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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

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.

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.