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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

#71

Post by nercht12 »

Keyframe wrote: post #18
oggedintocom wrote: post #2

GIMP is an icon of open-source software, but do any professional designers use it full-time over Photoshop? Compare with Sketch, which has taken scores of users from Illustrator.

Realistic answer is not really. There are people who probably use it, but they are invisible in the whole. However, Krita got some serious attention by digital painters and is used enough to be visible as an alternative to both ps and coral paint.

This. As an artist, I found Gimp too precise in its pixel-drawing. You want a dot, you get exactly that. Krita, however, uses an algorithm that smooths its brush edges so that the result - even after holding the brush in one spot for awhile - doesn't come out pixelated. I use Gimp for general editing, and particularly filters and such (e.g. liquid rescale (seam-carving)) - which is what it seems to be best at anyways.

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#72

Post by nercht12 »

imurray wrote: post #20

Gimp 2.8 frustrated me: I could no longer open a .png, edit it and easily resave it back to .png. The Gimp developers knew better and made the UI strongly favor saving as .xcf, which makes sense in some use-cases, but not mine. I found this fix, which made quick uses of GIMP less painful for me: http://shallowsky.com/software/gimp-save/ I'm assuming the new save behavior persists in Gimp 2.9.x, but I don't know.

So what would you like to happen if you open a lossy format and then open as layers a .png? Do you want it to downgrade the quality or bump it up? Some people might want the former, some might want the latter. What if Gimp always has to convert the color-space? I wanted CMYK in Gimp at one point, but while there was an importer, there was no exporter. What then? Saving to .xcf was initially a pain (I complained too), but I became accustomed to the new routine, and from a categorization perspective, it makes sense. The dev is blamed either way - either by people accustomed to the old routine or by people who messed up from it and want it changed.

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#73

Post by reitanqild »

nercht12 wrote: post #72
imurray wrote: post #20

Gimp 2.8 frustrated me: I could no longer open a .png, edit it and easily resave it back to .png. The Gimp developers knew better and made the UI strongly favor saving as .xcf, which makes sense in some use-cases, but not mine. I found this fix, which made quick uses of GIMP less painful for me: http://shallowsky.com/software/gimp-save/ I'm assuming the new save behavior persists in Gimp 2.9.x, but I don't know.

So what would you like to happen if you open a lossy format and then open as layers a .png? Do you want it to downgrade the quality or bump it up? Some people might want the former, some might want the latter. What if Gimp always has to convert the color-space? I wanted CMYK in Gimp at one point, but while there was an importer, there was no exporter. What then? Saving to .xcf was initially a pain (I complained too),…

Agree here, there is a reason I am not too fond of some self appointed UX people:

Here gimp devs has chosen to make the nondestructive action the default one - a sane choice given their development resources.

Worst case if you forget to export in the correct format you have to export again.

If it by default saved back to the same format by default then in a worst case you lose hours of work.

UX is about more than shiny, about more than copying Mac, about more than saving a keystroke here and there.

(Hardcore dev here, not UX, not UI.)

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#74

Post by reitanqild »

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.

One is potentially destructive, the other is potentially annoying. I know for certain which one I would choose as the default action.

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#75

Post by reitanqild »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #25
imurray wrote: post #20

Gimp 2.8 frustrated me: I could no longer open a .png, edit it and easily resave it back to .png. The Gimp developers knew better and made the UI strongly favor saving as .xcf, which makes sense in some use-cases, but not mine. I found this fix, which made quick uses of GIMP less painful for me: http://shallowsky.com/software/gimp-save/ I'm assuming the new save behavior persists in Gimp 2.9.x, but I don't know.

>The Gimp developers knew better and made the UI strongly favor saving as .xcf, which makes sense in some use-cases, but not mine. Well, remember, GTK originally stood for GIMP ToolKit. The GNOME DNA is strong within GIMP. And make no mistake, that's a very GNOMEy thing to do.

Eh, I'd say this is sane and understandable compared to typical "Gnome things".

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#76

Post by reitanqild »

pritambaral wrote: post #12

The action search feature is nice. I like it that more software is getting search-across-all-menu-entries. I'd have really liked Ubuntu's HUD menu-search to have become a standard on the Linux desktop; adding search-across-menus would become much easier for softwares, most wouldn't need any addition of code.

Yes, as someone who doesn't use Ubuntu and complains loudly about it my biggest annoyance is I really want to use it, I just don't want to fight something as basic as alt-tab every time I use my computer.

Same goes for Mac: So much polish, so much attention to detail, so much goodwill, - all ruined by a few IMO weird choices.

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#77

Post by gkya »

imurray wrote: post #37
AlecSchueler wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same amount of clicking, just that 'save' and 'export' do different things.

No it's not the same amount of clicking. From Gimp 2.7 to 2.8 something that used to be ctrl-s and close window went to ctrl-shift-e, and answering four dialog boxes before getting the image saved and the window closed. Around the time Gimp 2.8 came out, I wanted to edit and save around 50 images (in away that wasn't easy to automate). That (without the plugin that gives the old behavior) would be 200 dialog boxes to…

IIRC Ctrl shift e is export as, and ctrl e exports with no questions.

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#78

Post by gkya »

imurray wrote: post #20

Gimp 2.8 frustrated me: I could no longer open a .png, edit it and easily resave it back to .png. The Gimp developers knew better and made the UI strongly favor saving as .xcf, which makes sense in some use-cases, but not mine. I found this fix, which made quick uses of GIMP less painful for me: http://shallowsky.com/software/gimp-save/ I'm assuming the new save behavior persists in Gimp 2.9.x, but I don't know.

Some people create an image editing software that rival Photoshop which is worth a millions of dollars in their own time without expecting anything in return and they work on this for about twenty years and you are frustrated about a sensible change that can be reverted by little configuration or a little plugin?

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#79

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

reitanqild wrote: post #75
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The Gimp developers knew better and made the UI strongly favor saving as .xcf, which makes sense in some use-cases, but not mine. Well, remember, GTK originally stood for GIMP ToolKit. The GNOME DNA is strong within GIMP. And make no mistake, that's a very GNOMEy thing to do.

Eh, I'd say this is sane and understandable compared to typical "Gnome things".

Well, yes. GIMP and GNOME for the most part diverged fairly early on, save the toolkit, so the infection is less than that of the GNOME project, but it's still there.

some forget that GNOME started very far from where it is now. Look only to Sawfish for proof.

Re: GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

#80

Post by babuskov »

StevePerkins wrote: post #34
imurray wrote: post #20

Gimp 2.8 frustrated me: I could no longer open a .png, edit it and easily resave it back to .png. The Gimp developers knew better and made the UI strongly favor saving as .xcf, which makes sense in some use-cases, but not mine. I found this fix, which made quick uses of GIMP less painful for me: http://shallowsky.com/software/gimp-save/ I'm assuming the new save behavior persists in Gimp 2.9.x, but I don't know.

> 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"?

The main problem I have with it IS the fact that you have to use the mouse. There's no keyboard shortcut (at least on Mac version of Gimp). If you open a .png file, there's no keyboard shortcut to export it (overwrite). You can invoke the "export as" dialog which requires a couple more key presses and a context switch. Once you save it via menu, then the Command+E shortcut starts working, but for the first save not. As someone who works a lot with Gimp, this is the main usability problem I have.

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