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Gimp is 25 years old today

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Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#151

Post by arendtio »

coolhand2120 wrote: post #148

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…

Respectfully, I have to disagree. Yes, the modern Photoshop is miles away from GIMP, but there was a time when the gap wasn't so large. Given how much money was poured into the development of Photoshop, that should wonder nobody.

Developing a software for 25 years is in itself an achievement. As a user I think it developed quite nicely and added cool features every now and then.

Calling GIMP 'a worthless heap of garbage' is neither polite nor warranted.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#152

Post by arendtio »

I like GIMP.

Yes, the user interface has changed a lot over the years, but the underlying principles of how to compose images are still the same. I am no artist, so my requirements might be quite a bit lower than those of the typical Photoshop user, but GIMP is still my tool of choice if it comes to manipulating individual image files. For Vector Graphics I prefer Inkscape and for photos Darktable, but those are just more specialized use cases. Without Gimp my computer would be missing a crucial tool to edit images.

Thank you GIMP contributors and congratulations to your 25th anniversary.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#153

Post by ThePadawan »

LaputanMachine wrote: post #150
ThePadawan wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I simply found that GIMP produced very good results when dithering to 4bit grayscale (I'm converting images to be displayed on an e-ink display). I'm sure I could get any other lib to produce the same results, but only after an hour of tweaking. That is what I ended up doing after all, because learning how to automate GIMP was harder.

I also use a 4 bit e-ink display, and there are sometimes large areas of the same color where you can't see any details. After several hours of tweaking I managed to improve the quality, but it's still not perfect. Do you have some tips / links that could help me improve the dithering even further?

I've not investigated very deeply into it.

For my use case (a digital picture frame), I've simply rejected images that looked very bad after dithering, and that's very often

- (a) generally dark images,

- (b) very gradient-based images (banding appears) and

- (c) art with a color spectrum that's very narrow in lightness, but wide in value (i.e. most colors map to the same level of gray after converting to grayscale)

Besides using Floyd-Steinberg dithering, I have not tried anything fancy.

As I mentioned above, the exact quality of differing varies by a large amount depending on the tool. I would recommend comparing the quality of GIMP vs. other tools on a single example image.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#154

Post by Dylan16807 »

berkes wrote: post #113
blt wrote: post #81

I am glad non-destructive editing is on the roadmap. Hopefully we'll have it within the next 25 years. Photoshop had adjustment layers in 1996.

Gimp has adjustment layers. I've used them often. Do I maybe misunderstand you?

Huh? Everything clearly states it doesn't, and that they are planned for version 3.2

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#155

Post by awiesenhofer »

Any Gimp article wouldnt be complete without a list of all the alternatives so here are some Image Manipulation Programs that are not Gimp but also not Photoshop:

* Krita (OSS) https://krita.org

* Pinta (OSS, Paint.NET Clone) https://www.pinta-project.com

* Paint.NET (Freeware) https://www.getpaint.net

* Paintshop Pro 4.14 (Last Freeware Version) https://www.pagetutor.com/downloads/psp412.html

* Affinity Photo https://affinity.serif.com

Also https://www.photopea.com and https://pixlr.com in the browser

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#156

Post by [deleted] »

heavyset_go wrote: post #68
zingermc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK it has nothing to do with physical disability. The word has a lot of meanings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimp

The sexual connotation gets its name from the slur[1], because the suit handicaps the wearer. The name of the image editor originates from Pulp Fiction , which uses the sexual connotation. [1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40730/was-the-wo...

[deleted]

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#157

Post by app4soft »

jes5199 wrote: 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…

> GIMP is such a strange tool.

GIMP is less strange than AzPainter[0], even less strange than GrafX2[1].

FTR, Grafx2 (GrafX 2.0 and beyond) would celebrate its own 25th Anniversary next year.[2]

But really, development of the first version of GrafX2 (GrafX 1.0) started in 1995.[3]

> GRAFX 2.00 Beta 90% (11/01/1996) - Wired'96 release

> This version was 1st shown at the Wired'96 demo party in Belgium. We gave it to many people there, so let's start history from here. Note that there were a few different "90%" versions because we didn't want to change the number just for tiny bug-fixes.

> GRAFX 1.0? -> 1.02 (09/??/1995 -> 07/??/1996)

> Forget it!

So, Grafx2 & GIMP are age-mates, but GrafX2 maybe is 'older brother'.

[0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter

[1] http://grafx2.chez.com/

[2] http://grafx2.chez.com/index.php?article4/version-history

[3] http://grafx2.chez.com/index.php?article7/1990s

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#158

Post by dalbasal »

ehsankia wrote: post #125
megameter wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I would put it is: GIMP has features, not workflow. There are a lot of things that are possible, but not by combining the basic tools and metaphors in sensible ways: each time is more like diving into the command line options of a GNU tool, finding the exact thing, and if you really, really need to automate it, it goes in a script where it can be safely forgotten. Which is, certainly, a way of doing, but not…

Actually, the way I would put it is that GIMP is the perfect example of why companies hire UX designers. GIMP is textbook example of how software can technically have all the same features, but be insanely hard to use and utterly confusing to anyone without a guide. Compare it to Photoshop which does more or less the same things but anyone can naturally pick up and use.

>> GIMP is the perfect example of why companies hire UX designers.

Whole I agree that this is UX design, but I suspect that UX can be (and often is) a product of the type of organisation producing it moreso than the "UX designer hired to do UX." UX for something like Gimp is very hard. The metaphors have to encompass a ton of stuff and the UX needs

A web app created by a bank, electric company or somesuch will tend to be different from an app created by an SV-ish company in a pretty predictable way. Similarly, Gimp seems like a relative of other GNU/OSS software... Calibre comes to mind.

Different types of organisations or ways of doing things have different strengths and weaknesses. Th

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#159

Post by gorgoiler »

kazinator wrote: post #109
gorgoiler wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding a second UI to the codebase (with a friendlier, less conflict inducing name) would be a fantastic addition to the project. Something along the lines of a cooperative fork, I suppose, focused on exposing a minimal set of features but keeping the underlying image processing models. Fewer buttons. Distilled UI. Having a single rapid workflow for saving an edited PNG. [...and this is almost exactly what Glimpse is…

> 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”?

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#160

Post by jcelerier »

0x4a42 wrote: post #67
dwiash wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Krita. I think it's way better than GIMP

Krita is a painting app comparable to Corel Painter. You can't compare it with GIMP or Photoshop.

Krita is more than enough for a lot of photo editing needs, which are basically cropping, resizing, applying color filters etc - for those operations Krita is much more straightforward than GIMP.

Also if what you said matched reality, Corel Painter would still exist in a meaningful way in 2020 but most artists migrated to Photoshop for their painting needs in 2007

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