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GIMP development - What’s the point?

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Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#11

Post by sjellis »

hitekker wrote: post #4

Stories about an eloquent, suave believer enlightening a misguided, clearly-in-the-wrong naysayer may sometimes be true, but never very convincing. > In this case, I opted to give the fireworks/show. My weapons of choice this time included the unified transform tool, the handle-transform tool, and the warp transform tool Which prompts the leering, misinformed troglodyte to consider the error of his ways, to "imagine…

> Having used GIMP and Photoshop, the practical point of GIMP development, in my view, is to provide a baseline for other graphic editing software: i.e. your product's quality cannot drop below what GIMP offers.

I think that this is one of the important things that Open Source software does, generally - it provides a steadily rising baseline of functionality that is freely available to everyone.

LibreOffice is another product that's often considered not as good as the leading proprietary product, but as long as it exists and gets better with every release, it will benefit everybody, including Microsoft Office users.

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#12

Post by the_af »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #3

What's the point? It's a helpful question for narrowing your focus, but at the end of the day, there isn't always one, and it needn't be a lofty philosophical goal. Did the MDL team need a point to develop Zork? Did Thompson need a business reason to write UNIX? Did the AI lab ever justify extending TECO far beyond its original intent, into the first version of EMACS? Sometimes, although not all the time, "because I…

"Because I can" is of course a valid reason, but having a better goal is more motivating, especially if it's a team instead of a single person.

I believe GIMP does have a better goal than "just because", and in my mind it is achieving it. I'm not a graphics designer and therefore I have the luxury of not being locked-in with Photoshop's advanced features; therefore all my image manipulations are done using GIMP, Krita and/or Inkscape. I congratulate all those teams on a job well done.

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#13

Post by hitekker »

sjellis wrote: post #11
hitekker wrote: post #4

Stories about an eloquent, suave believer enlightening a misguided, clearly-in-the-wrong naysayer may sometimes be true, but never very convincing. > In this case, I opted to give the fireworks/show. My weapons of choice this time included the unified transform tool, the handle-transform tool, and the warp transform tool Which prompts the leering, misinformed troglodyte to consider the error of his ways, to "imagine…

> Having used GIMP and Photoshop, the practical point of GIMP development, in my view, is to provide a baseline for other graphic editing software: i.e. your product's quality cannot drop below what GIMP offers. I think that this is one of the important things that Open Source software does, generally - it provides a steadily rising baseline of functionality that is freely available to everyone. LibreOffice is anothe…

Agreed 100%. The best Open Source products motivate and inspire.

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#14

Post by the_af »

louhike wrote: post #10
finchisko wrote: post #5

I use GIMP exclusively. Last time it allowed me to turn SVG animation into GIF. It literally took few seconds to complete. Many people bitch about GIMP, but like in arcticle, they just trying to hide their laziness to learn new things. I've nothing against them, but one thing, most of them in my circles are using pirate copy of Photoshop instead free GIMP. Some of them arguing about RBG/CMYK missing in GIMP, but most…

Gimp is great if you're not a designer or exclusively a web designer. Otherwise, CMYK is a huge deal as it is the only way to go if you want to print something at a professional printer (not sure about the term).

Is there a way to add decent CMYK support to GIMP? Is it technically unfeasible, or is it something the main devs are simply uninterested in?

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#15

Post by thedudemabry »

hitekker wrote: post #4

Stories about an eloquent, suave believer enlightening a misguided, clearly-in-the-wrong naysayer may sometimes be true, but never very convincing. > In this case, I opted to give the fireworks/show. My weapons of choice this time included the unified transform tool, the handle-transform tool, and the warp transform tool Which prompts the leering, misinformed troglodyte to consider the error of his ways, to "imagine…

I tend to agree with you. GIMP is a very important project in my view because it provides legal, cross-platform access to a baseline of image manipulation tools. The above-and-beyond feature set is fantastic, but not the reason why I love it.

I suppose this isn't directly related, but following the theme of OSS alternatives to commercial software... after being ignorant of the OSS desktop application world for a few years, two cross-platform projects have blown my mind recently with their feature sets and level of polish:

Natron - https://natron.fr/ - Node-based video compositor. I've used it to add some dumb special effects to videos.

Godot - https://godotengine.org/ - Unity-like game engine and IDE with export to all non-console platforms. I've used it to make some dumb games.

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#16

Post by lmm »

finchisko wrote: post #5

I use GIMP exclusively. Last time it allowed me to turn SVG animation into GIF. It literally took few seconds to complete. Many people bitch about GIMP, but like in arcticle, they just trying to hide their laziness to learn new things. I've nothing against them, but one thing, most of them in my circles are using pirate copy of Photoshop instead free GIMP. Some of them arguing about RBG/CMYK missing in GIMP, but most…

I use Krita, except for a time when it had issues with my graphics tablet and I switched to Gimp. I think Krita is the proof that there's no good reason for Gimp to be as unusable as it is: Krita is free, has all the features I've ever felt the desire to try in an image editor and more (though I probably wouldn't bother loading up a GUI just to convert an SVG to a GIF), has the missing colourspace support, is exceedingly scriptable in a standard way (rather than requiring its own specific way of doing scripts), and does all this via an ordinary, sensible GUI that works the way you expect. Somehow the gnome world seems to have much better marketing than the KDE world (particularly in the US), but I'd urge people (especially people who aren't doing enough image editing to justify a big investment in learning a tool) to check out Krita.

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#17

Post by thedudemabry »

the_af wrote: post #9
hitekker wrote: post #4

Stories about an eloquent, suave believer enlightening a misguided, clearly-in-the-wrong naysayer may sometimes be true, but never very convincing. > In this case, I opted to give the fireworks/show. My weapons of choice this time included the unified transform tool, the handle-transform tool, and the warp transform tool Which prompts the leering, misinformed troglodyte to consider the error of his ways, to "imagine…

It's also a decent, free and Free product in its own right, even if flawed. Just being Free makes it better than Photoshop for me. Calling it the "baseline" is pretty dismissive. It's better than Photoshop in some aspects. Even if it was the baseline, here's the point of GIMP development: to make it a truly great alternative to Photoshop and similar proprietary tools. Even if you never quite achieve it, even if the t…

I didn't take "baseline" to be dismissive, but rather a description of GIMP's venn-diagram overlap with Photoshop. They both make different choices for different reasons, but ensuring that proven useful features eventually land in that overlapping region is a valuable contribution to OSS and proprietary software.

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#18

Post by dagw »

the_af wrote: post #14
louhike wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gimp is great if you're not a designer or exclusively a web designer. Otherwise, CMYK is a huge deal as it is the only way to go if you want to print something at a professional printer (not sure about the term).

Is there a way to add decent CMYK support to GIMP? Is it technically unfeasible, or is it something the main devs are simply uninterested in?

http://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#i-do-a-lot-of-desktop-...

there is however some cmyk support currently if you need it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GIMP/CMYK_support

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#19

Post by awesomerobot »

louhike wrote: post #10
finchisko wrote: post #5

I use GIMP exclusively. Last time it allowed me to turn SVG animation into GIF. It literally took few seconds to complete. Many people bitch about GIMP, but like in arcticle, they just trying to hide their laziness to learn new things. I've nothing against them, but one thing, most of them in my circles are using pirate copy of Photoshop instead free GIMP. Some of them arguing about RBG/CMYK missing in GIMP, but most…

Gimp is great if you're not a designer or exclusively a web designer. Otherwise, CMYK is a huge deal as it is the only way to go if you want to print something at a professional printer (not sure about the term).

"Only way" is a bit of an exaggeration (Most popular way for sure). I've had large print houses ask for RGB files so they can control the CMYK conversion on their end (usually in cases when you're trying to get as close as possible to an RGB match).
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