GIMP Turns 27
gimp.org
gimp.org
There's some sort of weird inferiority complex when your graphics software is 27 years old and you're still saying 'look we used it for one of our website assets.' It's like telling people at the birthday party that you dressed yourself.
I find it equally strange that there are almost no screenshots on the website, outside of the docs and tutorial section, and those tend to be partial screenshots for highly specific exemplar purposes. There are good screenshots in the Release Notes, but that's not somewhere new users are likely to head to immediately. The landing page declares it's great for 'High Quality Photo Manipulation, Original Artwork Creation, Graphic Design Elements, Programming Algorithms' - but none of these categories lead to their own pages full of compelling examples.
I get that GIMPists are very proud of how community-driven it is, but the quality is extremely variable to the point of weakening the project. Having good politics/aspirations is very important, but before you can turn people into contributors you need to turn them into enthusiastic users. GIMP could learn a bit from the commercial products it competes with about how to present itself to the rest of the world.
I believe written by GIMP contributors.. including Pat David who did a ton of older and a bit less polished ones here: https://patdavid.net/getting-around-in-gimp/ (for example this good one from 2012 https://patdavid.net/2012/08/getting-around-in-gimp-heal-sel... )
(It’s OK, personally since using gimp 20 years ago I now accept that gimp doesn’t want users)
Anyone aware of GIMP's history can figure out why the project goes in circles. History like how their developers "accidentally" deleted their entire roadmap a few months ago.
There used to be a registry of scripts, due to the following it was taken down:
> The main problem was maintenance. Every version of gimp more or less required an update of plugin. People would write their plugin, upload it and probably never updated because it was a one off for them.
> Then there was something like X-thousand plugins.
> And then hackers got into it and vandalised the site.
https://old.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/8wye88/why_was_the_re...
Internet Archive : https://web.archive.org/web/20121102092052/http://registry.g...
github archive : https://github.com/pixlsus/registry.gimp.org_static
Lots of manuals out there : https://www.uoxray.uoregon.edu/local/manuals/GUM/write_scrip...
"Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.
- concept art
- texture and matte painters
- illustrations and comics"
I'm not in the business of either, so why would I get the idea of installing it?
Some of this software has been around as long as I've been alive.
I love Open Source but we should just accept that some of it will always be mediocre at best. And as the other commenter mentioned, there are also negative consequences to something being around (mind share, presence in distributions and online docs, etc).
Nobody has time to wait 4 decades for software to be good.
This makes successful Open Source software like Blender or Firefox or Linux all the more impressive.
There's a few counter-examples of truly exemplary FOSS software that achieved a dominant position and managed to avoid too much fragmentation so that they became largely adopted: the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, X.org, etc. But for many others, too many wars have really caused the whole Linux-on-the-desktop dream to not be achieved to the level people hoped. GIMP is one of them, but the Gnome/KDE debacle is probably the biggest.
You're right that fragmentation can be an issue - but it's often a people problem, not a technical problem: if I have strong feelings on how a particular piece of software should work, and it's made clear that the project leads disagree and any patch to implement such will be rejected, I'm not likely to invest hobby / recreational development time in any other aspect of that project. (That's not meant as a criticism of the hypothetical project leads - merely an observation that when people work on project for the enjoyment of it, rather than for a living, the bar is raised massively in terms of how much a developer needs to "believe" in the project and the direction it's taking.)
I hate Gnome, but I know people like it. I'm happy that both KDE and Gnome exist, because it also means the people who made the decisions about Gnome's direction won't be making those same decisions about KDE.
That's not "a few years ago". It's "a baby is born, starts walking and talking, goes to kindergarten, primary school and is in secondary school now".
Noone claims that all open source is great.
And that would be fine if there was a robust community around the project, but there isn’t? Like, I’m not blaming the few maintainers and I’m not blaming the dwindling third party community at all. But I am going to be critical of the distros that continue to install it by default (Ubuntu dropped it as a default many years back IIRC, but Debian and Fedora still include it) and the people that just parrot it as what new users should use, even tho the most fervent defenders admit it is not at all competitive with what you need in an image editing tool in 2022.
Edit: turns out Ubuntu dropped GIMP as a default app in 2009 and someone that seems like yesterday. Changed that sentence accordingly.
Thanks for the information I will check it out
"Krita is the full-featured digital art studio.
It is perfect for sketching and painting, and presents an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters."
So it is not at all clear to most people that it is a tool that can also be used for photo editing.
That's some weird complex. I doubt most people know what piece of free software is European versus American. I further doubt it has any meaningful impact on adoption.
Red Hat/Fedora uses Gnome because Gnome is basically a Red Hat product. This has nothing to do with the geography of the distro.
Unfortunately, a lot more people use Gnome. Which is a shame in my opinion. But it is the way it is.
Mint I'll grant, though I always thought of it as a thin fork of Ubuntu. Interestingly the first version was based on Kubuntu - I wonder what motivated them to change, but the old release notes appear to have disappeared.
- Canonical (United Kingdom) ships GNOME for Ubuntu.
- SUSE (Germany) ships GNOME as default on their SUSE Enterprise Linux, openSUSE hsa no defaults.
- Manjaro (Austria, France, Germany according to DistroWatch) ships XFCE (GTK based) by default.
- Mint (Ireland) ships 3 GTK desktops, defaulting to Cinnamon.
Meanwhile, on America:
- Valve (USA) ships Plasma on SteamOS for their desktop experience.
- System76 (USA) ships (although they hate it) GNOME for PopOS. They want to replace it with a Rust-based, GTK/Qt-free alternative.
- Red Hat (USA) ships GNOME as their official desktop for RHEL.
- Fedora (USA) ships GNOME as their official desktop.
So I don't think country impacts much, it is just that GTK is the de facto toolkit for Linux and historically, Qt wasn't FOSS and GNOME received a lot of development for accessibility during Sun's days, which matters a lot for corporate due to stricter requirements on that front.
I don't know why. Maybe it was RMS who pushed for GNOME as back then Qt wasn't free software (as in FSF or OSI approved license). Maybe it was that KDE started in Europe and later GNOME in the US to provide an alternative to the “non-free” KDE.
This caused European funding (from companies and institutions) to go to KDE, and US funding to go to GNOME, thus creating the communities and ecosystems we have today.
Another point for GNOME back in the day for companies, was that it was (could be?) more locked than KDE and it had less customization options. These are desirable traits if you want to install it to your company's workstations, so maybe it made sense for Red Hat to adopt GNOME.
The key point in time where GNOME became way more popular, was when Ubuntu came out with GNOME as the default desktop. A smaller point was when Novell bought SUSE, so SUSE switched to GNOME, leaving almost no commercial distros that default to KDE.
All in all, it doesn't matter much anymore. Our life and workloads have moved to the cloud and locked down devices, thus limiting the surface area of desktop environments and their ecosystem.
And I encountered this before and left the website on opening it.
> I don't know if it's just americans not wanting to touch a European project or what, but it's just infuriating.
It has "Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program" with FREE straight out of scam ad.
"painting" is of no relevance to me, I edit photos. None of examples has photos - all are drawing editing (I opened https://krita-artists.org/t/maybe-mention-photo-editing-at-t... according to their bug reporting guidelines)
Prominent self-ad/sponsor banners/5 star testimonials adding to scam feeling.
It seems less prominent now but I remember that it previously had some vaguely NSFWish animeish art on website. And startup screen has some disfigured cross of human and bunny(?) what for me is worse than "Gimp" as name.
If you are infuriated by a project that has been around longer than Krita, then I think you need to seriously reconsider what makes you mad.
Today, with Krita, Affinity, Pixelmator and the like, I would never suggest its "morally right" to pirate Photoshop, because you will still inadvertently support an Adobe monoculture. The morally right choice is to use anything else, and the competitors are functionally capable of supporting 95% of Photoshop's features.
Also, GIMP did give us GTK, which solved a very real issue with open source desktops -- none of them were actually open source at the time. Gnome still conducts the very important work of supporting GTK.
After being lied to, I'm not eager to try again and see if I'll be lied to again. I'll just use Photoshop because it has always worked where GIMP never has.
If GIMP has truly, finally achieved their stated claims of replacing Photoshop (presumably through feature parity), then I'm glad to hear it for all those still willing to try it, but I've no interest in wasting any more of my time verifying that claim than I already have in the past.
Gimp is forever a major part of free software history and deserves total respect for that.
Everyone is free to use it today, or just get some of the better implemented alternatives... that's the beauty of open source.
Which failed promises are you referring to specifically?
Krita (https://github.com/KDE/krita | https://krita.org/en/) is a more intuitive UX imo.
GIMP is the only image program I have seen on Linux that shows a preview when printing, and it lets the user freely scale the image to get the desired size on paper.
GIMP is perfect for my workflow. Simple tasks like resizing selected regions is a chore with Krita. And did I mention that GIMP is scriptable? I've been using GIMP professionally since 2008.
Nice.
Oh… okay.
Did you also steal a car right after you learned how to drive?
As an engineer who grew up having to hone my skills using questionable software, I support this joke. If you're focusing on her background; you're focusing on the wrong thing.
See also: "Don't copy that floppy".
Her most famous role was on The Office, which constituted a significant portion of Netflix's bandwidth (7% is one hand-wavy estimate based on related data), and Netflix has been estimated to have been an even more significant portion of worldwide Internet traffic (25% - 35% in some data). They're hand-wavy numbers but I would be confident that the show Mindy Kaling is best known for having written and acted in has easily made up over 1-2% of global Internet traffic at times. I wouldn't say she's entirely divorced from the issue of digital media piracy.
Also it's from a stand up comedy routine. It's okay to laugh in life.
I remember I was in college and excited when I heard about GIMP. I had been running Linux for a year and wanted a photo editor but GIMP was written for the Motif GUI toolkit which was shipped with commercial Unix systems (Sun, HP, DEC, SGI, IBM) but on Linux it cost extra.
One of our campus sysadmins had the Linux Motif libraries and compiled GIMP and distributed static binaries to us.
There was an effort by "The Hungry Programmers" to develop LessTif as an open source Motif clone. You can see a reference to it in these old GIMP site from November 1995.
Motif 1.2 or above is required. (Ack! This restriction will be removed when LessTif becomes usable).
https://www.cc.gatech.edu/data_files/public/doc/gimp/index.h...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessTif
The developers got frustrated with Motif and decided to write their own GUI X Window toolkit which became GTK (GIMP Tool Kit)
While I like and use GIMP quite often I think GTK has become more influential and important than GIMP.
GIMP is great for what it is. As a dev I use it frequently to do minor adjustments to images and photographs; cropping, colors, brightness, resizing, rotation etc.
Right after Inkscape, GIMP is probably my second favorite "I'm actually a bit of a designer myself"-tool. Both do more than enough - again and again - for me to not need outside help, they no doubt give me an edge!
For those - probably designers - in need of more features, just go ahead and pay for it! There's no reason to mock GIMP for not matching the features of Photoshop.
In a comment above, CMYK support has just been added. That’s pretty late for an image editor that exists for so long. I am just irked by what could have been under more open and inviting management.
Thank you to the creators and maintainers.
Some examples of things I made use of:
Colors > Levels. Mostly to get noise to go across the whole range from black to white, not just some in-between. Multiple iterations of reducing the output levels and then stretching those out to the full range again can create interesting artifacts.
Colors > Curves. Same as above, and also final processing. I used a fixed set of gradients (UIGradients) and usually changed them up.
Colors > Map > Gradient Map. Combining the above with gradient mapping, or combining it with noise can result in interesting artifacts as well.
Colors > Desaturate > Color To Gray. Adds grain, texture and contrast around edges. Lots you can do with that, especially by distorting the result.
Filters > Distorts > Kaleidoscope, Filters > Map > Panorama Projection, Filter > Map > Paper Tile. With the exception of the galaxy one, all the ones in the album are somehow the result of those.
I did most of these in 2019 when I was deeply burned out, and clicking around for hours was all I was able to do. It really was kind of therapeutic.
So yeah, I am really glad GIMP exists.
Fantastic stuff. I appreciate you typing it all out.
It’s so easy to just critique away…but really? Really? Those are just absolutely essential image editing software features. What have they been prioritizing ahead of that?
GEGL aka duke nukem forever
If another project had become the de-facto we’d have all those basic features.
Instead we’re stuck with something that almost provides the basics ok, because it exists people treat it like a solved problem, and it has such a history no one’s allowed to say it just frankly isn’t usable for it’s one job.
My sister has used Photopea. She's as far from a sophisticated computer user as you can get. Regular people can stumble across Photopea, they certainly don't know about GIMP.
It is not like it is extremely well funded or otherwise resource consuming.
> because it exists people treat it like a solved problem
People complaining about lack of alternative projects in open source is a new one for me
> it has such a history no one’s allowed to say it just frankly isn’t usable for it’s one job.
that is not how free software creation works like, really
The linux distribution model seems to lead it to, somehow. If you open up a RedHat machine and ask it for a picture editor, you're going to get Gimp, even though Krita would almost certainly be better at doing what you want.
(or tried filing any such configuration request in any Linux distribution and got it rejected/ignored?)
If anything, GIMP has brought more people to Linux from the dark side.
It’s actually even bad for students because to create with GIMP you have to do early 90s image editing workflows which are no longer used in real jobs.
They could have been implemented by overloading the layer blending code, and recoded with GEGL once ready. But pure won over "we can do that too now, please do not look behind the curtain". It's really simple: adjustment is just a layer that only uses mask data and operates on the bottom layer pixels with already coded functions (levels, contrast, etc). Styles would be similar, applying plugins/scripts. If when proposed the reply is "we will not accept that kind of crude system", nobody wastes time coding a patch.
That was not the only time GIMP project went the pure road. There was also drama with themes and paintbrush system. On the end, some of the old ideas managed to get there, like grey icon theme (now hated by some, the irony) or having a working paint system (I have not tested with a tablet, so no idea if any good). Even non coders were trying to help, for example contributing brushes and testing the system [0], yet they ran out of steam after some time of hitting walls. The few people involved now seem to be the ones that have been taking over after all the previous got seriously burnt (except Kolås). [0] https://www.ramonmiranda.com/gimp-paint-studio-su-pasado-pre... (autotranslation work OKish)
Gnome integration and Wayland as far as I can tell from its roadmap. So basically staying functional under the ADHD driven development model that is the Linux desktop environment. A bit hilarious that Gimp now has a hard time staying up to date with Gnomes Gtk when Gtk was originally an UI lib for Gimp.
Yet not terribly surprising. GIMP provided a useful alternative widget framework because it helped them push boundaries. Now that's grown into its own thing, and the parent project lags since its core focus is elsewhere.
90% of the complaining that always happens in these threads is Photoshop/Irfanview/whatever users, coming in and assuming that the purpose of GIMP is to reimplement your favorite image editing software for free. That is not the goal, and it never has been. As long as you keep pretending anyone intends GIMP to be a Photoshop clone, you'll keep being disappointed.
After _three decades_ I can no longer blame anyone but the complainant.
There are very few active maintainers, what few there are have been scratching their own itches.
But it's just a bummer, not a source of anger/furor/vitriol for the project. I don't get why so many folks are talking shit like they didn't get their refund.
The new text widget has improved recently, and it's certainly an improvement on the original.
It's still a great piece of software, and I'm very grateful that it exists, but when I use it, it's generally a version from the 2.4 series, because it suits my workflow better. (When there's no image open the older versions just have a small unobtrusive toolbox window open, which you can use as a drop target for files picked from a file browser; the newer versions have a large empty window which gets in the way.)
[For those who say "fork it yourself", I have contributed to development in the distant past - dithered gradients were my addition, and I wrote a plugin (subsequently adopted by someone in Japan but long-since abandoned) for separating RGB images to CMYK layers, and saving them as a CMYK TIFF. But despite briefly maintaining a PPA with a patched version without the "no image open" window I quickly decided life was too short to spend my hobby time trying to hold back that particular tide.]
There is one capable of doing the three now: "Unified Transform Tool" (Shift+T)
The grouping is welcome for me, but the grey icons are less easy to read indeed.
Have you contributed to it any any way?
I'm fully aware that (a) I'm a dinosaur, and (b) not the target audience of the GTK project in its current form, but I still miss things like the tear-off menus, and the tab-completion and wildcard filtering in the file dialog (without the current keyboard focus complications) from GTK1.2!
Does it really make sense for them to break so many things? Doesn't show a lot of respect for people who adopt the library.
In a sense, Krita is not just better for painting. It's a better general purpose image editing program, specially in terms of UX
No idea what the timing of that version is.
It’s almost unusable in OSX because of that.
I'd prefer to keep my ugly-but-capable GIMP on every platform rather than having a single half-decent MacOS version that bends over backwards to foreign HID.
Does it mean that to use a tool you must be capable of building it?
Does it mean that to share criticism you must be able to build it? I’m thinking about applying this logic to the rest of life and it’s rather amusing to imagine the silence. Hmm, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.
I think one could more fairly say, “offer up money for someone to build the features you need” but I think that’s also a very difficult proposition given the logistics of the matter.
No. I've reported a lot of tickets/feature requests for a lot of projects that seemed to be taken good.
But criticism that seems entitled is rarely appreciated, and surprise about some obviously, severely underfunded project missing features is not very impressive neither.
There is a shitload of other missing features OP could have mentioned on this anniversary post and I guess it can feel a bit depressing too. "27 years! Happy birthday! Still no job though?". Eeh.
You can express constructive criticism with some humility.
"It's a shame nobody has been able to work on adjustment layers and layer styles, which are important features in such a piece of software."
OP did not feel entitled to me, but I can understand who their message could have been taken somewhat badly.
What specifically in the comment suggests a sense of entitlement? For me, I see none. I see a, “as an expert user, it’s surprising that such an important feature has been missing forever and I would like to criticize that.”
Edit: I’m not allowed to reply to your response but thank you for taking the time to respond.
I don't work on the Gimp, I've read developers working on it at length, I think as a developer reading this comment I would be thinking "Well, we do what we can". Jehan, who wrote the post, contributes to the Gimp thanks to donations to his Ze Marmot project, his team cannot pay itself very well. They are going out of their way improving the Gimp anyway, indeed prioritizing features they need the most most certainly. But you can do only so much.
It might just be a matter of form/formulation. But it matters, because people won't take the time analyzing a comment for several minutes to completely put themselves in the commenter's shoes.
edit: you can respond by clicking on the "X minutes ago" link I think, but I saw your edit :-)
No, it means it's not a priority for those who are building it.
The tool is free, so you are free to use it, and you are free not to. That is up to you. If you want a feature, please support the development woth either you cash or skill. Its that simple.
Subscription. Check. Paid add ons. Check. Paid color palette. Check and mark.
What's ironic is that I bought Affinity but still continue to use GIMP shrugs
One of these days I'll sit down with Affinity. One of these days...
Naw, there's better answers than that:
FOSS: Gimp, Krita; non foss: Affinity photo is a one-time purchase, at least for me. I haven't checked recently to see if that's changed.
>anyone using it professionally
Use what your boss tells you too/pays for -then it's not your problem.
Why would anyone with the talent required to do that invest time in a project that hasn’t been able to add these basic features.
Cloning the current GIMP feature set into a modern and competent system is easier than trying to work with the team that can’t ship these features alone.
You've provided a solid picture editor for in-a-pinch and free-out-of-the-box usage; and, while I've since moved on to usually use paid tools like ProCreate and Affinity's software, you have facilitated by artistic work for decades!
Thanks for your amazing work!
Just wanted to say thank you to the devs in case you are here.
What is hard to understand? Gimp promised since ages CMYK editing or non-destructive overlays, nothing materialized or as a shit-show (CMYK can be exported but not edited)
"I don't understand why people don't like it."
"It sucks in these specific ways."
"It's FREE."
Literal feces is free also, but most people aren't excited to receive it as a gift.
GIMP is considerably better than literal feces, but there are alternatives to GIMP in both FOSS and no-cost web-based form that are objectively better and also free, and have taken less than 27 years to get where they are.
An advantage I will say is that if you have more than two machines, Affinity doesn’t make you do the license login song and dance. Because I am frequently using at least 3 computers (and often it’s 5), I like that I don’t even have to have Creative Cloud installed on everything, because it’s just easier that way.
For me, Adobe is still better in some ways/more familiar, but Affinity is getting so close that I’m very happy we have this sort of tool as an alternative.
The reason definitely isn't because Photoshop is a great piece of software with a logical UI, because it's damn near a random UI filled with aging cruft, advertisements, and bizarre flows for doing simple things. Any affection for Photoshop is Stockholm Syndrome from spending 8 hours a day in it and getting periodic dopamine hits from puzzling out a riddle of how to do something in it that seemed like it would be simple.
If the GIMP had proper color management (and better non-destructive editing), I'd never touch Photoshop. That's the beauty of free software, though. Once that stuff is finalized and in, we'll have it forever. See, GIMP doesn't have the means to steal colors from work you've already done, and you don't have to rent it.
Yeah, because with GIMP, you can't use Pantone colors to begin with :)
I like and use GIMP, but the color issue is a misrepresentation. Mainly because I don't imagine that 99% of the Photoshop users ever touched the Pantone stuff.
The reason definitely isn’t because GIMP is a great piece of software with a logical UI, near a random UI filled with aging cruft, tutorials from 2004, and bizarre flows for doing simple things. Any affection for the GIMP is Stockholm Syndrome from spending 8 hours a day in it and getting periodic dopamine hits from puzzling out a riddle of how to do something in it that seemed like it would be simple.
--
Look, I respect and am appreciative of the work the GIMP team and community does. It's impressive and I've donated to them over the years, even though I have never enjoyed using the software. And Photoshop these days is often a mess, I'm not defending that.
But it is possible to appreciate that the GIMP exists and also be critical of its abysmal usability and the fact that it pales in comparison to not just other proprietary (but extremely affordable tools like Pixelmator, Affinity Photo, Acorn), but also other FOSS tools like Krita, Blender, and Inkscape, to say nothing of near-OSS tools like the excellent Paint.net. Some of this is down to the fact that making good software is hard, especially free software. But a lot of it comes down to a lack of solid direction and and insistence from the crowd that GIMP is every bit as good as Photoshop. It isn't. It never will be.
I'm glad the GIMP exists. You also couldn't pay me to use the GIMP.
They have run a UX brainstorm and then threw out all of the input that has been provided to them in good faith by hundreds of people.
Than there's the case of team's stubborn insistence on not changing the name.
GIMP team has been an active participant in the state of affairs that leads to threads like these.
I think some of us can be unduly sensitive to criticism of the GIMP, because it’s a long standing project we have all used at one time or another and may have fond memories of. But it’s no longer the only kid on the block, and it’s just not holding its own against new free projects. It’s mediocre, and it could be better. We’re not doing it any favours by refraining from fair critique.
I was hoping to read a ton of posts about good memories, or thanks, to the project but I wish I hadn't opened it now.
Starting to think this “you should be happy and eat this rotten morsel because otherwise you’d have nothing” ideology is toxic and harms actual good technology being built.
Even the Blender team managed to drop the “submit a patch” attitude and actually turn one of the most convoluted pieces of creative software ever made into the defacto for the next generation through actually listening and responding to users.
Think of the good that could have been done in the software world if a different team with an attitude of building for their users had decided to build a free image editor 27 years ago.
GIMP has the signs of what I call "Brainworms" in a project. By that I mean conceptual-ideological stubbornness for certain things that harm the Workflow of most users. A minor example of this is the save / export thing where use of the XCF format is forced for some conceptual reason that just gets in the way for me every single time I use GIMP. I used the XCF format for one thing once last year for the first time so I guess I saved saved time there once. Can't say that about any other time i used GIMP tho.
The other more major example I can give falls under the "missing non destructive editing functions" that I have seen other comments mention. As part of my image "manipulation" I need to add several simple geometric shapes of the right size to an image (I think it was 2 lines and a rectangle). This is super hard to do in GIMP because while there are ways to draw a line and to do a rectangle as soon as you let go of your mouse button those are converted to bitmap right away. So no adjusting the position angle or line width of the lines or the dimensions of the rectangle. This can be partially worked around by using layers to position the lines and redoing the lines with different widths until they match the width and angle you need. You can apply rotations but that has its own difficulties since the aliasing of the lines then isn't what it should be. The easiest Solution here is to not use GIMP.
The apparent reason why GIMP has been missing these vector functions is that it was felt that vector functions would be "drawing" on not "manipulating" an image if a comment I read by a person involved with the project is to be believed. So GIDP not GIMP if you will. A great app becomes completely unable because of a single function.
How "basic" are these is debatable though. They are very useful, and widely used, and multiple image tools support them, that's for sure.
Not saying this is technically basic, but it's a basic need for anyone doing print.
Huge thank you to Gimp developers that keep it going and congrats on anniversary!
I can't fathom that to this day people present it as an alternative to Photoshop where it's little more than an unusable Paint.
I mean, photopea.com is free, developed by a single guy, and runs in the browser, and it's light years ahead of Gimp.
A few years ago, I found out that Irfanview runs under Wine. It's a great feeling to understand the UI of a program.
The crop tool is literally one click away in the GIMP interface, by the way, and once you activate it, it works like it does in any other program.
Yeah, it's not amazing, but Gimp is light years from Paint. Just removing background on stuff, crap like that, 80% of the graphics stuff people ask me for at work. It's not PS, it's not even Blender-levels of OSS, but it works alright.
Now, compositing and actual challenging graphical stuff, different story.
Photopea makes millions. Maybe if people donated to support Gimp's development it wouldn't be that behind.
Funding isn't what's holding GIMP back. Leadership is.
Edit: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1NVMCeoBfTAJQ1qwX2Dx1...
They also accept a dozen other donation methods.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_...
It was a serious Photoshop competitor before it made a single cent.
>It was a serious Photoshop competitor before it made a single cent.
Can you provide an actual reference of this? The AMA you gave explicitly says Photopea is making a revenue.
3rd paragraph.
You can see what it looked like at that time by looking at the blog posts.
The UI seemed so cluttered and unnecessarily complex. Almost like they want to prove how powerful the tool is, by shoving it all in your face. I didn‘t like it.
I think it might be time to reinvent. It would be a shame if GIMP joined the club of 27…
Back then i might have been more fascinated with the „FOSS alternative“ and more eager to learn… but even back then it has never felt intuitive. Glad to hear people still enjoy & use GIMP.
While I love open source, Photopea accomplishes everything I need in photo editing.
And no install.
And when I’m not around, and they want to pull up their favourite drawing program, do you see them typing “gimp” into the search bar? Which - as of Windows 11 - now helpfully loads internet results and related ads?
Or do I just start them on Krita, a much more powerful and user friendly open source program, with significantly less risk of accidentally encountering the GIMP’s namesakes? Or me getting a call from my kid’s school to ask why my kid is talking about gimps?
Google "gimp" for me. What are the top results? What's highlighted in the sidebar? I don't see an issue. You have to scroll down a ways before you get to Urban Dictionary, I can't imagine a kid doing that instead of clicking the first result with the cute dog picture.
The school thing is the first actual problem. But then, it's an easy thing to clarify. I'm of the opinion that it's a good thing that their first experience of that word is an image editor, it detracts from the offensive meaning. The hope being that the offensive meaning will be relegated to an obscure footnote, the primary definition of the word to them being GIMP. We shouldn't give offensive words more power, we should diminish their power by using them in non-offensive contexts. See the adaptation of the word "cunt" in Australia.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1698408/gimp-essex-slams-b... - https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/gimp-man-essex-somerset-... - https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/gimp-man-essex-says-so...
Then there's the Urban Dictionary, as you mention. So yes, there's an issue.
> See the adaptation of the word "cunt" in Australia.
I'm Australian, so I understand pretty well how we use the word cunt. Contrary to popular perceptions, if you called someone a cunt at a work meeting, you'd probably be fired on the spot. Similarly, it would be... a career limiting move to pitch your supervisors on the idea of switching key business operations to a system called 'Cunt'.
Gimp is just not a good name. Context matters. I appreciate a bit of colour and character as much as the next guy, but there's a time and a place, and 'the name of a major piece of free software' just ain't it.
I am certainly less informed than yourself about the Australian lexicon. I was wrong to jump to the most widely recognized example and should have picked a different one which matched my point more closely, and one on which I was more informed.
My point was not that "cunt" is acceptable in businesses meetings, my point was that it was comparatively _more acceptable in common parlance_ than in other cultures. The message being that the words themselves are not innately offensive, but the meanings attached to them that can vary with time and context, and their impact can be lessened by repeat exposure in a non-offensive setting. I believe that is preferable to outright banning certain phonemes and maintaining their offensive power.
You can see this in action in our Google example - the image editor has the top results and the offensive term is in the newsbox (which we've proved is not universal), and lower down on the search page. The more popular the editor gets, the less prominent the other results are. I think that's a good thing.
From experience, the issues raised where total lack of CMYK, limited to 8 bit per channel,lack of even basic non destructive editing, crude paint engine, no healing tool, etc. Some have been solved partially or totally over the years, but too late for some users.
In fact, since they added support for 16 bit color, I can finally use it to do photo retouching. I mean, I was using it before, but it limited use-cases.
Now I'm not losing color anymore, and that's awesome!
I can see in the comments a lot of negativity towards this project, with a few valid reasons, but I think most of these people are trying to use GIMP like they would use Photoshop. But these are two different softwares with different capabilities. Stop fighting the tool and start working with it.
Thank you to all GIMP contributors. Thanks to you I can complety avoid Adobe's bullsh*t and still clean up the dust in my images :) Keep up the good work!
Oh, and if I may indulge in a request: a better foreground selection tool would be awesome. Faster, certainly, and maybe with some AI subject detection?
But still amazing, remember how things were different 27 years ago.
Spent a couple years recompiling X11 and tons of debugging of Linux issues.
And that’s how I launched my career in developer / sysadmin.
20 years later in a “wait. What happened to my original career idea?” Moment, I finally took some art classes at a local college.
That is strange, judging by the reactions on this HN story.
I'd sure like more features and a UI that looks like it wasn't made 27 years ago though. Keeps me from using it for day to day image editing or really anything advanced.
I joined IRC to humbly propose a feature. "Why would anyone want that?"
Not copying anything useful from Photoshop was a point of pride.
Congratulations on 27 years of existence. Congratulations on regular GSoC acceptance since 2006.
Before anyone gets mad, I’ve been using Gimp for a while
Gimp is fantastic image editor and the freedom and price are just right. Been using it since the late nineties when I gave up Paint Shop Pro (which was a better every-day image editor than even Photoshop). I use it a few times a week to edit/convert my photos, web images, and album covers and it works quite well.
If you want something dedicated to your niche profession, go ahead and rent it and file negative entitled comments to /dev/null.
Hear here! The comments are pretty gross tbh, even taking into account some legit gripes; the majority seem just gross and nearly vindictive.
Fine, fine you pay out the wazoo and you're too good for free software yawn yawn yawn. (not "you" mixmastamyk; I mean generic editorial "you")
Pretty sure that program that is useful and usable, but not as much as you want, does not qualify for this description.
A needlessly polarizing/antagonizing name that they've refused to change? Check.
A user interface that no one but the developers could love or understand? Check.
A focus on knobs for users to tweak and being far behind the rest of the industry in basic usability improvements such as "auto levels" that have been table stakes for many years? Check.
Deflection of any criticism by saying "there's a plugin for that", when the plugin is probably locked in a filing cabinet in a basement closet with a sign saying "Beware of the Leopard" and another saying "only supported up to <6 versions ago>"? Check and check.
pushing the python2 interface over guile was a masterstroke
There is a fork called Glimpse.
When Adobe hikes the prices to their SaaSS, you will still be welcome.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
But I have felt no need for drawing circles. Those should be done in Inkscape. I am not sure they should be in a photo processing app.
I agree that for complex drawings where you should align multiple objects and be able to adjust the width and other properties of the color, it's better to use Inkscape.
But for throwaway screenshots with a big red arrow or a circle around the part I want to highlight, I prefer Paintbrush.
Is it possible to add to Gimp an option to draw simple forms like in Paintbrush? Perhaps as a filter or a tool. Gimp looks very customizable, but I never went into that rabbit hole.
[1] MS changed the name to "Paint" like 20 years ago, but I never got the memo.
On KDE, the Spectacle screenshot tool comes with an "annotate" button that does exactly this. I agree this kind of stuff is very convenient, bonus points with a touchscreen.
If you want precision, you could use the "Paths" tool and then trace using a Brush.
> tell me you've never read a gnome bug report without ever saying it