6 ms·

Sorry to say I don't think GIMP is the best example of a great FLOSS project. Many other projects are very competitive (or better) than commercial options but

• 6DM 10y ago
  Edit: [Deleted] I'm sorry, but I don't find the tool intuitive. I ran into issues using it. I installed fresh copy and tried steps commenters suggested and it worked well. However this was not my experience a mere two days ago.
  • reitanqild 10y ago
    ? I'm by no means a pro but I can crop an image using gimp in less than 2mins and that includes figuring out where the tools are (I only open it whenever I upload images I guess every third month.)
  • mixmastamyk 10y ago
    Don't know what you're talking about? Cropping and scaling take one click and mouse drag or menu selection respectively.
  • kaybe 10y ago
    What are the problems you encounter?
    • 6DM 10y ago
      I usually end up at the point where the image is highlighted, but I can't get it to actually crop for some reason. Knowing about the exacto knife (from another comment) made it a lot easier.
  • pmoriarty 10y ago
    Cropping is a "HUGE pain"? Are you kidding me? 1. Rectangle select. 2. Image -> Crop to selection. How much simpler can you get?
    • MildlySerious 10y ago
      Exactly. I found myself using GIMP for exactly those "quick" scenarios because PS, especially before CS6, was just bulky and overcomplicated. GIMP: Roughly select something, zoom in to make it pixel-perfect, see the size of the selection in the bottom left, and just drag until it fits your need. PS? Roughly select something. Figure out the size of the selection. Zoom in. Dig into the menu.. Transform selection? Adjust. What's the size now? .. Nope, thanks. I am done 5 times over in GIMP by the time I did that. I get that GIMP is not perfect, but some people treat like the PHP of graphics software.
      • reitanqild 10y ago
        Complaining about php is like complaining about an axe: Yes, it might hurt incompetent people but the people who master it have a truly nifty tool at their disposal.
        • FatalBaboon 10y ago
          Complaining about PHP is sanity of someone who learned more than one language.
          • reitanqild 10y ago
            As someone who has coded in c, java, javascript (before it was cool), perl, python, visual basic I still see a clear niche for php even though I don't use it anymore.
            • rbanffy 10y ago
              Indeed. It's just that it's not a good language (like Visual Basic).
  • Grishnakh 10y ago
    That's weird. I'm not a regular user of GIMP at all, but cropping and scaling are pretty much the main things I do use it for, and it's pretty simple and easy. The crop tool is the one that looks like an Xacto knife blade, and the scaling tool is right there in one of the main menus.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • kruhft 10y ago
    Shift-C.
    • 6DM 10y ago
      Shift-C is only intuitive if you know the actual short cut. So how do you find out about it? Google.
  • Too 10y ago
    Agree! The discoverabilty UI in gimp is horrible, it's like the first time you accidentally ended up in Vi and didn't know how to even do basic shit like writing text or closing the application. For basic image editing just use Pinta on linux and Paint.net on windows. Unless you are a professional designer they will cover 99% of your use cases.
• reitanqild 10y ago
  > The UX has always been poor and unnecessarily complicated. I'm afraid a lot of photoshop ease-of-use boils down to : More tutorials are available for PS Those who complain already have an existing investment in learning PS I started using both at about the same time and I found PS more annoying except for one thing, -the multi window UI (which is now fixed). Those
• exDM69 10y ago
  GIMP, Inkscape, Blender and other open source art production tools have a big chicken and egg problem. To really improve, they need more professionals using them and a part of them should be developers or willing to chip in by other means. But because there are issues (education included) that are deal breakers for pros, you can't expect it to get better quickly. The situation is much worse for art production tools (than e.g. programmers' tools), because a smaller portion of professionals in the field are also capable programmers. This is a pretty sad situation and I can't how it would change, apart from giant (in open source terms) donations that would allow a developer-year or few full-time.
  • lips 10y ago
    I've long wondered how to address this "different itch" problem. People in a position to contribute code don't have the same itches or desires as those who don't, vs a DBMS, IDE, wiki, http server, etc.
  • initram 10y ago
    I would think that you could find a well-known artist who would be willing to consult on improving a product, especially if they got to have someone implement their pet features the way they want them to be implemented. But the question is - are the tools good enough to even get there or are there so many missing or poorly implemented features that it would be a full rewrite (at least of the UI) to even start?
  • makomk 10y ago
    Not all open source art production tools, though - Krita seems to have carved out a niche community of happy artistic users, probably because there's room for tools that take a different approach to Photoshop.
  • mlvljr 10y ago
    FreeCAD fits here as well, I suspect (is it even usable in its current state?).
• nnq 10y ago
  > There are many examples of complex professional systems that prove a decent UX is still possible ...and Adobe PS is not one of them! People tolerate its UX/I because the functionality is unequaled and, after you commit to visual and muscle-memory all the shortcuts and locations of commands and options, you can be extremely productive despite the UX/I. Also, people coming from the "physical arts" category are kind of used to horrible UX/I... I mean, the "UX/I" of a paint brush is pure horror story, even if you use acrylic paint... so the "suffering leads to great art" mantra when applied to tools too, carried into the digital world, makes artists pretty "masochistic" which pairs well with Adobe products' UI "sadism" :)
  • WhitneyLand 10y ago
    Totally agree PS has its own UX issues. My personal favorite: different key combinations for the first time you undo and the second time you undo.
    • PeCaN 10y ago
      …That's actually one of the things I like about Photoshop—you can just press Ctrl-Z repeatedly to look at before/after a change. Sure it's odd, but there's a reason it's the way it is.
    • teaearlgraycold 10y ago
      >different key combinations for the first time you undo and the second time you undo. That's not what's going on. Ctrl+Z is an undo/redo toggle, Ctrl+Shift+Z steps back in the document history. You shouldn't do Ctrl+Z followed by a series of Ctrl+Shift+Zs. Just do Ctrl+Shift+Z.
    • Retra 10y ago
      You're just undoing the undo.
  • monksy 10y ago
    That makes a good point. A lot of software being pushed out is targeted to beginner users and is broken in terms of encouraging users to to continue using it. We've gotten rid of "Advanced" settings and giving a deeper way of using the tool. I'm not suggesting that we should leave all tools and products completely unusable unless you're a level 20 night elf. However, reward your frequent users.
• justavoice 10y ago
  yeah, but for that $10 a month you get a free service running that checks your licensing status. No thanks, unless I'm a very high-end pro artist I'm not going to waste the time or the $10 a month when I could download Gimp for free and have 80% of the functionality.
• dubcanada 10y ago
  I have too agree, there are software (sketch, pixelmator, etc) on Mac that just got released a few years ago that surpass gimp in basically every single function including usability.
• pmoriarty 10y ago
  "The unified transform tool mentioned as a highlight is really a pretty simple thing to code." So you contributed to its development, right?
  • freehunter 10y ago
    I thought we left the idea of "you can't complain about something unless you built it yourself" way behind us. That's not a constructive way to talk about anything. I can't write a "hello world" in Clojure, but I still know it's a trivial thing to do. If someone was bragging to me about their hello world and I said "that's really simple", should they respond back "So you contributed to my hello world, right?" I'm not the one claiming I'm a great developer. I don't have anything to prove.
    • pmoriarty 10y ago
      There's constructive criticism, which is usually welcomed, and then there are just plain complaints. Alleging that the uniform transport tool is simple to code helps no one. It just expresses the author's disdain for the accomplishments of volunteers who added a feature to a free and open source tool. If he thought it was so simple, he could have actually spent a few minutes to help a project which everybody can see needs help, instead of sneering at it. That would have been constructive.
      • throwanem 10y ago
        > a few minutes Have you looked at the GIMP wiki's "how to build" pages lately? The build environment is quite complex, especially if you're doing cross-platform builds, and between the "work in progress" disclaimer and the fact that nobody's paid much attention to those pages this year, I have a strong feeling that following those directions as written doesn't result in a working build env. If you're already a GIMP dev, sure, it might be a few minutes. If you're not, it's probably going to be more like a few hours, more or less depending on whether anyone who can help is paying attention to IRC, just to get to the point where you can start hacking on it at all. That's a lot of time and irritation to invest.