I've found the people who have the biggest problem with GIMP are the ones that have expectations that come from using other image editors.
And that is the problem. People who have learned tools from what is now an established, multi-editor, digital medium, find they can't do what they wish to do.
I suspect very few even try to make this jump anymore.
GIMP still requires artists to think about and develop their workflow in the sequence that works best for GIMP.
Waving them away like this is a mind trick that the GIMP community should simply ban outright; it's devastating.
(Unless you mean this satirically and it's just gone over my head)
Hypothetically if GIMP just copied the photoshop UI and expected behavior a lot of tutorials for PS translate directly making GIMP accessible, which ultimately plays to the favor of GIMP as it is more accessible in that it's open source, free, and doesn't require subscription or accounting.
Also since GIMP is decentralized and volunteer-ran it'd be interesting to see exactly what Adobe would do about it, if they could even do anything.
Something else that would be nice to see from the open source community would be standardization in the control schema across software. For instance I use Blender a lot, but I also use Inkscape, and jumping between the two is... Less than pleasant because there's a pretty significant amount of overlap, but none of it is able to be homogeneous as there is some hard coding that a keymap alone doesn't allow for convergence.
That applies if your only goal is to create FOSS software that competes head-on with proprietary applications, so that being FOSS is the only differentiator.
But obviously, this isn't always applicable as a general principle. If you want to enable new functionality and support new use cases, where there are a variety of approaches or trade-offs, and conventions aren't well-established yet, you probably shouldn't presumptively conform to an a priori monoculture.
> Less than pleasant because there's a pretty significant amount of overlap, but none of it is able to be homogeneous as there is some hard coding that a keymap alone doesn't allow for convergence.
This is a great counter-example, where adhering to well-established conventions for problems that are already solved is advisable. There's been a lot of divergence in UI design recently, with lots of applications moving away from decades-old standards for purely aesthetic reasons, and creating huge usability regressions in the process.
I don't mean to be rude to the work done to make Gimp, but the harsh truth is that Gimp's UX has been a joke for over a decade
Or have expectations that...make sense? The way GIMP represents layers is unintuitive, at best.
There are some de-facto tools (Adobe Photoshop, etc.) that have paved the way for intuitive UX in this space - no need to re-invent the wheel in areas that are well-established by now.
And if you want something that has specific size and resizable and can be placed out of canvas. Use object instead.
Why would gimp even resist to make draw layer that have specific size at first place?
If you just need to crop, erase a pimple or a coke can on the floor, basically anything will do.
Pixelmator doesn’t even support CMYK editing, it only exports in it. It’s not even in the convention for serious image workflow.
Mac is blessed with several fantastic image apps. After using Pixelmator Pro for 5 minutes, I bought it. It does all the things I’ve wanted in GIMP, but I can figure out how to use it without hitting Google.
For example, can a mortal draw a circle with GIMP now? Up through the last time I used it, you had to select an ellipse (and hold down ctrl or something to constrain that ellipse to a circle), then stroke it as a path. In other apps, you choose the shape tool, and plop down a circle. While it could be that there was some esoteric case where GIMP’s weird process was nifty, it was markedly worse than everything else in the 99.9% of cases where you just wanted a circle.
For me, it was never that it wasn’t a Photoshop clone. I couldn’t care less about that. It’s that it was almost deliberately obtuse in ways that no alternatives were.