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GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

166 points by ashitlerferad 10y ago

oggedintocom 10y ago
GIMP is an icon of open-source software, but do any professional designers use it full-time over Photoshop? Compare with Sketch, which has taken scores of users from Illustrator.
- Keyframe 10y ago
  Realistic answer is not really. There are people who probably use it, but they are invisible in the whole. However, Krita got some serious attention by digital painters and is used enough to be visible as an alternative to both ps and coral paint.
  - nercht12 10y ago
    This. As an artist, I found Gimp too precise in its pixel-drawing. You want a dot, you get exactly that. Krita, however, uses an algorithm that smooths its brush edges so that the result - even after holding the brush in one spot for awhile - doesn't come out pixelated. I use Gimp for general editing, and particularly filters and such (e.g. liquid rescale (seam-carving)) - which is what it seems to be best at anyways.
- cobalt 10y ago
  unlikely, while a certainly poewrful piece of software that can do much of what photoshop can (in the 2D realm), it has no support for 3D work, real vector support, active filters (this is a huge one in traditional 2D work, esp icons/logos)
  - maweki 10y ago
    The one feature that breaks it for me for professional work is that filters happen to a layer instead of being attached to them an are able to be changed on a whim. It's impossible to do any real work if you have to render and re-render every shadow on every text and object when its size changes. I think I could do without everything else but that.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      That’s why I love Krita so much – it can do all those things, can do animation, and, partially, already 3D, too.
    - erlehmann_ 10y ago
      For this reason I use Inkscape for most things I used GIMP for in the past.
    - damptowel 10y ago
      Photoshop has 'smart filters' and 'smart objects' which do exactly what you describe.
    - goatface 10y ago
      The work you might have heard about GEGL - is all about providing foundations for such non-destructive editing. The highlighted split-view / curtain preview in the blog post is implemented using these new capabilities provided by GEGL. Adding new features that cement themselves as new things in the file format is part of GIMPs roadmap after GIMP-2.10 / 3.0. 2.10 / 3.0 are aiming to provide the same functionality that GIMP-2.6 / 2.8 provided but with GEGL as the core and thus higher bitdepth.
  - blub 10y ago
    Is this mandatory nowadays? I mean it's nice that PS (and even Pixelmator and Affinity) have that, but I did design work many years ago and managed fine. Sure it will be more inconvenient, but it's doable.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
      People did design work without any of these digital tools before. Give people better tools and it's hard to go back. Can you imagine writing a large piece of software without autocomplete or syntax highlighting these days?
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - damptowel 10y ago
    This is simply not true, Photoshop does have all those features!
- aoloe 10y ago
  Yes. But as for 42, this is unlikely the answer you wanted to hear.
  - oggedintocom 10y ago
    I'm not a designer - purely curious.
    - Freak_NL 10y ago
      I get aoloe's reaction though. Whenever someone posts something cool about Gimp, invariably a bunch of “yeah it's free, but it's not Adobe Photoshop is it?” comments pop up. Why should we care? Why not judge it on its own merits? This reminds me of how a lot of people used to respond to the notion of using GNU/Linux distributions as free operating systems suitable for day-to-day desktop use. Sure, I get why not everyone might want to use it (nobody is asking you to), but why does every bit of positive news or cool achievement have to get accompanied by dozens of comments by authors directly comparing it to a commercially available alternative, stating that they'd use it if only it did this and if only it looked more like that? I love how we as a global community have such a wealth of software tools available; to use for free (legally!), with a philosophy that explicitly encourages sharing and enables anyone with the know-how to contribute. Some of these tools have been with us for decades, such as Gimp, and each release brings new features and improvements. Instead of celebrating its strengths, software like Gimp gets scrutinized by holding it to an arbitrary standard it can never meet (the full feature set of Adobe Photoshop), simply because the goal posts are forever moving. I do not intend to berate anyone genuinely asking about how to migrate to free tools like Blender, Gimp, and Inkscape — questions where the comparison of features is warranted — but a lot of comments appear to dismiss tools like Gimp out of hand simply because they aren't carbon copies of the most popular proprietary alternatives. With operating systems we've entered the next phase, where using a free software operating system isn't cause for raised eyebrows, and where people are actually asking the reverse question: why can't Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X do this thing I can do easily on GNU/Linux? Hopefully we can reach that level of acceptance with other free software as well.
      - 10y ago
- aoloe 10y ago
  Ok, you want the longer answer? I know several professional designers who only (or mostly) use free software. Gimp inclusive. They do this as a matter of choice. And there are many more professional designers, who use free software for parts of their workflow. They do it, for many different reasons, but mostly because it just happens to fit their needs. Some of them use Gimp. If you would have read the article linked above, you would know that it's mostly about a professional designer (Aryeom) who is using Gimp for her work on an animation film. Personally, I still believe that you're question would have deserved only a "42" type of answer. "Professional designers" is such a vast term... But, hey I'm so generous today :-) P.S.: I don't want to get into a discussion on who is a professional designer and who is not, so I avoid putting links to the ones I know are using only/mostly free software... But here are the names of the first ones that comes to mind: Cédric, Elisa, Vlada, Camille, David, ...
  - damptowel 10y ago
    Well, only a shoddy craftsman blames his tools, but if you work in a design or ad agency everyone uses the Adobe monoculture because no one wants to deal with potential asset pipeline hickups when under tight deadlines. I'm sure there's freelancers who prefer gimp, but in the industry it's far from accepted, most designers will only know it exists but won't bother trying because they've been cosy with PS for over a decade.
    - Joof 10y ago
      Photoshop is getting less convenient to pirate; I'm starting to see more and more people who have grown up using gimp and have no desire to switch to Photoshop.
      - rpgmaker 10y ago
        Photoshop is as easy to pirate as it has ever been. The "SaaS" licensing scheme hasn't changed this one bit.
        10y ago
- gotofritz 10y ago
  It depends on the context. In my experience in advertising / agencies, graphic designers (or "creatives" as they insist on being called) are spoilt brats who found even "responsive design" too technical and "beneath" them, so much that the whole field of UX as we know it today was born to fill the gap. Expecting them to even consider using any tool other than Photoshop or Illustrator is just a waste of time. But in smaller, more "startuppy" enviroments you find some who do use Gimp. Still, the ratio in my personal experience is something like 98 - 2. TL;DR ADobe has it pretty much sewn up
- damptowel 10y ago
  Sketch use case is different though, its more layout oriented whereas illustrator is mainly a vector editing powerhouse. Layout is a pain in illustrator because it was never meant as a layout program. I use sketch, illustrator and indesign regulary and all have their relative strenghts and weaknesses even though theres a lot of feature overlap.
- ptero 10y ago
  IMO the main ideological difference is that Photoshop UI is targeting users who like to see things visually. Gimp has a more programmatic legacy. PS allows moving around a few sliders while looking at the screen to see how things change and nail it when the results look visually good. I bet that is critical for most PS users. It is for me. I paid for an (educational) PS license just so I can edit my photos before I print them and hang them on a wall. One example: doing levels. One slider move back and forth to see which areas are overblown in each channel. One extra keypress to switch between final result and overblown only. That, to me, is so powerful. I can decide on the fly, "well, I lost detail in yellow channel here, but extra detail there is clearly worth it". I am sure GIMP is great in many ways, but I guess their target user group is different. Their interface just does not work well for me (and I did try), they focus at different things, etc. I hate Adobe (both their licensing and privacy policies), but CS is just so good. It is one of the three programs for which I still have a Windows partition on my computer (I do most of my work in Linux).
  - Joeboy 10y ago
    I don't think you can blame it on the wrong kind of user. As a former Photoshop user, one of the most frustrating things about Gimp is the amount it forces me to use the mouse. I'm the kind of person that uses vim, and Photoshop is definitely a far better fit for the way I like to work [Edit: Unless it's got worse in the decade or so since I used it]. Gimp is just full of little annoyances that interrupt your flow and make it difficult to work efficiently.
    - goatface 10y ago
      This relearning problem goes both ways. People trained on GIMP tend to find Photoshop annoying and difficult to use - because they have to relearn. People accept spending extra time and struggling when learning a new skill; and are frustrated with tools (or really themselves) when something they think they know how to do suddenly is difficult.
      - Joeboy 10y ago
        I'm sure that there is a learning curve for people going from Gimp to Photoshop. In my case, going the other way, after over a decade, I still find Gimp a massive pain in the arse. It's not just that it's "not what I'm used to", it's that it's bad. Recently I had to make some end-credit cards for a short film - ie. white writing on black backgrounds. Gimp managed to make even that painful. Things like, placing an immovable dialogue over the handles of my text box so I can't get at them. If I try to replace text, it reverts to its arbitrary choice of font / size so I have to type new text in the middle of my existing text, then delete the original. No "duplicate layer" shortcut. Just gratuious annoyances that are good for nobody, and bad for everybody. Edit: I have a feeling you might be a Gimp dev, in which case I should be more grateful for the work you do, which I still use and benefit from even though the UI frustrates the hell out of me. Edit2: I just found the Duplicate Layer shortcut. Not sure how I missed it before.
- BashiBazouk 10y ago
  Mostly depends in what space you work I would think. I work in print production and absolutely need robust pantone support. I could go on endlessly about how few seem to understand what pantone is and how it works but that does not change the fact it is the defacto language for communicating printed color. Last I checked there is no pantone plugin for GIMP and as pantone is proprietary that may not change. I also deal with large format printers. These are built in the thousands or tens of thousands and don't get the software love that they would if produced on a larger scale. RIP's tend to be finicky and are designed to play nice with the adobe suite, so most stick with those tools.
- err4nt 10y ago
  I'm sure there are! While I've been a Photoshop user since v5, I haven't always had it installed. There are even times I've done professional work on Linux where Photoshop doesn't run. Currently I have Photoshop, but make use of the Gimp as well. When there are so many free tools like there that can do a pro job - the question isn't "Gimp or Photoshop" but "Gimp, and Photoshop?" I could replace Illustrator with Inkscape and still get my job done, but I have bought Illustrator so I get my money's worth out of it. But that doesn't mean I not longer also have Inkscape. Of course I use Inkscape where it's better than Illustrator :D
pritambaral 10y ago
The action search feature is nice. I like it that more software is getting search-across-all-menu-entries. I'd have really liked Ubuntu's HUD menu-search to have become a standard on the Linux desktop; adding search-across-menus would become much easier for softwares, most wouldn't need any addition of code.
- kozhevnikov 10y ago
  It's one of the better features built into OS X, ⌘⇧? will search through all menu items, combined with ability to assign a shortcut to one even if it had none originally.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Yes, as someone who doesn't use Ubuntu and complains loudly about it my biggest annoyance is I really want to use it, I just don't want to fight something as basic as alt-tab every time I use my computer. Same goes for Mac: So much polish, so much attention to detail, so much goodwill, - all ruined by a few IMO weird choices.
imurray 10y ago
Gimp 2.8 frustrated me: I could no longer open a .png, edit it and easily resave it back to .png. The Gimp developers knew better and made the UI strongly favor saving as .xcf, which makes sense in some use-cases, but not mine. I found this fix, which made quick uses of GIMP less painful for me: http://shallowsky.com/software/gimp-save/ http://shallowsky.com/software/gimp-save/ I'm assuming the new save behavior persists in Gimp 2.9.x, but I don't know.
- jorams 10y ago
  That was initially confusing to me as well, but it isn't that bad. If you open a .png (or similar) and edit it, there's a button in the File menu (I believe shortcut ctrl-shift-e) that exports directly to the original filename.
  - imurray 10y ago
    After ctrl-shift-e I have to hit enter in response to different pop-up dialogs three times, and then still answer a fourth confirmation when I quit gimp. If I'm editing a bunch of files that's not fun. With the Saver plugin I have it set up so I just hit ctrl-s like I used to, and can exit without being bothered.
  - babuskov 10y ago
    There isn't one. Ctrl-shift-e is "Export As" which opens a save dialog. Ctrl-e doesn't show up until you save the file manually at least once.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  >The Gimp developers knew better and made the UI strongly favor saving as .xcf, which makes sense in some use-cases, but not mine. Well, remember, GTK originally stood for GIMP ToolKit. The GNOME DNA is strong within GIMP. And make no mistake, that's a very GNOMEy thing to do.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    Eh, I'd say this is sane and understandable compared to typical "Gnome things".
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
GIMP is a handy tool: I use it for a lot of my image editing needs, for when very basic tools won't do. I rarely need the power of PS, and can't afford it anyway (although I do miss that magnetic lasso: GIMP's magic scissors don't quite have a good enough algorithm). All of this talk about the future is exciting. However, yes, GIMP is quite rarely an acceptable replacement for PS, and I find this unlikely to change any time soon. Also, GAP is really, REALLY, REALLY awkward and unwieldy to use. I would reccomend Synfig Studio for animation instead.
- goatface 10y ago
  GIMP's new (though not actually young) engine - GEGL, contains ffmpeg frame sources and sinks, provides a good abstraction for creating interfaces better than GAP for animation or video editing - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJJPgLGrSgc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJJPgLGrSgc for an example of a video that has been edited and encoded using GEGL this year.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Well, yeah, but why would I write a new interface, when Synfig is already there and, to some extent, comparable to Flash?
    - goatface 10y ago
      Synfig focuses on more cartoon based vector animation. What GEGL provides good foundations for doing is video editing/compositing with keyframed properties for filters. As mentioned in the linked article of this story - having an eco system of applications using GEGL would benefit both these applications and GIMP - since they would be sharing image processing operations and plugins.
      - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Well, I AM doing cartoon animation. Although video editing/compositing is always handy. Do you know if sombody's created a UI for this stuff yet?
lnanek2 10y ago
Really not a fan of this. In a link he says he took the code for saving/exporting and split it apart: http://girinstud.io/news/2015/09/improving-the-export-process-in-gimp/ http://girinstud.io/news/2015/09/improving-the-export-proces... The only way I ever use GIMP is through forked builds that let you save as whatever you want without the annoying save/export distinction, so they seem to making it tougher for people who are making good forks of their bad software to do their job.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  Saving and exporting are different tasks: the former saves the current work-in-progress project with no loss of data, the latter exports to a particular image format and is inherently lossy. If you combine them, you risk misleading users. And by keeping them split, it makes some things more convenient. When I edit images, I save a .xcf and I also export a .png. Having to manually switch between these file-types and manually remember and reënter the (possibly differing) filenames when saving would be a pain. Keeping Export and Save as separate means I don't have to. It also means that Ctrl-S saves the project, rather than overwriting my last export. And as the part you linked to points out, this means you can do things like change the scale at export time.
  - userbinator 10y ago
    What's the difference, and why should it matter? I just want to persist my changes to a file. IMHO just keep things simple and use Save for saving in the same format as the original (possibly if a warning if it doesn't support some things you've done to the file), or Save As for saving in a different format.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
      > What's the difference, and why should it matter? See edits. > IMHO just keep things simple and use Save for saving in the same format as the original (possibly if a warning if it doesn't support some things you've done to the file) You'd have to warn on every single format except XCF. > or Save As for saving in a different format. But I don't want to change the save destination. The project and the export are separate for me. If you just want to save a PNG or something, you have the option of using Export exclusively. But I need the ability to Save.
Kjeldahl 10y ago
Be aware, if you recommend GIMP to people on Macs with retina screens they are going to be very disappointed. TLDR; retina screens on Macs simply aren't supported properly (everything you do will be at a minimum of 2x scale). See https://medium.com/@kjeldahl/gimp-and-inkscape-on-retina-macs-do-not-work-9601c3052e86#.tq62wux1j https://medium.com/@kjeldahl/gimp-and-inkscape-on-retina-mac... for more details.
phkahler 10y ago
Still waiting. They need to prioritize 3 things IMHO, and those are 1) GEGL integration - this was claimed to be 80 percent done in 6 weeks (several years ago). Updating core code and libraries should be done quickly, not spread out over years concurrently with other development. 2) Update to GTK3. How can a flagship OSS program still be using a many-years-old GUI toolkit? And finally 3) Wayland support. This will be easier with GTK3 and is still slightly future-looking, but I'm writing this on a Wayland desktop so it won't be long before GIMP on the whole is completely built on outdated technology. I know all of these are in the works, but it seems like a nice sprint could get each one done in a month or two at this point. Yet here we are seeing another blog about anything but these...
- timonovici 10y ago
  It would probably be done in few months, if GIMP had a few full-time developers. But as it stands, with people working in their free time, don't expect miracles. If anything, I find it amazing that it's still developed at all.
- prokoudine 10y ago
  You mean completing and releasing 2.10 should be a 4) in your list? :D

166 points by ashitlerferad 10y ago

GIMP is an icon of open-source software, but do any professional designers use it full-time over Photoshop? Compare with Sketch, which has taken scores of users from Illustrator.

Keyframe 10y ago
Realistic answer is not really. There are people who probably use it, but they are invisible in the whole. However, Krita got some serious attention by digital painters and is used enough to be visible as an alternative to both ps and coral paint.
- nercht12 10y ago
  This. As an artist, I found Gimp too precise in its pixel-drawing. You want a dot, you get exactly that. Krita, however, uses an algorithm that smooths its brush edges so that the result - even after holding the brush in one spot for awhile - doesn't come out pixelated. I use Gimp for general editing, and particularly filters and such (e.g. liquid rescale (seam-carving)) - which is what it seems to be best at anyways.
cobalt 10y ago
unlikely, while a certainly poewrful piece of software that can do much of what photoshop can (in the 2D realm), it has no support for 3D work, real vector support, active filters (this is a huge one in traditional 2D work, esp icons/logos)
- maweki 10y ago
  The one feature that breaks it for me for professional work is that filters happen to a layer instead of being attached to them an are able to be changed on a whim. It's impossible to do any real work if you have to render and re-render every shadow on every text and object when its size changes. I think I could do without everything else but that.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    That’s why I love Krita so much – it can do all those things, can do animation, and, partially, already 3D, too.
  - erlehmann_ 10y ago
    For this reason I use Inkscape for most things I used GIMP for in the past.
  - damptowel 10y ago
    Photoshop has 'smart filters' and 'smart objects' which do exactly what you describe.
  - goatface 10y ago
    The work you might have heard about GEGL - is all about providing foundations for such non-destructive editing. The highlighted split-view / curtain preview in the blog post is implemented using these new capabilities provided by GEGL. Adding new features that cement themselves as new things in the file format is part of GIMPs roadmap after GIMP-2.10 / 3.0. 2.10 / 3.0 are aiming to provide the same functionality that GIMP-2.6 / 2.8 provided but with GEGL as the core and thus higher bitdepth.
- blub 10y ago
  Is this mandatory nowadays? I mean it's nice that PS (and even Pixelmator and Affinity) have that, but I did design work many years ago and managed fine. Sure it will be more inconvenient, but it's doable.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
    People did design work without any of these digital tools before. Give people better tools and it's hard to go back. Can you imagine writing a large piece of software without autocomplete or syntax highlighting these days?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- damptowel 10y ago
  This is simply not true, Photoshop does have all those features!
aoloe 10y ago
Yes. But as for 42, this is unlikely the answer you wanted to hear.
- oggedintocom 10y ago
  I'm not a designer - purely curious.
  - Freak_NL 10y ago
    I get aoloe's reaction though. Whenever someone posts something cool about Gimp, invariably a bunch of “yeah it's free, but it's not Adobe Photoshop is it?” comments pop up. Why should we care? Why not judge it on its own merits? This reminds me of how a lot of people used to respond to the notion of using GNU/Linux distributions as free operating systems suitable for day-to-day desktop use. Sure, I get why not everyone might want to use it (nobody is asking you to), but why does every bit of positive news or cool achievement have to get accompanied by dozens of comments by authors directly comparing it to a commercially available alternative, stating that they'd use it if only it did this and if only it looked more like that? I love how we as a global community have such a wealth of software tools available; to use for free (legally!), with a philosophy that explicitly encourages sharing and enables anyone with the know-how to contribute. Some of these tools have been with us for decades, such as Gimp, and each release brings new features and improvements. Instead of celebrating its strengths, software like Gimp gets scrutinized by holding it to an arbitrary standard it can never meet (the full feature set of Adobe Photoshop), simply because the goal posts are forever moving. I do not intend to berate anyone genuinely asking about how to migrate to free tools like Blender, Gimp, and Inkscape — questions where the comparison of features is warranted — but a lot of comments appear to dismiss tools like Gimp out of hand simply because they aren't carbon copies of the most popular proprietary alternatives. With operating systems we've entered the next phase, where using a free software operating system isn't cause for raised eyebrows, and where people are actually asking the reverse question: why can't Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X do this thing I can do easily on GNU/Linux? Hopefully we can reach that level of acceptance with other free software as well.
    - 10y ago
aoloe 10y ago
Ok, you want the longer answer? I know several professional designers who only (or mostly) use free software. Gimp inclusive. They do this as a matter of choice. And there are many more professional designers, who use free software for parts of their workflow. They do it, for many different reasons, but mostly because it just happens to fit their needs. Some of them use Gimp. If you would have read the article linked above, you would know that it's mostly about a professional designer (Aryeom) who is using Gimp for her work on an animation film. Personally, I still believe that you're question would have deserved only a "42" type of answer. "Professional designers" is such a vast term... But, hey I'm so generous today :-) P.S.: I don't want to get into a discussion on who is a professional designer and who is not, so I avoid putting links to the ones I know are using only/mostly free software... But here are the names of the first ones that comes to mind: Cédric, Elisa, Vlada, Camille, David, ...
- damptowel 10y ago
  Well, only a shoddy craftsman blames his tools, but if you work in a design or ad agency everyone uses the Adobe monoculture because no one wants to deal with potential asset pipeline hickups when under tight deadlines. I'm sure there's freelancers who prefer gimp, but in the industry it's far from accepted, most designers will only know it exists but won't bother trying because they've been cosy with PS for over a decade.
  - Joof 10y ago
    Photoshop is getting less convenient to pirate; I'm starting to see more and more people who have grown up using gimp and have no desire to switch to Photoshop.
    - rpgmaker 10y ago
      Photoshop is as easy to pirate as it has ever been. The "SaaS" licensing scheme hasn't changed this one bit.
      - 10y ago
gotofritz 10y ago
It depends on the context. In my experience in advertising / agencies, graphic designers (or "creatives" as they insist on being called) are spoilt brats who found even "responsive design" too technical and "beneath" them, so much that the whole field of UX as we know it today was born to fill the gap. Expecting them to even consider using any tool other than Photoshop or Illustrator is just a waste of time. But in smaller, more "startuppy" enviroments you find some who do use Gimp. Still, the ratio in my personal experience is something like 98 - 2. TL;DR ADobe has it pretty much sewn up
damptowel 10y ago
Sketch use case is different though, its more layout oriented whereas illustrator is mainly a vector editing powerhouse. Layout is a pain in illustrator because it was never meant as a layout program. I use sketch, illustrator and indesign regulary and all have their relative strenghts and weaknesses even though theres a lot of feature overlap.
ptero 10y ago
IMO the main ideological difference is that Photoshop UI is targeting users who like to see things visually. Gimp has a more programmatic legacy. PS allows moving around a few sliders while looking at the screen to see how things change and nail it when the results look visually good. I bet that is critical for most PS users. It is for me. I paid for an (educational) PS license just so I can edit my photos before I print them and hang them on a wall. One example: doing levels. One slider move back and forth to see which areas are overblown in each channel. One extra keypress to switch between final result and overblown only. That, to me, is so powerful. I can decide on the fly, "well, I lost detail in yellow channel here, but extra detail there is clearly worth it". I am sure GIMP is great in many ways, but I guess their target user group is different. Their interface just does not work well for me (and I did try), they focus at different things, etc. I hate Adobe (both their licensing and privacy policies), but CS is just so good. It is one of the three programs for which I still have a Windows partition on my computer (I do most of my work in Linux).
- Joeboy 10y ago
  I don't think you can blame it on the wrong kind of user. As a former Photoshop user, one of the most frustrating things about Gimp is the amount it forces me to use the mouse. I'm the kind of person that uses vim, and Photoshop is definitely a far better fit for the way I like to work [Edit: Unless it's got worse in the decade or so since I used it]. Gimp is just full of little annoyances that interrupt your flow and make it difficult to work efficiently.
  - goatface 10y ago
    This relearning problem goes both ways. People trained on GIMP tend to find Photoshop annoying and difficult to use - because they have to relearn. People accept spending extra time and struggling when learning a new skill; and are frustrated with tools (or really themselves) when something they think they know how to do suddenly is difficult.
    - Joeboy 10y ago
      I'm sure that there is a learning curve for people going from Gimp to Photoshop. In my case, going the other way, after over a decade, I still find Gimp a massive pain in the arse. It's not just that it's "not what I'm used to", it's that it's bad. Recently I had to make some end-credit cards for a short film - ie. white writing on black backgrounds. Gimp managed to make even that painful. Things like, placing an immovable dialogue over the handles of my text box so I can't get at them. If I try to replace text, it reverts to its arbitrary choice of font / size so I have to type new text in the middle of my existing text, then delete the original. No "duplicate layer" shortcut. Just gratuious annoyances that are good for nobody, and bad for everybody. Edit: I have a feeling you might be a Gimp dev, in which case I should be more grateful for the work you do, which I still use and benefit from even though the UI frustrates the hell out of me. Edit2: I just found the Duplicate Layer shortcut. Not sure how I missed it before.
BashiBazouk 10y ago
Mostly depends in what space you work I would think. I work in print production and absolutely need robust pantone support. I could go on endlessly about how few seem to understand what pantone is and how it works but that does not change the fact it is the defacto language for communicating printed color. Last I checked there is no pantone plugin for GIMP and as pantone is proprietary that may not change. I also deal with large format printers. These are built in the thousands or tens of thousands and don't get the software love that they would if produced on a larger scale. RIP's tend to be finicky and are designed to play nice with the adobe suite, so most stick with those tools.
err4nt 10y ago
I'm sure there are! While I've been a Photoshop user since v5, I haven't always had it installed. There are even times I've done professional work on Linux where Photoshop doesn't run. Currently I have Photoshop, but make use of the Gimp as well. When there are so many free tools like there that can do a pro job - the question isn't "Gimp or Photoshop" but "Gimp, and Photoshop?" I could replace Illustrator with Inkscape and still get my job done, but I have bought Illustrator so I get my money's worth out of it. But that doesn't mean I not longer also have Inkscape. Of course I use Inkscape where it's better than Illustrator :D

pritambaral 10y ago

The action search feature is nice. I like it that more software is getting search-across-all-menu-entries. I'd have really liked Ubuntu's HUD menu-search to have become a standard on the Linux desktop; adding search-across-menus would become much easier for softwares, most wouldn't need any addition of code.

kozhevnikov 10y ago
It's one of the better features built into OS X, ⌘⇧? will search through all menu items, combined with ability to assign a shortcut to one even if it had none originally.
reitanqild 10y ago
Yes, as someone who doesn't use Ubuntu and complains loudly about it my biggest annoyance is I really want to use it, I just don't want to fight something as basic as alt-tab every time I use my computer. Same goes for Mac: So much polish, so much attention to detail, so much goodwill, - all ruined by a few IMO weird choices.

imurray 10y ago

Gimp 2.8 frustrated me: I could no longer open a .png, edit it and easily resave it back to .png. The Gimp developers knew better and made the UI strongly favor saving as .xcf, which makes sense in some use-cases, but not mine. I found this fix, which made quick uses of GIMP less painful for me: http://shallowsky.com/software/gimp-save/ http://shallowsky.com/software/gimp-save/ I'm assuming the new save behavior persists in Gimp 2.9.x, but I don't know.

jorams 10y ago
That was initially confusing to me as well, but it isn't that bad. If you open a .png (or similar) and edit it, there's a button in the File menu (I believe shortcut ctrl-shift-e) that exports directly to the original filename.
- imurray 10y ago
  After ctrl-shift-e I have to hit enter in response to different pop-up dialogs three times, and then still answer a fourth confirmation when I quit gimp. If I'm editing a bunch of files that's not fun. With the Saver plugin I have it set up so I just hit ctrl-s like I used to, and can exit without being bothered.
- babuskov 10y ago
  There isn't one. Ctrl-shift-e is "Export As" which opens a save dialog. Ctrl-e doesn't show up until you save the file manually at least once.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
>The Gimp developers knew better and made the UI strongly favor saving as .xcf, which makes sense in some use-cases, but not mine. Well, remember, GTK originally stood for GIMP ToolKit. The GNOME DNA is strong within GIMP. And make no mistake, that's a very GNOMEy thing to do.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Eh, I'd say this is sane and understandable compared to typical "Gnome things".

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

GIMP is a handy tool: I use it for a lot of my image editing needs, for when very basic tools won't do. I rarely need the power of PS, and can't afford it anyway (although I do miss that magnetic lasso: GIMP's magic scissors don't quite have a good enough algorithm). All of this talk about the future is exciting. However, yes, GIMP is quite rarely an acceptable replacement for PS, and I find this unlikely to change any time soon. Also, GAP is really, REALLY, REALLY awkward and unwieldy to use. I would reccomend Synfig Studio for animation instead.

goatface 10y ago
GIMP's new (though not actually young) engine - GEGL, contains ffmpeg frame sources and sinks, provides a good abstraction for creating interfaces better than GAP for animation or video editing - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJJPgLGrSgc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJJPgLGrSgc for an example of a video that has been edited and encoded using GEGL this year.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Well, yeah, but why would I write a new interface, when Synfig is already there and, to some extent, comparable to Flash?
  - goatface 10y ago
    Synfig focuses on more cartoon based vector animation. What GEGL provides good foundations for doing is video editing/compositing with keyframed properties for filters. As mentioned in the linked article of this story - having an eco system of applications using GEGL would benefit both these applications and GIMP - since they would be sharing image processing operations and plugins.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      Well, I AM doing cartoon animation. Although video editing/compositing is always handy. Do you know if sombody's created a UI for this stuff yet?

lnanek2 10y ago

Really not a fan of this. In a link he says he took the code for saving/exporting and split it apart: http://girinstud.io/news/2015/09/improving-the-export-process-in-gimp/ http://girinstud.io/news/2015/09/improving-the-export-proces... The only way I ever use GIMP is through forked builds that let you save as whatever you want without the annoying save/export distinction, so they seem to making it tougher for people who are making good forks of their bad software to do their job.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
Saving and exporting are different tasks: the former saves the current work-in-progress project with no loss of data, the latter exports to a particular image format and is inherently lossy. If you combine them, you risk misleading users. And by keeping them split, it makes some things more convenient. When I edit images, I save a .xcf and I also export a .png. Having to manually switch between these file-types and manually remember and reënter the (possibly differing) filenames when saving would be a pain. Keeping Export and Save as separate means I don't have to. It also means that Ctrl-S saves the project, rather than overwriting my last export. And as the part you linked to points out, this means you can do things like change the scale at export time.
- userbinator 10y ago
  What's the difference, and why should it matter? I just want to persist my changes to a file. IMHO just keep things simple and use Save for saving in the same format as the original (possibly if a warning if it doesn't support some things you've done to the file), or Save As for saving in a different format.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
    > What's the difference, and why should it matter? See edits. > IMHO just keep things simple and use Save for saving in the same format as the original (possibly if a warning if it doesn't support some things you've done to the file) You'd have to warn on every single format except XCF. > or Save As for saving in a different format. But I don't want to change the save destination. The project and the export are separate for me. If you just want to save a PNG or something, you have the option of using Export exclusively. But I need the ability to Save.

Kjeldahl 10y ago

Be aware, if you recommend GIMP to people on Macs with retina screens they are going to be very disappointed. TLDR; retina screens on Macs simply aren't supported properly (everything you do will be at a minimum of 2x scale). See https://medium.com/@kjeldahl/gimp-and-inkscape-on-retina-macs-do-not-work-9601c3052e86#.tq62wux1j https://medium.com/@kjeldahl/gimp-and-inkscape-on-retina-mac... for more details.

phkahler 10y ago

Still waiting. They need to prioritize 3 things IMHO, and those are 1) GEGL integration - this was claimed to be 80 percent done in 6 weeks (several years ago). Updating core code and libraries should be done quickly, not spread out over years concurrently with other development. 2) Update to GTK3. How can a flagship OSS program still be using a many-years-old GUI toolkit? And finally 3) Wayland support. This will be easier with GTK3 and is still slightly future-looking, but I'm writing this on a Wayland desktop so it won't be long before GIMP on the whole is completely built on outdated technology. I know all of these are in the works, but it seems like a nice sprint could get each one done in a month or two at this point. Yet here we are seeing another blog about anything but these...

timonovici 10y ago
It would probably be done in few months, if GIMP had a few full-time developers. But as it stands, with people working in their free time, don't expect miracles. If anything, I find it amazing that it's still developed at all.
prokoudine 10y ago
You mean completing and releasing 2.10 should be a 4) in your list? :D