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GIMP – 2016 in review

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Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#51

Post by pbhjpbhj »

MikeTaylor wrote: post #44

Shame they are still refusing to fix the deliberately-introduced "can only save in XCF format" bug.

It's one of those pedantic programmer things I think. It's strictly better semantics, but I'd agree it's poor UX.

I wonder if it came from LibreGraphics collaborations as Inkscape did something very similar.

What's weird is that The GIMP used to win plaudits for allowing user-set defaults (particularly it's shortcut system). Why this change, "save only allows native format", wasn't introduced as an option I don't know.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#53

Post by mkohlmyr »

exDM69 wrote: post #50
mkohlmyr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, as someone who moved from GIMP to Photoshop a long time ago I never saw that as being the reason it was/is(in my opinion) inferior. It has plenty of features - more than enough. What it never had was as good of a user interface and user experience. It always felt clunky and awkward by comparison. If I were to give them one additional project member it wouldn't be a developer. It would be a product owner…

> It would be a product owner who uses Photoshop daily. But no-one sings praise to the Photoshop UI either, I've heard numerous complaints about it getting worse and worse all the time. It's a matter of people being used to PS and not willing to change. There was a project earlier which had a Photoshop-clone UI for GIMP (called GimpShop or something), but it didn't magically solve all the issues. These days core GIMP…

Admittedly I haven't used GIMP in a while, but the entire selection interface was awful last time I did. That's a very basic thing that was constantly annoying to me. Wether I can grok it or not really doesn't matter. Normal users don't want to have to grok things. It didn't feel intuitive, and as a result it only took a few hours of using Photoshop CS3 to never want to go back.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#54

Post by buovjaga »

odelomez wrote: post #18

You can help the maintainer and lead developer of GIMPs, Øyvind Kolås with a donation : https://www.patreon.com/pippin

If this gets enough supporters, it could eventually fund GIMP development: https://www.patreon.com/zemarmot

"Jehan is a developer of Free Software and the scenarist of ZeMarmot, but he is not the initial funding target. Right now, we want to fund the animation and the music. "

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#55

Post by buovjaga »

pawadu wrote: post #23
odelomez wrote: post #18

You can help the maintainer and lead developer of GIMPs, Øyvind Kolås with a donation : https://www.patreon.com/pippin

Now I finally have a legit reason to join patreon. Thank you for reminding us! Are there any other FOSS developers on patreon?

Kent Overstreet is creating bcachefs - a next generation Linux filesystem: https://www.patreon.com/bcachefs

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#56

Post by [deleted] »

blt wrote: post #11
bananicorn wrote: post #7

Glad to hear they're planning to work on non destructive editing - that might even convince some photoshop users to make the switch. Then again, I really like gimp for the incredible variety of work it does well already, like editing animated gifs.

Count me as one Photoshop user who avoids GIMP because it lacks non-destructive editing. Photoshop had Adjustment Layers since 1996, and using them is a widely accepted best practice. It is hard to imagine a valid reason why GIMP developers have taken so long to implement them.

[deleted]

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#58

Post by exDM69 »

mkohlmyr wrote: post #53
exDM69 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be a product owner who uses Photoshop daily. But no-one sings praise to the Photoshop UI either, I've heard numerous complaints about it getting worse and worse all the time. It's a matter of people being used to PS and not willing to change. There was a project earlier which had a Photoshop-clone UI for GIMP (called GimpShop or something), but it didn't magically solve all the issues. These days core GIMP…

Admittedly I haven't used GIMP in a while, but the entire selection interface was awful last time I did. That's a very basic thing that was constantly annoying to me. Wether I can grok it or not really doesn't matter. Normal users don't want to have to grok things. It didn't feel intuitive, and as a result it only took a few hours of using Photoshop CS3 to never want to go back.

Here's the thing: "normal users" looking for a free-of-charge alternative to commercial apps are not the typical target audience of open source productivity tools. They're primarily targetted to scratch the authors' own itch, and secondarily to benefit anyone who finds it useful in the hopes of more contributions.

Average Joes (nor non-contributing professional artists/photographers) are typically not beneficial to these projects, at worst they are a hindrance: tons of help requests (in the bug tracker), low effort bug reports, requests for Windows/OSX binaries (without offering to help in maintenance), etc. You can find some ugly examples if you look into bug trackers / mailing lists of some of these projects.

We can only hope that a benevolent philanthropist comes by and drops a few million dollars in to getting full time, paid developers into GIMP, Blender, Inkscape and all the other open source productivity tools but until that happens it's a mostly volunteer effort and the contributors can choose what to focus on.

If Photoshop suits you, great. I've managed to do all my image editing in GIMP for the past 20 years and I'm very glad the project exists.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#59

Post by mathw »

AimHere wrote: post #39
Freak_NL wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried using keyboard shortcuts to access the panels? I often switch between Layers , Align and Distribute , and Transform , but always use the keyboard shortcuts. Inkscape's UI is a point deserving of attention (the GIMP has a more elegant UI), but I can't say that I've found it to be in decline (on the contrary).

> the GIMP has a more elegant UI GIMP must have come a long way for those words to form a sentence! Not that it was ever necessarily inelegant, but GIMP's reputation has always suffered from a big chunk of it's natural audience being experienced Photoshop users who find the transition jarring, and trash the UI for that reason. Hearing someone praise the interface is a bit unusual, still!

FWIW I find Photoshop more intimidating and confusing than GIMP, because I never learned to use Photoshop.

If you're looking at GIMP as something to attract Photoshop users, sure, the UI is bad because it's not the same as Photoshop. Sure, there are places you can look at Photoshop and say "wow, that's so much better for productive use" (ignoring feature differences where we know Photoshop is ahead of course). But this thing about GIMP having a UI that's _objectively_ bad is just unsupportable IMO.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#60

Post by tornadoboy55 »

Yaggo wrote: post #19
babuskov wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works really well, I have been using it for about 2 years. The only two minor problems I found so far: 1. when you start it up from launcher, it doesn't show up in the foreground, so you have to click the icon again 2. if you have multiple monitors and you plug out the monitor with the gimp window it sometimes crashes. It doesn't happen every time, but as I precaution I first move the Gimp window to the other moni…

Also it does not seem to support retina mode, making it practically useless for a big share of Mac users. Besides, Pixelmator has raised the bar really high.

Yeah, for me personally Pixelmator is even better than Photoshop because (besides not having an astronomical price if you don't want a subscription) they have figured out the perfect sweetspot between too much and too few features (for a prosumer).
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