Photopea should be GIMP's permanent embarrassment.
I can't believe running a webapp offline written by a single person is more viable than a native program developed by a vast amount of contributors over decades.
I can't believe running a webapp offline written by a single person is more viable than a native program developed by a vast amount of contributors over decades.
You can do all the same stuff in the gimp, but it's just a little more laborious (or a lot more laborious if you're used to photoshop already I guess). The gimp lets you easily do all the same transformations, copy and reapply transformations, etc. It seems like the adjustment layer keeps the original image and the transformations to make it easier to repeatedly tinker with those adjustments and reapply them more quickly, though.
Or even a layer palette with a list view that acts like a normal list view with e.g. shift-click to multi-select, like every list view on every platform has had for upwards of two decades by now.
It's sad because it's not that the app isn't powerful, it's that it's obtuse to anyone but diehards.
For example when they introduced the single window mode as default, I view it as a regression only because people can't use a window manager properly or pretend to do professional stuff on what is just a glorified video game console OS with a shitty windows management. Thanksfully they kept an option to keep using multiple windows mode for us.
In that time I used GIMP a lot and was a good moderate level user probably, but the interface kept getting in my way (unlike Photoshop were I was able to reach almost a flow state of doing things at that time)
Eventually I just moved on, but I can’t fully shake the feeling that GIMP could have been so much more. Godot and Blender which others mentioned just have done so much better in that regard. Blender had the suckiest of UX/UI but even in the face of much/some “old timer” resistance they made something that most hail as a success now.
But I would agree that the classic model of big, slow-moving, design-by-committee open source projects have mostly yielded mediocre results.
Edit: here’s what gimp means:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gimp
1. Derogatory term for disabled person
2. Insult meaning stupid person
3. Male sex slave
Could they possibly have picked a worse name? “Poor taste” is a huge understatement
It would be offensive if that word was refering to someone. It doesn't. It refered initially to "General Image Manipulation Program" and now to "Gnu Image Manipulation Program". It is litterally in the front page of the Gimp website. It is an acronym.
I don't think I would be annoyed by a software called cripple, especially if it also stands for something else through the acronym., I would probably take it as a joke on the potentially beta status of the software at some point in its life. Again it is not targetting anyone in particular, unlike the former 2.
Designed by by committee, through and through. The older I get the more it seem obvious not to do it, but other people keep jumping on to them.
USB, Bluetooth groups are responsible for some of the dumbest tech decisions in 20 years.
I'm all in on Krita and believe it will be the next Blender.
With Krita, Blender, Inkscape, Love2D, even Kate, I'm confident those time investments will be worth it.
With GIMP and Godot and a few others, I'm not sure.
Why?
I unlearnt photoshop 2 decades ago (basically when I stopped being a teenager/young adult downloading pirate copy of softwares I can't afford) and got used to gimp and I never really missed the photoshop.
Is the state of GIMP annoying and frustrating? Sure. Is it a failure to more effectively allocate resources to work on a fairly critical piece of software? I think so. But if you look at the technical side of things it's not that clear-cut at all. Remember that back in the day GIMP had to invent their own toolkit (GTK).
Being a webapp is probably an advantage here. What's the big thing for GIMP 3? The port to GTK 3. Does that really add anything for users? Not really, as such. But that kind of stuff is quite a big time-sink and doesn't really add any features. Same with the new build system, wayland support, i18n changes, etc. which doesn't really "do" anything other than keep the thing from bitrotting.
Photopea has had someone work on it full-time for over 5 years; if you put that against the evenings and Sundays that people work on GIMP, and consider all the "plumbing" they had to do that Photopea doesn't have to deal with then the differences in time spent are probably much smaller than you'd might suspect at a glance.
Not really what I'd call an embarassment.