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Comment by JackFr | Hacker News Reader

Nailing the UI though is both very difficult and very important.

In 2006, GIMP had a ton of features, but compared to Photoshop’s UI it was positively awful.

You could replace that year with any year since the start of the GIMP project and it would still be true. It's the epitome of an open source project run by people who care about technical features, not real world users.

Photoshop had a pretty steep learning curve. "Users" had to spend some time getting to know the workflow.

GIMP also has a steep learning curve. But these same "users" turn their noses at spending some time getting to know the workflow.

As someone who is proficient in both, it is not hard to hit similar levels of productivity with GIMP as it is in Photoshop.

I hate this attitude that people have with open source being "user hostile". Stop acting like spoiled children. Why must the software always come to you? Why cant you come to the software?

I think the biggest hurdle is that the shortcuts, ui, and workflows all feel different for the sake of being different. Why reinvent the wheel on it?

I also hate this idea that we aren't allowed to give feedback on open source software. I get it, it's an incredibly thankless thing to do, but feedback of "having to relearn all of this stuff is unpleasant" isn't a problematic thing

It's not that they CAN'T duplicate photoshop, it's that adobe would sue them out of existence if they did.

Gimp is an entirely different league of user hostile. There are intuitive GUIs, unintuitive GUIs, and then there is GIMP.

Everyone says this, but nobody backs it up.

The thing about something like usability is that if, as you say, "everyone" says it's bad, then it is bad.

Or they're propagating a meme.

Because tools should be built for their users, not the other way around.

Last time I checked ( a few months back) there was a little package of configurations + plugins / skins that were geared towards tweaking GIMP to be more accessible to people who were familiar with Photoshop -

And it wasn’t perfect, but give credit where credit is due, it was better than it’s ever been, it definitely got me close enough to complete a little photo collage project.

GIMP definitely suffers from programmer UI design, but Photoshop isn't much better. Menus nested in menus nested in dialogue boxes, keyboard shortcuts that conflict with every other shortcut on any system still in use today, and of course the assumption that everyone already knows what every button does. It's not quite Blender levels of unintuitive, but there's a reason people take courses just to use the damn program. If it weren't for the branding popularity and the fact Photoshop was one of the first programs of its kind, I don't think it'd ever gain popularity with that terrible kludge of a UI, and that's without the ridiculous price.

Ever since GIMP docked toolbars and windows by default (which also took a few versions in Photoshop) I don't think the interface is that bad anymore, at least not compared to Photoshop.

Photoshop's UI is terrible as well (not defending GIMP). At least for digital painting.

- How to set 'C' key as to open color palette? Surprisingly, you can't do it in Photoshop.

- Photoshop is the only painting app that needs a completely new interface for liquifying, instead of just implementing it as a brush.

- Photoshop's 3D, vector path and animation feature are all abysmal. I guess it's to push you to buy other Adobe software.

GIMP is astonishingly bad. I got by for many years with Paint Shop Pro, even through its steady decline after Corel acquired it, but eventually they destroyed it. In desperation I turned to GIMP but it is so bad that I now use Photopea. I would pay for a modern functional equivalent of Paint Shop Pro, but I don't know that it exists.

This is completely subjective.

As a student I used a ton of warez software in the 90ies. As such, I didn't have any real prejudice back then, and photoshop was the worst of the bunch from my perspective. I held that view for a long time, akin to how I consider autocad from autodesk one of the worst cads you could use despite being outrageously popular.

I have no longer an opinion on it as I didn't use it for such a long time. I'm cycling between krita and GIMP, and GIMP's UI is just fine to me, in the same way I suppose a ton of designers-with-big-opinions are more familiar with photoshop due to all the training they did on it (and probably, _mostly_ on it).

Sure, our expectations about UI patterns are path dependent. However, if a program isn't consistent internally [0] (rather than against the body of software we are familiar with), then the complaint is less subjective.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tFYkGyaXCw0 1 minute example of the procedure for editing a brush style

I get that whoever made and posted that terrible youtube short is annoyed, but if they had done a basic search online, specifically "how to edit a brush in gimp", the first result would have taken them to this page:

https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-brush-dialog.html

Which says:

It is a general rule that you cannot alter the resources that GIMP pre-installs for you: brushes, patterns, gradients, etc; only ones that you create yourself.

It's okay to be annoyed when something doesn't work the way you want it to, but RTFM before you make a rant about it. It's the bare minimum.

People say this, but I didnt have such issues using Gimp compared to PS. They are different, that's it.

The main thing I missed were stackable layers, but it was not a huge issue for me.

People say it because it's true for them. User experience is after all highly subjective. I think that the open-source world largely ignores this fact and pretends that if any one person says "good enough for me" then it's done.

The reserve is true too: if anyone says it's NOT good enough for them, then it's done.

Actually check it out yourself, and give yourself some time to get used to it. If you care about not using PS of course.

> The reserve is true too: if anyone says it's NOT good enough for them, then it's done.

"done" is defined by the creator of the software. If you're the creator of GIMP and it's suitable to your purposes, you can call it "done". But ostensibly, you made it free so that others could benefit from your efforts, and possibly even open-sourced it so that it would be accepted as safe to use. If that's the case, then something isn't "done" unless you're happy with the number of users who find it acceptable.

I suspect that the creators of GIMP fall farther on the side of "suitable for our purposes" than on the side of "suitable for a large number of people's purposes" (however this may be unintentional and/or laziness or bad strategy on their part).

> Actually check it out yourself, and give yourself some time to get used to it.

Assuming I haven't is an extremely bizarre but inexplicably commonly-made mistake. Can you explain what leads to this mistake?

> If you care about not using PS of course.

You might not realize it, but this is a (perhaps unconscious) "no true Scottsman" fallacy. I take it you're not a creator of GIMP, so you don't have any authority to say what GIMP is intended for. So the idea that it's for people who "care about not using Photoshop" isn't a valid assertion. That's your opinion, but you should try to back it up with something. I see nothing on the website or the Wikipedia page that backs up the claim that it's for people who "care about not using Photoshop". It seems like it's for a much, much wider variety of people than that. Why gatekeep like that?

It also did lack some important features. It still doesn't have proper support for different colorspaces, for example, and it's really not very on board with non-destructive editing in general.

What's your opinion on Krita?

As someone who has used a bunch of different image editing tools to make stuff (mainly for games, though i'm not an artist - i just need to make art :-P), Krita is fine. It has a bunch of weirdnesses (e.g. 2983942 commands to paste an image and all of them are kinda weird or missing in some way) and doesn't have as much features as GIMP but overall it is fine. Then again i found GIMP fine for a long time.

Though my favorite UX (and features) of all time is Paint Shop Pro 7 which i find superior to Krita (i have it installed alongside Krita, GIMP and Kolourpaint -used for minor edits since it starts instantly- on my Linux setup via Wine). I used it since Win3.x days in the 90s until PSP8 was released and they screwed up the UI. I moved to GIMP some time later when i started using Linux and used that for years. Some years ago i found a boxed copy of PSP7 anniversary edition, reinstalled it and despite not using it for more than a decade i found it much easier than GIMP and i'm using that since, until i wanted to make a plugin to assist me with texture painting for 3D models. Making plugins for PSP7 was very cumbersome so i thought to try Krita instead (Krita has an MDI mode which i like when working with images) and ended up sticking with it since making the plugin was relatively easy[0].

I'll download Krita's source code and try to build it and add the features i miss from PSP7 at some point, KDE people do not seem very allergic to having options so i might be able to recreate the stuff and behavior i miss from PSP7 in Krita.

In order of preference:

1. PSP7

2. Krita

3. Pixelmator (only under macOS of course and i only used an old version before App Store with the only alternative being GIMP running under XQuartz - i think GIMP got a native version later but i never used it)

4. GIMP (i found older versions easier to use, but every time they introduce a new major UI change i find it more awkward than before and now they're switching away from Gtk2 to Gtk3 -which i dislike the feel of- i decided to stick with Krita)

5?. Photoshop, maybe (i only used it a little in the past, always found it more cumbersome than GIMP or PSP, but it'll do if nothing else is available)

[0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/kritaview3d/

Same as you... I don't use psp anymore because i'm on the lovely penguin for decades but psp was the finest paint i ever use, since, too, win3...

(not the GP)

Krita is very functional as a digial painting program. But I think the dev team took the "painting" part of digital painting too literal. They clearly spent a lot of time developing niche brush features (the only painting app has more detailed brush settings I know is Corel Painter), which is nice, but some other areas are neglected.

In comparison to Photosho, it's quite painful to add any text in Krita. The layer styles and filters are much less performant. But if you only do painting, Krita is totally fine.

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