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Why GIMP is Inadequate

troy-sobotka.blogspot.com

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Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#71

Post by froydnj »

billhasmail wrote: post #15

"Important progress towards high bit-depth and non-destructive editing in GIMP has been made. Most color operations in GIMP are now ported to the powerful graph based image processing framework GEGL, meaning that the internal processing is being done in 32bit floating point linear light RGBA. By default the legacy 8bit code paths are still used, but a curious user can turn on the use of GEGL for the color operations…

I think you're illustrating the point of the author: such an option should be the default. The user shouldn't have to go looking for it.

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#72

Post by ominous_prime »

To everyone who is replying to the 8bit issue by mentioning GEGL - Have you actually used it in a professional capacity?

As a (now part-time) professional photographer, I have evaluated GIMP; and as a FOSS advocate I really wanted it to work. The performance issues the article mentions are with reasonable sized images at only 8 bits, but editing a 16bit, 25MP image wasn't just slow, it was unusable. Photoshop however, runs in near real time at these image sizes. Even automating a GEGL filter to run on a series of a few hundred images would take long enough that I couldn't maintain a usable workflow.

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#73

Post by ghaff »

damncabbage wrote: post #35
joakin wrote: post #9

I expected this to be a rant or flame, but in fact he has described wonderfully what needs to be said. Besides from all this pro features that GIMP lacks, in my opinion its biggest flaw its the UI. Its poor and raw, and makes sense if you are a programmer... Mainly this is what keeps it far from the regular users I know. Hope It doesnt die, its a very good open source multiplatform editing tool...

I, hand on my heart, swear that, as a programmer, I don't think GIMP's UI makes a jot of sense. A week away from GIMP to mess with Photoshop had me converted after the first couple of days, sadly. Photoshop is both a blessing and a curse for OSS. (A blessing that it's a nice shiny target. A curse in that the target is half-way to the moon.)

And the fact of the matter is that Photoshop has far from the world's greatest UI either (for one of the usual reasons--so much stuff has been incrementally added over time) so saying a UI is bad compared to Photoshop really is pretty damning. Contrast with Lightroom which, although I disagree with one or two of the fundamental design decisions, was coherently designed from the ground up.

The situation with The GIMP is really a lot like OpenOffice on a smaller scale. Lots of people would like a free image editing program but it's a big undertaking to produce something that's competitive with the proprietary alternatives and there's no commercial organization that sees benefit in supporting such an effort.

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#74

Post by jarek »

webuiarchitect wrote: post #3
healthyhippo wrote: post #2

I don't know much about photo editing, but I've used Gimp for a little while along with Inkscape for editing. I use it for simple stuff- drop shadows, minor logo work, etc. Is there a noticeable difference vs. photoshop on that level?

Yes, the noticeable difference is Gimp sucks!! Hats off to the Gimp development team for pulling off so many features and above all having an open-source product out there. But the problem is PhotoShop has set the expectations way too high. And I'm afraid, a non-commercial product will never be able reach that level.

Just because Photoshop might have set the bar high doesn't mean the GIMP "sucks!!".

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#75

Post by yesimahuman »

joakin wrote: post #9

I expected this to be a rant or flame, but in fact he has described wonderfully what needs to be said. Besides from all this pro features that GIMP lacks, in my opinion its biggest flaw its the UI. Its poor and raw, and makes sense if you are a programmer... Mainly this is what keeps it far from the regular users I know. Hope It doesnt die, its a very good open source multiplatform editing tool...

I honestly don't see what the big deal is. Comparing GIMP usability to Photoshop usability only makes sense if you have no experience with either. Many people say GIMP is difficult yet forget they had a hard time learning Photoshop to begin with.

I personally find Photoshop daunting and GIMP pretty easy to use for most of what I need.

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#76

Post by rbanffy »

davidw wrote: post #67
rbanffy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. And having progress per se is what proprietary software like Photoshop has to do in order to sell more licenses. Why would you buy the most recent CS version if Photoshop 6 was certainly good enough? The logic is different. GIMP does not have to evolve in order to survive. It's open and if you need it doing something it doesn't, you can hire a developer to do it. The fact nobody does it is because it's good e…

+1, although, to be correct, economically "the fact nobody does it" means the cost is higher than the benefit. You could purchase a copy of photoshop for much cheaper than the cost of hiring a good developer for a week. Open source economics are tricky.

> You could purchase a copy of photoshop for much cheaper than the cost of hiring a good developer for a week.

True. That's why pooling resources is such a good idea. If you need a feature that's missing from Photoshop, you can find other people who need that feature (or would like to have it) and pool resources to hire someone to do it in GIMP. If you have a company with 10 seats using Photoshop, it may start to become cheaper to hire a GIMP developer than providing all employees with a Photoshop license (and Adobe must have corporate licenses exactly to counter that reasoning)

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#77

Post by davidw »

rbanffy wrote: post #76
davidw wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1, although, to be correct, economically "the fact nobody does it" means the cost is higher than the benefit. You could purchase a copy of photoshop for much cheaper than the cost of hiring a good developer for a week. Open source economics are tricky.

> You could purchase a copy of photoshop for much cheaper than the cost of hiring a good developer for a week. True. That's why pooling resources is such a good idea. If you need a feature that's missing from Photoshop, you can find other people who need that feature (or would like to have it) and pool resources to hire someone to do it in GIMP. If you have a company with 10 seats using Photoshop, it may start to bec…

Yes, this sort of thing makes it interesting (and tricky). For 'common features', buying commercial products is a good, and really simple way of pooling resources. You buy the product that has invested in the features you want. When you start talking about one-off types of things, or special, advanced features, open source can start to look a whole lot more competitive, especially since there is no monopoly on who is going to do the work.

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#78

Post by joakin »

yesimahuman wrote: post #75
joakin wrote: post #9

I expected this to be a rant or flame, but in fact he has described wonderfully what needs to be said. Besides from all this pro features that GIMP lacks, in my opinion its biggest flaw its the UI. Its poor and raw, and makes sense if you are a programmer... Mainly this is what keeps it far from the regular users I know. Hope It doesnt die, its a very good open source multiplatform editing tool...

I honestly don't see what the big deal is. Comparing GIMP usability to Photoshop usability only makes sense if you have no experience with either . Many people say GIMP is difficult yet forget they had a hard time learning Photoshop to begin with. I personally find Photoshop daunting and GIMP pretty easy to use for most of what I need.

I never mentioned PS in my response, for me they are different and both of them are necessary.

In fact, from a year now, I always use Gimp as my image editing program after 4 years of PS, and I hope it doesnt die because it would leave me without choices...

This said, we cannot ignore the flaws on the UI, not comparing them to photoshop, but on their own. User life could be eased a lot fixing lots of little quirks the UI has.

Saying Gimp is pretty easy to use doesnt mean its UI could be improved a lot

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#79

Post by NIL8 »

What shocks me is the lack of competition in this field in the year 2011. Why are we still talking about choosing between GIMP or Photoshop? I know there are other programs out there that some people will claim they prefer over GIMP or PS, but for most of the planet it's GIMP or PS.

Is the lack of competition due to the magnitude of such a programming endeavor or is it something else like patents? Any idea?

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#80

Post by samlevine »

NIL8 wrote: post #79

What shocks me is the lack of competition in this field in the year 2011. Why are we still talking about choosing between GIMP or Photoshop? I know there are other programs out there that some people will claim they prefer over GIMP or PS, but for most of the planet it's GIMP or PS. Is the lack of competition due to the magnitude of such a programming endeavor or is it something else like patents? Any idea?

I've been using Pixelmator for a few months now (GIMP works great in Linux but I've found it's performance in OS X to be rather poor). It's still closed source software like PS (even if it does use open source libraries), but it's fast enough and gets the job done (my needs are really meager).

The reason why GIMP doesn't have more developers is easy: Programmers don't have any itch to scratch at this point and there isn't currently a big market for prosumer image tools (most folks use PS one way or the other, paid or pirated).

If Adobe managed to somehow magically make piracy of their software impossible I think it's likely that you'd see a number of free and non-free products in strong competition with Photoshop Elements.

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