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Gimp is 25 years old today

gimp.org

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Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#131

Post by mkl »

0x4a42 wrote: post #67
dwiash wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Krita. I think it's way better than GIMP

Krita is a painting app comparable to Corel Painter. You can't compare it with GIMP or Photoshop.

Yes you can. I've done a lot of photo editing in Krita. My cameras output 12-bit raw images, which for a long time GIMP could only work with by truncating to 8-bit. Krita has been able to work with higher bit depths for a long time.

People do photo editing in Krita just like people do painting in Photoshop. Both tools can do both, as can GIMP, it's just that most of Krita's new features of the last few years have been focused on painting.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#132

Post by Phlogistique »

ThePadawan wrote: post #103
tartoran wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gimp has script fu / python / scheme. It is quite capable of automating and generating images. Gimp is the kind of software you may hate at first but then start to love it for how extensible friendly it is.

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…

I did this very long ago. It's possible but the documentation was nearly non-existant, it took me a long time to figure it out.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#133

Post by dvirsky »

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…

Creating an open source desktop app tends to require a different set of skills than what most open source developers have, and getting top notch UX designers and product managers to work on an open source project. When open source developers work on servers, networking, frameworks, etc - they can do top notch work and be their own PMs, it's much much harder for desktop software.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#134

Post by tannhaeuser »

Slightly O/T but have F/OSS graphic apps gotten worse over time? Sitting in front of Inkscape on Ubuntu 20.04 and the thing crashes, wouldn't display guides, wouldn't snap, is overloaded with controls to leave a poststamp-sized canvas for your actual work on a notebook, has miniscule icons not really helpful for revealing functionality, and even lacks icons for basic actions so you're basically clicking on black borders to hope to get some actions back. Guess I have to manually calculate and edit SVGs when I just wanted to construct really simple tangents and typographic Bezier curves. Or is it Ubuntu 20.04 and gnome which just suck? It has recently improved a little bit at least, but is bordering on the unusable for me. What is the recommendation for a Linux workstation OS that is at least designed to run the precious few graphic apps we have? I used to run FreeBSD in the 2000s, so that is an option, too, in the hope that FreeBSD will priorize support for running actual X11 apps rather than grand plans for tablet UIs from early 2010s left in a state of neither here nor there.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#135

Post by Ice_cream_suit »

"gimp in British English

NOUN slang 1. US and Canadian offensive

a physically disabled person, esp one who has difficulty walking

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

Collins English Dictionary. "

Gimp badly needs help from people with expertise in UI, UX and naming.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#137

Post by pja »

ehsankia wrote: post #125
megameter wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can they though? I'll admit it's a long time since I've sat in front of a Photoshop window, but I remember it being just as complex to use.

Is this just partially a "what you're used to is easy & anything different is hard" thing?

What exactly makes Photoshop easier to use in your opinion? This is a genuine question - I see this asserted so often, like it's a truism, but nobody ever seems to give specific examples.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#139

Post by distances »

warent wrote: post #88

I used Gimp every so often over the past few years and always loved it... until just about a month ago when I finally tried photoshop for the first time. I really don't like Adobe, but photoshop just blows gimp out of the water. anything you want to do in gimp, you can do in photoshop in a fraction of the time and with higher quality. It makes me feel like I've been unknowingly torturing myself for years

I have had to work on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. One of the GIMP strengths is that I can just install it and do the small task I need to. No hassle with compatibilities and requesting licenses and whatever. Just get it and go.

I'm a developer and my editing needs are very modest. GIMP just feels like the right tool. I've heard lots of praise for Krita too though, should try that out too.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#140

Post by throwawaylolx »

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…

I only ever use GIMP out of necessity and when I do I can't wait to stop using it. I never had a pleasant experience using GIMP and it almost never failed to frustrate me. Just yesterday I had to use it, and this is what my search history looked like: https://i.imgur.com/ZP3U17i.png . I'm pretty fluent in Photoshop and I've also begrudgingly used GIMP for many years. It's a very bizarre tool.
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