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For anyone who is interested in funding Professional quality OSS graphics software that meets the requirements of current standards and expectations I strongly

For anyone who is interested in funding Professional quality OSS graphics software that meets the requirements of current standards and expectations I strongly suggest to donated to the Krita, Natron or Blender project instead of Gimp. The Gimp project has been quite abrasive to the graphics research and software development communities for many years. The Gimp team 'knows better' then the highly qualified and experienced graphics programmers who offered to help the project bring there code base into the current standards for graphics. There has been a lot of goodwill that has been squandered by the Gimp developers to the point that I seriously doubt that anyone with the skills or the time to work on OSS graphics is willing to invest any time in the project. Any further development of Gimp will more then likely be an upgrade to the latest version of the GTK+ toolkit slapped on top of the same outdated 8bit early 1990's architecture fallowed by praise by people who have little experience or interest in graphics at any serious level.

std_throwaway 10y ago
Can you comment on the substantial redesign of the GIMP that will be in the next major version?
- generic_user 10y ago
  I would not give a critique unless I did a thorough review of the current incarnation of re-architecture with some benchmarks on stressful average work flow that could be expected from a computer graphics artist or painter. I will say that the Gimp 'core rewrite' has been a project in development since the early 2000's. I have never seen a clear design document explaining what this new core is suppose to achieve and for what uses Gimp expects to be used by professional level Artists workflows. The last development that I was paying attention to was the decision to switch to GEGL for there core compositing and pixel engine. But it looked like it would simply be easier and probably better to start from scratch and build an entirely new software build around a 32bit image architecture rather then try and retrofit there 8bit custom build compositing system. I will also note that they decided to invest there limited resources into upgrading the gui from GTK2 to GTK3 rather then focus that energy on the core. That shows rather skewed priority focus for a software that has some serious issues.
  - std_throwaway 10y ago
    Thanks for your reply. You present some interesting points. * Project management. * Goal/benchmark definition. * Human resource allocation. I can't decide if what you say is truly so. One thing that I know, though, is that the old GIMP has been very useful to me for editing images (nothing fancy). I'm not an artist/painter but if I were, I'd start that with Krita instead of GIMP. In my mind, GIMP is more of a toolbox for doing the boring stuff like cropping/converting/annotating/correcting some random images and saving them in various formats. Gaining proper color management would be a good thing in my opinion, even if everything else stayed the same.
    - generic_user 10y ago
      If Gimp works for you then use it. But I think you will find that even for simple image manipulation Krita is a faster easier to use editor at this point. My concern is with Professional quality tools for artists. These tools already exist on Linux but they are predominately closed source. If Linux and OSS is going to be an option for Artists then the tools have to meet the same high quality standards that other professions that use Linux expect. But in graphics this is not the case and has not been the case for many years. The best way to encourage the momentum for better tools is to support those projects that take the quality of there software seriously and have some urgency. The projects I have mentioned previously have demonstrated that they have that focus.
      - timonovici 10y ago
        There's one artist that uses FLOSS to draw and make a living out of it, David Revoy. He's using Krita as his main painting tool, but: "Gcolor2 is a colorpicker, Inkscape my favorite vector editor, Gimp for manipulating images and Shutter for taking advanced screenshots." https://www.davidrevoy.com/article316/ubuntu-16-04-for-my-digital-painting-workstation https://www.davidrevoy.com/article316/ubuntu-16-04-for-my-di... I don't see why we shouldn't support the development of both programs. I personally like GIMP better, maybe just because I'm used with the interface, and I don't do paintings, only image manipulations.
timonovici 10y ago
GIMP had some very serious progress lately (v 2.8) . I found myself using the Cage tool a lot, for example, and the new brush size selector is quite nice. As for the 8 bit stuff - you do know that they are transitioning to babl and GEGL, right? I don't know much about those highly qualified graphics programmers - but every good project has a pace and a development plan - GIMP definitely has a roadmap in place, that can't and shouldn't be turned 180 degrees everytime someone comes with an idea; and I've seen quite a few people who see the rigors and the standards set in place as "abrasiveness" Could you point us to some mailing list messages that would support the claim though? I don't follow the mailing list closely, mainly the news announcements.
- generic_user 10y ago
  > transitioning to babl and GEGL The Gimp has been 'transitioning to GEGL' for how many years now? Something like six or seven years. And getting the data structures in place is only part of the challenge. How fast is this going to be for users? If the speed is to slow for users to efficiently get there work done at an intuitive pace then you have still failed. From the initial GEGL integration attempts I saw the whole thing was hacked together with no clear thought to performance. And the performance was indeed quite abysmal.
  - timonovici 10y ago
    GEGL supports acceleration via OpenCL, so it's unfair to claim they haven't thought of performance at all. And AFAIK most plugins are already ported to GEGL, and the core seems to be done. I do agree that it took a lot of time, but I find it surprising that the project made any progress at all - whitout a few developers hired full time, aren't we too entitled to ask for such advanced features, and have them shipped quick as well? There are very few sustainable free/open source projects, which have corporate or some other kind of backing - GNOME (redhat), Linux (linux foundation) and Blender (blender institute) are the only one that come to my mind.
    - generic_user 10y ago
      > aren't we too entitled to ask for such advanced features, and have them shipped quick as well? It would be unreasonable to expect from unpaid volunteers if they has no ambition to do such work. Which is why I suggest that if you want to see advanced features and professional quality graphics software with a predictable cycle of development then you support the projects that actually try to create such programs. Krita has a regular development cycle, a clear set of priorities and goals and funded development efforts that clearly lays out what features and improvement are going to be achieved with your hard earned money. That has been an ENORMOUSLY successful improvement for both the programmers who can now get paid to work on there projects and the artists that now get quality continuously updated graphics software. If Gimp or any other project deserve funding they have to step up and show the discipline and commitment to there project that successful projects like Krita have. I do not see that at this time so my recommendation is to support the projects that I listed in the OP. > edit As far as performance is concerned OpenCL or Cuda is not going to save you if your cpu bound memory architecture is not carefully thought for performance. This has always been a major problem for gimp for a long time. The higher bit depth and resolutions that are used now only exacerbate the situation. A general use case now could easily have tens of gigabytes worth of data that the user wants to manipulate delete and expand in real time. I have never seen this addressed in a serious proposal.
iak8god 10y ago
> The Gimp project has been quite abrasive to the graphics research and software development communities for many years. The Gimp team 'knows better' then the highly qualified and experienced graphics programmers who offered to help the project bring there code base into the current standards for graphics. Unfortunately groups of humans act that way sometimes. Wouldn't it make sense for the more qualified and experienced graphics programmers to simply fork it and make their own better product?
- generic_user 10y ago
  More experienced graphics programmers have careers working on commercial DCC(digital content creation) applications, Animation/Game studios, Academic positions or some other graphics related position. A lot of people would like to work on a established project rather then bootstrap a new one. And many could not do that anyways because of NDA terms. The climate is getting better but only because there is a new crop of applications that sprung up in the last few years that has more interest and understanding of who the graphics community is and how it works. And seems more interested in contributions by people who have highly specialized and deep expertise in graphics. My general sense is that it has been more fruitful for people to work on specific projects privately or in there professional environment that solve there problems and then release those projects as OSS. Rather then try to wrangle the politics and project structure of some of the older established open source software.
andmarios 10y ago
The alternatives you suggest aren't GIMP replacements. I am into photography and, for better or worse, only GIMP provides tools for photographers and is an alternative to photoshop. Since Krita and Blender seem to be at a better funding position than GIMP, it only makes sense to donate to it. Note: I've donated to Krita, GIMP, digiKam and other software, animation projects and libregraphics meetings in the past.
herbst 10y ago
Or maybe just help funding Gimp as its the only software i actually use. Next to many other people i know.
prokoudine 10y ago
> The Gimp team 'knows better' then the highly qualified and experienced graphics programmers who offered to help the project bring there code base into the current standards for graphics. Name one such programmer. > Any further development of Gimp will more then likely be an upgrade to the latest version of the GTK+ toolkit slapped on top of the same outdated 8bit early 1990's architecture 8bit has been gone since 2012. Wake up and smells the floats :)

std_throwaway 10y ago

Can you comment on the substantial redesign of the GIMP that will be in the next major version?

generic_user 10y ago
I would not give a critique unless I did a thorough review of the current incarnation of re-architecture with some benchmarks on stressful average work flow that could be expected from a computer graphics artist or painter. I will say that the Gimp 'core rewrite' has been a project in development since the early 2000's. I have never seen a clear design document explaining what this new core is suppose to achieve and for what uses Gimp expects to be used by professional level Artists workflows. The last development that I was paying attention to was the decision to switch to GEGL for there core compositing and pixel engine. But it looked like it would simply be easier and probably better to start from scratch and build an entirely new software build around a 32bit image architecture rather then try and retrofit there 8bit custom build compositing system. I will also note that they decided to invest there limited resources into upgrading the gui from GTK2 to GTK3 rather then focus that energy on the core. That shows rather skewed priority focus for a software that has some serious issues.
- std_throwaway 10y ago
  Thanks for your reply. You present some interesting points. * Project management. * Goal/benchmark definition. * Human resource allocation. I can't decide if what you say is truly so. One thing that I know, though, is that the old GIMP has been very useful to me for editing images (nothing fancy). I'm not an artist/painter but if I were, I'd start that with Krita instead of GIMP. In my mind, GIMP is more of a toolbox for doing the boring stuff like cropping/converting/annotating/correcting some random images and saving them in various formats. Gaining proper color management would be a good thing in my opinion, even if everything else stayed the same.
  - generic_user 10y ago
    If Gimp works for you then use it. But I think you will find that even for simple image manipulation Krita is a faster easier to use editor at this point. My concern is with Professional quality tools for artists. These tools already exist on Linux but they are predominately closed source. If Linux and OSS is going to be an option for Artists then the tools have to meet the same high quality standards that other professions that use Linux expect. But in graphics this is not the case and has not been the case for many years. The best way to encourage the momentum for better tools is to support those projects that take the quality of there software seriously and have some urgency. The projects I have mentioned previously have demonstrated that they have that focus.
    - timonovici 10y ago
      There's one artist that uses FLOSS to draw and make a living out of it, David Revoy. He's using Krita as his main painting tool, but: "Gcolor2 is a colorpicker, Inkscape my favorite vector editor, Gimp for manipulating images and Shutter for taking advanced screenshots." https://www.davidrevoy.com/article316/ubuntu-16-04-for-my-digital-painting-workstation https://www.davidrevoy.com/article316/ubuntu-16-04-for-my-di... I don't see why we shouldn't support the development of both programs. I personally like GIMP better, maybe just because I'm used with the interface, and I don't do paintings, only image manipulations.

timonovici 10y ago

GIMP had some very serious progress lately (v 2.8) . I found myself using the Cage tool a lot, for example, and the new brush size selector is quite nice. As for the 8 bit stuff - you do know that they are transitioning to babl and GEGL, right? I don't know much about those highly qualified graphics programmers - but every good project has a pace and a development plan - GIMP definitely has a roadmap in place, that can't and shouldn't be turned 180 degrees everytime someone comes with an idea; and I've seen quite a few people who see the rigors and the standards set in place as "abrasiveness" Could you point us to some mailing list messages that would support the claim though? I don't follow the mailing list closely, mainly the news announcements.

generic_user 10y ago
> transitioning to babl and GEGL The Gimp has been 'transitioning to GEGL' for how many years now? Something like six or seven years. And getting the data structures in place is only part of the challenge. How fast is this going to be for users? If the speed is to slow for users to efficiently get there work done at an intuitive pace then you have still failed. From the initial GEGL integration attempts I saw the whole thing was hacked together with no clear thought to performance. And the performance was indeed quite abysmal.
- timonovici 10y ago
  GEGL supports acceleration via OpenCL, so it's unfair to claim they haven't thought of performance at all. And AFAIK most plugins are already ported to GEGL, and the core seems to be done. I do agree that it took a lot of time, but I find it surprising that the project made any progress at all - whitout a few developers hired full time, aren't we too entitled to ask for such advanced features, and have them shipped quick as well? There are very few sustainable free/open source projects, which have corporate or some other kind of backing - GNOME (redhat), Linux (linux foundation) and Blender (blender institute) are the only one that come to my mind.
  - generic_user 10y ago
    > aren't we too entitled to ask for such advanced features, and have them shipped quick as well? It would be unreasonable to expect from unpaid volunteers if they has no ambition to do such work. Which is why I suggest that if you want to see advanced features and professional quality graphics software with a predictable cycle of development then you support the projects that actually try to create such programs. Krita has a regular development cycle, a clear set of priorities and goals and funded development efforts that clearly lays out what features and improvement are going to be achieved with your hard earned money. That has been an ENORMOUSLY successful improvement for both the programmers who can now get paid to work on there projects and the artists that now get quality continuously updated graphics software. If Gimp or any other project deserve funding they have to step up and show the discipline and commitment to there project that successful projects like Krita have. I do not see that at this time so my recommendation is to support the projects that I listed in the OP. > edit As far as performance is concerned OpenCL or Cuda is not going to save you if your cpu bound memory architecture is not carefully thought for performance. This has always been a major problem for gimp for a long time. The higher bit depth and resolutions that are used now only exacerbate the situation. A general use case now could easily have tens of gigabytes worth of data that the user wants to manipulate delete and expand in real time. I have never seen this addressed in a serious proposal.

iak8god 10y ago

> The Gimp project has been quite abrasive to the graphics research and software development communities for many years. The Gimp team 'knows better' then the highly qualified and experienced graphics programmers who offered to help the project bring there code base into the current standards for graphics. Unfortunately groups of humans act that way sometimes. Wouldn't it make sense for the more qualified and experienced graphics programmers to simply fork it and make their own better product?

generic_user 10y ago
More experienced graphics programmers have careers working on commercial DCC(digital content creation) applications, Animation/Game studios, Academic positions or some other graphics related position. A lot of people would like to work on a established project rather then bootstrap a new one. And many could not do that anyways because of NDA terms. The climate is getting better but only because there is a new crop of applications that sprung up in the last few years that has more interest and understanding of who the graphics community is and how it works. And seems more interested in contributions by people who have highly specialized and deep expertise in graphics. My general sense is that it has been more fruitful for people to work on specific projects privately or in there professional environment that solve there problems and then release those projects as OSS. Rather then try to wrangle the politics and project structure of some of the older established open source software.

andmarios 10y ago

The alternatives you suggest aren't GIMP replacements. I am into photography and, for better or worse, only GIMP provides tools for photographers and is an alternative to photoshop. Since Krita and Blender seem to be at a better funding position than GIMP, it only makes sense to donate to it. Note: I've donated to Krita, GIMP, digiKam and other software, animation projects and libregraphics meetings in the past.

herbst 10y ago

Or maybe just help funding Gimp as its the only software i actually use. Next to many other people i know.

prokoudine 10y ago

> The Gimp team 'knows better' then the highly qualified and experienced graphics programmers who offered to help the project bring there code base into the current standards for graphics. Name one such programmer. > Any further development of Gimp will more then likely be an upgrade to the latest version of the GTK+ toolkit slapped on top of the same outdated 8bit early 1990's architecture 8bit has been gone since 2012. Wake up and smells the floats :)