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Gimp is 25 years old today

gimp.org

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Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#121

Post by prokoudine »

throwawaygimp wrote: post #77

Very long time Gimp user, also photoshop user here. Full credit to all the hard working developers on it over the years. You should be proud of what you created. However. Gimp was always just slightly too good, mature, stable and complete, to justify alternative projects. Gimp IMHO is the reason we don't have a layered raster (& vector) editor in 2020 which can hold a candle to Photoshop. There have been attempts, bu…

The real reason is that making complicated software is hard, and few people have enough motivation to do that. Blaming lack of persistence on other software is a very strange take on dealing with this.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#122

Post by IshKebab »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #82

For me it's a case of being the worst open source image editor, except for all the others. The scripts always seem broken, the UI was a mess for a while on a Mac. The multi windowed system was great if the windowing manager expected that sort of thing and terrible otherwise. Ufraw integration seems an awful way of getting to edit raw files and I go years at a time without being able to get it working on a Mac. But it…

It's definitely worse than Krita.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#123

Post by prokoudine »

mushbino wrote: post #56

Is it possible to contribute to the user experience of GIMP? I've tried GIMP a number of times over the past 20 years and it's just totally illogical, imo. It would be great to have an open source alternative to an Adobe product that was more well thought through.

Of course it is possible. Talk to us :)

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#124

Post by mkl »

BuildTheRobots wrote: post #98
agumonkey wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny because GIMP is one of the tools I hate the most. It's really hard to describe how quickly I want to say no to just about everything that it does. I'm quite open[0] but I'd rather write perl script with imagemagik than use gimp. [0] i can love both emacs and vi and even ed, I've used just about any 2d/3d program ever

> It's funny because GIMP is one of the tools I hate the most. You've obviously not tried to replace Adobe Illustrator with Inkscape ;) (edit: a flippant comment backed by much frustration. If you're creating SVGs for laser cutting then the inability to nicely use mm as a unit of measure is infuriating.)

I use purely mm for most Inkscape projects (not for laser cutting, but some are for my plotter). Set the units in Document Properties and it just works, IME.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#125

Post by ehsankia »

megameter wrote: post #73
jes5199 wrote: post #14

GIMP is such a strange tool. I actually have used it, semi-frequently - since the 90s! The overall experience of using it has only changed a little in that time. And it gets the job done. I guess that makes it successful! What else has been so stable? But of all the software I have ever used, GIMP is the most difficult to learn. I memorized a few tutorials, this must have been around Y2K, to do the a couple things. A…

The way I would put it is: GIMP has features, not workflow. There are a lot of things that are possible, but not by combining the basic tools and metaphors in sensible ways: each time is more like diving into the command line options of a GNU tool, finding the exact thing, and if you really, really need to automate it, it goes in a script where it can be safely forgotten. Which is, certainly, a way of doing, but not…

Actually, the way I would put it is that GIMP is the perfect example of why companies hire UX designers. GIMP is textbook example of how software can technically have all the same features, but be insanely hard to use and utterly confusing to anyone without a guide. Compare it to Photoshop which does more or less the same things but anyone can naturally pick up and use.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#126

Post by prokoudine »

lionkor wrote: post #78
mushbino wrote: post #56

Is it possible to contribute to the user experience of GIMP? I've tried GIMP a number of times over the past 20 years and it's just totally illogical, imo. It would be great to have an open source alternative to an Adobe product that was more well thought through.

I dont know for sure, but I would expect this project to be run like vim - any drastic or useful UX changes lead to you getting told off. But I'm not sure, it could also be that in 25 years nobody ever tried to change the UI/UX.

Or you could ask us how we run the project. Or what we did about UX/UI. Or what we want to do with it.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#127

Post by prokoudine »

mastazi wrote: post #42

While I use GIMP all the time, I'm a bit out of the loop regarding its development community. I remember CMYK support was discussed as a future goal in the community a few years ago. Is it still planned? Or it was later abandoned?

Architecturally, CMYK can be added today. Someone would have to step up and do it.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#128

Post by prokoudine »

interfixus wrote: post #95

Always surprising to see the amount of ire that GIMP can reliably call forward in threads like this. I've used the thing privately and professionally for countless projects since 1997. Stuff for websites, photo material for several books, restauration work for museums and photo archives, colorizations, weirdo manipulations and just general fun. Have ventured into other software but always come back to GIMP, very quic…

Thank you :)

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#129

Post by ThePadawan »

mkl wrote: post #120
ThePadawan wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to automate a simple workflow (resize, reduce color to grayscale) using GIMP just last week. I would want to run this on ~100 files in a folder. This takes a few lines of calls to imagemagick/gm or ~10 lines of python + Pillow. Do you have any resources how to do this in GIMP? After googling for a good while, I could not for the life of me figure out how to even get started with this. I don't want to write an…

Why do you want to do it in GIMP? I like and use GIMP, but imagemagick sounds like the right tool for the job, and what I'd use there. For almost any batch processing, Python or bash-scripted imagemagick gets the job done. If you need some complex feature of a GIMP plugin, that's another story.

I simply found that GIMP produced very good results when dithering to 4bit grayscale (I'm converting images to be displayed on an e-ink display).

I'm sure I could get any other lib to produce the same results, but only after an hour of tweaking. That is what I ended up doing after all, because learning how to automate GIMP was harder.

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