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GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

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Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#51

Post by goatface »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #28

GIMP is a handy tool: I use it for a lot of my image editing needs, for when very basic tools won't do. I rarely need the power of PS, and can't afford it anyway (although I do miss that magnetic lasso: GIMP's magic scissors don't quite have a good enough algorithm). All of this talk about the future is exciting. However, yes, GIMP is quite rarely an acceptable replacement for PS, and I find this unlikely to change a…

GIMP's new (though not actually young) engine - GEGL, contains ffmpeg frame sources and sinks, provides a good abstraction for creating interfaces better than GAP for animation or video editing - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJJPgLGrSgc for an example of a video that has been edited and encoded using GEGL this year.

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#52

Post by goatface »

maweki wrote: post #6
cobalt wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unlikely, while a certainly poewrful piece of software that can do much of what photoshop can (in the 2D realm), it has no support for 3D work, real vector support, active filters (this is a huge one in traditional 2D work, esp icons/logos)

The one feature that breaks it for me for professional work is that filters happen to a layer instead of being attached to them an are able to be changed on a whim. It's impossible to do any real work if you have to render and re-render every shadow on every text and object when its size changes. I think I could do without everything else but that.

The work you might have heard about GEGL - is all about providing foundations for such non-destructive editing. The highlighted split-view / curtain preview in the blog post is implemented using these new capabilities provided by GEGL. Adding new features that cement themselves as new things in the file format is part of GIMPs roadmap after GIMP-2.10 / 3.0. 2.10 / 3.0 are aiming to provide the same functionality that GIMP-2.6 / 2.8 provided but with GEGL as the core and thus higher bitdepth.

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#53

Post by goatface »

Joeboy wrote: post #50
ptero wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the main ideological difference is that Photoshop UI is targeting users who like to see things visually. Gimp has a more programmatic legacy. PS allows moving around a few sliders while looking at the screen to see how things change and nail it when the results look visually good. I bet that is critical for most PS users. It is for me. I paid for an (educational) PS license just so I can edit my photos before I p…

I don't think you can blame it on the wrong kind of user. As a former Photoshop user, one of the most frustrating things about Gimp is the amount it forces me to use the mouse. I'm the kind of person that uses vim, and Photoshop is definitely a far better fit for the way I like to work [Edit: Unless it's got worse in the decade or so since I used it]. Gimp is just full of little annoyances that interrupt your flow an…

This relearning problem goes both ways. People trained on GIMP tend to find Photoshop annoying and difficult to use - because they have to relearn. People accept spending extra time and struggling when learning a new skill; and are frustrated with tools (or really themselves) when something they think they know how to do suddenly is difficult.

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#54

Post by Joeboy »

goatface wrote: post #53
Joeboy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can blame it on the wrong kind of user. As a former Photoshop user, one of the most frustrating things about Gimp is the amount it forces me to use the mouse. I'm the kind of person that uses vim, and Photoshop is definitely a far better fit for the way I like to work [Edit: Unless it's got worse in the decade or so since I used it]. Gimp is just full of little annoyances that interrupt your flow an…

This relearning problem goes both ways. People trained on GIMP tend to find Photoshop annoying and difficult to use - because they have to relearn. People accept spending extra time and struggling when learning a new skill; and are frustrated with tools (or really themselves) when something they think they know how to do suddenly is difficult.

I'm sure that there is a learning curve for people going from Gimp to Photoshop. In my case, going the other way, after over a decade, I still find Gimp a massive pain in the arse. It's not just that it's "not what I'm used to", it's that it's bad.

Recently I had to make some end-credit cards for a short film - ie. white writing on black backgrounds. Gimp managed to make even that painful. Things like, placing an immovable dialogue over the handles of my text box so I can't get at them. If I try to replace text, it reverts to its arbitrary choice of font / size so I have to type new text in the middle of my existing text, then delete the original. No "duplicate layer" shortcut. Just gratuious annoyances that are good for nobody, and bad for everybody.

Edit: I have a feeling you might be a Gimp dev, in which case I should be more grateful for the work you do, which I still use and benefit from even though the UI frustrates the hell out of me.

Edit2: I just found the Duplicate Layer shortcut. Not sure how I missed it before.

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#55

Post by bobwaycott »

phkahler wrote: post #45
StevePerkins wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> less painful for me I realize that this is common UX jargon, but is it literally "painful" to click "File->Export" rather than "File->Save"? I frequently hear front-end developer peers arguing that it's "painful" to read 10 or 20 lines of XML. Back-end peers retort that it's more "painful" to look at large complex structures in JSON. There's a hundred other cases in which this comes up. Are people really walking ar…

>> I realize that this is common UX jargon, but is it literally "painful" to click "File->Export" rather than "File->Save"? One can also make that statement to the person who decided the default save format should be different from the one the user opened. IMHO most people want to save in the format they started with and if they want to change it, something other than "save" is warranted.

This. It is far too common for applications to default to saving their own .special format, despite opening another fully supported format. Save should always default to file type opened, and .special format when a new file was created. Save As is an easy and friendly enough vector for allowing saving that opened .whatever file as a .special when specifically wanted. It really is unfriendly increased mental load to open a .whatever and have to remember or figure out you must Export to retain your file type.

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#56

Post by pfranz »

phkahler wrote: post #45
StevePerkins wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> less painful for me I realize that this is common UX jargon, but is it literally "painful" to click "File->Export" rather than "File->Save"? I frequently hear front-end developer peers arguing that it's "painful" to read 10 or 20 lines of XML. Back-end peers retort that it's more "painful" to look at large complex structures in JSON. There's a hundred other cases in which this comes up. Are people really walking ar…

>> I realize that this is common UX jargon, but is it literally "painful" to click "File->Export" rather than "File->Save"? One can also make that statement to the person who decided the default save format should be different from the one the user opened. IMHO most people want to save in the format they started with and if they want to change it, something other than "save" is warranted.

This isn't just a problem with Gimp. It's a problem with Photoshop and basically every discipline where there's a bunch of file formats that have varying levels of support for features.

"Open" would then more correctly called "Import" for most file formats. If you want Open and Save to work with all file formats, you'd then need to restrict the UI to operations that work with the file format you have open. Otherwise, you lose data when saving.

>> IMHO most people want to save in the format they started with and if they want to change it, something other than "save" is warranted.

Most people when they save a file expect everything to be there when they open it later. That's only possible when you save using that applications proprietary file format.

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#57

Post by rpgmaker »

Joof wrote: post #40
damptowel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, only a shoddy craftsman blames his tools, but if you work in a design or ad agency everyone uses the Adobe monoculture because no one wants to deal with potential asset pipeline hickups when under tight deadlines. I'm sure there's freelancers who prefer gimp, but in the industry it's far from accepted, most designers will only know it exists but won't bother trying because they've been cosy with PS for over a d…

Photoshop is getting less convenient to pirate; I'm starting to see more and more people who have grown up using gimp and have no desire to switch to Photoshop.

Photoshop is as easy to pirate as it has ever been. The "SaaS" licensing scheme hasn't changed this one bit.

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#58

Post by pfranz »

userbinator wrote: post #44
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saving and exporting are different tasks: the former saves the current work-in-progress project with no loss of data, the latter exports to a particular image format and is inherently lossy. If you combine them, you risk misleading users. And by keeping them split, it makes some things more convenient. When I edit images, I save a .xcf and I also export a .png. Having to manually switch between these file-types and m…

What's the difference, and why should it matter? I just want to persist my changes to a file. IMHO just keep things simple and use Save for saving in the same format as the original (possibly if a warning if it doesn't support some things you've done to the file), or Save As for saving in a different format.

Simply, you expect Open > Save to persist your file format. In the use case they target Save > Open persist what you were editing. Things like Live Text, Smart Objects, alpha layers (for many file formats), etc will stay around. It's a common approach I've seen in other image editors (including Photoshop), 3d tools, and I imagine text editors do this, too.

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#59

Post by 0xmohit »

Joof wrote: post #40
damptowel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, only a shoddy craftsman blames his tools, but if you work in a design or ad agency everyone uses the Adobe monoculture because no one wants to deal with potential asset pipeline hickups when under tight deadlines. I'm sure there's freelancers who prefer gimp, but in the industry it's far from accepted, most designers will only know it exists but won't bother trying because they've been cosy with PS for over a d…

Photoshop is getting less convenient to pirate; I'm starting to see more and more people who have grown up using gimp and have no desire to switch to Photoshop.

Long time back, I wanted to timestamp certain pictures (a couple of hundred). That is, pick up the timestamp from EXIF metadata and put the date on a corner of the photo.

I wasn't able to do it programatically using Adobe tools. FOSS on Linux did that for me.

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#60

Post by 0xmohit »

rpgmaker wrote: post #57
Joof wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photoshop is getting less convenient to pirate; I'm starting to see more and more people who have grown up using gimp and have no desire to switch to Photoshop.

Photoshop is as easy to pirate as it has ever been. The "SaaS" licensing scheme hasn't changed this one bit.

> The "SaaS" licensing scheme ...

It's the "crooked" licensing scheme.

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