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GIMP – 2016 in review

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Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#141

Post by boudewijnrempt »

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…

Understaffed is an understatement. We have been able to fund one full-time developer, Dmitry, for the fourth year now. I am the maintainer, and I'm currently working full-time on Krita because I got burned out on my paid job, but that's not really funded. There are a few other people who help answering questions and triaging bug reports and things -- and that is it.

We try to keep up on tumblr, reddit, twitter, facebook, the forums, email, irc, phone calls even! We love our users, we love what our users are doing (see https://krita.org/en/item/made-with-krita-2016-the-krita-art...), but it sometimes gets very hard to deal with some people :-( I want to help them, but I cannot fix Ugee's drivers, and I want to help, but I also need to find time to code...

There are just too few people helping out; too few people who remember that Krita is an open source project, that it's really easy to start hacking on it, and that it's really easy to start helping out with helping others and doing bug triaging.

We might have done too good a job already: there are a lot of people who think that there's a big company with scores of employees and a professional help desk behind Krita. While it's me, Dmitry and a few others carrying the load.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#142

Post by Joeboy »

rebuilder wrote: post #140
Joeboy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alt-F + W will save your file back to the original file. (or File menu + "Overwrite {filename}". I complain a lot about GIMP's UI but I don't really see a problem here.

What if you don't want to overwrite the original?

Then the "Overwrite original" option is probably not for you.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#143

Post by bblough »

FreakyT wrote: post #104
LordWinstanley wrote: post #103

Three words why The Gimp isn't taken seriously by anyone who uses Photoshop: "Non-Destructive Editing" [Oh yes. The interface is awful, too]

> The interface is awful, too It's really a shame. As an example, it's been more than a decade and they still haven't fixed the utterly absurd "layer boundaries" system that it has. There's a reason no other image editor does that, and it's because it makes no sense . (To elaborate, every layer in GIMP has a defined "boundary rectangle" which cannot be drawn outside of.)

I guess I'm in the minority, but not only does this behavior not bother me, for me it's a feature.

Most of the time, if I'm trying to draw outside the boundary, then it's because I've got the wrong layer selected. So it saves me from drawing on the wrong layer and then having to deal with trying to get the changes moved to the correct layer.

In cases where the above doesn't hold (i.e., I actually want to draw inside the smaller layer), then it's easy enough to expand the layer's size.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#144

Post by JoeAltmaier »

prokoudine wrote: post #119
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its certainly OK for a product to innovate, as GIMP has. But sometimes the differences are gratuitous. That doesn't help with GIMP adoption, because admit it, most folks have some exposure to Photoshop already. Further, GIMP suffers (as many mature products do) from a certain baroque-ness of feature. Its menus and features have grown from someplace less mature, to where they are. And it shows in the clumsy menus that…

> And it shows in the clumsy menus that make sense if you went along for the ride but for a 1st-timer are just confusing. Would you mind being a wee bit more specific? :)

Sure! Running a script is under 'Filters' for some reason. To undo a brush, that's under 'Windows' inexplicably. Filters like Feather and Distort are under 'Select'. Keyboard shortcuts are under 'Edit'. The Plugin Browser tool is under 'Help'

My favorite: 'File' has 'Open' above 'Open as Layers', as if you'd more commonly want to destroy all your image layer info when opening an image file. In fact, with 'flatten' there's no need for 'Open' at all?

These things maybe made some sense at some time, who knows. But now, its like a blender went through the menus and scattered features at random.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#145

Post by edgarvaldes »

boudewijnrempt wrote: post #141
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…

Understaffed is an understatement. We have been able to fund one full-time developer, Dmitry, for the fourth year now. I am the maintainer, and I'm currently working full-time on Krita because I got burned out on my paid job, but that's not really funded. There are a few other people who help answering questions and triaging bug reports and things -- and that is it. We try to keep up on tumblr, reddit, twitter, faceb…

Krita is an amazing piece of software, and always evolving. Kudos to the whole team.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#146

Post by klodolph »

prokoudine wrote: post #128
nothis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" :)

16-bit, Lab, good text support…

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#147

Post by xemdetia »

chris_wot wrote: post #107
RUG3Y wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Gimp and Inkscape. The Gimp vs Photoshop debate is irrelevant to me because I can't afford Photoshop - it's Gimp or nothing for me.

Same here, but I am now genuinely interested to know what advantage Photoshop has over The Gimp nowadays?

The digital tablet based art is still a better experience on photoshop rather than gimp (I admit I have tried this version but not recently), but there are also more mature alternatives to that end. Photoshop also has some better features for working with 3D files natively that I don't think gimp has tried to tackle.

At this point for me I am doing Krita for art and photo manipulation, and Inkscape for vector. Krita has really come a long way recently and works well on Windows as well as Linux. So far I have enjoyed working with many files at once in Krita and some of the live edit things (crop/selection sort of stuff) feels a bit nicer.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#148

Post by aceperry »

This is a pleasant surprise, because I've noticed that newer versions haven't been coming too often. I use GIMP on both windows and linux and it seems like the windows version has stagnated, could be the same situation for linux as well. Not that it matters since I'm not really a graphics/UI person. And most of the time that I fire up GIMP, it's for very simple things, or else I'm forced to google how to do things. I took a course on photoshop, where I followed all of the steps to do the projects and exercises. But unless you use these programs constantly, you're not going to remember how things are done. So GIMP is fine for my uses and suits me well because it's free. I understand there's a free version of photoshop (or whatever it's called) that can do most of what I use GIMP for, but that's only available on Windows, so I stick with GIMP because I'm using linux most of the time.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#149

Post by buzzybee »

a300600st wrote: post #131
Blaaguuu wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it still mostly comes down to usability. A big part of it is probably that I just have more experience with Photoshop, and if I really forced myself to use The GIMP more, it might grow on me... But when I am working in Photoshop I always feel incredibly productive, where as whenever I have to use The GIMP, I feel like the interface is constantly fighting against me, trying to keep me from getting my work done…

That's interesting because I feel the same but about Photoshop - having learned editing on Gimp. I'm curious to hear from someone who knows both well.

I used to use pirated PS as a teenager, and switched to Gimp later on. My experience has consistently been: for basic selection masking, color changes, and minor adjustments(i.e. things you would typically do to photos), they're equivalents. For graphic design, Gimp lacks in certain features that add flexibility; the text tool is not as robust, and there isn't a direct equivalent to effects layers. The UI of Gimp tends to have more "irritating adjustment" involved and forces more early commitment. And PS has a much deeper set of content creation options - especially so in the later versions, which I've read about but haven't used.

I'm interested in learning Krita next. Krita is more explicitly an creation app but it also bleeds into other spaces in its new versions as it accumulates more features. It's gained animation tools, and its interface more closely resembles the classic PS look. Krita has a lot of velocity which makes me think it may surpass Gimp as an all-rounder in time.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#150

Post by DonHopkins »

prokoudine wrote: post #112
DonHopkins wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's as if some of the core GIMP developers and evangelists wear the fact that they have never ever used or know anything about Photoshop and never will as a badge of pride, and they are fanatically dedicated to never sullying themselves by ever even looking at Photoshop or especially listening to any of the complaints from Photoshop users. Any changes to GIMP that make it more like Photoshop, or acknowledgement that…

> Any changes to GIMP that make it more like Photoshop, or acknowledgement that there's anything about Photoshop that GIMP should emulate, are considered anathema. Not really, no. Whenever people ask us to do smth like what Photoshop does, all we ask back is to explain why it is better. Perhaps you should answer that question every once in a while?

Have you actually used Photoshop yourself, or spent any time watching the millions of free Photoshop tutorial videos available on youtube? If not, then why not?

And also: why throw down the gauntlet about never changing the name from GIMP, unless your point is to offend people for being "politically correct", and marginalize your project so nobody will ever consider using it in a professional context, on purpose?

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/gimp

gimp (ɡɪmp) n

1. offensive slang US and Canadian a physically disabled person, esp one who is lame

2. slang a sexual fetishist who likes to be dominated and who dresses in a leather or rubber body suit with mask, zips, and chains

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