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GIMP receives a $100K donation

gimp.org

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Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#71

Post by wongarsu »

billyhoffman wrote: post #46
dzmien wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, given that it is open source software, have you ever considered contributing? I'm not trying to be dick. I know that just because you can spot flaws doesn't necessarily mean you know how to improve them, nor are you obligated to just because it is open source. But I bet you could offer some valuable feedback and/or ideas.

There is a tremendous amount of inertia that most be overcome to make changes to the UI. I don't just mean technical inertia which is probably large given GIMP's size and long history, but also people inertia. UI tends to be the ultimate bikeshedding [1] blackhole. Few people have an opinion about how a denoising filter should be implemented. Several orders of magnitude more have feelings about the UI should look and…

The most viable path would likely be to fork GIMP (while merging in their updates), make a better UI without being bound to the original project, and if the new UI turns out to be much better offer to merge it back into the GIMP project.

You could conceivably raise enough money from stakeholders to do this properly with a few experienced UI developers, proper user testing etc.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#72

Post by emidln »

chrisseaton wrote: post #69
sleepychu wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you want changed about the UI? I don't even look at it most of the time. Single window mode/quick toggling of that was the biggest change for me.

> I don't even look at it most of the time What do you do instead? Are you using GIMP entirely through the scripting interface? How are you using a graphical image editor without looking at the user interface?

Open an image and then use shortcuts.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#73

Post by chrisseaton »

emidln wrote: post #72
chrisseaton wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't even look at it most of the time What do you do instead? Are you using GIMP entirely through the scripting interface? How are you using a graphical image editor without looking at the user interface?

Open an image and then use shortcuts.

Like with your monitor off or something? How do you not look at the UI when editing an image?

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#74

Post by rootlocus »

nomadtwin wrote: post #49

There's Affinity Photo / Designer that is pretty similar to Photoshop (UI & functionality) and cost around $50. No subscription, no bullshit. That's (kinda) affordable, right?

Affinity Photo / Designer are very very far from Photoshop. Affinity Photo is a replacement for Lightroom (raw photo editors), and Affinity Designer is a replacement for Adobe Illustrator (vector graphics).

Although you can do vectors and photo editing in Photoshop, the main purpose of PS is raster painting, which neither Affinity Photo nor Designer are remotely good at.

As such, neither of them could replace GIMP or Photoshop.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#75

Post by mrspeaker »

ginko wrote: post #40
darkwinx wrote: post #2

I hope that someday GIMP will have major change just like Krita & Blender. The UI of GIMP have received many complains.

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 editor - but it's not something I look forward to opening... but it could be! I'm hoping it'll get there eventually!

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#76

Post by wongarsu »

ginko wrote: post #40
darkwinx wrote: post #2

I hope that someday GIMP will have major change just like Krita & Blender. The UI of GIMP have received many complains.

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…

>It essentially felt like Emacs for 3D editing.

Which is exactly the complaint :D

Blender has a very efficient UI that is great for power users, but it has a much bigger learning curve than the competition with their point&click UIs. Add to that that most people are trained on Maya/3ds Max/Cinema 4d, learning Blender is a big investment with uncertain payoff.

Basically the same reason why very few people use Emacs or Vim nowadays.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#77

Post by mschaef »

nothis wrote: post #45
ricardonunez wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you until the hiring. The work that needs to be done is hard and hiring just one designer will not fix it. Maybe hiring one person to manage that part of the project. They need to pay an agency to do the work. The UX/UI needs major work and a lot of testing. That donation is good but the project will probably need more funding.

I definitely agree about the team size/cost. I have to say, it baffles me how much time programmers are willing to put into open source works but apparently it's impossible to find UI designers who are willing to do the same. I don't think it's a lack of enthusiasm, I think it's probably more of a social/clique thing and open source projects would benefit greatly from opening themselves up to contributers outside the…

> I have to say, it baffles me how much time programmers are willing to put into open source works but apparently it's impossible to find UI designers who are willing to do the same.

So you're surprised it's hard to find UI designers willing to work for free? I'd argue the surprising part is that there are programmers that ARE willing to work for free or reduced rates on open source.

Both of these disciplines take time and effort to learn and then perform. The people that do them not only pay these costs, but have their own obligations to themselves and their loved ones they might need to help support. It doesn't surprise me at all that the vast majority of people with these skills choose (or are forced by circumstance) to do something else.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#78

Post by enriquto »

ginko wrote: post #70
enriquto wrote: post #47

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…

This. If anything GIMP is missing features for me. Especially the non-destructive editing and disk paging support you mentioned feel sorely lacking. Floating point pixel values should be supported as of GIMP 2.10, though.

> Floating point pixel values should be supported as of GIMP 2.10, though.

True! I have just updated to 2.10 and it can open floating-point tiffs of one or three channels. The support is very limited, though. It seems to ignore negative values or values higher than 1, so it is mostly useless to me. Yet, I'm very happy to see new advances!

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#79

Post by sachdevap »

kaffeemitsahne wrote: post #43
rqs wrote: post #17

Create news, hope GIMP can use that money to work out a better and intuitive design. For example, currently, many Filters don't have previews (Or the preview window is too small), which make apply them become a slow try and error game. Also, the Text in the picture can be hard to select, as sometime you mistakenly select the underlying layer instead of the text. Also again, Filters cannot be directly applied to edita…

You can always submit bugs/annoyances/requests directly to the GIMP developers: https://www.gimp.org/bugs/

Seconded. If you are a user, consider actively filing bugs and not expect them to be fixed by the developers without following this process.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#80

Post by mschaef »

nothis wrote: post #5
darkwinx wrote: post #2

I hope that someday GIMP will have major change just like Krita & Blender. The UI of GIMP have received many complains.

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).

> 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).

Firefox has a lot more commercial support than something like Gimp, which is supported primarily through contributions in various forms. What this means is that it's harder to turn down contributions and harder to implement the kind of process that'd be required for a more coherent UI. As simple as it might seem at first, it really is a whole 'nother ball game.

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