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

Gimp is 25 years old today

gimp.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 271 posts

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#141

Post by jansan »

starky wrote: post #70
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 learned on software like PaintShop Pro and Photoshop, so I find GIMP to be incredibly frustrating software. I use it at work for editing and cropping photos since I don't have access to Adobe's suite and I'm fairly quick at those few tasks. But I just can't be bothered to learn anything more than that when I find it so frustrating and inefficient to use.

I am actually using PaintShop Pro 7.04 until today. It is good enough for 95% of my bitmap graphics work and it just feels so easy to use.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#142

Post by jansan »

neolog wrote: post #43

GIMP's name comes from Pulp Fiction. > It took us a little while to come up with the name. We knew we wanted an image manipulation program like Photoshop, but the name IMP sounded wrong. We also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs. At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a single word popped into my mind while we were tossing…

Did you know that the term for a female Gimp is "Glimpse"? :)

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#143

Post by asddubs »

pja wrote: post #137
ehsankia wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I still remember that time I tried selecting something and moving the pixels of my selection, rather than the whole layer in GIMP. I ended up having to google it and it was a 3-key combination shortcut. I don't remember how to do it in photoshop, but I'm pretty sure I didn't have to google "how to move a selection" that time I used it.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#144

Post by sildur »

throwawaylolx wrote: post #140
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.

Both, Photoshop and GIMP are really complex programs with steep learning curves. I tried to do some editing in Photoshop, since I now have a license, and I was totally lost. I tried to add some guides so I could draw a rectangle to cut a image. I tried dragging from the border of the image, as I do with GIMP, and no way. So I resorted back to GIMP, not wanting to spend half an hour trying to learn how to select and cut an image in Photoshop when I already know how to do it in GIMP.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#145

Post by moonbug »

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…

You'll be wanting Glimpse https://glimpse-editor.github.io/

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#146

Post by distances »

mastazi wrote: post #29
neolog wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't realistically use an app called "GIMP" at work even if I was personally comfortable with it. What kind of work do you do?

I'm not parent but probably they work in a corporate environment where you have to talk to someone about what apps you're going to have installed on your machine and get them approved. Based on my experience it's quite common at companies over a few hundreds employees. If the company is publicly traded, then you're almost guaranteed having to go through that because of regulatory concerns (I'm in Australia, it may va…

I'd find it very weird if there was some platform team member responsible for app installations who's not familiar with GIMP.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#147

Post by ngold »

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.

Been using gimp for 20 years, every couple years I try and fail to do even the most basic stuff in photoshop. Then I give up and go back to gimp.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#148

Post by coolhand2120 »

Kid: "I want Photoshop!" Dad: "We already have a Photoshop at home!" Photoshop at home: GIMP

And what a great name for this program.

We're always looking to replace Photoshop with a non subscription program, and I've tried to use GIMP many times. Every time I remind myself that GIMP is a worthless heap of garbage. For a FOSS program to have such design problems for as long as it has shows that the people in charge of the project are overly opinionated about how THEY think a Photoshop clone should be.

GIMP can only be a Photoshop clone. To the extent it is like Photoshop it wins. It is however nothing like Photoshop. They go far out of their way to make it not like Photoshop. Even when every other ANYTHING editing program UX uses the same behaviors, GIMP manages to invent some new totally stupid UX. And I do not use the S word there lightly. It's almost as if they had a meeting to determine what the worst UX was and picked that one.

GIMP is an example of how FOSS can fail and be worse than useless to the rest of the open source community. We would likely have some sort of FOSS Photoshop clone if GIMP wasn't there. If there was a worldwide vote to end a single FOSS project, I suspect GIMP would be in the top 5 list.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#149

Post by pja »

asddubs wrote: post #143
pja wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I still remember that time I tried selecting something and moving the pixels of my selection, rather than the whole layer in GIMP. I ended up having to google it and it was a 3-key combination shortcut. I don't remember how to do it in photoshop, but I'm pretty sure I didn't have to google "how to move a selection" that time I used it.

Fair. I think you’re expected to float the selection into a new layer and then move the layer, but this is such a common operation for people to want that it ought to be directly available from the Move tool.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#150

Post by LaputanMachine »

ThePadawan wrote: post #129
mkl wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also use a 4 bit e-ink display, and there are sometimes large areas of the same color where you can't see any details. After several hours of tweaking I managed to improve the quality, but it's still not perfect.

Do you have some tips / links that could help me improve the dithering even further?

Post reply on HN