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GIMP needs a major user-interface overhaul like Edward Snowden said on Twitter: https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1416778909358731266?lang=...

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This. This is the biggest reason why I don't use GIMP more often. The tooling is great, but the usability is atrocious. I would give them all the money for a UI overhaul.

I'm guessing that Blender has more funding available to it and/or has retained more of its senior developers, compared to GIMP.

Expecting that a piece of software undertakes an ambitious UI overhaul (which is no small feat) without one or both of those resources shows, to me, a lack of understanding.

It should not be underestimated how much Blender is helped by the project management by Ton.

As far as I know GIMP does not have a face for the press, does not organize conferences, has no one contacting businesses for funding. And it has an unfortunate joke name.

If it's any consolation, "Blender" is a actually negative word in German ("deceiver"; someone who blinds others).

The name seems to be fitting for a 3d computer graphics toolset.

The same is true for Poser (https://www.posersoftware.com)

I agree. Two things come to mind regarding the interface of GIMP.

One is what you wrote - that it needs a product manager and tons of manhours just to do what's essentially a refactor. Not to mention that GIMP devs said that many UI changes would imply backend changes too, because of limitations. And they are working on those limitations, among other things. Second part of the point is that Adobe must have like 50 people work on Photoshop, and I guess even more when you consider the overlaps with their other products. Compare this to the active contributor number to GIMP.

The second point is that many people compare it to Photoshop like Photoshop is a gold standard of usability. It's just as a nightmare as GIMP if you're not used to it. So, it's not really GIMP's fault that people are used to something else.

I think the fact that Blender has had same person steering its development since the days when it was an in-house tool for a small animation studio makes a tremendous difference.

The other factor is that Blender was always a tool by and for actual companies doing real commercial work and understands those needs. GIMP on the other started as a university project that got picked up the GNU project, and has always been more of a 'research' project.

From my historic experience with both, the GIMP project always seemed actively hostile to UI change suggestions, and even keeping their name is a thumb in the eye to going mainstream. Blender has been more about being a good product from the very start, I've been following it since before it was open sourced. It's current success is a path it started walking way before it had lots of devs and resources.

Blender was extremely hostile to UI change suggestions as well until only recently when they changed things drastically with the insanely successful Blender 2.8 project. From then on donations (including corporate sponsors) grew massively. Blender has made massive strides in the past few years, and much of it can be attributed to them changing their stance on UI/UX changes.

> From my historic experience with both, the GIMP project always seemed actively hostile to UI change suggestions

We ask for rationalization of suggested changes. For some reason people think it's hostile.

I just noticed they don't even have screenshots on their website. That's horrible in my opinion. I'm not using a program where I have to actively search for 3rd party websites to find some pictures of the UI.

Redoing the features and the home pages is on the todo list already :)

Indeed. I really want to like GIMP, but it doesn't hold a candle to my old copy of Photoshop CS4 from ten years ago. From what I can recall, the GIMP UI has hardly changed since then too.

I suppose they're probably constrained by what is possible with GTK? Basically it seems like Linux needs a better standard for user interfaces -- I can't think of a GTK app that doesn't have awkard position/spacing/layout issues.

Pretty ironic, considering GTK was originally created for GIMP (that's even what the G stood for back then: the GIMP ToolKit).

I always smile when thinking about the fact that GTK stands for "GNU is not Unix ... is not Unix Image Manimulation Program ToolKit"

> From what I can recall, the GIMP UI has hardly changed since then too.

There have actually been changes, and even if they aren't major, someone like me who has never used anything but GIMP was annoyed/slightly confused by them. I don't know what the issue with GIMP is, besides tools that Photoshop appears to have or has better implementations for. My impressions is that it is mostly Photoshop users, that are expecting something else, or am I mistaken?

> My impressions is that it is mostly Photoshop users, that are expecting something else, or am I mistaken?

I use GIMP for my (modest) editing needs, and I like it. But some of the behaviour is.... weird.

For example, if you've got a region selected and you use the flood fill tool, it will only fill pixels within that region. OK, that's logical enough, a tool only applies to selected pixels, right?

But if you've got a region selected and you use the move tool, it'll move the entire layer. If you want to move only the pixels in the selected region, you gotta convert it to a floating selection.

And after you've moved your floating selection, you want to select a different region to move, so you drag out a new selection. Not so fast, your floating region has now vanished. You gotta defloat the selection by selecting nothing. But you can't do that by choosing 'None' in the 'Select' menu, that's greyed out for some reason.

I'm sure these behaviours all make sense to a developer or expert user - but nobody's going to be telling their friends that GIMP is easy to pick up :)

I think I’ve seen GIMP’s “move tool moves the frame” behavior on somewhere else, perhaps in ancient versions of Photoshop. Back in the time GIMP UI was close enough to those, like in the legendary CS2 or v5.5 days.

Did you try Krita ? https://krita.org/en/features/highlights/ (the doc is great too: https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/getting_started/naviga...)

Krita has a different focus though. What photoshop is to Illustrator, is GIMP to Krita.

I use both and I think GIMP is really usable and the UI isn't that bad. There were some changes though, so people should take a look at the latest version.

> Krita has a different focus though. What photoshop is to Illustrator, is GIMP to Krita.

I mean, that's the theory, but I just find photo editing to be all around much more comfortable in Krita despite using GIMP for years.

Also one of Photoshop's main domain is digital painting (https://www.google.com/search?q=making+digital+painting+with...) which is what Krita focuses on. You don't really draw with Illustrator.

True, they have overlapping functionality.

I meant Fresco instead of Illustrator, I forget the names of Adobe apps constantly.

I don't see how Edward Snowden is relevant...if you don't like the UI, just say that.

GIMP's use interface is the reason I switched to Krita. Nothing ever worked as expected in GIMP.

A typical example is the need to use paths for what are basic geometric tooling in almost every other graphical application.

Or some would rather at best use Krita, if not continue to use Photoshop running in Wine.

GIMP needs funding to do that. It's not easy to turn a ship around.

Almost not joking: I wonder if it wouldn't be better if Blender grew image editing features. After all, it now has video editing features, and I hear they're decent.

Photoshop and Illustrator's UIs are so illogical, arbitrary and tooltip-free they give skilled users Stockholm syndrome. GIMP's UI is logical and good, and you have 10x the odds of finding something you've never looked for before quickly than you do with Photoshop.

The GIMP's weakness is color management.

I've never used Photoshop so can't comment on that, but I've always found GIMP's UI to be simple and straightforward.. but maybe that's because I've used it for so long. I really don't have a problem with it.

I'd rather GIMP focused on adding features that Photoshop and other competitors have.

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