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GIMP 3.0 is on the way

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Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#91
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to leave this as a top-level comment, but it might be more appropriate as a response to your question. "They" are a handful of maintainers doing relatively thankless work. This is not a well-paid full-time job for them. Take Øyvind Kolås, the maintainer and lead developer of babl/GEGL, which is the technology underlying GIMP 3.0. He's barely being paid for this work. Nowadays he has a patreon, which also…

Would giving him more money improve the quality of his output? He also seems to not be in charge of the UI which is the major problem area. It's also worth noting that I could buy a subscription to Photoshop if we're talking about paying money to have software developed.

With more money, he could leave his daily job and work full time on GIMP

If you cannot / will not give money, you can also send patches: in most opensource projects, help is welcome

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Congrats to the GIMP team, can't imagine the catharsis they will experience when 3.0 officially drops. Thanks for the catharsis word, I have to look it up for the meaning. 20 years or equivalent to 5 times Olympics games, is a very long time to develop and improve a software. It's now comparable to the real-time Linux kernel, another open-source software albeit it's a kernel not a user application [1]. Any other op…

Blender started ad in-house 3d modeling back in 1994, was open sourced in 2002, and continues with very active and sustainable development today. I used it most 2010-2012, and it has been incredible to see how much has happened since then. https://www.blender.org/about/history/

What's been added since then?

I remember Blender back then. The days of watching squares slowly render over 2-7 minutes each for some cool project I made with lighting.

Has much new been added to editing/functionality or just speed optimisations?

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#93
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would giving him more money improve the quality of his output? He also seems to not be in charge of the UI which is the major problem area. It's also worth noting that I could buy a subscription to Photoshop if we're talking about paying money to have software developed.

With more money, he could leave his daily job and work full time on GIMP If you cannot / will not give money, you can also send patches: in most opensource projects, help is welcome

I get that this evangelism is useful, but it's also annoying. I'm also doing things with my life and I don't have the time to fix GIMP. My purpose in writing these comments is not to volunteer my time or money to the GIMP project, but to suggest they improve it by focusing on the many basic UI issues it has, which for some reason they haven't done in the last 20 years. Instead of laying the ground work for non-destructive editing, they should be making it so you can reliably click on text without selecting the thing behind.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#94
post #51

I use Gimp from time to time, and often get frustrated with its... unique UI. It's nice to see they're hearing feedback and working on it :D A tip for others that feel the same: if you've used Photoshop before and are used to its UI, try the free Photopea website. It's a Photoshop "clone" that works really well in web (I believe it's a solo dev doing it too). It's replaced Gimp for me lately.

I would recommend Krita instead of a website. Websites are not automatically free or opensource, they also require internet access and can sneakily copy the files you are working with. If photopea is free today, it may cost money tomorrow. Krita exists for Windows and macOS too nowadays. https://krita.org/en/

Krita is more geared toward digital drawing than image processing, I recommend Affinity Photo

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#96
post #89
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would recommend Krita instead of a website. Websites are not automatically free or opensource, they also require internet access and can sneakily copy the files you are working with. If photopea is free today, it may cost money tomorrow. Krita exists for Windows and macOS too nowadays. https://krita.org/en/

> Websites[...] can sneakily copy the files you are working with You have made one of the most baffling logical errors that commonly crop up when people criticize browser-based apps. Browser-based apps execute in a sandbox. They are more constrained in what they can do in comparison to a traditional program running on your machine. Any nefarious thing a browser-based app can do, a local program can do, too, and not j…

i can remove network access capabilities from a desktop app after it is installed. i can't easily do that with an app running in a browser.

likewise monitoring and detecting network access per application is easy. tracking down which browser tab is making which network connection is a lot harder.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#97

I use Gimp from time to time, and often get frustrated with its... unique UI. It's nice to see they're hearing feedback and working on it :D A tip for others that feel the same: if you've used Photoshop before and are used to its UI, try the free Photopea website. It's a Photoshop "clone" that works really well in web (I believe it's a solo dev doing it too). It's replaced Gimp for me lately.

Many years ago, I lost my work because of this "unique UI" and pledge never to use Gimp again, unless its behavior changed.

When you open a non-Gimp file, for instance a PNG, and you want to update the source file, you need to "export" to PNG. And if you close the tab, Gimp warns you that your work isn't saved, because it hasn't been saved in its native xcf format. There is no way to know if the work has been saved to the original file. At least, that was the behavior at the time.

So I had opened a dozen of (versioned) PNG files, modified them, then overwritten the PNG files. On closing, Gimp warned me that none of the images was saved. I ignored the warning since I didn't want to track the changes in xcf files. It turned out one the files had not been "exported" to PNG.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender started ad in-house 3d modeling back in 1994, was open sourced in 2002, and continues with very active and sustainable development today. I used it most 2010-2012, and it has been incredible to see how much has happened since then. https://www.blender.org/about/history/

What's been added since then? I remember Blender back then. The days of watching squares slowly render over 2-7 minutes each for some cool project I made with lighting. Has much new been added to editing/functionality or just speed optimisations?

A vast, vast array of features. Multiple new renderers, material systems (lumping node systems into this), 2D animation systems (mostly via grease pencil AIUI), video compositing features, sculpting (I think is new since then?)

I mean, even if you aren't using it now, it's probably worth looking at e.g. the latest release notes https://www.blender.org/download/releases/4-3/ just to see the array of things improving and adding onto stuff that mostly didn't exist 12 years ago.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#99

> GIMP 3.0 supports palettes outside of the "Standard Red Green Blue" (sRGB) range, such as "Cyan Magenta Yellow Key" (CMYK) and (CIELAB). This expanded color support, especially for CMYK, is essential to those who work with print and desktop publishing. However, GIMP continues to use sRGB, grayscale, and indexed colors for storing color information internally for now. Conversion to other color spaces is done on outp…

This doesn’t make any sense to me. If I have 2 CMYK images open I should be able to colour pick and copy/paste between them and do any other sorts of manipulations with them without any colour space conversions taking place.

The only colour space transformation that should happen when working with a CMYK image is when the image is displayed on screen. The CMYK data is interpreted with the attached colour profile (perhaps provided by the commercial printer I’m using) and then the colours are converted to RGB via my monitor’s profile and displayed on screen. None of these converted colours are ever saved in the file, and they need to be updated whenever any part of the image is altered (say using a dirty region -> repaint system).

Now if I do happen to open both a CMYK image and an RGB image and then try to copy and paste part of the RGB image into the CMYK one then a one-time conversion to CMYK needs to take place. Otherwise if I’m working only with CMYK images then no conversions should take place.

It sounds to me like the GIMP may have been written so that all of its operations are specialized to work with RGB pixels and so they cannot implement native editing on CMYK images without doing round trip conversions all over the place? If that’s the case then they need to buckle down and do the hard work of rewriting everything to be colour space independent.

I also want to note that Photoshop added CMYK support in version 2.0 which was released in 1991. This was before they even added layers! Photoshop was essentially designed for print almost from the very beginning. Having all the colour space stuff figured out before adding huge numbers of features was a major advantage. Trying to retrofit CMYK support into the GIMP seems like a bit of a nightmare.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#100

I find it a bit weird that Gimp does not use the latest GTK (i.e. GTK4, which was considered stable since 2020), even though GTK originates in the Gimp project itself. It actually seems to be quite a bit behind: This is now the first release of Gimp which started to use GTK3, i.e. before, it even still used GTK2 (reached end-of-life in 2020)?

GTK has become the Gnome toolkit , and the Gnome developers don't care about developers outside their umbrella.
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