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Switch from Photoshop to Gimp: Tips From a Pro

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Re: Switch from Photoshop to Gimp: Tips From a Pro

#121

Post by copergi »

eropple wrote: post #120
copergi wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He isn't using the functionality that Photoshop provides And since that is the same for the vast majority of photoshop users, he provided a super helpful guide for them. It does not say "how everyone can switch to gimp".

You have a long road to hoe before you claim so emphatically that that's true for the "vast majority" of Photoshop users. Photoshop is the 90/10 app to end all 90/10 apps. I do very straightforward digital art and manipulation and I'd put my head in an oven before trying to do it in GIMP, and I am not using anything complex.

I didn't say you would want to switch. I said most people use little photoshop functionality. If you think that is controversial, then I think you are delusional.

Re: Switch from Photoshop to Gimp: Tips From a Pro

#122

Post by oblio »

Silhouette wrote: post #118
oblio wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd so much rather have a platform like this, where the hardest part--the image engine--would be done by experts, and the apps themselves, the feature sets, the UIs, could then be built by hordes of amateurs. The naïveté of a budding hacker. Great UIs are done by experts too, young padawan.

Great UIs are done by experts too, young padawan. Yes, they are, but that doesn't preclude building the underlying data model and functionality as a common platform with shared tools. It also doesn't mean that building that platform and implementing a comprehensive range of functionality isn't a much more demanding task than building a UI on top if you've already got a good foundation. No doubt there is plenty of har…

I wasn't disagreeing with your vision, but rather with your dismissal of UIs as "amateur work".

And I'm not even a experience designer :)

Re: Switch from Photoshop to Gimp: Tips From a Pro

#123

Post by nitrogen »

jzzskijj wrote: post #119
nitrogen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Gimp professionally for UI and web work, and it does have some UI difficulties. The biggest for me is the haphazard arrangement of tool icons. It sometimes takes me ages to find the right icon because they aren't categorized and don't have a coherent style.

In Windows: Edit -> Preferences -> Toolbox -> Tools Configuration Order the icons as you like. Hide the ones you don't need. And also learn key shortcuts.

It's not just the default ordering that's the issue, it's the lack of grouping. And as a Vim user, I'm no stranger to keyboard accelerators. Unfortunately I don't use GIMP frequently enough for all of the keyboard shortcuts to stick (were some of them assigned from nouns in a language other than English?).

Thanks for the reordering tip, though.

Re: Switch from Photoshop to Gimp: Tips From a Pro

#124

Post by SiVal »

oblio wrote: post #122
Silhouette wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great UIs are done by experts too, young padawan. Yes, they are, but that doesn't preclude building the underlying data model and functionality as a common platform with shared tools. It also doesn't mean that building that platform and implementing a comprehensive range of functionality isn't a much more demanding task than building a UI on top if you've already got a good foundation. No doubt there is plenty of har…

I wasn't disagreeing with your vision, but rather with your dismissal of UIs as "amateur work". And I'm not even a experience designer :)

It will make more sense if you know that, by "amateur", I mean someone who knows something about image processing, but not enough to build an image processor--someone whose expertise is in something else: photography, public presentation, UI design, etc.

I should have worded my final sentence differently, but in the sense that someone who knows enough about database engines to be able to use one but is an "amateur" at creating them can still use SQLite to build an app incorporating a database engine, my "vision" would let developers whose expertise is not in image processing engine implementation to write apps that incorporated a sophisticated image processor.

Re: Switch from Photoshop to Gimp: Tips From a Pro

#125

Post by eropple »

copergi wrote: post #121
eropple wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a long road to hoe before you claim so emphatically that that's true for the "vast majority" of Photoshop users. Photoshop is the 90/10 app to end all 90/10 apps. I do very straightforward digital art and manipulation and I'd put my head in an oven before trying to do it in GIMP, and I am not using anything complex.

I didn't say you would want to switch. I said most people use little photoshop functionality. If you think that is controversial, then I think you are delusional.

GIMP doesn't support all of most people's ten percent, almost regardless of involvement. That is very far from delusional.

Re: Switch from Photoshop to Gimp: Tips From a Pro

#126

Post by gcr »

SiVal wrote: post #103
jordigh wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this stuff all the time. So this is my own canned response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6675258 > it has a ways to go before it will actually be a competitor. And it doesn't have a few features that I find incredibly invaluable as an Evernote user: [list of features snipped out] As an Octave developer, I frequently hear exactly the same things about Octave vs Matlab, and if I listen too closely, I fin…

Instead of the GIMP limping along behind PhotoShop, both dragging their decades-old legacy baggage, monolithic architectures, 1990s pricing models, etc., into the foreseeable future, I wish we had something more like Octave, SQLite, or Python: a powerful, faceless dev platform on which to build graphics-processing apps. Basically, a runtime that holds a GPU-optimal image model (raster layers, vector layers, non-destr…

Something like a programming language for composing graphics? Racket comes awfully close to that ideal.

http://docs.racket-lang.org/quick/index.html

I laid out a conference poster this way.

The poster: http://temp.sneakygcr.net/cvpr2012-mughunt-demo-poster.pdf

The source: https://gist.github.com/gcr/9854495#file-poster-rkt-L227

Unfortunately I gave in and made the center figure in Inkscape.

Re: Switch from Photoshop to Gimp: Tips From a Pro

#127

Post by schumaml »

plasticbugs wrote: post #36
nomadcoop wrote: post #8

I haven't tried it myself so can't vouch for it but GimpShop ( http://www.gimpshop.com/ ) fills a similar niche.

I originally created Gimpshop, but I'm not the jerk who owns that domain and added adware & spyware to the source. Sorry about that. I hate that this guy is out there making my fun little project into an abomination.

Thanks for clarifying - I always suspected this to be the case, but I wasn't sure.

Re: Switch from Photoshop to Gimp: Tips From a Pro

#128

Post by tripzilch »

windsurfer wrote: post #55
niels_olson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, is it just me or are InkScape and GIMP both set up with rather unhelpful defaults? I didn't run into such problems with Huygen.

Inkscape is actually very good, and certainly comparable to Adobe Illustrator, if not superior nowadays. The main problem I see people have with Inkscape is when they have a MacOS computer, the only available build is from 3 years ago.

I love InkScape, but it's a little bit crashy when doing stuff like adding multiple outline borders around fonts. And the extensions are all very mysterious, slow and crash-prone when they generate insane amounts of geometry if you happen to guess the meaning of one of the parameters wrong.

Some parts of the UI are very rough to work with. The gradient editor, for instance. Sure I can use it to make any kind of gradient I want, but navigating your colour stops through a pull-down menu? Then also not marking the current colour stop in the preview gradient, means you can't see "where you are" in your gradient as the pull-down is collapsed. Makes adding colour stops very unintuitive cause you won't know where they'll appear (before or after the current point) ... there's more, but it's all this unnecessary friction for something that should be quite simple, and has been done in various better or worse ways lots of times before.

Re: Switch from Photoshop to Gimp: Tips From a Pro

#129

Post by Silhouette »

oblio wrote: post #122
Silhouette wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great UIs are done by experts too, young padawan. Yes, they are, but that doesn't preclude building the underlying data model and functionality as a common platform with shared tools. It also doesn't mean that building that platform and implementing a comprehensive range of functionality isn't a much more demanding task than building a UI on top if you've already got a good foundation. No doubt there is plenty of har…

I wasn't disagreeing with your vision, but rather with your dismissal of UIs as "amateur work". And I'm not even a experience designer :)

Please note that I wasn't the person who you replied to before. In fact, part of what I do professionally involves UI work, so clearly I don't regard UI design as merely work for amateurs. On the other hand, I also find that 90% of the skill in building a good UI has very little to do with knowing how to make dialog boxes and toolbars appear. The functionality behind those UI elements, how that functionality is organised, and presenting everything as clearly and ideally as simply as possible is often far more important, IMHO.

Re: Switch from Photoshop to Gimp: Tips From a Pro

#130

Post by andro_dev »

Why is everyone so negative towards this app? I have been a digital artist for 20 years almost and I have been using photoshop for over 18 years now. Gimp is no match for Photoshop but it is a great alternative on Linux and it is a free tool on other platforms. This is what we have and it is better than not having an alternative. It is mind boggling to see that people passionately hate Gimp meanwhile Adobe has been screwing the software world behind the scenes. No one seems to passionately care about Adobe`s evils.

I hope that some of you will care enough about learning and modifying Gimp at some point because it is not as bad as most of you think. And I bet that some of you wont even need most of the pro features of Gimp.

On the other hand I doubt that all this negative talk will motivate the Gimp developers. Seriously grumbling artists cannot do much art. Artists and creatives have to be passionate, positive and forward progressives.

Anyway here is my personal wish list for Gimp

- Single transform tool for move rotate scale - mirror drawing - proper blending brush - visual brush resizer - And the most important of all is to support 32 bit linear image formats

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