Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GIMP is Now a Self-Contained Native App for Mac OS X

petapixel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 186 posts

Re: GIMP is Now a Self-Contained Native App for Mac OS X

#81

Post by Nicole060 »

dantheta wrote: post #63
eropple wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would gently suggest that Photoshop Elements or Pixelmator are probably more likely to be of value to such people. Pixelmator is something like $20 and vastly more user-friendly than Gimp.

I'd definitely agree. I guess more specifically (and more charitably), I'm thinking of the section of the audience that uses photoshop but doesn't need any of its intermediate or advanced features, whether they paid for it or not. There's a lot of them. If they had more awareness of their own (lack of) requirements, I think it would be a greater opportunity for the < $100 graphics packages to pick up more sales (sinc…

Photoshop Elements is a http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/adjustment-layers-in-p...

When you can get something that good for $60 there is absolutely no reason whatsoever as to why you'd put up with something like The GIMP. None. Photoshop had things like Adjustments Layers since 1996 with Photoshop 4.0, the same version that introduced an easy method to make your own automation (macro recording). 1996. The GIMP can't beat something that was made in 1996. I'd rather put up with a VERY old version of photoshop running under a PC emulator with an old OS than use the GIMP. That's how different the two software package are, and how useless The GIMP is.

Re: GIMP is Now a Self-Contained Native App for Mac OS X

#82

Post by kellishaver »

DenisM wrote: post #80

Any thoughts on this new GIMP vis-a-vis Photoshop Elements? I don't mind paying <$100 for a decent graphics editor. My primary use case is tweaking screenshots, app icons, buttons, and the like for my iOS apps and the web site. I want to get in and out as quick as possible, so I can get back to my other work.

I haven't tried GIMP in ages, but have a look at Pixelmator. It's a great little app. http://www.pixelmator.com/ It has a lot of features for not a lot of money, and a very Photoshop-like interface.

Re: GIMP is Now a Self-Contained Native App for Mac OS X

#83

Post by mrpollo »

mikeryan wrote: post #78
drats wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone who's not doing graphics as their main job description it is a photoshop killer. Asides from integration with other Adobe products, print colour management and a few higher level features it has everything a person might need who's main job is not image processing. That's most of the "market" in terms of general home users and web designers who need to process photos and do logos etc. So while I imagine ph…

For anyone who's not doing graphics as their main job description it is a photoshop killer. Doing Graphics is not my main job description, far from it (somewhere between damage control and janitor is more like it), but I still do a lot of front end development, at my job I prefer to do all the graphics production work myself for the apps I'm building and have tried using GIMP a crap ton of times over the years - I've…

Can't agree more, I'm a front-end developer and for years I have tried to move from OS X to Ubuntu but I always come back to OS X and one of the top reasons is the Photoshop > GIMP situation, have tried to use it but I can never get any productivity out of it, it feels like trying to use a hammer to get a screw in the wall.

Re: GIMP is Now a Self-Contained Native App for Mac OS X

#84

Post by Nicole060 »

armored_mammal wrote: post #22
jfaucett wrote: post #3

I love it! GIMP is one of those tools that's "almost" a photohop killer, not quite yet, but this is a big step in the right direction. Good job GIMP team! As an asside, I think the plugin API and scheme joice is great and a blast to develope with I'd just like to see others jump on board. EDIT: I thought I'd add this since there seems to be a large discussion below as to the type of user for which GIMP is applicable.…

In general open source creative tools have come a long way - with Scribus, Gimp, Inkscape, Darktable, Ardour, Blender, etc. all being quite functional, I think there is a pretty strong argument for the 'open source creative suite' being more than capable enough for all but the most stringent professionals.

I don't know about the others, because I mainly do photo stuff ( Darktable seems decent though, and it has a been a long time since I've run linux on my desktop computer so I don't know how far it went ), but the GIMP is NOT functional in any way for a professional and a professional who is not willing to spend some dollars to get something that triples his productivity is NOT a professional.

The GIMP doesn't even support something like Adjustment Layers and that's a feature that was added to Photoshop 4.0 in 1996. Get real. Those who make that kind of argument for the GIMP, even pretending it could be used as a professional tool, have no idea what they're talking about.

Even the all-public, cheap edition of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, that you can get for $60, has features like Adjustment Layers.

The GIMP has been working on that stuff for a long time and they're still not done yet. They put off all features related to non-destructive editing until they finally fully switch to the GEGL engine.

Re: GIMP is Now a Self-Contained Native App for Mac OS X

#85

Post by stan_rogers »

dantheta wrote: post #26
jfaucett wrote: post #3

I love it! GIMP is one of those tools that's "almost" a photohop killer, not quite yet, but this is a big step in the right direction. Good job GIMP team! As an asside, I think the plugin API and scheme joice is great and a blast to develope with I'd just like to see others jump on board. EDIT: I thought I'd add this since there seems to be a large discussion below as to the type of user for which GIMP is applicable.…

I'm not sure about photoshop killer ... although I do suspect that outside of the professional class of photoshop user (webdevs, print designers etc), a great many people who have a less-than-legitimate copy of photoshop and dramatically under-utilize its features could do worse than try out Gimp. These are the users for whom an entire copy of photoshop is massive overkill and a terrible waste - the absence of some p…

The real missing piece is 8BF (Photoshop plugin) compatibility. There is an entire ecosystem of productivity enhancement out there that's missing from the GIMP, at least from the professional photographer's point of view, that, absent a coding pro photographer scratching his own itch, probably isn't going to be filled. Selling a $200 plugin for a $600 program to reduce image turn-around times by an hour apiece works in the pro world; selling a $200 plugin for a free program to people who have essentially all of the time in the world to do things the hard way is a fool's game. That's a sort of chicken-and-egg problem—until there is sufficient pro adoption of the GIMP, the tools won't be there; and until the tools are there, there won't be a large-scale pro adoption of the GIMP. (A wedding photographer, for instance, may have 200–300 images from a wedding that "make the cut" for the album and slideshow, and need editing. Spending even ten minutes per image on skin is a week's work somebody has to do and somebody has to pay for. A plugin that takes that down to two minutes is the difference between profit and failure, even if the big prints still need manual work to look right.)

Re: GIMP is Now a Self-Contained Native App for Mac OS X

#86

Post by toyg »

fuzionmonkey wrote: post #10

Does it have Retina display support? I'd download this in a heartbeat. It's frustrating how long it is taken Adobe to update their software for Hi-DPI.

We don't know how much warning Apple gave them. To be fair, two months to update such beastly products is really nothing, especially when you have to change core functionality (like on-screen rendering in an image-creation tool...). I'd say 4 to 6 months would be an acceptable turnaround time for the most important products.

Compare with Microsoft, which simply won't support retina "for the time being"...

Re: GIMP is Now a Self-Contained Native App for Mac OS X

#87

Post by nsxwolf »

btn wrote: post #69
wtallis wrote: post #7

So, is this an app that bundles it's own X11, or is it using a Quartz/Cocoa backend for GTK? EDIT: I downloaded it, and the app bundle doesn't seem to have an X11, so that's nice. However, upon firing it up, it throws up a splash screen in front of all other applications. Who still thinks that's acceptable behavior on a multitasking operating system? Also, the app quits when the last window is closed, which isn't how…

> Also, the app quits when the last window is closed, which isn't how OS X apps are supposed to behave. This is almost consistent with Apple's HIG: "In general, quit when users close the last open window in your app. [...] If users close the last remaining document window in a document-based app and switch to another app , it’s appropriate to quit the app" (emphasis added). [1] [1]: https://developer.apple.com/librar…

That's odd. I don't think I've ever seen this behavior. I just tried it with Pages and the application remained open.

Re: GIMP is Now a Self-Contained Native App for Mac OS X

#88

Post by wsc981 »

Nicole060 wrote: post #77
ajross wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience (which is a little stale) of watching "photoshop experts" is that this is a familiarity effect. Photoshop workflows are uniformly bizarre and awful, in my experience. Serious practitioners are like voodoo priests, pulling tools out that have no sane relevance to the problem at hand and making them work. But it works, because you know it really well and have spent (literally, in most cases) years perfect…

And my experience is that people who say the same thing as you do are ignorant who have never used either Photoshop, The GIMP or have no business using either and should stay with something like Picasa. For the record, The GIMP doesn't even have what we call "Non-Destructive editing" which allows to make a change to some of the filters and transformations you did on the image much later even when the image has been t…

I'd like to add that Photoshop Elements is probably fine for the average user / developer that deals with graphics and that costs only around 60 Euros (Mac AppStore). And with all the guides, filters etc... around for Photoshop and the guaranteed compatibility with PSD files, it's a very interesting deal.

Re: GIMP is Now a Self-Contained Native App for Mac OS X

#89

Post by jarcoal »

nsxwolf wrote: post #87
btn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, the app quits when the last window is closed, which isn't how OS X apps are supposed to behave. This is almost consistent with Apple's HIG: "In general, quit when users close the last open window in your app. [...] If users close the last remaining document window in a document-based app and switch to another app , it’s appropriate to quit the app" (emphasis added). [1] [1]: https://developer.apple.com/librar…

That's odd. I don't think I've ever seen this behavior. I just tried it with Pages and the application remained open.

Give it a try with TextEdit and you'll see the expected response.
Post reply on HN