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Gimp is 25 years old today

gimp.org

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Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#191

Post by babuskov »

neolog wrote: post #43

GIMP's name comes from Pulp Fiction. > It took us a little while to come up with the name. We knew we wanted an image manipulation program like Photoshop, but the name IMP sounded wrong. We also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs. At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a single word popped into my mind while we were tossing…

It could have been GINP, as in GINP Is Not Photoshop.

Close, but no cigar ;)

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#192

Post by riidom »

asddubs wrote: post #143
pja wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can they though? I'll admit it's a long time since I've sat in front of a Photoshop window, but I remember it being just as complex to use. Is this just partially a "what you're used to is easy & anything different is hard" thing? What exactly makes Photoshop easier to use in your opinion? This is a genuine question - I see this asserted so often, like it's a truism, but nobody ever seems to give specific examples.

I still remember that time I tried selecting something and moving the pixels of my selection, rather than the whole layer in GIMP. I ended up having to google it and it was a 3-key combination shortcut. I don't remember how to do it in photoshop, but I'm pretty sure I didn't have to google "how to move a selection" that time I used it.

Well moving the selection is the 3rd thing you can do, what you meant probably is moving the content of the selection. It's controlled by 3 buttons on top of the tools window, and this plus a few other things are worth spending a bit time to learn the basic concepts.

Which is a good advice for PS as well, btw.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#193

Post by riidom »

mkl wrote: post #124
BuildTheRobots wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's funny because GIMP is one of the tools I hate the most. You've obviously not tried to replace Adobe Illustrator with Inkscape ;) (edit: a flippant comment backed by much frustration. If you're creating SVGs for laser cutting then the inability to nicely use mm as a unit of measure is infuriating.)

I use purely mm for most Inkscape projects (not for laser cutting, but some are for my plotter). Set the units in Document Properties and it just works, IME.

Yes. I get when people criticize Inkscape for it's UI (personally I find it annoying to re-arrange the side windows), but feature-wise there is nothing left to be desired (except maybe CMYK not sure about that). But whenever I need something to be printed, it goes into Scribus anyway, and there we have CMYK.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#194

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

kody wrote: post #66

The first time I downloaded the GIMP was when I realized that MS Paint wouldn’t cut it for making convincing Runescape “fakes”. I was too chicken to pirate Photoshop but knew that I needed better tools to do what I needed. I went on to use the GIMP to make Runescape forum signatures (proud member of $clan, $skill in woodcutting, etc). That was the first time I had people PMing me, asking me to make something for them…

I miss those forum banners a lot. One of those things that you could really make your profile yours.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#196

Post by riidom »

usrusr wrote: post #41
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…

Quite similar situation here: it's the tool that I know but that I will never master. I'm not bothered much by the UI though, it gets the job done well enough for the occasional pixel task. What I mind much more is the atrocious startup time (might be a peculiarity of wingimp)

Check your version and likely you should update (if you don't rely on plugins that aren't ported yet). Startup time was increased by a huge amount some time ago (can't remember when exactly).

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#197

Post by rozab »

megameter wrote: post #73
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…

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…

I really, really wish there was a paint.net clone for Linux. Paint.net is windows freeware, closed source since an early release, which is both feature rich and a pleasure to use. It covers 99% of use cases ordinary people have.

I believe the author closed the source after some other projects tried to use it commercially. It still gets regular updates.

There's an attempt at a clone, Pinta, which was based off the early open source version but it didn't get much further than mspaint functionality.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#198

Post by qwertox »

throwanem wrote: post #180
kristopolous wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audacity has this in spades. Every annoying thing has a bizarre undiscoverable keystroke to invoke a sensible not-broken alternative. Why they don't make the reasonable implementations the first class defaults is way beyond me... (I haven't read the mailing list/bug report threads enough to find out, if someone has insight I'd love to know. It's like they know something is what people don't want to do 99.9% of the ti…

What's the Photoshop to Audacity's GIMP?

Sound Forge

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#199

Post by klodolph »

Lipsey wrote: post #35
klodolph wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, but there are lots of better options available.

Free and Open source? Please which ones do you recommend?

If you’re dead-set on using FOSS, why switch to the Mac in the first place? Wouldn’t you stick with Linux and use GIMP (or maybe Krita, which is usually a better alternative)?

GIMP is not really a good image editor, when you compare it to the alternatives and include paid alternatives in the comparison. From my memory of using Photoshop, I’d say that GIMP is roughly equivalent to Photoshop 3.0, which came out in 1994, although it is missing some core features from Photoshop 3.0 (and prior versions—the workflows that I used in Photoshop 2.5 are unworkable in GIMP, as far as I can tell, and it’s extremely frustrating to try and use GIMP for basic tasks).

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#200

Post by dreen »

rozab wrote: post #197
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…

I really, really wish there was a paint.net clone for Linux. Paint.net is windows freeware, closed source since an early release, which is both feature rich and a pleasure to use. It covers 99% of use cases ordinary people have. I believe the author closed the source after some other projects tried to use it commercially. It still gets regular updates. There's an attempt at a clone, Pinta, which was based off the ear…

Yeah, I switched from GIMP to PaintNET and loved it for my simple needs, but because Pinta wasnt what I hoped it would be nowdays I just use http://www.photopea.com on any system, its basically PaintNET in the browser.
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