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GIMP Turns 27

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Re: GIMP Turns 27

#301

Post by wellanyway »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #119

Man, who would've guessed I'd be tempted to flag a post about GIMP. The level of vitriol in these comments is truly impressive...

Gimp team members, especially the person in charge of their publicity efforts, were notorious for finding any and all discussions about GIMP on the internet and telling people to go **** themselves should any improvements be suggested or any criticism uttered. Have you tried to raise a bug for them? I did and I saw dozens of others do it, only to end up lectured about how much of a deficient human beings we were for not getting the greatness of GIMP.

They have run a UX brainstorm and then threw out all of the input that has been provided to them in good faith by hundreds of people.

Than there's the case of team's stubborn insistence on not changing the name.

GIMP team has been an active participant in the state of affairs that leads to threads like these.

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#302

Post by npteljes »

npteljes wrote: post #245
wetpaws wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Krita is better in any conceivable way.

They even have a healing tool I like to use: https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/tools/smart_patch... Nice.

EDIT: I tried the heal tool, it's pretty shit :( Seems to clone random parts which kind of fit, but the tool edges are always visible. Resynthesizer for GIMP works much better (and Adobe's stuff works very well of course).

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#303

Post by wankle »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #262
wankle wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this project existing has harmed creative tools on Linux If anything, GIMP has brought more people to Linux from the dark side.

Not anyone who needs to edit images in a professional sense. They arrive, try GIMP because they’re told it’s a Photoshop alternative then leave when they see the lack of normal features. It’s actually even bad for students because to create with GIMP you have to do early 90s image editing workflows which are no longer used in real jobs.

A lot of people including me from time to time do need to deal with some image editing at work and do not need Photoshop (nor have I ever used Photoshop) and GIMP's powerful tools more than fill this need.

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#305

Post by midoridensha »

robinsonb5 wrote: post #286
midoridensha wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the big problems with so much open-source/Free software: there's a lot of fragmentation, and competition between projects reduces mindshare and developer resources (which were already scarce). So as a result, these projects never become all that popular. There's a few counter-examples of truly exemplary FOSS software that achieved a dominant position and managed to avoid too much fragmentation so that…

It's somewhat ironic that you've included X.org in that list given (a) its history, and (b) how much time and effort has been spent in recent years on creating something to replace it. You're right that fragmentation can be an issue - but it's often a people problem, not a technical problem: if I have strong feelings on how a particular piece of software should work, and it's made clear that the project leads disagre…

>It's somewhat ironic that you've included X.org in that list given (a) its history, and (b) how much time and effort has been spent in recent years on creating something to replace it.

There's nothing "ironic" about it at all. For many, many years, X.org was the only real display server that anyone used, after they all abandoned XFree86 for good reason. Wayland didn't come about until later, and even then, *it was made by the same people*. It was never a competing project.

>if I have strong feelings on how a particular piece of software should work, and it's made clear that the project leads disagree and any patch to implement such will be rejected

This is understandable, but frequently not the case. The KDE/Gnome fiasco, for instance, all started because of an argument about a license.

>merely an observation that when people work on project for the enjoyment of it, rather than for a living

Here again, it's frequently not the case. In the KDE/Gnome fiasco, many of the devs there were employed full-time by companies like RedHat to work on it. So it was really political.

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#306

Post by Adj_and_Styles »

zulban wrote: post #55

GIMP is great, I use it all the time. I wish they would change their name so it could have more mainstream acceptance.

Non English speakers should have no such issue with the name and adoption in that population should be higher than English speakers. But is it? If similar usage, the problem is somewhere else.

From experience, the issues raised where total lack of CMYK, limited to 8 bit per channel,lack of even basic non destructive editing, crude paint engine, no healing tool, etc. Some have been solved partially or totally over the years, but too late for some users.

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#307

Post by ornel »

GIMP has been extremely useful over the years for all sorts of image processing tasks. Krita on the other hand, is the best for image composition (combining several layers) due to its non destructive filters. Imagemagick is great for scripted and complex workflows and large images. All my image needs are fulfilled by these three and it's great to have different tools

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#308

Post by midoridensha »

Sakos wrote: post #281
midoridensha wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the big problems with so much open-source/Free software: there's a lot of fragmentation, and competition between projects reduces mindshare and developer resources (which were already scarce). So as a result, these projects never become all that popular. There's a few counter-examples of truly exemplary FOSS software that achieved a dominant position and managed to avoid too much fragmentation so that…

You say that as if people would be working on the same project otherwise. Guaranteed if they aren't able to work on their competing project in the name of "solidarity", they probably wouldn't work on the other project instead. There are too many social and cultural barriers to being able to enact change in existing projects, which is why competing projects exist. People have different priorities, values, preferences,…

There were no social or cultural barriers when the KDE/Gnome war started. It was entirely over a licensing issue. Other than that, the two projects were largely very similar, except that Gnome insisted on using C instead of C++ (and then replicating all of C++'s features in C). It wasn't until later that the two really diverged, with KDE having the "make it as configurable as possible" philosophy and Gnome having the "we're UI experts and know what's best for you little users" philosophy, borrowed from Apple but without the well-funded team of real UI researchers.

Anyway, even with the different philosophy towards users, that could have been done in a single project (i.e., Gnome3 can be a KDE skin), or two closely-related projects (i.e., Gnome3 is a fork of Plasma but otherwise shares the same libraries), reducing a lot of duplicated effort. Instead, we now have 6 or more different desktop environments for Linux and potential new users look at the mess and ask, "WTF?". Or they try one and hate it, and when they ask how to switch to a different one to try it out, the answer is "reformat your hard drive and install this other distro that actually cares about that DE", or "follow this list of command-line instructions and hope it doesn't break because your distro doesn't care about supporting that DE".

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#309

Post by npteljes »

nullpilot wrote: post #276
npteljes wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the abstract stuff gallery! How do you go about creating one of these? I can't even imagine.

Thanks! In a way it's a mix of generative and manual art, I guess. It starts with gradients or noise. Afterwards it's layers upon layers of color mapping, filters, distortion, more noise, more gradients, etc. - Basically creating artifacts from lossy transforms/mappings/distorts/layer modes and then building those up again into an image. Rinse and repeat. Some examples of things I made use of: Colors > Levels. Mostly…

Thank you very much for the pointers! I just tried a bunch randomly, and got this result in under 5 minutes: https://imgur.com/a/4Tb4uWC

Fantastic stuff. I appreciate you typing it all out.

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#310

Post by nullpilot »

npteljes wrote: post #309
nullpilot wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! In a way it's a mix of generative and manual art, I guess. It starts with gradients or noise. Afterwards it's layers upon layers of color mapping, filters, distortion, more noise, more gradients, etc. - Basically creating artifacts from lossy transforms/mappings/distorts/layer modes and then building those up again into an image. Rinse and repeat. Some examples of things I made use of: Colors > Levels. Mostly…

Thank you very much for the pointers! I just tried a bunch randomly, and got this result in under 5 minutes: https://imgur.com/a/4Tb4uWC Fantastic stuff. I appreciate you typing it all out.

Very cool! And no problem at all, glad I could get you to experiment.
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