Gimp development release 2.99.12 includes initial CMYK support
gimp.org
gimp.org
Was it because non RGB color spaces were hard, due to the program being designed around RGB and the assumption of RGB is everywhere in the codebase?
Or is it something particularly tricky about CMYK?
The previous attempt to add CMYK exporting didn't go well. The developer implemented all that in a new set of plugins instead of building the functionality into existing code. This wouldn't work. The developer apparently wasn't interested to do it right or did not have the time, he wouldn't say.
So there's the architectural aspect of this and then there's availability of a contributor willing to hacks on this.
You can read a little more about this GSoC project here: https://www.gimp.org/news/2022/06/03/cmyk-in-gsoc-2022/
Bit weird to put it like that, everyone else in the world didn't do it either, it's open source after all.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/gimp-web/-/issues/25...
Years of docs gone because one unnamed maintainer forgot to update hosting. With no backups. The official roadmap https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Roadmap#GIMP_3.0 has been inaccessible for 3 months, which the blog glosses over as no big deal. This kind of amateurism is uncommon to Blender and Krita but rather common to GIMP; some of their maintainers have even been banned from twitter.
OMG, nope. The person in a parent thread asked a very specific question: what's tricky about CMYK support and why it didn't come earlier.
How can I answer that without explaining that CMYK exporting almost happened years before and saying what went wrong there?
Of course, it's your choice to think the worst of people.
> some of their maintainers have even been banned from twitter.
Are you referring to me?
Not only for Gimp, but for Inkscape too.[0,1]
[0] https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Color_Management_Planning
We really need an open source alternative to Photoshop. I just don’t know if gimp will ever be it.
What a shame.
Names have a lot of meaning, you think about it constantly, if you are thinking about a crippled person unconsciously even while developing software, maybe that is why Gimp is in the state it is.
Many Open Source projects are just named damn stupidly, like with the KDE suite does it really make any sense naming your projects starting with "K" just to follow the KDE ?
Or with Gnome you have so many stupid project names, beginning with the whole name "Gnome". All I can think is a forest gnome when I think about that desktop environment. Maybe it's supposed to be Ge-nome, but who thinks it's a good idea to call a desktop environment a small dwarf like bearded old person .. Combine that with Gnome Gimp, you have a crippled forest gnome handling your image editing, nice.
Everytime I try Linux and it's modern desktop environments, the application names just make me cringe, it's like somebody just decided that "Yeah hey naming conventions for software don't matter, just call it the terminal emulator "Kerminal" or whatever shit that suites the stupid naming scheme.
Its weird when people complain about minor things like multiple windows or name when actually doing something with the program is much more complicated.
Me too. As a non native English speaker I didn't think about that first, but then I saw Pulp Fiction.
Oh wait. That's who makes it. I guess they spoiled their own name. Never mind.
...Somebody once called me the Emily Litella of the net.
I am aware of "gimp" as a derogatory term, but it pops up so infrequently, its primary connotation for me has become this piece of software. I imagine plenty of other non-native speakers would similarly only have a loose connotation to the meaning as an insult.
In other words, while names may sometimes be important, I think this case is not an instance of that for the majority of people on the planet.
This is also the way our language perception generally works: The word is just the signifier, a variable. The meaning, the significate, is not inherent in the word itself.
If enough people say "gimp" and mean the software, that becomes the default inference.
They should change the name; it's difficult to understand why the maintainers are so attached to something so self-defeating.
I think name changes are like bug fixes: the later in the life cycle you go for it, the more expensive. Whether that is worth the cost... in the case of Gimp and git: for you maybe yes, for me decidedly no. Doesn't mean either of us is more right than the other, but does say something about how we feel about using and talking about these pieces of software.
Proprietary software is often stupidly named too, yet we take it seriously. I feel like for some people it's not the name, but the lack of associated cost that moves GIMP to the 'hobby utility' category for them.
(And yes, I'm aware Linus named Git as an insult on purpose and that he wanted to call Linux something weird too, like Freax - the questions is, why does it matter?)
I don't think these people are faking it. Words have always seemed to have power.
When my wife and I were considering names for our child, there was one name in particular where she said that she could never name her child that. She had hated (HATED, apparently) a girl with the same name in primary school. The look on her face. The real emotions in her eyes. That name was definitely out.
I have seen people get in physical fights purely over a few words and name-calling.
I personally do not feel this way about words. I think we should not let words have such power over us. But for some people, words do matter that much.
As such, we have a choice when naming something. We can either ignore this power of words and risk having the name itself hold back adoption of the [product, service, whatever], or we can be aware of this power and conscious and conscientious in choosing how to name the thing.
There are people who assume malice on the part of the developers refusing to change a name that has over 20 years of 'name recognition' behind it, for better or worse. It's those people that, despite understanding their concerns to a large degree, actually make it less likely that naming will be considerate in the future.
It also doesn't help that the suggested replacement names are not much better, GIMP was forked as Glimpse because of the name. Glimpse has all sorts of potentially creepy/negative behaviors associated with it as well if one goes into it trying to analyze the name as flawed.
To me Gimp is a pretty meaningless word, though I guess that's mostly because I'm a non-native speaker and the word seems to be used so infrequently that I have a hard time judging how it's perceived in general. But usually people don't think twice about the name of brands or products if they're used to it, and are able (though not always willing) to see things in context. I doubt that Gimp's popularity would increase with a name change, critics mainly seem to have issues with the UI. Either way I use it because it does everything I need with a pretty reasonable learning curve.
Edit: Apparently gimp is also an insult directed to disabled people (I just learned).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpAvcGcEc0k
https://montycasinos.com/montypython/scripts/argument.php.ht...
>A: (under his breath) stupid git.
"git" can mean anything, depending on your mood.
- random three-letter combination that is pronounceable, and not actually used by any common UNIX command. The fact that it is a mispronounciation of "get" may or may not be relevant.
- stupid. contemptible and despicable. simple. Take your pick from the dictionary of slang.
- "global information tracker": you're in a good mood, and it actually works for you. Angels sing, and a light suddenly fills the room.
- "goddamn idiotic truckload of sh*t": when it breaks
I'm not sayint that the k-names are great and new kde applications try to avoid using it, but then a big company does it and has a big marketing budget, nobody minds it.
That's why I think 'Krita' is a good name, and 'Konqueror' not so much.
But this is many times the problem with open source desktop environments, and I don't really see any easy way to fix it .. some people have tried to create unified experiences, but those are mostly forgotten with time.
You misread your parent commenter. They meant "cheesy" as a negative thing.
> I wish there was some committee or some board of members trying to actually design the whole user experience
There is: the Visual Design Group [1].
> But this is many times the problem with open source desktop environments
Oh, and Gnome too: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design So that's two of the two major open source DE that actually have teams "trying to actually design the whole user experience".
Feel free to join them.
About Gimp, this is a word that does not mean anything in most parts of the world. But actually, I think most people don't care that much. Names is not the among the problems people mention when they struggle with the open source world.
huh? it's absolutely not, it's goofy as hell. I regularly have contacts / clients / etc... be like "gmail ? that's not serious".
One expects a name@company.com style structure for professionals. It being called Gmail is not relevant.
Honestly, picking up about Gmail name in 2022 is a bit anachronistic.
Being associated with uninventive names like GMail, Linux or Konqueror is a pretty comfortable level of goofiness for a professional setting. They don't mean anything, maybe we can all groan at how uninventive they are, but at least they are boring and have no real connotations and won't tempt me to make a joke that'd annoy HR. I wouldn't be the only one thinking that either.
The difference is these big companies spend a lot of time thinking about the application names, iPhone is genius in how simple it is.
I mean there are good names also, Linux in itself is a good name for example, it's unique and doesn't sound dorky. And Firefox and some others, I'm not blaming all of them.
Gimp might have been a good name in the mid-to-late 90s when the development of Gimp and Gnome began, but still sticking to it just doesn't make much sense to me.
Name is least of Gimp's concerns. Backronym it to GNU/Gnome Imp, presto.
Bigger problem is they took so long to add CMYK support.
Some people consider gimp to mean some kind of bdsm latex freak.
Rebrand it as GNU imp, put some wings on mascot, presto. Problem, solved.
As opposed to Gee Mail or Eye Tunes. Don't think either would do so great as "Gail" or just "Tunes". One thing I noticed in a foreign country is that our brains fill in the details a lot when listening and that extra syllable really narrows down the possible words and sounds that you might be hearing.
iTunes
iMac
iPhone
iPad
iPod
Okay, this is a Linux thing.
How does "KMail" sound like phonetically ? KayMail ? KeiMeil ? It just doesn't give the same vibe. The designers at Apple know that "iPhone" means something to the user.
Even gPhone would be better, but Google has that covered already. KDE doesn't really stand for anything or it's phonetical counterpart doesn't communicate anything meaningful to the user.
I just looked it up and, K used to stand for "Kool", but already that is not a real word, doesn't look good or even sound good, at least to my ears or thinking.
Also iMac came from "Internet" back then, so it had multiple meanings behind it.
Stupid like "windows" for a windowing system or "word" for a word processor or "mail" for an email client or "iMessage" for a messaging system, or Pages, Numbers, or everything starting with an "i" from Apple, or everything g by Google or the endless stream of startup named like their name was created using one of those "startup name generator"?
I am a non native english speaker, if I had not discovered much of the software I know of,including Photoshop, in the late 80s when I was a kid and didn't know English I would have thought software companies were run by idiots.
But lucky me (and them) Photoshop now for me it's just a name with no actual meaning.
Is Krita worse than Photoshop as a name? Is Blender worse than Maya?
are Chrome or Safari or Edge really better than Firefox?
I'm not sure.
The horror!
See this https://apps.gnome.org/
Wait, really? The name of the tool is something to think about "constantly"? Why?!
To me, seriously dismissing a tool because of the name is like failing an IQ test. It is a sign of someone that wants to be spoon-fed by any sort of shit that is offered by the big companies, as long as it is packaged in nice colors.
Or even more not so extreme examples, for examples let's say your music player would be called "Brown Juice" or something like that, would you be happy about that application, vs for example "iTunes" or "Soundamp" or whatever.
You know these are extreme examples but just show you that the power of words is very clear in what kind of images they create in our thinking, I bet if Gimp would change their software name to something like "GNU PhotoEdit" or something like that, more people would be willing unconsciously to work and improve it also vs working on this "Gimp" that still uses that silly logo with the Gnome Mascot. It's very unprofessional and you wont attract the best designers or developers if you don't think about the big picture.
That's just my view on the thing. The package and nice colors matter, but of course the interiors and working of the software is that matters more, and on that frontend Gimp just doesn't cut it. What I'm trying to say is that maybe they could make the software better by changing it's name and design.
I mean, no professional uses Gimp for photo editing, at least I don't know anyone besides some hobbyist who rarely use photo editing, they might use Gimp. Or am I wrong ?
Argumentum ad absurdum.
> I mean, no professional uses Gimp for photo editing
Perhaps because the lack of CMYK, the limited architecture for plugin, or the outdated UI have more to do than the name?
If the name was the real bottleneck for adoption, you can be sure that you'd see someone creating a fork with different branding and being widely successful. Oh, wait. It has been tried already! [0]
Check out https://www.rosiehardy.com/. Rosie is a commercially successful photographer who has been using GIMP for years.
I don't miss Photoshop at all.
Maybe it has changed but everytime I see gimp I'm reluctant to open it. too many bad memories...
They should just copy what works.
There is this tutorial on YT right now: "How to Download and Install Adobe Photoshop CC 2021 Free Trial". It's got 755K views.
Do you really think your YT tutorials argument holds any water? :)
I guess it depends on what you need it for. As someone who's a software developer and occasionally dabbles in video game development or some very basic design, GIMP is perfectly suitable for what I need. I actually haven't used Photoshop in years and don't really feel like anything at all is missing for my use cases.
Things like sometimes creating images for my blog posts, or favicons for my sites. Or touching up photos or removing some details, or maybe creating some textures for a video game/visualization. GIMP is just there and works well enough. For even more basic (or batch) processing, I'd also recommend XnView: https://www.xnview.com/en/ or IrfanView: https://www.irfanview.com/
That said, the quality of FOSS software is all over the place:
* since the UI/UX revamp, I'd say that Blender is one of the better and more high quality packages out there, what FOSS *should* be like
* software like GIMP, LibreOffice and Kdenlive take a middle spot: fully functional, decent quality, good enough to be a daily driver
* software like Inkscape and OpenShot are at the bottom of the barrel: only workable if there are no alternatives, bad performance and unstable, bad UI/UX and so onFor now I use Krita because... Well, adjustment layers.
Also: Have you considered contributing a patch to do background loading after GNU Image starts?
If they are just, now, adding CMYK support (Photoshop has had CMYK for many years, as CMYK has been critical for printers), I suspect that you may be correct.
Functionalities and workflow matter.
GIMP was always a toy for programmers, without any vision behind for how to actually make it a product that commercial users would want. It’s a big job to move a ship like that.
GIMP is not competitive with Adobe Photoshop from a capabilities or user experience perspective.
Here’s a non-biased article comparing GIMP to Photoshop: https://thegimptutorials.com/gimp-vs-photoshop/
Also blender was regularly used to make content with input from the community. Multiple shorts that dog fooded it and provided improvements through the process, while inspiring many to see what’s possible.
GIMP doesn’t have any of that. Photoshop can be had now for $10/mo or something cheap like that. It’s not thousands of dollars a year like for DCCs. It doesn’t have productions driving features in it , or creating content regularly to inspire people.
Krita does better here because they do small but more engaged community outreach to create content with Krita and have it feed back into the app
The Blender Foundation and community made that happen! No glib “if you don’t like it, fix it!” type comments. I’m not suggesting that you personally have said that, but look at the context and process of Blender’s development and success. The people at the Foundation, along with a buoyant community have worked hard and listened to the criticisms and transparently worked on them. It’s been a long slog.
They’re not only developing it, they’re trying it in actual productions and using that to improve it
> The Fuzzy Select tool in GIMP took about 20 seconds to decide what I had clicked on and isolate it for me
That's uncommon enough to be an isolated incident.
Would it be nice to have? Sure. But there are tons of alternatives to Photoshop that just don’t compete on market share, despite photoshop lagging behind in many areas.
If companies were backing an OSS editor though, Krita is by far more favoured by professional creatives. It’s more familiar coming from Photoshop, has better extensibility+Python scripting+Qt which is great for pipelines and has a much better handling of color science and other features important for professionals.
Really? How? :)
You are ignoring non-profits and countries foreign to you.
In the context of this discussion, the question was why companies aren’t funding GIMP development, and the ones that can’t afford a $20/mo aren’t the ones who would be funding development anyway.
Yes, of course there’s a market for free stuff. But the price of admission into the existing paid for products is low enough that there’s little motivation to fund it.
GIMP 2.99.x (future 3.0) is shipping with support for Python, Script-Fu, Lua, JavaScript, and Vala as languages for extensions.
The last time I used Gimp, the Gimp Python extension was an optional module that wasn’t included in the build I had But it’s been a while clearly and I missed it. I’ll edit my prior comment
I think people who consider GIMP a good substitute for Photoshop probably haven't ever used Photoshop seriously, or have photo editing needs that fall in a very narrow range.
Companies which don't want to pay for Creative Cloud can more easily pay for one of the various alternatives--the particular alternative that works for you will be different.
Layer Effects are the only 5.0 feature from Photoshop that GIMP doesn't yet have.
There's also a million things GIMP does better or does at all compared to all the versions of Photoshop you mentioned. I can give you examples or you can spare me the time and just admit you've seen Photoshop 3/4/5 so long ago that you don't quite remember what it was like :)
I could clearly see the image I wanted in the red, green and blue channels. But because the alpha channel was filled with full transparent, all I could see outside of individual color channel mode was the checkered background. Deleting the alpha channel or converting the image format from RGBA to RGB just erased the entire image to black.
I eventually found the solution in the eraser tool, which had an erase alpha mode. I had to set it to a really large size and go over the entire image.
Would probably have been faster to just write a script in python.
I am more a PSP than a PS guy and I really tried to use GIMP for my image editing needs on kubuntu. I even ran a pinned patched version of it fixing the save/export "bug" (Another boneheaded ideological dev decision).
A few months back I wanted to add a few straight lines to an image. In PSP these would be vector object that can be adjusted in size, color and position. In GIMP not so much. It has only the pencil tool with an alt mode holding shift that does straight lines.
However I needed to adjust the lines distance from each other slightly - What followed was a lot of cursing and repeated attempts, switching to the path tool followed by discarding that idea and switching to making a layer per line. After finishing I deleted what I had done and did the same by starting PSP 9 in WINE in about 30 seconds.
I did some googling and found the reason why GIMP lacks any useable Vector functions is that vector functions belong in a Drawing program not a Manipulation program. And GIMP is the latter. This is a paraphrased from memory quote by a GIMP dev.
That probably means that not putting any vector function in (even though stuff like the Text function really benefits from vector layers) was a decision long ago that passed into ideological canon by now and is probably a huge task to implement.
So I am currently back to using a PSP version from 1998 for editing images on ubuntu. Even though its buggy as hell. Newer version after the Corel acquisition sadly come with a DRM service that balks at wine. I have licences for a few of those I would love to use.
GIMP development started in 1995. First version of Adobe Photoshop with adjustment layers was released a year later, in 1996. The notion just wasn't there.
If you still want talking about notions and time, GEGL as the non-destructive backend for GIMP was started by Rhythm&Hues developers in early 2000.
We could have a long conversation about priorities and availability of developers and refactoring and all the reasons resulting in non-destructive editing not yet available, if you like.
Vector layers was a 2006 Google Summer of Code project. It was too ambitious, it wasn't completed, whatever good bits were done got merged years later so that the code wouldn't be lost completely, and there is still no user interface for any of that.
But the sole reason this project was assigned was because people behind GIMP were quite open to having better drawing tools in the program. They just lacked the time and the motivation to work on that.
When your program is primarily intended for image manipulation and you have a crapton of requests from users to add image manipulation tools, filters, and whatnot, how else do you prioritize your work? Especially when you program's architecture turns out to be inadequate for complex features and you have to rearchitect and repurpose 800K LOC, not to mention updating it for the next generation of the UI toolkit that is a moving target of its own?
For every user complaining about not having shape tools you'll get three complaining about the UI, another two or three complaining about not having non-destructive editing, another two demanding layer styles, then an assorted group of individuals wanting CMYK image mode, LAB image mode, more use of GPU, AI features, more filters, better HiDPI support, and the list goes on. All the while you have essentially one person doing 50% of all work and a small team of people all working on small items. All the while there are free/libre applications like Inkscape that have been providing better drawing tools for years.
So I'll ask again: given all that, how else do you prioritize your work?
CMYK image mode being pretty much the only missing feature from Photoshop 3.0?
I think people tend to forget all the hoops they had to jump through years ago.
Do you remember how you couldn't edit text layers until version 4.0 or 5.0?
Or how most filters and some selection tools didn't work in 32-bit mode until fairly far in the CS release series?
So GIMP not having CMYK, or any color space support besides RGB, is actually sort of amusing. Just through version 7 Photoshop added vector shapes, history brush, adjustment layers, and a bunch of other stuff GIMP still lacks. It's an FOSS project so it's not like I'm saying the GIMP developers are bad, they clearly are quite talented.
What I'm saying is GIMP today is not as capable as Photoshop from 25 years ago. It's good enough for a lot of people but useless for others. I've been hearing your arguments about GIMP for as long as it has existed. It has a lot of capability and works for your use case so that must mean it just works for everyone. It's great that it works for some people. But you can't pretend Photoshop hasn't improved faster than GIMP. If you need anything beyond basic destructive editing GIMP is just not appropriate.
Must it mean that? Really? I had no idea! :)
> But you can't pretend Photoshop hasn't improved faster than GIMP.
That's not what I'm doing here :)
Sure, but when I look at the development of image editing tools in the 90ies then vector shapes and layer pretty much was widespread by 1998. If I were to guess then the functionality just came with support for TT Fonts and became a standard feature for image manipulation applications.
Again I tried really hard to make GIMP work for me - I still found myself hunting for the right tool icon time and time again (I think something is fundamentally wrong there but I cannot with certainty say what) This might be where the UI criticism comes from. I bet you would learn the symbols in the end and . I still got so annoyed by the save function insisting to save as some weird format I didn't want to use that I had to patch that out. But then in the end what killed it for me was the vector lines thing.
With that in mind seems believable that companies where long term impact of investing in tools is clearer are more likely to consider investing in open source tools for the sake of long term benefits. In comparison with 2d drawing industry where investment in tooling is mostly limited to skill and experience of individual persons working with specific software.
There is also fact that final output of 2d drawing software is plain image which have relatively simple widely used standard formats (for practical reasons the Photoshop files are still commonly exchanged but sooner or later result is treated as plain image). With 3D software the complexity of output and integration with other software is much bigger. This encourages other big software companies to invest in Blender for the sake of better integration with their tools. Unity, Unreal consuming 3d models produced in blender, there is interest for both good workflow and integration, as well general accessibility to tools required during game development because more game developers means more potential game developers buying their software. Nvidia and AMD interested in better support for their hardware, so that end users are more likely to buy it.
I think a lot of things in Gimp are not broken, there is a worthy foundation to build upon. The text UI is bad but it's not the cornerstone of the product, it can be fixed without rearchitecting it. The library approach to graphical ops is more important, and it looks promising to me.
Look how much has Inkscape's UI improved, to say nothing about Blender.
Blender is, after Linux, the golden child of FOSS for professional level tooling and I’d argue the model for running an open source project.
Blender has made some big UI gains. I used it a long time ago, and the hidden menus and backwards control scheme made it unusable for anyone with basic computing knowledge (right click was select? Insanity) and doubly so for anyone with 3D knowledge. They revamped it a few years back and it’s usable now. I went from a blender hater to happily dropping paid 3D software and preaching about how good blender is.
Companies could throw money at gimp. But that doesn’t mean it’ll ever have a control scheme that’s usable to the 99.9% of people with prior digital art experience who go in expecting something similar to 99.999% of other software, only to find it’s completely backwards.
Literally just putting aside all other development plans and going all in for a year on making the UI usable would launch the project to success.
And comments like this always get a “well, it’s open source so you could fix it yourself if it’s that bad!” I could and so could others. But there’s usable software out there, and instead of dedicating loads of time to trying to fix a decades-old mess, we’d all rather just use a better product even if it costs money and get to work, or make something different from the ground up.
I'm afraid you are dismissing quite a lot of work to improve the UX/UI.
Could more be done? Absolutely! Was there zero attempt? Not really, no.
It’s like: if you’re a large manufacturer, would you prefer investing in a city where government officials pocket the cash and roads don’t exist but with handwavy excuses that something might improve with a little more cash, or invest literally anywhere else where the roads improve every year and things are getting cleaner?
Gimp seems to be spinning its tires for infinity. I’ve tried it once a year or so for 15 years. It hasn’t changed much. It’s incredible. Almost no company is going to throw them cash and it’s obvious why.
There’s perfectly good software out there. I’d rather get work done and use that, than spend forever trying to make sense of some mess of an ancient project’s code and trying to fix it. There are even free projects with usable UI that would be a better use of time if I were to want to contribute to something. Krita’s been mentioned here a few times and it seems to have a brighter future.
IMO, one of the core reasons why UI/UX in open source applications (that aren't backed or actively contributed by dedicated staff in big companies that keeps them on a salary for the sole purpose of contributing) is because it's more widely accepted for programmers to contribute to open source than UI/UX designers.
In this case the best one can do is design mockups, but then who implements it? Who even has to be convinced that the mockup is a step forward or backwards, the moment every design decision is treated as having the same value as the next one, on the grounds of "it's just an opinion"?
My point is, we don't lack programmers/developers we lack UI/UX people willing to contribute, and we also lack the former to actually listen to what they have these people to say instead of dismissing their suggestions as "not data driven enough", "too opinionated" etc.
It’s why as a UX designer I don’t contribute to open source projects any more as the fight just isn’t worth it.
GIMP is peak that attitude. It could be a top-quality mainstream open source image editor if they wanted it to, but they don’t.
Photopea is the work of one guy, Affinity Photo was made by a small team, so it’s clear it’s not manpower but attitude.
They’ve got things just how they like it and the last thing they want is to make things easier and have a bunch of n00bs running around and spoiling things, thank you very much.
Except the GIMP team worked with a UX architect for several years. That's how you got single-window mode, convenient rectangular/ellipse selection and cropping tool, polygonal selection tool built into lasso, the unified transform tool, and more.
And even after Peter (the UX guy) departed, the team still made a bunch of UX improvements (and continues making them, time-permitting).
> Affinity Photo was made by a small team, so it’s clear it’s not manpower but attitude.
Serif Ltd. is 200 to 500 employees. They have paid developers working full time. They had the funds to start from scratch and build on their previous experience creating similar applications.
In case of GIMP, the existing team is already stretched thin and has to deal with too many reports and requests to handle. In the past 4 years, the amount of reports in the issue tracker more than doubled, but the team hasn't grown accordingly. I don't think it's realistic to expect that the team would be able to maintain the current code base while starting anew. If the current progress is already commonly referred to as glacial, what do you think will happen if they start reimplementing GIMP from scratch?
And I get it why you are referring to Photopea here. I think Photopea is a formidable effort. But it's been under development for 10 years already. That's quite a long time. And Ivan didn't have another image editor to maintain while working on that project. AFAIK, he originally intended the write a web app to merely open and show a PSD file in the browser. That's a quite different development trajectory.
The right kind of an analogy would be an investor stumbling upon a tiny community of developers that has been serving hundreds of thousands of users for the past 25+ years without pay.
I love the GIMP, use it all the time, find it super-intuitive, and last time I had to use Photoshop I felt like a fresh vim user who couldnt wait to figure out how to get the hell out of there.
Most people don’t even think about photoshop UI. Same with Microsoft paint: users can get in and start figuring out what they want to do just by clicking around.
There's hundreds of thousands downloads every month. I'm sure you have better facts at your disposal and will share them easily.
But I have found Gimp to be wildly inconsistent in the UI. I never remember how to draw a circle, for example, when I just want to add something to a screenshot because you have to use the circle cut tool and then choose a different option which I never remember because it is unintuitive. Yet its easy to have a paintbrush that draws one of those texture patterns that I can't imagine anyone ever using.
As such I then don't use it.
There just isn't a task that Gimp fits.
I suspect if you surveyed 1000 art professionals, you'd get very few who like or use GIMP. You're going to get a very different result with something like Blender and 3D designers though, which really should make the GIMP devs pause and think what it is that Blender does well that GIMP doesn't.
Also i think Photoshop is intuitive mainly because everybody is so used to it. Gimp just has very bad ux because they cant colectivelly agree and unify the ux. If the ux was very different but very good it might be even advantage but now its lot worse PS.
This happened because Adobe sued Macromedia over palettes.
Annoyingly enough, the interface has not substantially changed in the intervening years despite Adobe eating MM.
I guess they are only intuitive if you use a graphics tablet?
Infact I find the MDI interface to be quite ergonomic.
For what it's worth, GIMP does indeed have about a million dollars sitting in their donation account. So money isn't their issue, project management is.
If you're going to write a software for artists, design the UI for artists, not developers... "just learn the UI" doesn't cut it. The problem isn't resource oriented, it's "we don't want to change anything because we think there is nothing wrong with the UI".
While every software is different, there are rules to UX/UI and GIMP is breaking too many of them. Also the bar to contribute is C and GObject knowledge which is quite high. Blender UI can be modified with Python so it's much easier for a designer to make prototypes.
That seems to be a popular myth.
Krita is an amazing piece of software. The GIMP has it's uses, but if what you want to do is draw, Krita is what you want.
GIMP is excellent at image manipulation and doing various effects, not so much at drawing. Krita is the other way around.
I’m not trying to be negative for negative’s sake, because I’d truly love for something to be to images what Blender is to 3D. I just wonder if anyone’s thinking about the costs-vs-payoff here.
There’s a lot of advertising out there. Granted many will use RGB inputs but with cmyk working spaces
We’re not in VR just yet.
People are printing less paper, but today anybody can print a custom photo album, or T-shirt, or business cards, or custom pens, or mouse pad, or vehicle C-pillar sticker, or literally hundreds of other custom items. All that runs on CMYK.
This assumption is wrong.
Work that comes in from professional design shops come in as CMYK. But not from small businesses that are not in a tech field, such as grocery stores, restaurants, sports teams, children's or senior's activities, security firms, hardware stores, hair stylists, etc. All that comes in as RGB.
If you do care, as most professionals should, it matters greatly. RGB and CMYK have extremely different gamuts of reproduction, not even counting what your output medium is capable of rendering (whether that’s your display range or your ink+surface range)
I don't work in printing or publishing but I have opened hundreds of CMYK files in Photoshop for further editing. Also lots of (most of?) PDFs use CMYK.
And then there's fsck...
When the new hire is offended by the icon on their desktop that says GIMP, I should just say to them, "get over it"?
The UI toolkit is GTK, it's not exemplarily maintained for operating systems other than Linux.
A lot of potential new stuff used to be held back by the lack of a complete GEGL port. I think the public perception is that it is still the case (it is not).
Long development cycles used to demotivate contributors. You could write a new cool feature, and most users wouldn't see it until 3-4 years later. This has been resolved as well. Since 2.10, stable releases get new features backported from the unstable branch.
Organizationally, there is no structure like a foundation in place to help financing development. It's being talked about in the project for the past few years, no action has been taken yet.
But I can see how not having enough people can make even that very difficult.
[0] Time Till Open Source Alternative. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32624461
For web use, app use, or other display-based use, RGB (and related) is usually enough, and that’s what people have been using the GIMP for.
Um, nope. CMYK is not basic. Rotation and scaling are basic. Gaussian blur is basic. Levels/Curves are basic. CMYK is advanced stuff.
> ...the author argues that GIMP is a competitor to Photoshop
It gets worse. He claims that OpenCascade, a 3D solids construction engine, is the alternative to AutoCAD, a 2D drafting program.