41 ms·

GIMP – 2016 in review

346 points by BuuQu9hu 10y ago

janvdberg 10y ago
Great stuff. I'm looking forward to 2.10. GIMP is my tool when I want to edit photos or create Christmas cards. Even though I hear this quote ringing in my ear, and I can't seem to shake it, mainly because of who said it: "Yet I think that a few programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, will always be superior to competitors like the Gimp—for some reason, I really don’t know why! I’m quite willing to pay good money for really good software, if I believe that it has been produced by the best programmers." [1] [1] http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856 http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856
- aarontyree 10y ago
  I wonder sometimes if the reason GIMP development doesn't surpass other options is simply not having enough developers, having a user base that is more art centered than programming centered, and having a somewhat bottlenecked development culture. These could just be perceptions. I am hoping that when the transition to GEGL is fully implemented, there will be an acceleration. Its hard to use it for serious work. The stable branch is still 8bit :/
  - mkohlmyr 10y ago
    I don't know, as someone who moved from GIMP to Photoshop a long time ago I never saw that as being the reason it was/is(in my opinion) inferior. It has plenty of features - more than enough. What it never had was as good of a user interface and user experience. It always felt clunky and awkward by comparison. If I were to give them one additional project member it wouldn't be a developer. It would be a product owner who uses Photoshop daily.
    - qume 10y ago
      Couldn't agree more.
    - exDM69 10y ago
      > It would be a product owner who uses Photoshop daily. But no-one sings praise to the Photoshop UI either, I've heard numerous complaints about it getting worse and worse all the time. It's a matter of people being used to PS and not willing to change. There was a project earlier which had a Photoshop-clone UI for GIMP (called GimpShop or something), but it didn't magically solve all the issues. These days core GIMP has a single window interface available. I've personally never had an issue with GIMP's UI after I grokked some of the basic concepts (e.g. "make selection and flood fill" - not "draw rectangle"). I see the lack of non-destructive editing and (historically) bad color management as a bigger issue. I'm sure GIMP would accept UI-related contributions but the list of volunteers is short.
      - mkohlmyr 10y ago
        Admittedly I haven't used GIMP in a while, but the entire selection interface was awful last time I did. That's a very basic thing that was constantly annoying to me. Wether I can grok it or not really doesn't matter. Normal users don't want to have to grok things. It didn't feel intuitive, and as a result it only took a few hours of using Photoshop CS3 to never want to go back.
        exDM69 10y ago
        Here's the thing: "normal users" looking for a free-of-charge alternative to commercial apps are not the typical target audience of open source productivity tools. They're primarily targetted to scratch the authors' own itch, and secondarily to benefit anyone who finds it useful in the hopes of more contributions. Average Joes (nor non-contributing professional artists/photographers) are typically not beneficial to these projects, at worst they are a hindrance: tons of help requests (in the bug tracker), low effort bug reports, requests for Windows/OSX binaries (without offering to help in maintenance), etc. You can find some ugly examples if you look into bug trackers / mailing lists of some of these projects. We can only hope that a benevolent philanthropist comes by and drops a few million dollars in to getting full time, paid developers into GIMP, Blender, Inkscape and all the other open source productivity tools but until that happens it's a mostly volunteer effort and the contributors can choose what to focus on. If Photoshop suits you, great. I've managed to do all my image editing in GIMP for the past 20 years and I'm very glad the project exists.
    - ninjaroar 10y ago
      Do product owners really work in open source projects where developers aren't getting paid? I know personally, as an developer and an open source contributor, I'm going to work on something which either scratches my own itch or something which interests me. I certainly wouldn't be spending my own time working on the roadmap of a product owner if it doesn't fall into one of the two categories anyways.
  - intoverflow2 10y ago
    > having a user base that is more art centered than programming centered Sorry but I think it's more likely the opposite and the user base is more developer centered than artist centered. How are devs supposed to understand how to move this app forward if no one even uses it to it's full potential. Getting tired of technies pointing fingers at the artists when they fail to understand how to make great creative tools.
  - exDM69 10y ago
    The same chicken-and-egg problem plagues all the open source creativity suites and other "professional" software (GIMP, Blender, Inkscape, etc): there aren't enough artists, photographers, etc using it and contributing to it to make it competitive, and there will be no new users as long as the development (with user friendliness in mind) is stagnant. The pool of programming-capable professional artists isn't very large in the first place and I can't blame them for focusing on their jobs and deadlines instead of developing the software they use. That said, I have no sympathy for people who complain about the issues but do not contribute in any way. Being rude and mean to the developers doesn't help anyone, go ahead and use the commercial alternatives and shut up.
  - prokoudine 10y ago
    Aaron, basically you are looking at a combination of factors: — a huge momentum that Photoshop has accumulated over the decades; — huge R&D and marketing budget at Adobe; — whole businesses built around educating Adobe tools (think Envato et al.). And the list goes on. Which is why it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to "surpass other options". But it makes a hell of a sense to create a sensible sophisticated tool for a certain user base. Which is kinda what we do with GIMP, as much as time permits. BTW, love your photos :)
    - aarontyree 10y ago
      Thank you. I like most of them, most days:) That really is correct. It isn't about being better than every other option is it? Its amazing how easy it is to fall back into the global stage competition thinking. I think its just that my inner Richard Stallman still points an accusing finger at me every time I fire up Photoshop:)
- unwind 10y ago
  Un-link-baiting: the quote is by Donald Knuth.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Even though I hear this quote ringing in my ear, and I can't seem to shake it, mainly because of who said it 1) Photoshop had a 10+ year head start and tons of patents. 2) Adobe can pay programmers to work on it as their main and sole focus. GIMP is stuffed by volunteers. 3) Adobe can pay programmers to work on boring parts. OSS programmers tend to navigate to the "glorious" and "fun" parts. 4) Adobe has extensive testing equipment and top notch relations with top designers using its products for feedback. 5) At some point GTK, the toolkit GIMP (and Gnome and tons of other stuff) is based on, had just one developer working actively on it. I know because he blogged about it, and was fed up. That's not really what you want for your core infrastructure. 6) Adobe actively maintains Windows and OS X releases. GTK has mostly given up on other platforms and had historically had lots of problems.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    > 3) Adobe can pay programmers to work on boring parts. OSS programmers tend to navigate to the "glorious" and "fun" parts. Aka CADT...
    - yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
      Yes, but it's harder to judge volunteers who are only working at all because they enjoy doing so.
  - sebnukem2 10y ago
    GTK literally means the Gimp ToolKit. It's not based on, it's the toolkit that started it all.
  - nothis 10y ago
    GTK is probably the main reason Gimp isn't a serious competitor in professional work, then. I can imagine what monumental task it must be to maintain a cross-platform GUI toolkit, but it's IMO the single most important aspect of Gimp. Let's face it, all the features are there. Maybe 5% of Photoshop's deep ocean of features is actually used by the average user, Gimp can provide almost the complete functionality. Some extra performance and nice-to-have tweaks might still make a difference, but they're not what's holding people back from considering a free option over a several-hundred-dollar one. The user interface is what's crap. Sorry, GTK, it just is. Copy-pasting what I wrote a few months ago: >Out of curiosity, I tried installing Gimp to see how much has changed (for the better?) since I last checked it out. The tool interface doesn't quite fit into its window by default so you have a tiny little scrollbar at the bottom that you have to scroll to see the full text. I resized it. After popping out a submenu, it once again didn't fit. This is plain unacceptable. Yes, this is 99% there, it's a minor thing, it's probably thousands of man-hours to avoid a gazillion other bugs and issues and even get to this point. But it's not enough. A UI for such a tool, where you actually fiddle with it a lot, has to be perfect. Perfect on a technical level, perfect in a Apple-y "let's ensure that the empirically determined most-used features are shown first and less-used stuff doesn't clutter precious screen-space" sense that takes long and frustrating trial-and-error involving real-world feedback. You can't have a button that's 15 pixel larger than it has to be. You can't have a layout arrangement that wastes half a window because it's poorly aligned. You can't have spacing that's inconsistent enough to make you hesitate clicking an icon because you're not sure if it's connected to some other element of the interface. Open source/free software needs a user interface push, but apparently that's not a sexy field to work on.
Rugsandbeyond 10y ago
its nice stuff
currywurst 10y ago
Thank you GIMP project for all the goodies and the steady progress over so many years ... A really admirable achievement ! I'm not a professional user but it does more than enough for my needs.
Freak_NL 10y ago
I don't use the GIMP nearly as much as Inkscape (the two form an awesome free software graphics suite together), but I am always pleasantly surprised by the gradual improvements — the layer improvements look useful! What really impresses me though is how the GIMP has managed to remain such a constant ever-present factor on the free software desktop. It feels as if it has just always been there. Kudos to all the developers and maintainers!
- ordbajsare 10y ago
  Inkscapes perfromance it to shitty to be usefull.
- distances 10y ago
  GIMP indeed just is always there, on all platforms. As a developer my needs are quite modest: editing screenshots, juggling graphics assets, etc. But I do use GIMP at least weekly, and it always delivers. Big thanks for the developers.
  - gurkendoktor 10y ago
    > on all platforms I've recently tried GIMP after reading about an update on Hacker News (not this one) and it was an absolute disaster - took forever to start, nothing worked, UI was glitchy, and then I accidentally quit it because I didn't know what the empty, floating window was good for. It's a pity that Gtk apps usually don't really work on macOS, it makes it much more unlikely for us Apple users to contribute on GitHub etc. :( I'd much prefer a native cross-platform toolkit to the web-based stuff that's popular now.
    - forbidden404 10y ago
      I've been using GIMP sparingly on my MBP and it's been working just fine, I know it's difficult to work with GTK apps in macOS, but installing it through homebrew cask was really smooth.
- pawadu 10y ago
  Inkscape on the other has started to show gradual decline in the UI department. For example every time you open a tool (the small dialogs on the right) all others will collapse. Since you normally jump back and forth between these tools during drawing you have to ask yourself what went on in their heads when they decided to make this change.
bananicorn 10y ago
Glad to hear they're planning to work on non destructive editing - that might even convince some photoshop users to make the switch. Then again, I really like gimp for the incredible variety of work it does well already, like editing animated gifs.
- blt 10y ago
  Count me as one Photoshop user who avoids GIMP because it lacks non-destructive editing. Photoshop had Adjustment Layers since 1996, and using them is a widely accepted best practice. It is hard to imagine a valid reason why GIMP developers have taken so long to implement them.
  - gtaylor 10y ago
    It's an open source project with a million things to work on whenever the contributors can spare a few moments. Adobe has a full time paid staff to make progress on numerous fronts at any time.
  - dagw 10y ago
    It is hard to imagine a valid reason why GIMP developers have taken so long to implement them. Time. It's not that they're unaware of the importance of non-destructive editing. But adding it to GIMP required a pretty complete overhaul of the underlying architecture, which ended up taking much more time than initially anticipated. Basically the developers had to choose between completely stopping the development of GIMP and focus all their time re-implementing and re-writing the underlying architecture, or to keep working on GIMP as it was, and to slowly changing the underlying architecture bit by bit as and when they found the time. They chose the latter option. Non-destructive editing has been in development, on and off, for about 15 years now.
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      That was a wise decision. The LibreOffice team have essentially been doing the same thing.
  - 10y ago
Yaggo 10y ago
I didn't know GIMP nowadays run natively (without X11) on macOS, cool.
- babuskov 10y ago
  It works really well, I have been using it for about 2 years. The only two minor problems I found so far: 1. when you start it up from launcher, it doesn't show up in the foreground, so you have to click the icon again 2. if you have multiple monitors and you plug out the monitor with the gimp window it sometimes crashes. It doesn't happen every time, but as I precaution I first move the Gimp window to the other monitor before disconnecting.
  - Yaggo 10y ago
    Also it does not seem to support retina mode, making it practically useless for a big share of Mac users. Besides, Pixelmator has raised the bar really high.
    - Yaggo 10y ago
      Just out of curiosity, why downvote? I can assure you that non-retina graphics on retina display looks awful. In spreadsheet software the lack of retina support may not be a dealbreaker, but GIMP is software for creating graphics.
    - intoverflow2 10y ago
      Gonna have to agree with this, very few Mac users are going to use your application (assuming they have other options) if it looks blocky next to all their other apps. This goes for absolutely everything but especially so for creative tools. 2X displays might seem frivolous to non-Mac developers but they've been the norm on OS X for several years now.
    - tornadoboy55 10y ago
      Yeah, for me personally Pixelmator is even better than Photoshop because (besides not having an astronomical price if you don't want a subscription) they have figured out the perfect sweetspot between too much and too few features (for a prosumer).
Jdam 10y ago
What I don't get is why people think it's a great idea to use a custom scrollbar for their website.
- prokoudine 10y ago
  There's no such thing on gimp.org. What do you mean?
dsego 10y ago
Why stick with such an old codebase? Wouldn't it just make sense to start a new Rust project with editable shaders. It could have an extensible, clean task-based interface, instead of the antiquated control room with lots of buttons and switches. Or maybe even a dispatcher/server with protocols to send graphic commands from UIs to different image processors.
- dsego 10y ago
  I asked an honest question. But it seems a gobject codebase in C must be a delight to work with. And then you wonder why it takes long to implement new stuff.
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    It might have been an honest question, but so many of us here have seen this sort of thing and the disaster it entails that it's not at all surprising people were downvoting...
- coldtea 10y ago
  Because above a level of experience developers know that "rewriting" is not some magic bullet, and can in fact take you years back and kill your project. And rewriting in a still-developing language du jour, even less so.
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  > Why stick with such an old codebase? Because it works and is a full-featured mature product. Nothing stops anyone from starting a new project based on modern insights and try to become the next GIMP, but such an endeavour does not imply that this project should simply stop its development. The GIMP is used by a lot of people in their daily work or for personal projects. It's free, it works, and most crucially, it's here today. Why abandon it? I'm sure the GIMP developers will adopt new technologies as they come along when and where they make sense (they are migrating to GTK3, and who knows, perhaps some parts will be replaced by Rust code).
  - 10y ago
odelomez 10y ago
You can help the maintainer and lead developer of GIMPs, Øyvind Kolås with a donation : https://www.patreon.com/pippin https://www.patreon.com/pippin
- pawadu 10y ago
  Now I finally have a legit reason to join patreon. Thank you for reminding us! Are there any other FOSS developers on patreon?
  - odelomez 10y ago
    I don't know. Would be nice to have a "directory" of FOSS devs on patreon !
  - booli 10y ago
    One of my favourite project is by Gina Häußge, creator and maintainer of OctoPrint. "OctoPrint is the snappy web interface for your 3D printer that allows you to control and monitor all aspects of your printer and print jobs, right from within any browser on your network."[0] https://www.patreon.com/foosel https://www.patreon.com/foosel Disclaimer: I work closely with Gina on (open source) plugins for OctoPrint. [0] http://octoprint.org http://octoprint.org
    - pawadu 10y ago
      I tought this was a very niche project but there are obviously enough people interested to pay Gina $5400 every month. I assume even after patreon takes it cut (?) and German taxes she has enough money to live a comfortable life.
      - vurpo 10y ago
        OctoPrint is pretty much the 3D printer web interface. It's very widely used for network-connected 3D printers. Personally, printing with OctoPrint is much nicer than printing the old regular way, specifically for shared printers like e.g. hackerspace printers. If you have a community printer without OctoPrint, you need to somehow move your G-code file to the shitty single-purpose laptop connected to the 3D printer, open it with the printer controller program, start printing, and hope the laptop keeps working throughout the print. Or you can replace the laptop with a Raspberry Pi and OctoPrint, and now you just need to open the printer page, upload the G-code file, press Print and watch it go. This is a realistic recount of the 3D printing experience at Turku Hacklab, before and after OctoPrint was installed.
SunShiranui 10y ago
For those who are more interested in digital painting rather than image editing, I found Krita impressive in its capabilities and progress: https://krita.org https://krita.org I'm just an hobbyist, but I like having FOSS alternatives to Photoshop.
- rebuilder 10y ago
  I paint for a living, and I much prefer Krita to Photoshop nowadays. It's really very good. For my purposes it matches Photoshop's features plus more, such as the guides (vanishing point, ellipses etc), symmetrical painting etc. That said, from reading the forums, the dev team seems chronically understaffed to the point that some of them are less than polite to users. This worries me a bit. If anyone has been looking of an open-source project in this space to get involved in, here's a very successful one that could use a hand!
  - prokoudine 10y ago
    > That said, from reading the forums, the dev team seems chronically understaffed to the point that some of them are less than polite to users. Are referring to threads on BlenderArtists where users regularly give hell to Krita developers? :)
    - rebuilder 10y ago
      No, I haven't seen those. I meant their own forums. It sounds like they've been getting a lot of crap somewhere, and their patience seems to have been worn pretty thin.
  - Keyframe 10y ago
    Krita is awesome. Not only for painting, but for 2D animation as well. It does have issues, but it's definitely above and beyond usable.
  - boudewijnrempt 10y ago
    Understaffed is an understatement. We have been able to fund one full-time developer, Dmitry, for the fourth year now. I am the maintainer, and I'm currently working full-time on Krita because I got burned out on my paid job, but that's not really funded. There are a few other people who help answering questions and triaging bug reports and things -- and that is it. We try to keep up on tumblr, reddit, twitter, facebook, the forums, email, irc, phone calls even! We love our users, we love what our users are doing (see https://krita.org/en/item/made-with-krita-2016-the-krita-artbook/ https://krita.org/en/item/made-with-krita-2016-the-krita-art...), but it sometimes gets very hard to deal with some people :-( I want to help them, but I cannot fix Ugee's drivers, and I want to help, but I also need to find time to code... There are just too few people helping out; too few people who remember that Krita is an open source project, that it's really easy to start hacking on it, and that it's really easy to start helping out with helping others and doing bug triaging. We might have done too good a job already: there are a lot of people who think that there's a big company with scores of employees and a professional help desk behind Krita. While it's me, Dmitry and a few others carrying the load.
computereye 10y ago
I think a good, free, open and multi-platform product that can help. However, I recently tried it again (after a couple years) for a professional project, and it's nowhere near Photoshop in terms of usability. I was expecting the software to have improved, hearing so many great things about it, but I was very disappointed...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
MikeTaylor 10y ago
Shame they are still refusing to fix the deliberately-introduced "can only save in XCF format" bug.
- Zardoz84 10y ago
  You can "Export" on any format :P
  - MikeTaylor 10y ago
    I know you can. But for someone who mostly uses GIMP to crop screenshots, for example, the workflow is used to be: 1. Load PNG 2. Edit PNG 3. Save PNG 4. Quit Now it's 1. Load PNG 2. Edit PNG 3. Export as PNG (retyping the extension) 4. Quit 5. Say that yes, you do want to quit even though there are unsaved changes (because there are not). 6. Worry about whether there really WERE unsaved changes after all. I fully understand why graphics professionals prefer the XCF-only approach; what I can't understand is why the GIMP people flatly refused to let the rest of us use the software the way that suits us.
    - Joeboy 10y ago
      Alt-F + W will save your file back to the original file. (or File menu + "Overwrite {filename}". I complain a lot about GIMP's UI but I don't really see a problem here.
      - rebuilder 10y ago
        What if you don't want to overwrite the original?
        Joeboy 10y ago
        Then the "Overwrite original" option is probably not for you.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  It's one of those pedantic programmer things I think. It's strictly better semantics, but I'd agree it's poor UX. I wonder if it came from LibreGraphics collaborations as Inkscape did something very similar. What's weird is that The GIMP used to win plaudits for allowing user-set defaults (particularly it's shortcut system). Why this change, "save only allows native format", wasn't introduced as an option I don't know.
jordache 10y ago
gimp would benefit itself immensely simply by implementing all of photo shop's default keyboard shortcuts
- Joeboy 10y ago
  There used to be a fork called GimpShop that did this. It didn't help much to be honest, because GIMP's pain points are mostly deeper than the keyboard shortcuts.
buovjaga 10y ago
Various ways to help move GIMP forward: https://www.gimp.org/develop/ https://www.gimp.org/develop/ I would add to that list the following activities not requiring programming knowledge: - triage incoming bug reports and close obsolete ones - learn the build process and recruit new developers - form a design team
typetypetype 10y ago
GIMP has met my needs for photo editing for at least 10 or 15 years. Nothing to add but a big thank you to the team!
wowtip 10y ago
I really like GIMP, but does anyone know why current stable release takes forever starting up when using Windows, and if there is anything you can do about it?
- arthur2e5 10y ago
  The font cache re-runs every time you change your fonts folder. It's like what you do with `fc-cache`, but on Windows you get per-application caches for apps that uses fontconfig (they carry their own copies of fc). Every time you install a new font or update your system, you have to do a recache for each of these apps.
- dr_zoidberg 10y ago
  In my case changing to a SSD dropped the booting time for GIMP (and system and every application, of course) to a few seconds. 3 or 4. But the font cache thing eats up most of it, so that'd be the real issue.
Mendenhall 10y ago
I have not personally used gump but I am going to have to download and try it out. Side question, does anyone know if you can put gimp on a rasberry pi ? hmm and I wonder if you can usb a drawing taplet to pi.
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  The performance is gonna be pretty terrible if it does work.
unicornporn 10y ago
Is a GIMP version with 16 bit finally available from the official Ubuntu repos? Last year I had to install Flatpak to get my hands on 16 bit. I know 16 support has been brewing for years. Once a year or so I Google at conclude that the easily available versions of GIMP still don't have it.
- dr_zoidberg 10y ago
  Still not there. GIMP 2.10 will be the official stable version that will get the 16/32 bit support. So far, it's only in the dev branch (2.9.x).
  - unicornporn 10y ago
    OK then, I'll have a look in january 2018 and we'll see how/if things have progressed. :)
    - dr_zoidberg 10y ago
      In theory 2.10 will be released during 2017, and you'll surely see it posted here :)
robotjosh 10y ago
I used to be a gimp fanatic keeping up with the latest alpha builds. I lost a bunch of money one time using gimp to implement a website from psd. I implemented that site pixel-perfect but gimp had rendered the psd completely wrong so it looked like I implemented the site completely wrong. Now I just pay my $10/month to have photoshop.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
rocky1138 10y ago
The only thing missing from The GIMP with respect to my work is CYMK PSD support.
fizixer 10y ago
I used to be very good with MS-Paint when I used Windows XP. When I switched to linux, I didn't find a single program that has equivalent functionality with equivalent ease, though there are many (including GIMP) that can do much more but the basic stuff (MS-Paint level) isn't as easy (e.g., the pixel perfect precision, Pinta by default does some blurring so pixel editing needs tweaking it a bit). Is there any guide or resource where I can learn GIMP for doing just the MS-Paint level stuff (all of it, MS-Paint feature list is fairly small, the XP version). I will use that as a way of getting comfortable with GIMP, and then move on to exploring other features. (Note: I don't know photoshop either).
- andreyk 10y ago
  Not a direct answer to your question, but a recommendation for something to try: I always install KolourPaint on every linux machine I use, for me it achieves MS-Paint like functionality quite well.
  - RUG3Y 10y ago
    I've never tried KolourPaint, but now I'm going to. Thanks!
  - Jach 10y ago
    Yup, me too. Especially now that modern Windows OSes ruined the classic Paint program, KolourPaint is all I have left.
- RUG3Y 10y ago
  Paint.NET is a really good equivalent to paint: http://www.getpaint.net/index.html http://www.getpaint.net/index.html It's much more powerful than the old paint program, but much simpler than Gimp. It only works on Windows though, so it may not work for you.
davexunit 10y ago
Can always count on a GIMP thread to bring out the people that like to put down the work of volunteers.
LordWinstanley 10y ago
Three words why The Gimp isn't taken seriously by anyone who uses Photoshop: "Non-Destructive Editing" [Oh yes. The interface is awful, too]
- FreakyT 10y ago
  > The interface is awful, too It's really a shame. As an example, it's been more than a decade and they still haven't fixed the utterly absurd "layer boundaries" system that it has. There's a reason no other image editor does that, and it's because it makes no sense. (To elaborate, every layer in GIMP has a defined "boundary rectangle" which cannot be drawn outside of.)
  - Joeboy 10y ago
    Maybe this is a good example to talk about good and bad UI. There are UIs that are easy to learn, but less efficient in daily use. There are UIs that are difficult to learn, but efficient in daily use by experienced users. Good UIs steer an appropriate course between those options, according to the needs of their users. GIMP's "boundary rectangle" system provides a learning barrier for new users, and a regular annoyance for experienced users. If people don't like it, the problem isn't that they're Adobe shills, the problem is that it's indefensibly bad. OK I guess it saves some ram if you need to run GIMP on a Raspberry Pi, but this is not a sensible thing for GIMP to be optimizing for. I fully accept that it's run by volunteers and it's OSS and I could patch it myself etc. I don't blame the volunteer devs for not making a perfect program in their spare time. But I wish people would lay off blaming discontent with GIMP's UI on the unsuitability of its users or the existence of Photoshop.
  - prokoudine 10y ago
    > they still haven't fixed the utterly absurd "layer boundaries" system that it has Yes, it's is kinda absurd. And no, it doesn't magically happen. Someone should sit down and actually write the code. It could be you. Or maybe not.
  - bblough 10y ago
    I guess I'm in the minority, but not only does this behavior not bother me, for me it's a feature. Most of the time, if I'm trying to draw outside the boundary, then it's because I've got the wrong layer selected. So it saves me from drawing on the wrong layer and then having to deal with trying to get the changes moved to the correct layer. In cases where the above doesn't hold (i.e., I actually want to draw inside the smaller layer), then it's easy enough to expand the layer's size. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
aceperry 10y ago
This is a pleasant surprise, because I've noticed that newer versions haven't been coming too often. I use GIMP on both windows and linux and it seems like the windows version has stagnated, could be the same situation for linux as well. Not that it matters since I'm not really a graphics/UI person. And most of the time that I fire up GIMP, it's for very simple things, or else I'm forced to google how to do things. I took a course on photoshop, where I followed all of the steps to do the projects and exercises. But unless you use these programs constantly, you're not going to remember how things are done. So GIMP is fine for my uses and suits me well because it's free. I understand there's a free version of photoshop (or whatever it's called) that can do most of what I use GIMP for, but that's only available on Windows, so I stick with GIMP because I'm using linux most of the time.
- flukus 10y ago
  Well for one thing, they're stuck on old GTK releases because GTK no longer cares about being cross platform.
theorique 10y ago
Great to read that vector toolbar icons and Gtk3 are on their radar screen. HiDPI devices have been rolling out for 3+ years, so I hope the fixes get in soon.

346 points by BuuQu9hu 10y ago

Great stuff. I'm looking forward to 2.10. GIMP is my tool when I want to edit photos or create Christmas cards. Even though I hear this quote ringing in my ear, and I can't seem to shake it, mainly because of who said it: "Yet I think that a few programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, will always be superior to competitors like the Gimp—for some reason, I really don’t know why! I’m quite willing to pay good money for really good software, if I believe that it has been produced by the best programmers." [1] [1] http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856 http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856

aarontyree 10y ago
I wonder sometimes if the reason GIMP development doesn't surpass other options is simply not having enough developers, having a user base that is more art centered than programming centered, and having a somewhat bottlenecked development culture. These could just be perceptions. I am hoping that when the transition to GEGL is fully implemented, there will be an acceleration. Its hard to use it for serious work. The stable branch is still 8bit :/
- mkohlmyr 10y ago
  I don't know, as someone who moved from GIMP to Photoshop a long time ago I never saw that as being the reason it was/is(in my opinion) inferior. It has plenty of features - more than enough. What it never had was as good of a user interface and user experience. It always felt clunky and awkward by comparison. If I were to give them one additional project member it wouldn't be a developer. It would be a product owner who uses Photoshop daily.
  - qume 10y ago
    Couldn't agree more.
  - exDM69 10y ago
    > It would be a product owner who uses Photoshop daily. But no-one sings praise to the Photoshop UI either, I've heard numerous complaints about it getting worse and worse all the time. It's a matter of people being used to PS and not willing to change. There was a project earlier which had a Photoshop-clone UI for GIMP (called GimpShop or something), but it didn't magically solve all the issues. These days core GIMP has a single window interface available. I've personally never had an issue with GIMP's UI after I grokked some of the basic concepts (e.g. "make selection and flood fill" - not "draw rectangle"). I see the lack of non-destructive editing and (historically) bad color management as a bigger issue. I'm sure GIMP would accept UI-related contributions but the list of volunteers is short.
    - mkohlmyr 10y ago
      Admittedly I haven't used GIMP in a while, but the entire selection interface was awful last time I did. That's a very basic thing that was constantly annoying to me. Wether I can grok it or not really doesn't matter. Normal users don't want to have to grok things. It didn't feel intuitive, and as a result it only took a few hours of using Photoshop CS3 to never want to go back.
      - exDM69 10y ago
        Here's the thing: "normal users" looking for a free-of-charge alternative to commercial apps are not the typical target audience of open source productivity tools. They're primarily targetted to scratch the authors' own itch, and secondarily to benefit anyone who finds it useful in the hopes of more contributions. Average Joes (nor non-contributing professional artists/photographers) are typically not beneficial to these projects, at worst they are a hindrance: tons of help requests (in the bug tracker), low effort bug reports, requests for Windows/OSX binaries (without offering to help in maintenance), etc. You can find some ugly examples if you look into bug trackers / mailing lists of some of these projects. We can only hope that a benevolent philanthropist comes by and drops a few million dollars in to getting full time, paid developers into GIMP, Blender, Inkscape and all the other open source productivity tools but until that happens it's a mostly volunteer effort and the contributors can choose what to focus on. If Photoshop suits you, great. I've managed to do all my image editing in GIMP for the past 20 years and I'm very glad the project exists.
  - ninjaroar 10y ago
    Do product owners really work in open source projects where developers aren't getting paid? I know personally, as an developer and an open source contributor, I'm going to work on something which either scratches my own itch or something which interests me. I certainly wouldn't be spending my own time working on the roadmap of a product owner if it doesn't fall into one of the two categories anyways.
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  > having a user base that is more art centered than programming centered Sorry but I think it's more likely the opposite and the user base is more developer centered than artist centered. How are devs supposed to understand how to move this app forward if no one even uses it to it's full potential. Getting tired of technies pointing fingers at the artists when they fail to understand how to make great creative tools.
- exDM69 10y ago
  The same chicken-and-egg problem plagues all the open source creativity suites and other "professional" software (GIMP, Blender, Inkscape, etc): there aren't enough artists, photographers, etc using it and contributing to it to make it competitive, and there will be no new users as long as the development (with user friendliness in mind) is stagnant. The pool of programming-capable professional artists isn't very large in the first place and I can't blame them for focusing on their jobs and deadlines instead of developing the software they use. That said, I have no sympathy for people who complain about the issues but do not contribute in any way. Being rude and mean to the developers doesn't help anyone, go ahead and use the commercial alternatives and shut up.
- prokoudine 10y ago
  Aaron, basically you are looking at a combination of factors: — a huge momentum that Photoshop has accumulated over the decades; — huge R&D and marketing budget at Adobe; — whole businesses built around educating Adobe tools (think Envato et al.). And the list goes on. Which is why it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to "surpass other options". But it makes a hell of a sense to create a sensible sophisticated tool for a certain user base. Which is kinda what we do with GIMP, as much as time permits. BTW, love your photos :)
  - aarontyree 10y ago
    Thank you. I like most of them, most days:) That really is correct. It isn't about being better than every other option is it? Its amazing how easy it is to fall back into the global stage competition thinking. I think its just that my inner Richard Stallman still points an accusing finger at me every time I fire up Photoshop:)
unwind 10y ago
Un-link-baiting: the quote is by Donald Knuth.
coldtea 10y ago
>Even though I hear this quote ringing in my ear, and I can't seem to shake it, mainly because of who said it 1) Photoshop had a 10+ year head start and tons of patents. 2) Adobe can pay programmers to work on it as their main and sole focus. GIMP is stuffed by volunteers. 3) Adobe can pay programmers to work on boring parts. OSS programmers tend to navigate to the "glorious" and "fun" parts. 4) Adobe has extensive testing equipment and top notch relations with top designers using its products for feedback. 5) At some point GTK, the toolkit GIMP (and Gnome and tons of other stuff) is based on, had just one developer working actively on it. I know because he blogged about it, and was fed up. That's not really what you want for your core infrastructure. 6) Adobe actively maintains Windows and OS X releases. GTK has mostly given up on other platforms and had historically had lots of problems.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  > 3) Adobe can pay programmers to work on boring parts. OSS programmers tend to navigate to the "glorious" and "fun" parts. Aka CADT...
  - yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
    Yes, but it's harder to judge volunteers who are only working at all because they enjoy doing so.
- sebnukem2 10y ago
  GTK literally means the Gimp ToolKit. It's not based on, it's the toolkit that started it all.
- nothis 10y ago
  GTK is probably the main reason Gimp isn't a serious competitor in professional work, then. I can imagine what monumental task it must be to maintain a cross-platform GUI toolkit, but it's IMO the single most important aspect of Gimp. Let's face it, all the features are there. Maybe 5% of Photoshop's deep ocean of features is actually used by the average user, Gimp can provide almost the complete functionality. Some extra performance and nice-to-have tweaks might still make a difference, but they're not what's holding people back from considering a free option over a several-hundred-dollar one. The user interface is what's crap. Sorry, GTK, it just is. Copy-pasting what I wrote a few months ago: >Out of curiosity, I tried installing Gimp to see how much has changed (for the better?) since I last checked it out. The tool interface doesn't quite fit into its window by default so you have a tiny little scrollbar at the bottom that you have to scroll to see the full text. I resized it. After popping out a submenu, it once again didn't fit. This is plain unacceptable. Yes, this is 99% there, it's a minor thing, it's probably thousands of man-hours to avoid a gazillion other bugs and issues and even get to this point. But it's not enough. A UI for such a tool, where you actually fiddle with it a lot, has to be perfect. Perfect on a technical level, perfect in a Apple-y "let's ensure that the empirically determined most-used features are shown first and less-used stuff doesn't clutter precious screen-space" sense that takes long and frustrating trial-and-error involving real-world feedback. You can't have a button that's 15 pixel larger than it has to be. You can't have a layout arrangement that wastes half a window because it's poorly aligned. You can't have spacing that's inconsistent enough to make you hesitate clicking an icon because you're not sure if it's connected to some other element of the interface. Open source/free software needs a user interface push, but apparently that's not a sexy field to work on.

Rugsandbeyond 10y ago

its nice stuff

currywurst 10y ago

Thank you GIMP project for all the goodies and the steady progress over so many years ... A really admirable achievement ! I'm not a professional user but it does more than enough for my needs.

Freak_NL 10y ago

I don't use the GIMP nearly as much as Inkscape (the two form an awesome free software graphics suite together), but I am always pleasantly surprised by the gradual improvements — the layer improvements look useful! What really impresses me though is how the GIMP has managed to remain such a constant ever-present factor on the free software desktop. It feels as if it has just always been there. Kudos to all the developers and maintainers!

ordbajsare 10y ago
Inkscapes perfromance it to shitty to be usefull.
distances 10y ago
GIMP indeed just is always there, on all platforms. As a developer my needs are quite modest: editing screenshots, juggling graphics assets, etc. But I do use GIMP at least weekly, and it always delivers. Big thanks for the developers.
- gurkendoktor 10y ago
  > on all platforms I've recently tried GIMP after reading about an update on Hacker News (not this one) and it was an absolute disaster - took forever to start, nothing worked, UI was glitchy, and then I accidentally quit it because I didn't know what the empty, floating window was good for. It's a pity that Gtk apps usually don't really work on macOS, it makes it much more unlikely for us Apple users to contribute on GitHub etc. :( I'd much prefer a native cross-platform toolkit to the web-based stuff that's popular now.
  - forbidden404 10y ago
    I've been using GIMP sparingly on my MBP and it's been working just fine, I know it's difficult to work with GTK apps in macOS, but installing it through homebrew cask was really smooth.
pawadu 10y ago
Inkscape on the other has started to show gradual decline in the UI department. For example every time you open a tool (the small dialogs on the right) all others will collapse. Since you normally jump back and forth between these tools during drawing you have to ask yourself what went on in their heads when they decided to make this change.

bananicorn 10y ago

Glad to hear they're planning to work on non destructive editing - that might even convince some photoshop users to make the switch. Then again, I really like gimp for the incredible variety of work it does well already, like editing animated gifs.

blt 10y ago
Count me as one Photoshop user who avoids GIMP because it lacks non-destructive editing. Photoshop had Adjustment Layers since 1996, and using them is a widely accepted best practice. It is hard to imagine a valid reason why GIMP developers have taken so long to implement them.
- gtaylor 10y ago
  It's an open source project with a million things to work on whenever the contributors can spare a few moments. Adobe has a full time paid staff to make progress on numerous fronts at any time.
- dagw 10y ago
  It is hard to imagine a valid reason why GIMP developers have taken so long to implement them. Time. It's not that they're unaware of the importance of non-destructive editing. But adding it to GIMP required a pretty complete overhaul of the underlying architecture, which ended up taking much more time than initially anticipated. Basically the developers had to choose between completely stopping the development of GIMP and focus all their time re-implementing and re-writing the underlying architecture, or to keep working on GIMP as it was, and to slowly changing the underlying architecture bit by bit as and when they found the time. They chose the latter option. Non-destructive editing has been in development, on and off, for about 15 years now.
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    That was a wise decision. The LibreOffice team have essentially been doing the same thing.
- 10y ago

Yaggo 10y ago

I didn't know GIMP nowadays run natively (without X11) on macOS, cool.

babuskov 10y ago
It works really well, I have been using it for about 2 years. The only two minor problems I found so far: 1. when you start it up from launcher, it doesn't show up in the foreground, so you have to click the icon again 2. if you have multiple monitors and you plug out the monitor with the gimp window it sometimes crashes. It doesn't happen every time, but as I precaution I first move the Gimp window to the other monitor before disconnecting.
- Yaggo 10y ago
  Also it does not seem to support retina mode, making it practically useless for a big share of Mac users. Besides, Pixelmator has raised the bar really high.
  - Yaggo 10y ago
    Just out of curiosity, why downvote? I can assure you that non-retina graphics on retina display looks awful. In spreadsheet software the lack of retina support may not be a dealbreaker, but GIMP is software for creating graphics.
  - intoverflow2 10y ago
    Gonna have to agree with this, very few Mac users are going to use your application (assuming they have other options) if it looks blocky next to all their other apps. This goes for absolutely everything but especially so for creative tools. 2X displays might seem frivolous to non-Mac developers but they've been the norm on OS X for several years now.
  - tornadoboy55 10y ago
    Yeah, for me personally Pixelmator is even better than Photoshop because (besides not having an astronomical price if you don't want a subscription) they have figured out the perfect sweetspot between too much and too few features (for a prosumer).

Jdam 10y ago

What I don't get is why people think it's a great idea to use a custom scrollbar for their website.

prokoudine 10y ago
There's no such thing on gimp.org. What do you mean?

dsego 10y ago

Why stick with such an old codebase? Wouldn't it just make sense to start a new Rust project with editable shaders. It could have an extensible, clean task-based interface, instead of the antiquated control room with lots of buttons and switches. Or maybe even a dispatcher/server with protocols to send graphic commands from UIs to different image processors.

dsego 10y ago
I asked an honest question. But it seems a gobject codebase in C must be a delight to work with. And then you wonder why it takes long to implement new stuff.
- chris_wot 10y ago
  It might have been an honest question, but so many of us here have seen this sort of thing and the disaster it entails that it's not at all surprising people were downvoting...
coldtea 10y ago
Because above a level of experience developers know that "rewriting" is not some magic bullet, and can in fact take you years back and kill your project. And rewriting in a still-developing language du jour, even less so.
Freak_NL 10y ago
> Why stick with such an old codebase? Because it works and is a full-featured mature product. Nothing stops anyone from starting a new project based on modern insights and try to become the next GIMP, but such an endeavour does not imply that this project should simply stop its development. The GIMP is used by a lot of people in their daily work or for personal projects. It's free, it works, and most crucially, it's here today. Why abandon it? I'm sure the GIMP developers will adopt new technologies as they come along when and where they make sense (they are migrating to GTK3, and who knows, perhaps some parts will be replaced by Rust code).
- 10y ago

odelomez 10y ago

You can help the maintainer and lead developer of GIMPs, Øyvind Kolås with a donation : https://www.patreon.com/pippin https://www.patreon.com/pippin

pawadu 10y ago
Now I finally have a legit reason to join patreon. Thank you for reminding us! Are there any other FOSS developers on patreon?
- odelomez 10y ago
  I don't know. Would be nice to have a "directory" of FOSS devs on patreon !
- booli 10y ago
  One of my favourite project is by Gina Häußge, creator and maintainer of OctoPrint. "OctoPrint is the snappy web interface for your 3D printer that allows you to control and monitor all aspects of your printer and print jobs, right from within any browser on your network."[0] https://www.patreon.com/foosel https://www.patreon.com/foosel Disclaimer: I work closely with Gina on (open source) plugins for OctoPrint. [0] http://octoprint.org http://octoprint.org
  - pawadu 10y ago
    I tought this was a very niche project but there are obviously enough people interested to pay Gina $5400 every month. I assume even after patreon takes it cut (?) and German taxes she has enough money to live a comfortable life.
    - vurpo 10y ago
      OctoPrint is pretty much the 3D printer web interface. It's very widely used for network-connected 3D printers. Personally, printing with OctoPrint is much nicer than printing the old regular way, specifically for shared printers like e.g. hackerspace printers. If you have a community printer without OctoPrint, you need to somehow move your G-code file to the shitty single-purpose laptop connected to the 3D printer, open it with the printer controller program, start printing, and hope the laptop keeps working throughout the print. Or you can replace the laptop with a Raspberry Pi and OctoPrint, and now you just need to open the printer page, upload the G-code file, press Print and watch it go. This is a realistic recount of the 3D printing experience at Turku Hacklab, before and after OctoPrint was installed.

SunShiranui 10y ago

For those who are more interested in digital painting rather than image editing, I found Krita impressive in its capabilities and progress: https://krita.org https://krita.org I'm just an hobbyist, but I like having FOSS alternatives to Photoshop.

rebuilder 10y ago
I paint for a living, and I much prefer Krita to Photoshop nowadays. It's really very good. For my purposes it matches Photoshop's features plus more, such as the guides (vanishing point, ellipses etc), symmetrical painting etc. That said, from reading the forums, the dev team seems chronically understaffed to the point that some of them are less than polite to users. This worries me a bit. If anyone has been looking of an open-source project in this space to get involved in, here's a very successful one that could use a hand!
- prokoudine 10y ago
  > That said, from reading the forums, the dev team seems chronically understaffed to the point that some of them are less than polite to users. Are referring to threads on BlenderArtists where users regularly give hell to Krita developers? :)
  - rebuilder 10y ago
    No, I haven't seen those. I meant their own forums. It sounds like they've been getting a lot of crap somewhere, and their patience seems to have been worn pretty thin.
- Keyframe 10y ago
  Krita is awesome. Not only for painting, but for 2D animation as well. It does have issues, but it's definitely above and beyond usable.
- boudewijnrempt 10y ago
  Understaffed is an understatement. We have been able to fund one full-time developer, Dmitry, for the fourth year now. I am the maintainer, and I'm currently working full-time on Krita because I got burned out on my paid job, but that's not really funded. There are a few other people who help answering questions and triaging bug reports and things -- and that is it. We try to keep up on tumblr, reddit, twitter, facebook, the forums, email, irc, phone calls even! We love our users, we love what our users are doing (see https://krita.org/en/item/made-with-krita-2016-the-krita-artbook/ https://krita.org/en/item/made-with-krita-2016-the-krita-art...), but it sometimes gets very hard to deal with some people :-( I want to help them, but I cannot fix Ugee's drivers, and I want to help, but I also need to find time to code... There are just too few people helping out; too few people who remember that Krita is an open source project, that it's really easy to start hacking on it, and that it's really easy to start helping out with helping others and doing bug triaging. We might have done too good a job already: there are a lot of people who think that there's a big company with scores of employees and a professional help desk behind Krita. While it's me, Dmitry and a few others carrying the load.

computereye 10y ago

I think a good, free, open and multi-platform product that can help. However, I recently tried it again (after a couple years) for a professional project, and it's nowhere near Photoshop in terms of usability. I was expecting the software to have improved, hearing so many great things about it, but I was very disappointed...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

MikeTaylor 10y ago

Shame they are still refusing to fix the deliberately-introduced "can only save in XCF format" bug.

Zardoz84 10y ago
You can "Export" on any format :P
- MikeTaylor 10y ago
  I know you can. But for someone who mostly uses GIMP to crop screenshots, for example, the workflow is used to be: 1. Load PNG 2. Edit PNG 3. Save PNG 4. Quit Now it's 1. Load PNG 2. Edit PNG 3. Export as PNG (retyping the extension) 4. Quit 5. Say that yes, you do want to quit even though there are unsaved changes (because there are not). 6. Worry about whether there really WERE unsaved changes after all. I fully understand why graphics professionals prefer the XCF-only approach; what I can't understand is why the GIMP people flatly refused to let the rest of us use the software the way that suits us.
  - Joeboy 10y ago
    Alt-F + W will save your file back to the original file. (or File menu + "Overwrite {filename}". I complain a lot about GIMP's UI but I don't really see a problem here.
    - rebuilder 10y ago
      What if you don't want to overwrite the original?
      - Joeboy 10y ago
        Then the "Overwrite original" option is probably not for you.
pbhjpbhj 10y ago
It's one of those pedantic programmer things I think. It's strictly better semantics, but I'd agree it's poor UX. I wonder if it came from LibreGraphics collaborations as Inkscape did something very similar. What's weird is that The GIMP used to win plaudits for allowing user-set defaults (particularly it's shortcut system). Why this change, "save only allows native format", wasn't introduced as an option I don't know.

jordache 10y ago

gimp would benefit itself immensely simply by implementing all of photo shop's default keyboard shortcuts

Joeboy 10y ago
There used to be a fork called GimpShop that did this. It didn't help much to be honest, because GIMP's pain points are mostly deeper than the keyboard shortcuts.

buovjaga 10y ago

Various ways to help move GIMP forward: https://www.gimp.org/develop/ https://www.gimp.org/develop/ I would add to that list the following activities not requiring programming knowledge: - triage incoming bug reports and close obsolete ones - learn the build process and recruit new developers - form a design team

typetypetype 10y ago

GIMP has met my needs for photo editing for at least 10 or 15 years. Nothing to add but a big thank you to the team!

wowtip 10y ago

I really like GIMP, but does anyone know why current stable release takes forever starting up when using Windows, and if there is anything you can do about it?

arthur2e5 10y ago
The font cache re-runs every time you change your fonts folder. It's like what you do with `fc-cache`, but on Windows you get per-application caches for apps that uses fontconfig (they carry their own copies of fc). Every time you install a new font or update your system, you have to do a recache for each of these apps.
dr_zoidberg 10y ago
In my case changing to a SSD dropped the booting time for GIMP (and system and every application, of course) to a few seconds. 3 or 4. But the font cache thing eats up most of it, so that'd be the real issue.

Mendenhall 10y ago

I have not personally used gump but I am going to have to download and try it out. Side question, does anyone know if you can put gimp on a rasberry pi ? hmm and I wonder if you can usb a drawing taplet to pi.

Synaesthesia 10y ago
The performance is gonna be pretty terrible if it does work.

unicornporn 10y ago

Is a GIMP version with 16 bit finally available from the official Ubuntu repos? Last year I had to install Flatpak to get my hands on 16 bit. I know 16 support has been brewing for years. Once a year or so I Google at conclude that the easily available versions of GIMP still don't have it.

dr_zoidberg 10y ago
Still not there. GIMP 2.10 will be the official stable version that will get the 16/32 bit support. So far, it's only in the dev branch (2.9.x).
- unicornporn 10y ago
  OK then, I'll have a look in january 2018 and we'll see how/if things have progressed. :)
  - dr_zoidberg 10y ago
    In theory 2.10 will be released during 2017, and you'll surely see it posted here :)

robotjosh 10y ago

I used to be a gimp fanatic keeping up with the latest alpha builds. I lost a bunch of money one time using gimp to implement a website from psd. I implemented that site pixel-perfect but gimp had rendered the psd completely wrong so it looked like I implemented the site completely wrong. Now I just pay my $10/month to have photoshop.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

rocky1138 10y ago

The only thing missing from The GIMP with respect to my work is CYMK PSD support.

fizixer 10y ago

I used to be very good with MS-Paint when I used Windows XP. When I switched to linux, I didn't find a single program that has equivalent functionality with equivalent ease, though there are many (including GIMP) that can do much more but the basic stuff (MS-Paint level) isn't as easy (e.g., the pixel perfect precision, Pinta by default does some blurring so pixel editing needs tweaking it a bit). Is there any guide or resource where I can learn GIMP for doing just the MS-Paint level stuff (all of it, MS-Paint feature list is fairly small, the XP version). I will use that as a way of getting comfortable with GIMP, and then move on to exploring other features. (Note: I don't know photoshop either).

andreyk 10y ago
Not a direct answer to your question, but a recommendation for something to try: I always install KolourPaint on every linux machine I use, for me it achieves MS-Paint like functionality quite well.
- RUG3Y 10y ago
  I've never tried KolourPaint, but now I'm going to. Thanks!
- Jach 10y ago
  Yup, me too. Especially now that modern Windows OSes ruined the classic Paint program, KolourPaint is all I have left.
RUG3Y 10y ago
Paint.NET is a really good equivalent to paint: http://www.getpaint.net/index.html http://www.getpaint.net/index.html It's much more powerful than the old paint program, but much simpler than Gimp. It only works on Windows though, so it may not work for you.

davexunit 10y ago

Can always count on a GIMP thread to bring out the people that like to put down the work of volunteers.

LordWinstanley 10y ago

Three words why The Gimp isn't taken seriously by anyone who uses Photoshop: "Non-Destructive Editing" [Oh yes. The interface is awful, too]

FreakyT 10y ago
> The interface is awful, too It's really a shame. As an example, it's been more than a decade and they still haven't fixed the utterly absurd "layer boundaries" system that it has. There's a reason no other image editor does that, and it's because it makes no sense. (To elaborate, every layer in GIMP has a defined "boundary rectangle" which cannot be drawn outside of.)
- Joeboy 10y ago
  Maybe this is a good example to talk about good and bad UI. There are UIs that are easy to learn, but less efficient in daily use. There are UIs that are difficult to learn, but efficient in daily use by experienced users. Good UIs steer an appropriate course between those options, according to the needs of their users. GIMP's "boundary rectangle" system provides a learning barrier for new users, and a regular annoyance for experienced users. If people don't like it, the problem isn't that they're Adobe shills, the problem is that it's indefensibly bad. OK I guess it saves some ram if you need to run GIMP on a Raspberry Pi, but this is not a sensible thing for GIMP to be optimizing for. I fully accept that it's run by volunteers and it's OSS and I could patch it myself etc. I don't blame the volunteer devs for not making a perfect program in their spare time. But I wish people would lay off blaming discontent with GIMP's UI on the unsuitability of its users or the existence of Photoshop.
- prokoudine 10y ago
  > they still haven't fixed the utterly absurd "layer boundaries" system that it has Yes, it's is kinda absurd. And no, it doesn't magically happen. Someone should sit down and actually write the code. It could be you. Or maybe not.
- bblough 10y ago
  I guess I'm in the minority, but not only does this behavior not bother me, for me it's a feature. Most of the time, if I'm trying to draw outside the boundary, then it's because I've got the wrong layer selected. So it saves me from drawing on the wrong layer and then having to deal with trying to get the changes moved to the correct layer. In cases where the above doesn't hold (i.e., I actually want to draw inside the smaller layer), then it's easy enough to expand the layer's size. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

aceperry 10y ago

This is a pleasant surprise, because I've noticed that newer versions haven't been coming too often. I use GIMP on both windows and linux and it seems like the windows version has stagnated, could be the same situation for linux as well. Not that it matters since I'm not really a graphics/UI person. And most of the time that I fire up GIMP, it's for very simple things, or else I'm forced to google how to do things. I took a course on photoshop, where I followed all of the steps to do the projects and exercises. But unless you use these programs constantly, you're not going to remember how things are done. So GIMP is fine for my uses and suits me well because it's free. I understand there's a free version of photoshop (or whatever it's called) that can do most of what I use GIMP for, but that's only available on Windows, so I stick with GIMP because I'm using linux most of the time.

flukus 10y ago
Well for one thing, they're stuck on old GTK releases because GTK no longer cares about being cross platform.

theorique 10y ago

Great to read that vector toolbar icons and Gtk3 are on their radar screen. HiDPI devices have been rolling out for 3+ years, so I hope the fixes get in soon.