D graphics apps commercially for over 10 years, Gimp is sadly not a patch on it. UX is a thing, and Gimp doesn't have that. As a now software engineer, I can see the thought process behind the application, but it's workflow is treacherous. I switched out to Affinity a few years ago, because PS became too bloated/heavy, and Gimp just doesn't cut it for real work imho. I mention this because it was easier to pick up Affinity after a couple of hours than wrestling with Gimp. Same goes for Blender Vs Max/Maya. I hate to say this, because I would like these tool to be more accessible to all

Been using gimp for 20 years, every couple years I try and fail to do even the most basic stuff in photoshop. Then I give up and go back to gimp.

Photoshop doesn't have a great UI, it was just very early, good enough, and targeted at professionals. GIMP is better in every way for me so far (I've just recently become a Photoshop user), except that CMYK doesn't work well or seamlessly yet on GIMP, making it unusable in a professional context. Other proprietary photo editors that worked with CMYK from their beginning are passing the GIMP as photoshop competitors.

Honestly, I wouldn't pick Photoshop as a particularly shining example of UX. It's probably better than GIMP. But it's also a product that has accreeted features and ways of doing things over the years and is pretty squarely targeted at people who use it all the time professionally. There are lots of different ways of doing the same or similar things.

Having many ways to do a thing is arguably better than GIMP, where there's exactly one way to do a thing and you need to find the right option from the right menu under the right icon to use it.

>technically have all the same features

>does more or less the same things

Photoshop has way more features than GIMP. GIMP has some severe basic wholes like lacking CMYK support after 25 years. I think they rather wait for printers to be obsolete than actually spend time implementing the color mode.

>> GIMP is the perfect example of why companies hire UX designers.

Whole I agree that this is UX design, but I suspect that UX can be (and often is) a product of the type of organisation producing it moreso than the "UX designer hired to do UX." UX for something like Gimp is very hard. The metaphors have to encompass a ton of stuff and the UX needs

A web app created by a bank, electric company or somesuch will tend to be different from an app created by an SV-ish company in a pretty predictable way. Similarly, Gimp seems like a relative of other GNU/OSS software... Calibre comes to mind.

Different types of organisations or ways of doing things have different strengths and weaknesses. Th

Calibre may not be pretty but for a CRUD app it is usable. People who have complaints about Calibre generally have issues with its chrome and dated layout but nobody dislikes it because it is hard to use. A default GTK style UI always looks terrible on Windows and Mac, both of which have much higher requirements for user interface defaults. This is especially so with Amazon and iBooks setting differing expectations for how an eReader should look like. The issue with GIMP is with both its UI and its UX. Trying to get work done in GIMP is difficult and challenging. It is not a mere CRUD app like Calibre.

People like Calibre. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just using it as a type example. Gnu-ish software is different in a recognizable way from Google, MSFT, etc. Different enough that both strengths and weaknesses are different.

With Calibre, most users won't feel like they have a grasp of what the software is and what you can do with it... compared to an Apple product. But, it's super powerful and the answer to a lot of "how do I X?" queries is use calibre. Without calibre, the operative answer would probably be "you can't."

While I like and appreciate Calibre, its a fantastically useful piece of software and I use it all the time, its UI veers closer to outsider art than what could be considered best-practice interface design.

GIMP, however, is more like when an ecosystem is cut off for millions of years and there’s no natural predators so things evolve in strange and highly localised ways.

GIMP is the duck-billed platypus of software.

> Compare it to Photoshop which does more or less the same things but anyone can naturally pick up and use.

Trolling is not appropriate in HN.

How is that trolling?

Feeding the flame war with obviously false bullshit.

"People are born with the ability to use the program that I offer in contrast to the impossible-to-use crap being discussed. Literally anyone. Even babies who couldn't latch on to a boob for the first two months of their life can use it, whereas that other monstrosity requires a Ph. D. in computer graphics or signal processing."

Come on; it's not 1995, and this is not comp.sys.os.advocacy.

While I didn't claim anything close to that, and the evidence I have is only anecdotal between me and a dozen peers, I myself learned to use Photoshop at the age of 13, yet the half a dozen times I had to use GIMP, I spent over an hour every single time trying to do basic things such as moving pixels around and doing basic transformations.

Look around the thread and you will hear dozens of similar stories.

I'm sorry but I didn't know telling my own experience counted as trolling.

In GIMP, selection works in a way that runs counter to the predominant user interface paradigm. A selection isn't an object that the user can pick up for direct manipulation. Rather, it's a delimited region of the image which confines the effects of editing. Thus, you can't just select a rectangle (or whatever) and then drag it to move the pixels. So yes, that will perplex the average user. Scratch that, probably every user. In Gimp, the move tool selects the entire layer which contains the pixels that you're pointing to, and moves that. The selection "cross-cuts" through layers. So that is to say, you can make a selection in one layer (say by picking out a shape), and then switch to another layer where that original selection is still in effect and delimits the edit operations.

The way you move pixels in GIMP, though it doesn't conform to certain well-established user interface conventions, is learnable (and even discoverable). By the time you used it half a dozen times, you should have picked it up on it.

The way you're evaluating these programs is the equivalent of comparing cars by kicking their tires, slamming the door, and honking the horn.

> I didn't know telling my own experience counted as trolling.

Exact words: "Compare it to Photoshop which does more or less the same things but anyone can naturally pick up and use."

That doesn't at all look like telling one's own experience.

Also, your experience consists of evaluating use cases from Microsoft Paint on advanced image editing tools, then it's not relevant enough.

Your comment amounts to what HN calls "shallow dismissal".

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