Proves the value of managers breathing down everyone’s necks. It’s a good tool but hasn’t achieved all that much over 27 years.
no - Adobe has GUI and process Software Patents by the boatload for Photoshop.
GIMP Turns 27
61–70 of 310 posts
Re: GIMP Turns 27
#62If they would just copy Photoshop... Even the 2000 version of Photoshop.
That would please me-- in Gimp I have to think carefully about every command. It seems like every choice for a default operation is the non-intuitive one.
Re: GIMP Turns 27
#63Re: GIMP Turns 27
#64Still no adjustment layers, still no layer styles. It’s so easy to just critique away…but really? Really? Those are just absolutely essential image editing software features. What have they been prioritizing ahead of that?
They've been working on this for like a decade, in a sense. They're rewriting the core as a library, GEGL, which supports non-destructive editing as well as other long-requested features. My impression is GEGL is largely done; the remaining work is to port GIMP to it. Realizing these gains for non-destructive editing is planned for v3.2, which is probably years away still. The other major initiative since forever has…
Sorry, come again? Porting to GTK 3? GTK 4 has been out for years.
Re: GIMP Turns 27
#65> To celebrate [...] this nice birthday illustration (fully drawn within GIMP [...]
There's some sort of weird inferiority complex when your graphics software is 27 years old and you're still saying 'look we used it for one of our website assets.' It's like telling people at the birthday party that you dressed yourself.
I find it equally strange that there are almost no screenshots on the website, outside of the docs and tutorial section, and those tend to be partial screenshots for highly specific exemplar purposes. There are good screenshots in the Release Notes, but that's not somewhere new users are likely to head to immediately. The landing page declares it's great for 'High Quality Photo Manipulation, Original Artwork Creation, Graphic Design Elements, Programming Algorithms' - but none of these categories lead to their own pages full of compelling examples.
I get that GIMPists are very proud of how community-driven it is, but the quality is extremely variable to the point of weakening the project. Having good politics/aspirations is very important, but before you can turn people into contributors you need to turn them into enthusiastic users. GIMP could learn a bit from the commercial products it competes with about how to present itself to the rest of the world.
Re: GIMP Turns 27
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's evident. I've used the tool periodically and I can't think of anything that's improved in the last 10 years. I think it actually got worse when they made all the icons greyscale and hid some under others. You still have 3 different tools for moving, resizing, and rotating when every other program has them all in one.
It's disappointed me as well over the past 5-10 years. The switch from save->export seemed arbitrary and pointless. And the last time I tried putting text into an image with their text editing tool, the widget was so buggy I gave up - and that was in a release that shipped in debian stable at the time. But it's just a bummer, not a source of anger/furor/vitriol for the project. I don't get why so many folks are talki…
Oh that particular change drives me crazy. It's not the switch per se, it's the lecture I receive when I slip up and use the muscle-memory procedure of File->Save As with a .tif extension, like I did for the first decade of using GIMP. The software has quite clearly identified what I'm trying to do, so refusing to comply and forcing me to jump through an arbitrary hoop is akin to jeering the words "You didn't say 'Simon Says'"!
The new text widget has improved recently, and it's certainly an improvement on the original.
It's still a great piece of software, and I'm very grateful that it exists, but when I use it, it's generally a version from the 2.4 series, because it suits my workflow better. (When there's no image open the older versions just have a small unobtrusive toolbox window open, which you can use as a drop target for files picked from a file browser; the newer versions have a large empty window which gets in the way.)
[For those who say "fork it yourself", I have contributed to development in the distant past - dithered gradients were my addition, and I wrote a plugin (subsequently adopted by someone in Japan but long-since abandoned) for separating RGB images to CMYK layers, and saving them as a CMYK TIFF. But despite briefly maintaining a PPA with a patched version without the "no image open" window I quickly decided life was too short to spend my hobby time trying to hold back that particular tide.]
Re: GIMP Turns 27
#67Still no adjustment layers, still no layer styles. It’s so easy to just critique away…but really? Really? Those are just absolutely essential image editing software features. What have they been prioritizing ahead of that?
At this point I don’t think it’s controversial to say that this project existing has harmed creative tools on Linux. If another project had become the de-facto we’d have all those basic features. Instead we’re stuck with something that almost provides the basics ok, because it exists people treat it like a solved problem, and it has such a history no one’s allowed to say it just frankly isn’t usable for it’s one job.
In some ways the de facto standard now is http://www.photopea.com in a browser.
Re: GIMP Turns 27
#68Gimp is great, just wished they could have the same support for improving UX as Blender and Krita for instance.
But still amazing, remember how things were different 27 years ago.
Re: GIMP Turns 27
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Does it mean that to share criticism you must be able to build it? No. I've reported a lot of tickets/feature requests for a lot of projects that seemed to be taken good. But criticism that seems entitled is rarely appreciated, and surprise about some obviously, severely underfunded project missing features is not very impressive neither. There is a shitload of other missing features OP could have mentioned on this…
I appreciate what you’re saying. Do you mind if I dig into something a wee bit? Because us engineering types are often a bit communicatively tone deaf. What specifically in the comment suggests a sense of entitlement? For me, I see none. I see a, “as an expert user, it’s surprising that such an important feature has been missing forever and I would like to criticize that.” Edit: I’m not allowed to reply to your respo…
Whoops, I edited to state that OP didn't feel entitled to me in the meantime. Sorry for this. It's more the "surprise about some obviously, severely underfunded project missing features is not very impressive" part. To be clear, I'm almost 100% sure the OP comment was written with good intent.
I don't work on the Gimp, I've read developers working on it at length, I think as a developer reading this comment I would be thinking "Well, we do what we can". Jehan, who wrote the post, contributes to the Gimp thanks to donations to his Ze Marmot project, his team cannot pay itself very well. They are going out of their way improving the Gimp anyway, indeed prioritizing features they need the most most certainly. But you can do only so much.
It might just be a matter of form/formulation. But it matters, because people won't take the time analyzing a comment for several minutes to completely put themselves in the commenter's shoes.
edit: you can respond by clicking on the "X minutes ago" link I think, but I saw your edit :-)
Re: GIMP Turns 27
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've been working on this for like a decade, in a sense. They're rewriting the core as a library, GEGL, which supports non-destructive editing as well as other long-requested features. My impression is GEGL is largely done; the remaining work is to port GIMP to it. Realizing these gains for non-destructive editing is planned for v3.2, which is probably years away still. The other major initiative since forever has…
Sorry, come again? Porting to GTK 3? GTK 4 has been out for years.
Yes, which means GTK3 is finally a stable target! ;)
I'm fully aware that (a) I'm a dinosaur, and (b) not the target audience of the GTK project in its current form, but I still miss things like the tear-off menus, and the tab-completion and wildcard filtering in the file dialog (without the current keyboard focus complications) from GTK1.2!