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Comment by reginold | Hacker News Reader

For those more familiar with GIMP, can you share what you love about it? I'm assuming most people think of it as a "open-source-but-less-good photoshop". Would like to hear from fans.

edit: reading this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25174686

Also curious about PhotoGIMP, focused on a better UI

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After 15 years, I'm just used to it.

Gimp was _usable_ before the same-window toggle (introduced about 2010?), but when they added that I stopped looking at competitors tbh. I wish certain things in Gimp weren't so kludgy (mainly basic stuff like dropdowns and dialogs), but Photoshop isn't perfect underneath its slick-looking UI either.

That said, I use and kinda adore Premiere, so I'm losing the Adobe "synergy" by not using Photoshop. I still can do everything I want or need to do in Gimp, and I admittedly don't do anything advanced.

Paint.NET sufficed for a little while but Gimp hits that great middle ground for me personally between too-simple and too-powerful.

Gimp moves so slowly that I personally can't wait for downstream forks like PhotoGIMP to pick up updates, so I've always tried to stick to the latest official stable release. I love reading new updates hit the front of HN, usually means a meaty release. :)

> That said, I use and kinda adore Premiere, so I'm losing the Adobe "synergy" by not using Photoshop.

GIMP and Krita getting better is what finally got me to dump the abusive relationship I had with Premiere Pro. Seriously, it has to be the most unpleasant software I've ever used. Like, it's good in theory, but then the most basic things just...don't work?? Dynamic link is cute in theory, but in practice there isn't much of a productivity loss with 1-click exports in both GIMP and Krita.

[I cut out like 2 paragraphs of Premiere rant here, but if anyone is curious I'm happy to paste it back. I'm glad if PrPro works for you, but I personally can't stand it anymore]

I would love to hear your problems with Premiere haha.

Definitely agreed on the lack of usefulness for dynamic linking.

The most I've put Premiere through its paces was a 23-minute short film. I learned a bit of After Effects for it, and that integration was nice.

Not sure if Krita is aiming to replace AE as well, and I imagine that's a much tougher job than just creating a nonlinear editor. I have a lot more problems with AE than Premiere, much of it comes down to Gimp-style UI kludginess.

I've been using GIMP since at least middle school. I learned about color, layers, opacity, paths, etc all from GIMP. It has always been free, available, and it doesn't change too fast. I have used photoshop for advanced features (CMYK halftoning), but that never comes up for me often enough to subscribe.

Having learned on GIMP, its super easy to me. I have a hard time understanding what could be better just because I am so used to it.

I haven't used Photoshop in about decade, but there isn't many reasons why I use it over Photoshop other than it works on Linux, I don't have to pay a subscription fee, it's not as bloated and resource heavy, and it just works. In fact, I'm much more familiar with GIMP than Photoshop. I'm not a designer/illustrator by any means, but the times I've had to edit photos for whatever reason or do bulk conversion, GIMP did the job well and there's a community providing support.

I like that it inspired Krita. Those folks really seem to be listening to users; working hard to build highly demanded features without navel-gazing or bike-shedding.

For those who haven't seen it before, check https://krita.org/en/ out!

I checked it out and could not wrap my head around Krita tbh. It feels very powerful but focused on solving many different problems, of which photo-manipulation is only one of them.

I need to take another look and give it another try, I don't think I'm done with Krita yet, but it's not a replacement for Gimp yet (as far as I'm concerned.) There's some beauty in having focus.

Photo manipulation is explicitly one of the problems we are not trying to solve with Krita.

Then I'm not sure why the parent comment is implying otherwise.

Well, I cannot look in their mind, but they're not the maintainer of Krita, I am :-).

Here's our current vision statement: https://krita.org/en/item/kritas-updated-vision/

I tried gimp, and still use it sometimes, but switched to affinity photo mostly because the smart select tool was so much better, and the Ux was a lot smoother. Faster too. They are basically the same program in a lot of ways and if I’m on Linux (I dual boot) I do use gimp sometimes still. You will spend some time on YouTube trying to figure out how to do things but there are a lot of good short videos to get you moving

On a related note, I used kdenlive (video editing) the other day and it was a really good experience, smoother and faster than a paid editor I used to use

Kdenlive reached a good enough level of maturity in features and stability. Very nice editor nowadays.

Blender is also very usable as a nonlinear video editor.

I simply don't know or care if it is better or not than photoshop. I never used photoshop, I can't even compare. All I can say is that it has always been good enough for whatever I needed.

a clever friend once said it this way, while I was complaining about the GIMP interface. He said "Adobe spent years refining the small details of Photoshop, and GIMP must not copy PS, so therefore all the GIMP interface parts will feel terrible, by default"

of course this is humorous oversimplification, but I can't help but think of it every time I really, really need a general editor, open GIMP and immediately start cursing over ordinary thing.

source: I wrote the third color paint app for the Mac II thirty years ago while a contractor at Apple Inc.

There's no limit on copying from PS, but it wouldn't make sense to trash the current user base to try to acquire those used to PS. Then it would be the Gimp users who feel upset.

Something that others might not be aware of - Gimp could be a lot better by now, but Adobe actually has patents on features that cannot be included into Gimp, including certain UI elements. So there is a limit on what Gimp can do, not because of competency, but because of legality.

Is there by any chance a list of software patents that Adobe or other companies hold that GIMP cannot implement for this reason?

There is no such thing because patents have nothing to do with this.

Agree, Rubyridge is just flat-out wrong. Check out photo pea for example, UI is remarkably similar to photoshop

https://patents.justia.com/assignee/adobe-systems-inc

content aware stamp tool

METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR SELECTIVE SYNCHRONIZATION OF A DISPLAY LAYOUT

METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR GESTURE BASED COPYING OF ATTRIBUTES

METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR AN IMPROVED WORKFLOW FOR DIGITAL IMAGE EDITING

Construction of multimedia compositions

Methods and apparatus for selecting objects by state

Methods and apparatus for automatically grouping graphical constructs

Methods and apparatus for maintaining online preferences

Methods and apparatus for creating a quick canvas

System and method for identifying Bezier curves from a shape

Method and apparatus for applying locale behaviors to regions of a form

Preview window including a storage context view of one or more computer resources

Methods and apparatus for arranging graphical objects

Methods and apparatus to identify graphical elements

Methods and apparatus for three-dimensional isographic navigation

System for manipulating noise in digital images

Compound layers for composited image manipulation

Method of color selection for display and printing

> Something that others might not be aware of - Gimp could be a lot better by now, but Adobe actually has patents on features that cannot be included into Gimp, including certain UI elements.

It's an urban legend :)

Improving UX means we need

1) UX architects/designers — got none

2) developers to implement what UX people design — got too few

https://patents.justia.com/assignee/adobe-systems-inc content aware stamp tool

METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR SELECTIVE SYNCHRONIZATION OF A DISPLAY LAYOUT

METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR GESTURE BASED COPYING OF ATTRIBUTES

METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR AN IMPROVED WORKFLOW FOR DIGITAL IMAGE EDITING

Construction of multimedia compositions

Methods and apparatus for selecting objects by state

Methods and apparatus for automatically grouping graphical constructs

Methods and apparatus for maintaining online preferences

Methods and apparatus for creating a quick canvas

System and method for identifying Bezier curves from a shape

Method and apparatus for applying locale behaviors to regions of a form

Preview window including a storage context view of one or more computer resources

Methods and apparatus for arranging graphical objects

Methods and apparatus to identify graphical elements

Methods and apparatus for three-dimensional isographic navigation

System for manipulating noise in digital images

Compound layers for composited image manipulation

Method of color selection for display and printing

None of that is the reason for a missing feature. Some of those things are actually implemented in GIMP, at least, judging by titles.

Like I said, urban legend.

My clever take is that complaining about GIMP’s UI is just a meme at this point.

I could easily complain about Photoshop or Illustrator’s UI just as much as GIMP or Inkscape.

Yeah I'm curious what exactly makes GIMP different. Photoshop and Pixelmator are bot pretty similar to use on a Mac. Is it just the layout of buttons? Or is there some "first principles" difference in the design of GIMP vs Photoshop? Is GIMP made for programmers and Photoshop for designers?

No, GIMP is for designers, too. I use Photoshop at work and GIMP at home. Both for very light work. Adding text to an image, putting a product into a mockup template, resizing, etc. Both programs are very similar - I don’t really notice much difference between them. And GIMP does some things better!

Like any program, there’s a learning curve. But there are lots of like-for-like features and layout choices between the two, so if you know one then the other is easy to adapt to.

Is it Stockhold syndrome? After years of GIMP I really disliked the Affinity interface, also it is unusably slow on a very recent computer here. I kinda like GIMP, the good parts.

Is that an egg-corn? ie an mishearing of a well-known phrase in a way that makes total sense? Stockhold syndrome - it's like Stockholm syndrome but you're cheerleading for companies with crappy products only because you own stock.

I like GIMP. All its features are straightforward and accessible and make sense to me. For this reason, I like it more than Affinity Photo (can't wrap my head around showing or hiding different features based on what "persona" you have active).

There are rough edges. The name, for one. The save/export fiasco. One of the transform tools recently became completely broken. But anything I can imagine doing in image manipulation can usually be done in GIMP with a minimum of fuss.

> One of the transform tools recently became completely broken.

Any details much appreciated.

Cage transform in 2.10

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/5267

I made a separate install of 2.8 for an image where I really needed it. Not the most common tool and not the end of the world, but I think it qualifies as a rough edge.

I use it mainly because I love FOSS. Looking at what sets it apart technologically, I really like two plugins: Liquid Rescale and Resynthesizer (Heal Selection), the very wide support of formats, including niches like the windows icon format, and the fact that I can use it everywhere legally.

I only use its "auto white balance" feature...I don't know how to do this with imagemagick as good as GIMP.

I don't have to pay $15/month.

This was the issue for me even before the subscription model. I realized that any FOSS I learned could be taught and given to friends and family at no cost. Photoshop Elements can fill that niche too, though paying anything for software is becoming an uphill battle with some demographics.

It’s good there is a Gimp, but it’s idiosyncratic UI is a real hindrance for me. So Affinity Photo is my go to tool these days.

I find GIMPs rectangular selection tool amazing. The way it does double duty with crop tool is really well thought out.

I haven’t used the software for a long time, preferring Affinity, but I’ve tried all the major image editing programs and selection in none comes near the GIMP’s UX.

Command Palette is really useful. However, there are some UI quirks with text layers, selecting layers, etc that I never quite got the hang of.

Everything and the pluggins

(but Imagemagick is also great).

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