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GIMP – 2016 in review

gimp.org

171–180 of 188 posts

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#171
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its certainly OK for a product to innovate, as GIMP has. But sometimes the differences are gratuitous. That doesn't help with GIMP adoption, because admit it, most folks have some exposure to Photoshop already. Further, GIMP suffers (as many mature products do) from a certain baroque-ness of feature. Its menus and features have grown from someplace less mature, to where they are. And it shows in the clumsy menus that…

> Its certainly OK for a product to innovate, as GIMP has. I'm not sure the GIMP's UI choices can generally be described as "innovating". I think they're generally just the obvious GTK+ default options, implemented without much testing or tweaking.

> I think they're generally just the obvious GTK+ default options, implemented without much testing or tweaking.

GTK+ is the GIMP ToolKit; the entire toolkit is GIMP's innovation.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#172
post #99
post #5

I don't use the GIMP nearly as much as Inkscape (the two form an awesome free software graphics suite together), but I am always pleasantly surprised by the gradual improvements — the layer improvements look useful! What really impresses me though is how the GIMP has managed to remain such a constant ever-present factor on the free software desktop. It feels as if it has just always been there. Kudos to all the devel…

I love Gimp and Inkscape. The Gimp vs Photoshop debate is irrelevant to me because I can't afford Photoshop - it's Gimp or nothing for me.

When GIMP happens to be not the best tool for photo editing (Photoshop definitely has an edge in this department), I turn to the excellent darktable (http://www.darktable.org/).

Since I don't do any paper printing pre-processing that requires CMYK support, the duo above completely replaces Photoshop for my tasks.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understaffed is an understatement. We have been able to fund one full-time developer, Dmitry, for the fourth year now. I am the maintainer, and I'm currently working full-time on Krita because I got burned out on my paid job, but that's not really funded. There are a few other people who help answering questions and triaging bug reports and things -- and that is it. We try to keep up on tumblr, reddit, twitter, faceb…

Thanks for all the hard work! I use Krita because it's simply the best tool I've found for painting - that's a big accomplishment. Now that you mention it, I think your successful kickstarters left me with the impression you had funding and therefore workforce to a much greater degree than is actually the case. Is another fundraiser coming up? I didn't participate before, as I only found out about them after the fact…

A kickstarter brings in about 30k to 40k euros, before kickstarter takes its part. That wouldn't be enough to hire a receptionist for Adobe, but it's almost enough to pay for a single Krita developer, Dmitry. We've given him a raise this year, since it's the fourth year we've got him full-time!

Then sales of dvd's and so on, donations, and sometimes special, bigger donations, also bring in money, and I'm currently living from that income, together with my wife, since it turns that trying to combine a paying freelance gig for four days a week and doing krita for five, six days a week isn't sustainable.

So I'm looking to make supporting me working full-time on Krita sustainable as well; fortunately our three daughters have left the house, so it's just me and my wife who need to live on the income.

That makes for two people working full-time on Krita (one of them the project lead, which eats into coding time): then there are two volunteers who help with kickstarter and communication, a volunteer webmaster/UX designer, a volunteer bug triager, three or so summer of code students doing a 3-month project, and now and then a flurry of volunteers who want to hack on the codebase.

But developer-wise, it's about one and a half person shouldering most of the burden at the moment, as a quick look at the github mirror stats shows: https://github.com/KDE/krita/graphs/contributors

For this year's fund raiser (not sure if it'll be a kickstarter again), the theme is going to be "Stability, stability, stability!" -- we've added so much stuff in the past years, while still fixing about 1200 bugs a year, that it's time to take a breath and clear out the bugzilla backlog, and do some serious polishing.

But first, svg/vector tools, text tool and python scripting need to be done!

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, but I am now genuinely interested to know what advantage Photoshop has over The Gimp nowadays?

Content Aware Fill (and other such things) turn a 30 minute job in GIMP into a 5 minute job in Photoshop. Granted it's not perfect, but it's usually good enough™ Also I find Photoshop's UI to be a lot prettier and more fun to use, even though I tried learning GIMP first.

Is that a UI issue with Resynthesizer/Heal selection, or are you comparing a "plugin-free" GIMP with Photoshop?

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#175

Is a GIMP version with 16 bit finally available from the official Ubuntu repos? Last year I had to install Flatpak to get my hands on 16 bit. I know 16 support has been brewing for years. Once a year or so I Google at conclude that the easily available versions of GIMP still don't have it.

Still not there. GIMP 2.10 will be the official stable version that will get the 16/32 bit support. So far, it's only in the dev branch (2.9.x).

OK then, I'll have a look in january 2018 and we'll see how/if things have progressed. :)

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#176
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the thing: "normal users" looking for a free-of-charge alternative to commercial apps are not the typical target audience of open source productivity tools. They're primarily targetted to scratch the authors' own itch, and secondarily to benefit anyone who finds it useful in the hopes of more contributions. Average Joes (nor non-contributing professional artists/photographers) are typically not beneficial to t…

I too have managed to do lots of image editing in GIMP. That doesn't mean it was a pleasant experience. I am not trying to tell the volunteers what to work on, but if we can't give honest product feedback to FOSS projects on the basis that they are volunteer efforts, then those projects will never succeed broadly. If you don't care about succeeding broadly that's fine, but I get the impression from gimp.org that they…

> but if we can't give honest product feedback to FOSS projects on the basis that they are volunteer efforts

Why can't you give feedback to the GIMP team?

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#177
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GTK is probably the main reason Gimp isn't a serious competitor in professional work, then. Xamarin Studio is built using Gtk and actually looks nice on macOS, or at least I have seldom heard people complain about it: https://blog.xamarin.com/the-making-of-xamarin-studio/ I think the problem is that Gimp is understaffed to produce a Photoshop killer with any toolkit.

There probably aren't that many xamarin studio users on mac and most of them would be developers anyway. If something looks out of place, developers are often oblivious to it (how long would it take you to spot a font out of place?) but artists are hyper-sensitive to it.

Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, and non-Adobe tools like Affinity Designer all use portable, non-native UI code. That hasn't stopped artists from using them. I don't out-of-place UI is the reason why people avoid Gimp.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#178
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its certainly OK for a product to innovate, as GIMP has. But sometimes the differences are gratuitous. That doesn't help with GIMP adoption, because admit it, most folks have some exposure to Photoshop already. Further, GIMP suffers (as many mature products do) from a certain baroque-ness of feature. Its menus and features have grown from someplace less mature, to where they are. And it shows in the clumsy menus that…

Photoshop isn't available unless you pay money or violate copyright, so I can well imagine not having exposure. That could be me. I think I might have used it though, on a System 6 Mac with a 1-bit black-and-white screen. (resulting opinion: Photoshop doesn't support color)

There is a web site called "youtube" that has many many free video tutorials explaining how to use Photoshop. There is nothing about self imposed ignorance to be proud about.

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually used Photoshop yourself, or spent any time watching the millions of free Photoshop tutorial videos available on youtube? If not, then why not? And also: why throw down the gauntlet about never changing the name from GIMP, unless your point is to offend people for being "politically correct", and marginalize your project so nobody will ever consider using it in a professional context, on purpose? htt…

> Have you actually used Photoshop yourself I've been Photoshop user since 1997. > why throw down the gauntlet about never changing the name from GIMP, unless your point is to offend people I'm not trained to deal with people who apparently seek to be offended.

This is not about labeling the idea of treating disabled people politely and not insulting people with hurtful name calling as "political correctness" and labeling people who object to offensive and inappropriately sexual language as delicate snowflakes "who apparently seek to be offended". The term "gimp" is an offensive slang term, as well as a sexual term, according to the dictionary definition. You're trolling if you pretend otherwise. The purpose of GIMP is not to fight against political correctness, or arouse people sexually, it is to edit images. Using a purposefully offensive name does not help edit images, or encourage people to take it seriously.

I don't know how much training you have in the meaning of words of the English language, but do you understand this definition or not?

https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/gimp

The noun gimp is sometimes used to describe a limp or another physical disability, although it's an outdated and offensive word to use.

If you comment on someone's gimp, call the person a gimp, or say, "Look at that guy trying to gimp across the parking lot without his crutches," you've chosen a very objectionable way to talk about a disability. People will know what you mean if you use the word, but they're likely to be offended by it. Gimp was first used in the 1920's, possibly as a combination of limp and gammy, an old slang word for "bad."

Re: GIMP – 2016 in review

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have managed to do lots of image editing in GIMP. That doesn't mean it was a pleasant experience. I am not trying to tell the volunteers what to work on, but if we can't give honest product feedback to FOSS projects on the basis that they are volunteer efforts, then those projects will never succeed broadly. If you don't care about succeeding broadly that's fine, but I get the impression from gimp.org that they…

> but if we can't give honest product feedback to FOSS projects on the basis that they are volunteer efforts Why can't you give feedback to the GIMP team?

Because they glibly brush it off, like the way when someone makes an honest point by giving you feedback that "gimp" is an offensive term that inhibits its adoption by "normal users" in professional and educational settings, GIMP team members like yourself actively seek to be offensive and attempt to turn it around, by accusing them of being "people who apparently seek to be offended", instead of acknowledging the well know dictionary definition of the term and addressing the problem.

The purpose of GIMP is to edit images, not fight political correctness or offend disabled people or reclaim offensive words.

Do you understand this definition or not?

https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/gimp

The noun gimp is sometimes used to describe a limp or another physical disability, although it's an outdated and offensive word to use.

If you comment on someone's gimp, call the person a gimp, or say, "Look at that guy trying to gimp across the parking lot without his crutches," you've chosen a very objectionable way to talk about a disability. People will know what you mean if you use the word, but they're likely to be offended by it. Gimp was first used in the 1920's, possibly as a combination of limp and gammy, an old slang word for "bad."

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