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GIMP receives a $100K donation

gimp.org

121–130 of 318 posts

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#121
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I used gimp it wouldn’t save a file in different format - I had to export it. For someone that just wants to grab an image, touch it up and resave it, gimp just irritates. There’s at least another 50 of these kinds of small annoyances that add up to one large dealbreaker for me. Of course none are bugs - it’s likely just intended behaviour that the developers think is great. For what I need to do Krita is m…

That's more a question of wording rather than an issue. In gimps export is for formats with which you lose information (your layers for example), save is for formats allowing you to re-open you file as you let it and continue working on it

That's — "small annoyances that add up to one large dealbreaker".

I should be able to find the command to save my file without needing to know about that lossy distinction.

If there's a potential problem the software can ask me how it should be resolved, when it needs to be resolved.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#122
post #105

This is great, I hope Gimp puts it to good use. I would love for Gimp to focus more on artistic uses instead of only on software types (which is probably a vain hope). We would greatly benefit from a good artistic/photo image editing tool that does not belong to the Adobe's subscription license racket. Unfortunately, Gimp is not nearly in the same class as Photoshop, so most artists grumble about Adobe but still pay…

Krita's pretty good for an digital-pencil-based art tool and Darktable is a nice Lightroom replacement, both just need a bit of UI tuning.

Darktable is not even in the same category as Lightroom. I spent months trying to figure out how to make it work for me before realizing it has zero library management functionality, which the devs seem to have missed is Lightroom's main value proposition. It is purely a non-destructive editor, and if you look up discussions on this topic on the mail lists you'll see WONTFIX responses in the vein of "just use your file manager and a tangle of custom shell scripts!"

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn’t say it isn’t already on par or more powerful than Photoshop. Having just woken up, deprived of my morning caffeine, this sentence sent my brain for a real loop :)

his main point is powerful, but there's not enough funding for him to spend time on phrasing.

hahah well done

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#124
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who uses Photoshop and Krita for painting and animation, I can tell you GIMP is unusable as a painter. The way they allocated this donation does nothing to help me use GIMP. And you don't have to take my word for it: David Revoy, the only professional painter to use open-source software and actively promote GIMP that I know, switched to Krita [1] [1] https://krita.org/en/item/interview-with-david-revoy/

I don't think anybody doubts that the Gimp's UI needs help - This has been well understood for over 20 years. To it's credit, the project has, over that time, made some significant improvements to its UI. (Starting the GTK project to replace Lesstif/Motif and adding single-window mode come to mind immediately.) The question is really this: what is the best way for the project to effectively use this contribution to i…

Installing GIMP again recently and finding single window mode was a great, great joy.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#125
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off-topic: Googling "complex-valued pixels" didn't bring up anything, but I'm interested in finding out more about that. What pixel-related information do the real/imaginary parts represent? What sort of applications does that have?

Radar images (e.g., those publicly available from the Sentinel 1 satellite) typically come as complex-valued images. You look at the norm of the complex numbers to understand the structures, but for interferometry you need the phase also. If you compute the Fourier transform of a scalar-valued image, you obtain a complex-valued image. It would be nice to be able to process these transforms with gimp (e.g., to "paint"…

Very cool, thanks!

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#126
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood that complaint with the Blender UI. If anything Blender's UI even before the whole 2.5 change was a lot more streamlined and less stupid point&click than for instance Maya. It essentially felt like Emacs for 3D editing. But maybe that's because I started out on Blender and only had a cursory look at Maya. Same with GIMP. I have years of experience working with GIMP so if you sat me in front of phot…

Blender has slowly improved over years - things got more consistent and (given the complexity of the domain) it made the standard operations more obvious. I'm excited to see the 2.8 changes, but I certainly don't mind it as it is. GIMP, however... makes me (every so slightly) annoyed every time I use it. I have to google so many task that should just be intuitive. It does the job, and I still use it as my primary edi…

2.8 is a massive improvement imo, tooltips and nicer icons for everything.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#127
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is exactly the problem with gimp's UI? I find it intuitive and very easy to use (but then, I have not used many other interactive imaging programs). Is it missing something important? Has too many useless features? GIMP's UI is alright for me, what I need are more features that are sorely lacking: 1) ability to work with images having an arbitrary number of spectral bands 2) floating-point pixel values 3) comple…

> What is exactly the problem with gimp's UI? Where do I start? - sometimes when I start it it doesn't display toolbox - when I open the toolbox it is (sometimes) a vertical line of buttons (single column) instead of 5 columns that I begged it countless times to be - setting the size of pencil is completely unintuitive - I usually click in what appears to be input field, only to discover it is not (but instead some m…

> sometimes when I start it it doesn't display toolbox

Agreed. It's hard to imagine a scenario when you open a file in GIMP and don't want the tools. While there may be some such scenarios, it's hard to believe that it's a common case.

> when I open the toolbox it is (sometimes) a vertical line of buttons (single column) instead of 5 columns that I begged it countless times to be

Oh, yeah. Having the toolbox form factor changing and the tool buttons moving around (seemingly at random) is by far the most annoying part of GIMP for me. I don't actually much care what layout is chosen; I just want it to stay the same.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#128

My hope: whichever direction Gimp development goes, they should try doing something similar to Blender - where they bring a bunch of developers and artists into a space. While they're in that space (for a limited amount of time) work on some big project involving Gimp. Develop Gimp to suite that project's needs.

They could also get some inspiration from Krita.

https://krita.org

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#129
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to support GIMP but, especially for fast, professional use, the UI makes it impossible. Their raw features are on par with anything I'd want to do in Photoshop, it's 100% a UI issue at this point. And I don't get why it's this hard for open source projects to realize that (the only notable exception I know is Firefox, which I love).

What is exactly the problem with gimp's UI? I find it intuitive and very easy to use (but then, I have not used many other interactive imaging programs). Is it missing something important? Has too many useless features? GIMP's UI is alright for me, what I need are more features that are sorely lacking: 1) ability to work with images having an arbitrary number of spectral bands 2) floating-point pixel values 3) comple…

GIMP's IWarp workflow is horrendous. And this is saying something - photoshop's liquify could be much better too.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#130
post #42
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to support GIMP but, especially for fast, professional use, the UI makes it impossible. Their raw features are on par with anything I'd want to do in Photoshop, it's 100% a UI issue at this point. And I don't get why it's this hard for open source projects to realize that (the only notable exception I know is Firefox, which I love).

> And I don’t get why it’s this hard for open source projects to realize that I don’t know, but I’ll throw out my theory. Note I’m very much a fan of open source even though this might sound negative. I would also love to see GIMPs UI get an overhaul. In short, I think it’s harder to prioritize open source features for multiple reasons. When you don’t have paying customers, it’s very hard to prioritize the feedback y…

I'm sure there are people who are UI experts who would be willing to improve FLOSS UIs in their spare time.

The problem is that the current developer base of many FLOSS project don't understand that a) decent UI requires an expertise and b) knowing how their poor UIs are implemented doesn't count as expertise in UI development.

For example-- if I write to a FLOSS mailing list that the way they are using realloc leaves some stale pointers that can cause crashes, they very quickly fix the problem. But if a UI expert posts something about a similarly severe and easily fixed UI bug, they'll get at least 5 authoritative-sounding responses from people who know absolutely nothing about UI design.

Such a UI developer would definitely need a full-time salary to deal with that kind of social situation.

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