Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GIMP – 2016 in review

gimp.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 188 posts

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#121

Post by prokoudine »

babuskov wrote: post #13
Yaggo wrote: post #9

I didn't know GIMP nowadays run natively (without X11) on macOS, cool.

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…

We'd appreciate respective bug reports, thanks :)

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#122

Post by Joeboy »

bluGill wrote: post #89
Joeboy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its certainly OK for a product to innovate, as GIMP has. I'm not sure the GIMP's UI choices can generally be described as "innovating". I think they're generally just the obvious GTK+ default options, implemented without much testing or tweaking.

GTK is the Gimp Tool Kit. I expect GIMP to use the defaults: historically they created to toolkit for their needs, and so they should choose the right defaults for them. Note that the above is historical. GNOME selected GTK long ago and has somewhat strong armed GTK development away from GNOME. I don't follow either project closely enough to suggest how much.

Here's an example that was just pointed out to me by prokoudine:

https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?id=52ad5bb2a11e39f...

The default situation was that the toolbox grabbed the focus when clicked. That meant various actions, eg. "Show/hide docks", didn't work if the last thing you clicked was the toolbox. That's an annoyance created by "accepting the defaults", that's thankfully now been fixed in light of real-world usability issues.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#123

Post by prokoudine »

Joeboy wrote: post #105
phaemon wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> things like the focus always being in the wrong place so I have to use the mouse, or windows being placed over things I need to see But both of these are things that are fixed with Single Window Mode (which it's clear you know about). Complaining about a UI issue that has already been fixed does seem a bit ungrateful. > or having to reselect my font styling every time I retype something Ok, fair enough. That one is…

> But both of these are things that are fixed with Single Window Mode (which it's clear you know about). They aren't entirely gone though. Eg. if I find my chosen font in the font selector, click it or press enter to select it, and continue typing I'll end up with "Nimbus Sans Lsomerandomtext" in the font selection box. Another example - the default shortcut for "Show / hide docks" is Tab, which is also the shortcut…

> Despite my whining...

The thing with complaints is... Personally I'm prepared to handle a lot of that, even trash talking. But only if the user ends up providing a useful insight. Otherwise it's just a huge senseless loss of time for both parties.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#124

Post by joe_the_user »

mathw wrote: post #59
AimHere wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

I use both GIMP and Inkscape regularly. I used GIMP every third day to just crop an image and sometimes to add text to an image.

GIMP is a hodgepodge that has at best marginally improved over the years. I'd give the GIMP UI credit for being good-enough but that's about it. I can understand that for someone people, a UI that can be simply understood is the main thing (Photoshop, deriving from pre-computer methods, is opaque in its operations but the now-obscure Corel Photopaint showed how a paint program could have an actual good interface - naturally, similar to CorelDraw and ... Inkscape).

Consider that there are wide variety of tasks that clearly take more time than necessary. The separation of the move, scale, rotate and so-forth operations into distinction tools is an constant annoyance (Inkscape has one tool for all this btw). If you input text over an image and then attempt to move this text, the background image move instead (you can do it with a little UI dancing but why, this should be simple). Setting the font and size of text is a constant pain also as mentioned by other posters.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#125

Post by rebuilder »

prokoudine wrote: post #120
rebuilder wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paint for a living, and I much prefer Krita to Photoshop nowadays. It's really very good. For my purposes it matches Photoshop's features plus more, such as the guides (vanishing point, ellipses etc), symmetrical painting etc. That said, from reading the forums, the dev team seems chronically understaffed to the point that some of them are less than polite to users. This worries me a bit. If anyone has been looking…

> That said, from reading the forums, the dev team seems chronically understaffed to the point that some of them are less than polite to users. Are referring to threads on BlenderArtists where users regularly give hell to Krita developers? :)

No, I haven't seen those. I meant their own forums. It sounds like they've been getting a lot of crap somewhere, and their patience seems to have been worn pretty thin.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#126

Post by Joeboy »

prokoudine wrote: post #123
Joeboy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But both of these are things that are fixed with Single Window Mode (which it's clear you know about). They aren't entirely gone though. Eg. if I find my chosen font in the font selector, click it or press enter to select it, and continue typing I'll end up with "Nimbus Sans Lsomerandomtext" in the font selection box. Another example - the default shortcut for "Show / hide docks" is Tab, which is also the shortcut…

> Despite my whining... The thing with complaints is... Personally I'm prepared to handle a lot of that, even trash talking. But only if the user ends up providing a useful insight. Otherwise it's just a huge senseless loss of time for both parties.

The thing is, my whining isn't really directed at you or the GIMP's devs, it's directed at people who blame any complaints about the UI on Photoshop users or whatever. It sounds like you understand that the program isn't perfect and you're focused on making it better, which is obviously great.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#127

Post by prokoudine »

aarontyree wrote: post #8
janvdberg wrote: post #2

Great stuff. I'm looking forward to 2.10. GIMP is my tool when I want to edit photos or create Christmas cards. Even though I hear this quote ringing in my ear, and I can't seem to shake it, mainly because of who said it: "Yet I think that a few programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, will always be superior to competitors like the Gimp—for some reason, I really don’t know why! I’m quite willing to pay good money for real…

I wonder sometimes if the reason GIMP development doesn't surpass other options is simply not having enough developers, having a user base that is more art centered than programming centered, and having a somewhat bottlenecked development culture. These could just be perceptions. I am hoping that when the transition to GEGL is fully implemented, there will be an acceleration. Its hard to use it for serious work. The…

Aaron, basically you are looking at a combination of factors:

— a huge momentum that Photoshop has accumulated over the decades;

— huge R&D and marketing budget at Adobe;

— whole businesses built around educating Adobe tools (think Envato et al.).

And the list goes on.

Which is why it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to "surpass other options". But it makes a hell of a sense to create a sensible sophisticated tool for a certain user base. Which is kinda what we do with GIMP, as much as time permits.

BTW, love your photos :)

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#128

Post by prokoudine »

nothis wrote: post #88
coldtea wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even though I hear this quote ringing in my ear, and I can't seem to shake it, mainly because of who said it 1) Photoshop had a 10+ year head start and tons of patents. 2) Adobe can pay programmers to work on it as their main and sole focus. GIMP is stuffed by volunteers. 3) Adobe can pay programmers to work on boring parts. OSS programmers tend to navigate to the "glorious" and "fun" parts. 4) Adobe has extensive…

GTK is probably the main reason Gimp isn't a serious competitor in professional work, then. I can imagine what monumental task it must be to maintain a cross-platform GUI toolkit, but it's IMO the single most important aspect of Gimp. Let's face it, all the features are there. Maybe 5% of Photoshop's deep ocean of features is actually used by the average user, Gimp can provide almost the complete functionality. Some…

> Let's face it, all the features are there.

You really should prepare for a ton of bricks about to crush you down as people discover that you think adjustment layers, layer effects, or CMYK support is "5% of Photoshop's deep ocean of features" :)

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#129

Post by uabstraction »

mathw wrote: post #34
Freak_NL wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why stick with such an old codebase? Because it works and is a full-featured mature product. Nothing stops anyone from starting a new project based on modern insights and try to become the next GIMP, but such an endeavour does not imply that this project should simply stop its development. The GIMP is used by a lot of people in their daily work or for personal projects. It's free, it works, and most crucially, it's…

There's a push by some GNOME community people to get a good story going for using Rust with GNOME tech, which could be applied to GIMP, being based also on GObject and GTK+. Hopefully that will work out.

While this would be awesome (and progress is underway), what GTK+ needs even more than additional language bindings is documentation and literature. I considered Rust for my current project, but passed it on due to the frontier nature of the GTK+ Rust bindings. I ended up using C++ instead, and even there the documentation is extremely limited. You get a basic intro that shows the most trivial use of the important widgets, and a class/api reference, and that's it. There are no books that I'm aware of that cover GTK3 (forget about GTKmm-3), client side decorations, or theming, and GTK4 is right around the corner.

With the current state of documentation, learning GTK+ is impossible unless you are willing to dive into dozens of other people's projects in multiple programming languages to figure out how all the pieces come together. The lack of literature also makes it hard to know the difference between good, idiomatic constructs (within the context of Gobject/GTK+), and hacks which work by coincidence.

I get the feeling many GTK+ based projects suffer from lack of manpower, and I'm pretty sure this is why.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#130

Post by Keyframe »

rebuilder wrote: post #85
SunShiranui wrote: post #24

For those who are more interested in digital painting rather than image editing, I found Krita impressive in its capabilities and progress: https://krita.org I'm just an hobbyist, but I like having FOSS alternatives to Photoshop.

I paint for a living, and I much prefer Krita to Photoshop nowadays. It's really very good. For my purposes it matches Photoshop's features plus more, such as the guides (vanishing point, ellipses etc), symmetrical painting etc. That said, from reading the forums, the dev team seems chronically understaffed to the point that some of them are less than polite to users. This worries me a bit. If anyone has been looking…

Krita is awesome. Not only for painting, but for 2D animation as well. It does have issues, but it's definitely above and beyond usable.
Post reply on HN