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Gimp is 25 years old today

gimp.org

161–170 of 271 posts

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#161
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is how I've been doing it since forever and and at the very least didn't have to Google it.

I did not know another way existed... which also just illustrates the point.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between it's derogatory and sexual definitions, I can't realistically use an app called "GIMP" at work even if I was personally comfortable with it. If you're in a similar position, try Glimpse. https://glimpse-editor.github.io/

Meh. Try living in Norway and explaining to your boss about how you had a bug in your poo (bash). (Ambiguity grows exponentially the number of languages you switch between, meaning the possibility for innuendo does too =P)

Hahaha this is so funny!

- What are you writing?

- I'm writing a poo script

- have you tried laxatives?

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#163
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 just can't think of anything else I've had this kind of relationship with - other tools, I either master, or I move on from. GIMP is an odd one.

I feel the same about Latex

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having a single rapid workflow for saving an edited PNG. You mean instead of two rapid workflows? 1. File -> Overwrite Existing .png. First time it is used, there is prompting. After that, no prompting. Has no hotkey. 2. Or use Export As, which has a Shift-Ctrl-E hotkey. The first time you use Export As, there is prompting. But after the first use, the "Overwrite Existing .png" menu item (for workflow 1) disappears…

Thanks. I feel stupid now. I guess I would have expected this to be called “save”?

Not same thing, Save implies you want to save the work in progress, so xcf typically (thats the gimp project format, so you can do things like undo stuff etc).

Export is well export "Take this project and make it format with quality" settings.

It's the way many print/graphics packages split it conceptually.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#165
I love GIMP! Never used adobe stuff, so I don't really have anything to compare it to; but I cannot imagine in what sense Photoshop can be much better than that.

Still, there are some improvements that I yearn for GIMP that are not likely to ever be considered. Everybody seems so intent to make a tool for dealing with photos and synthetic color images, to the detriment of other kinds of images. For example, in scientific imaging, you would need to deal with floating-point valued pixels, and an arbitrary number of channels (more than 3 or 4). If you work with images coming from microscopy or satellite images, then every pixel typically has a lot of spectral bands that cannot often be reduced naturally to RGB, but you'd still want to map them in an arbitrary way and edit them in GIMP. This is far from being possible today.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#166

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…

> They go far out of their way to make it not like Photoshop.

That is some serious analytical thinking on your part. Congrats! :D

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#167
Do you know Photopea.com. Coded over the course of five years by ONE developer, runs in your browser, and it is basically a full-fledged Photoshop (at least for casual users, anyway). Plus it's free (ad-supported) and requires no registration.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#169
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.

Audacity has this in spades. Every annoying thing has a bizarre undiscoverable keystroke to invoke a sensible not-broken alternative.

Why they don't make the reasonable implementations the first class defaults is way beyond me... (I haven't read the mailing list/bug report threads enough to find out, if someone has insight I'd love to know. It's like they know something is what people don't want to do 99.9% of the time, they fix it, then they hide the fix; ie deleting some audio without shifting everything over - I have never wanted to shift things on delete. Not once, never. Not a single time. Why is that default?)

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#170
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.

This looks like another instance of "I don't know how to use gimp, but I know how to use photoshop, therefore gimp is a very bizarre tool."

I'm pretty fluent in Gimp, and I only ever use Photoshop out of necessity, and I'm always totally lost when I need to do that.

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