GIMP development - What’s the point? • Hacker News Board

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#111

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 23, 2016, 5:23 PM UTC

thedudemabry wrote: post #15

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…

[deleted]

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#112

Post by kazinator » Fri, Sep 23, 2016, 5:25 PM UTC

waivej wrote: post #101

tomtomtom777 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For professional use, how does modern GIMP compare to modern PS?

I use Photoshop regularly (over 18 years) and earlier this year I gave GIMP another honest 2-3 week try. There are some big conceptual differences, but the small things like it not remembering what folder you last loaded images from slowed me down too much.

A lot of "professional" apps have these kinds of problems. MS Word 2013 refuses to remember the folder where you last exported a PDF; each time you do it, you have to navigate there or give a full path. These sort of thing is more or less easily fixed if someone does the grunt work. Chances are the app internally has a nice object for representing a persisted global variable such as an option; it just has to be actually used as the value of the path when opening that dialog.

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#113

Post by SixSigma » Fri, Sep 23, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

tomtomtom777 wrote: post #65

pmoriarty wrote: post #58

People whining about GIMP not being as good as PS don't appreciate what life was like on Linux before GIMP existed, or how primitive GIMP was when it first came out. GIMP has advanced leaps and bound over what it once was. I remember for ages PS fans were complaining about how GIMP had a multiple window layout, and how unnecessarily complex that was, and they wanted a single window layout. So the volunteers who work…

For professional use, how does modern GIMP compare to modern PS?

Gimp = Photoshop 4

and I use Gimp a couple of times a week.

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#114

Post by Annatar » Fri, Sep 23, 2016, 5:31 PM UTC

Long time GIMP user here. I use GIMP because my Solaris 10 install came with it, and for no other reason (I also used it on IRIX). Some software is just so bad, that it cannot even be given away for free; GIMP is one such example, as the interface is horrible.

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#115

Post by anthk » Fri, Sep 23, 2016, 5:31 PM UTC

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #104

kruhft wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently tried PS for the first time after using Gimp for almost 20 years. My images I work with are about 40"x40" at 600-1200 dpi. First impressions was that PS was a somewhat faster (about 25%) for certain operations like duplicating layers and it's interface was intuitive after using GIMP for so long, but the advantages I saw aren't enough to convince me to switch on OSX.

I've used PS for ~5 years for hobby work, but I've also spent a fair amount of time in GIMP while using Linux. GIMP is missing some rather powerful tools that PS has, one being content-awareness. In PS, you can remove a section from a bitmap, and have the space filled automatically based on the surrounding image. It works incredibly well, and the technique is used in a number of tools. PS also works much better for s…

>GIMP is missing some rather powerful tools that PS has, one being content-awareness. In PS, you can remove a section from a bitmap, and have the space filled automatically based on the surrounding image. It works incredibly well, and the technique is used in a number of tools.

That's false, GIMP had that before PS itself.

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#116

Post by mschaef » Fri, Sep 23, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

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…

> Many people bitch about GIMP, but like in arcticle, they just trying to hide their laziness to learn new things.

The other way to look at 'laziness to learn new things' is that these people are choosing to do something else with their time - something that they presumably value more highly than learning GIMP. For most people, the set of such things is huge. GIMP is usually just a means to some other end, and there's nothing particularly noble or enlightening about learning yet another piece of software.

Personally speaking, I've used GIMP off and on since before it had either layers or GTK. (It was once Motif.) That said, a few years ago, I got sick of the time it was taking for relatively basic operations, installed a $30 copy of Pixelmator, and haven't looked back. Part of the problem with open source consumer software is just that: it has to compete with commercial alternatives and most of the time lacks the resources to do so in an effective way.

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#117

Post by kazinator » Fri, Sep 23, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

loopbit wrote: post #89

imaginenore wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt there are many people in the world who can tell the difference between a print printed from RGB vs CMYK. Maybe a few extremely good print professionals with perfect vision and a $4000+ monitor. I've printed gallery quality prints from sRGB (online and at home), and nobody gives a crap.

When you have to print thousands of leaflets for a client using that client's corporate colors and, after printing, it turns out that the artwork was in RGB and the colors are not exactly those the client wanted[0], yes, you notice it. And the client always gives a crap. Of course no one cares if you print something for your house or a friend and the color is slightly off. But in some industries something like that c…

Even so, doesn't this just boil down to a few math functions applied to each pixel?

Why would I need something in GIMP whose effect can only be seen on paper, except as some kind of Export ... format?

Suppose I have a properly calibrated monitor, yadda yadda, I should be seeing good colors on the screen as I'm editing. When I'm done, good colors on paper can only be seen after the data passes through a professional printer provided its RGB values have been properly massaged into CMYK values. So it has nothing to do with interactive image editing.

It's almost entirely "off topic" for GIMP.

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#118

Post by pmoriarty » Fri, Sep 23, 2016, 5:36 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #103

pmoriarty wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The unified transform tool mentioned as a highlight is really a pretty simple thing to code." So you contributed to its development, right?

I thought we left the idea of "you can't complain about something unless you built it yourself" way behind us. That's not a constructive way to talk about anything. I can't write a "hello world" in Clojure, but I still know it's a trivial thing to do. If someone was bragging to me about their hello world and I said "that's really simple", should they respond back "So you contributed to my hello world, right?" I'm not…

There's constructive criticism, which is usually welcomed, and then there are just plain complaints. Alleging that the uniform transport tool is simple to code helps no one. It just expresses the author's disdain for the accomplishments of volunteers who added a feature to a free and open source tool.

If he thought it was so simple, he could have actually spent a few minutes to help a project which everybody can see needs help, instead of sneering at it. That would have been constructive.

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#119

Post by Annatar » Fri, Sep 23, 2016, 5:37 PM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #109

pmoriarty wrote: post #58

People whining about GIMP not being as good as PS don't appreciate what life was like on Linux before GIMP existed, or how primitive GIMP was when it first came out. GIMP has advanced leaps and bound over what it once was. I remember for ages PS fans were complaining about how GIMP had a multiple window layout, and how unnecessarily complex that was, and they wanted a single window layout. So the volunteers who work…

I used GIMP in 1996 and it was great! I got it going on a Sun Sparcstation 20 running Red Hat 2.0 Linux.

You had a SPARCStation 20 with Linux on it? Facepalm.

The very first SPARCstation I bought also had Linux on it. I promptly ordered Solaris 7 from Sun for $50 (which is how much redhat CD's cost back then), played with Linux until my Solaris 7 kit arrived in the mail, completely wiped away Linux, installed Solaris 7, and never looked back. Seeing that

  UNIX System V Release 4.0

was such an awesome feeling. I was thrilled. My very own Solaris machine. I actually owned a Sun! I walked out, my whole body shaking in excitement. It was surreal. Before that, a Sun workstation was a mythical system, something one only saw on a poster, or got to log into along with 1,250 other users at the computer center, but never see in person. And you actually ran Linux. What a waste of good hardware.

Re: GIMP development - What’s the point?

#120

Post by lips » Fri, Sep 23, 2016, 5:38 PM UTC

exDM69 wrote: post #55

WhitneyLand wrote: post #42

Sorry to say I don't think GIMP is the best example of a great FLOSS project. Many other projects are very competitive (or better) than commercial options but GIMP is not even close. They just released support for 16bit/32bit/c color last year which is needed for so many scenarios. The unified transform tool mentioned as a highlight is really a pretty simple thing to code. They are 5-10 years behind what you get in P…

GIMP, Inkscape, Blender and other open source art production tools have a big chicken and egg problem. To really improve, they need more professionals using them and a part of them should be developers or willing to chip in by other means. But because there are issues (education included) that are deal breakers for pros, you can't expect it to get better quickly. The situation is much worse for art production tools (…

I've long wondered how to address this "different itch" problem. People in a position to contribute code don't have the same itches or desires as those who don't, vs a DBMS, IDE, wiki, http server, etc.