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I really want Gimp to succeed. It's a software I've been trying to use since more than 20 years now but the UX is so clunky.... and different than Photoshop. Muscle Memory is a thing.

I'm moving my main machine from macOS to Linux (which I also used partially since 20years), moving from a mac mini M1 to a lovely Lenovo M75Q-1 and so far the experience has been great.

I'm a (enthusiast) photographer and I have big hopes for that 3.0 release of Gimp. I'm ready to learn something else and freeing myself from Adobe.

If I can manage my workflow, that will probably seal the deal. Everything else works fine and is unbelivably smooth while macOS had been very frustrating lately.

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I would love Gimp to succeed but Gimp is made by coders for coders (as you might expect from a open source program) and not by visual artists for visual artists. I don’t have a lot of hope.

For years I have been using Affinity and it’s been really good, haven’t looked back. Unfortunately it’s not on linux.

>for coders

https://www.gimp.org/news/2025/01/27/gimp-team-zemarmot-fosd...

Gimp is being used,and improved along the way, to make an animation movie. Jehan (scenarist, technical) of that movie is also a core maintainer.

Gimp is nearing 30 years old, and it has been used for at most a handful of animation movies. I think, regarding its usage, that this is more of an outlier, than a main purpose of the software. So I don't think that this example refutes OP's point.

and I think otherwise https://girinstud.io/news/2018/04/zemarmot-main-contributor-...

I do know about the movie, and having one (upcoming even) movie being made about GIMP doesn't say anything about its usage, or it not being made for coders. Being made for coders is a bad claim as well, at most, it's a jab at its user interface, which, I think, is no worse then Photoshop's by the way, it's just that people are familiar with one, and the not the other.

A good refutal of the for-coders claim would be that it's one of the default image editor most commonly included with major Linux distributions. That's a much larger thing than it being just made for coders.

s/about GIMP/with GIMP/

> I do know about the movie, and having one (upcoming even) movie being made about GIMP doesn't say anything about its usage, or it not being made for coders.

Yes it does because ZeMarmot producers are the main contributors to Gimp's code.

GIMP's initial release was in June 2, 1998.

ZeMarmot's announcement was in 05 February 2015.

The GIMP was an at least 17 year old software project, when the animated movie was announced.

Of the two main GIMP maintainers, one of them works on ZeMarmot.

What this all says is that yes, there is an animation movie 10 years in the making, by some of the people who also work on the GIMP project. It says nothing about GIMP being made for any particular purpose, either or not for coders, and/or for animation or for visual creatives in particular.

They could start with a name change.

Yes, I suggest they change it to... The Pimp

^ when you use 100% of your brain

Pixel Image Manipulation Program

> They could start with a name change.

Yes. Peacock will be fine. It is a wonderful bird.

Though Photopea is already an online Photoshop clone and sounds a bit similar?

(It’s also pretty decent. My usual go to for stuff I can’t justify spinning up an Adobe VM for…)

Same here. Affinity is great, it has some quirk and some basic features are scattered around the UI without seemingly much thought.

But every time I have to use Gimp is just a pain, feels like going back in time.

For such a complex tool, UX is and will always remain king. That's why many people miss even something as simple as the Mac Preview tool, it does its job nicely and neatly. It doesn't do much but for basic stuff is quick and straightforward.

The few people I know doing visual design still balk at a program that lacks native CMYK editing. Honestly I'm still skeptical about the significant improvements made for 3.0 due to the project's history.

I remember CMYK being the most common complaint (after the UI) 20 years ago, too. And at the time the entire GIMP project insisted that you never needed it and RGB was good enough. By coders for coders, indeed.

I don’t know. RGB was good enough. For every 1 person out there digitally processing art for a children’s book, which is the only piece of printed media I could think of whose lifecycle does not feature immediate disposal, there are 19 who would love their HDR iPhone photos to look right, so if anything, they should be worrying about P3.

One of the big reasons for the rewrite, GEGL brings CMYK (and many other things).

Affinity seems like it works through Wine/Proton

For what it's worth, a full CMYK mode is on my personal to-do list after the final 3.0 release (though 3.0 RC has had CMYK import/export and soft-proofing for a long while). I made a prototype implementation earlier (https://twitter.com/CmykStudent/status/1618261982628704259) and with all the color space improvements made since, it should be even easier to prototype now.

Out of curiosity, what improvements in 3.0 RC are you skeptical of? If you're willing to share, it'd be helpful feedback for us. :)

This I feel is a fair complaint, I have seen it many times but I have to admit I am not a visual designer so I do not really understand it. Allow me to enumerate.

rgb is a larger color space than cmyk, that is to say the colors that cmyk can represent are a subset of rgb.

You are doing the work on an rgb monitor. what does having the illusion that you are working in cmyk get you? just use a cmyk color picker

but most damning, industrial printers are not CMYK, they are spot color, that is, they will be filled with essentially random primary colors chosen to best fit the final print. When you do need very fine control over the final color, you don't want a cmyk aware system you want a spot color aware system. And even then, you will only get close, requiring many test prints to validate the final result.

Irrespective of technical merit, if your printing shop requires a CMYK PDF, they requires a CMYK PDF.

You're not going to argue and discuss the merit of such and such color spaces with them; you're going to switch tools so that you get them to print your wedding invitations.

As I've said exhaustively before, this is also reflected in the stupid stubbornness in not changing the name.

I firmly believe they could have eaten Adobe's lunch decades ago, but I can't recommend something that may be an ableist slur, and definitely means something that is the opposite of "skilled."

Childish and disappointing.

It's not made for coders, it's made for the benefit of whomever uses it, and many people use and bundle it as well. I do understand the issues that people are experiencing with it UX-wise, but the answer to that is not that it's being made for coders, it's that it's an open source project, and as such, it has other incentives, than giving the best UX possible. Also, since it's open source and not for-profit, it has other circumstances than proprietary projects do. For-profit projects live and die on profit, and for b2c profit, you have to have good UX (like Affinity), or for b2b, good connections (like Cerner, or Windows). What open source projects need is being able to hold their main contributor's attention and dedication to the project. Entirely different ballgame. And, yes, very different UX as well. I also stopped fiddling with GIMP - what I do I can do 10 times faster in f** Photopea of all software.

We actually set up a UX repo to better track issues with UI/UX, and to get feedback from designers and other members of the community. If anyone's interested in helping, feel free to post issues and discuss on https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/issues

That is very nice, thanks for linking it!

gimp became way less annoying once i discovered the command pallette (the forward slash key), you can pretty much do everything with it. i even use it to switch tools sometimes sinces its easier than trying to look through all the tool icons or having to long press them

Thanks for that - I've been using GIMP regularly more than two decades and didn't know about that trick!

It was easier when the icons had color and were not grouped into multiple tools behind one icon.

You can change both if you like (it's one of the first things I do whenever I install GIMP on new systems)! In 2.10, you can change the icons in Preferences under the Icon Theme section, and remove tool groups in the Toolbox section.

In 3.0 it's even easier, as both options are available in the Personalize tab of the Welcome Dialogue. I'm hoping this will help make that feature more discoverable. :)

Thank you! This comment made my day.

In a recent attempt to use Gimp for a small project, a few features I found were lacking:

1. Viewing the layer boundaries of all layers. Very helpful in seeing the total layout of the project.

2. Select multiple layers and do operations like move/align.

You can move multiple layers if they are in a layer group, at least in gimp 2.10

The group also shows the outline of the bounding box of all layers in it, although that's not quite the same as the layer outlines ofc.

I think both of those are resolved in GIMP 3. You can multi-select layers, and when you do it shows the total boundary for all selected layers. If you're willing to try it out, feel free to share if there are other issues you'd like us to look at!

Try Krita, it’s free, opensource and what gimp should have been all along.

Different focus.

Krita is for free drawing, gimp is a photoshop replacement.

I do agree they probably would benefit from trying Krita.

I often hear that Krita has a different focus, but does it lack anything that GIMP has? (disregarding obscure features like bell pepper brush)

(And I'm sure someone has ported the pepper brush as well!)

I haven't missed anything in my usage, I just wish it had photoshop's easy automation tools where I could record and save my actions but Krita has scripting support so I'll learn that eventually.

Yes it does.

I am mostly using krita for painting and gimp for general editing and composing usually so I haven't double-checked every single feature on both but I have one example: krita can open a pdf but cannot save it and doesn't even have a "print" functionality. Found out when trying to sign a contract with krita on my convertible thinkpad. Gimp makes it a breeze in comparison.

I am sure there are other features missing in both directions. It is great to have choice.

Krita is a better Photoshop than GIMP, in my opinion. I don't care what its intended usage is.

I switched from Photoshop CS to Gimp, and it took me 5 years at the time :) I kept on working on CS for that time, and ran gimp on the side on a VM running linux (it was the crunchbang distribution, a cool debian distrib).

Gimp's Dotfiles on Linux are really well done, once your settings are done, you keep them forever (i barely changed them now for a decade).

I was really used to Photoshop (used it from photoshop 4 to CS) ; a good idea would be to change Gimp's bindings to the one you have on photoshop.

Some stuff won't work as well as Photoshop, the best is to experiment, and find alternatives maybe not in the most optimal way.

I used to produce pictures, and then tried to do the same thing on Gimp, using the same source files. Stopping when I was stuck, trying to find other ways to work.

It isn't alternative to photoshop though, what about darktable (https://www.darktable.org/)? I could be wrong but it is more of an alternative to lightroom afaik. Have you used?

Thanks for the suggestion. I've never been really into the "catalog" apps, starting from itunes. Always been more of a winamp guy ;) I like to browse my files from the explorer and not having to deal with a software to navigate or a software to catalog files and corrupting my filetree.

I've been using gimp since one week and so far, once you start trying to understand what's going on (something I never allowed it since 20 years I've tried), it's really not that bad.

Darktable may have a catalog, but like you, I've never seen the value in that. It's primary purpose is as a RAW editor, and it's pretty good at that. Highly recommend it as a first pass for any digital photography. That, or Rawtherapee.

There is also rawtherapee.

I just want to draw lines and geometric shapes, without having to deal with paths, like in any other sane graphical program.

Has this been finally sorted out?

Inkscape is an SVG editor. It's in the name. I for one love having a tool with semantics so close to the format, instead of dealing with Illustrator's nonsense. Sometimes Illustrator is the right tool, but as a web developer, Inkscape is the only sane tool for manipulating SVG.

The point is this a solved problem in every other paint program out there since Xerox, no one is asking for drawing SVG.

But it never gets sorted out due to whatever ideologic feeling Gimp developers have with offering only paths as option.

My post was irrelevant anyway, somehow I misread and thought you were replying to a post about Inkscape. Sorry about that!

No issues, I imagined just as much.

You might like Pinta. It's my favorite no nonsense image editor for basic drawing and quickly changing stuff. Not for big projects, just editing a few pixels, resizing, brightness, cropping, painting, flood filling, basically classic MS Paint but with layers.

It's a fork of Paint.NET, which happens to be my favorite image editor on Windows. The Mono-based port is a bit flaky and crashes sometimes, but the Gimp UX is just unusable for me, so Pinta it is. I tried gimp many times, but I just end up reading forums and often the program either can't do the small stuff I want, or it takes 5 minutes of clicks.

Actually I eventually moved into Paint.NET, and I am mostly on Windows/macOS nowadays.

Thanks for the hint, tough.

Exciting to be trying something new!

Curious what drove the switch? You say macOS had been very frustrating lately, anything that made it particularly so?

I've always been tempted by Linux as my main driver, being myself an idealist. But making the move always been hard while I always had linux secondary machines around.

My main reproaches towards macOS are weird choices Apple is imposing his users or the lack of compatibility with other systems :

- Mail.app and the way it persists with its ridiculous way of handling attachements (I use Thunderbird)

- Having to install additional apps to have an decent window manager or finder : Alt-Tab, Rectangle, new file menu

- Not being able to pop a calendar while clicking on the clock

- SMB compatibility is hell

- Finder is hell

- ...

Too much customisations needed while Linux "just works".

The recent position of the brand toward politics made me take the plunge.

> I'm a (enthusiast) photographer and I have big hopes for that 3.0 release of Gimp. I'm ready to learn something else and freeing myself from Adobe.

GIMP is for general graphics stuff. Try DarkTable, which was made specifically for photography editing and is very good at it.

The UI improved years ago. And they revamped the UI in Gimp 3.0 and latest InkScape.

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