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I hope that someday GIMP will have major change just like Krita & Blender. The UI of GIMP have received many complains.

rasengan 8y ago
There are actually many different ways you can customize the UI to your liking, including themes among other things. You can also run GIMP in window mode which encapsulates all sub windows into a single app window, just like the other apps you mentioned. If none of these are your cup of tea, please make a PR - It’s open source. :) That said, Krita and Blender are very very nice.
- nothis 8y ago
  I know it's well-meaning but this is not the issue. It's not about "customization" or singular problems with a simple fix. It's about having a well-ordered, uncluttered, snappy GUI that never gets in the way. As a default. Until the GIMP team realizes that this isn't a separate issue but the central purpose of an image editing program, it will never be a serious option for professional work. They should invest those $100k into hiring a professional UI designer and intensive user testing.
  - lbriner 8y ago
    Agreed but it's harder than that. You could get a professional UI designer but their results are not objectively good or bad, they are subjective. The benefit of a larger UI-focussed organisation, e.g. Adobe or Apple, is that you have a large enough team of UI professionals so that work is peer-reviewed and controversial ideas have to be justified. I assume that the Gimp team would be too small to have that kind of group-based UI sign-off?
    - nothis 8y ago
      I'd say a professional UI designer is capable of producing objectively good results. He'd first sit experienced photographers and graphic designers in front of GIMP and identify their biggest gripes with the UI and then would develop a hierarchy of measures to fix them. And test the results. Honestly, they'd probably have to spin it off into a separate, UI-focused project that starts with minimal features and gradually adds more every time a good UI solution is found. In the order of what real-world users identify as the most needed features. In other words, I believe what GIMP needs is a partnership with an idealistic professional workplace willing to use it as an experiment and communicate their day to day issues.
  - ricardonunez 8y ago
    I agree with you until the hiring. The work that needs to be done is hard and hiring just one designer will not fix it. Maybe hiring one person to manage that part of the project. They need to pay an agency to do the work. The UX/UI needs major work and a lot of testing. That donation is good but the project will probably need more funding.
    - nothis 8y ago
      I definitely agree about the team size/cost. I have to say, it baffles me how much time programmers are willing to put into open source works but apparently it's impossible to find UI designers who are willing to do the same. I don't think it's a lack of enthusiasm, I think it's probably more of a social/clique thing and open source projects would benefit greatly from opening themselves up to contributers outside the realms of programming, signaling respect for that kind of work.
      - mschaef 8y ago
        > I have to say, it baffles me how much time programmers are willing to put into open source works but apparently it's impossible to find UI designers who are willing to do the same. So you're surprised it's hard to find UI designers willing to work for free? I'd argue the surprising part is that there are programmers that ARE willing to work for free or reduced rates on open source. Both of these disciplines take time and effort to learn and then perform. The people that do them not only pay these costs, but have their own obligations to themselves and their loved ones they might need to help support. It doesn't surprise me at all that the vast majority of people with these skills choose (or are forced by circumstance) to do something else.
  - interfixus 8y ago
    My one or two cents: I have done professional work in GIMP, plenty of it. And certainly, this or that could be better thought through, and more smoothly laid out. But on the whole - and being accustomed over the better part of twenty years - I don't quite see the major problems everyone is on about. The Photoshop thing, on the other hand, on the rare occasions I am forced to venture there, strikes me as a confusing mess that I'm always happy to leave behind as soon as possible. Plus of course it requires one kind or another of strange proprietary OS in order to function.
    - ufmace 8y ago
      I always wonder if all of these "bad UI" complaints translate to "it isn't exactly like Photoshop". I only use the basics in Gimp myself, and I know it has a few quirks that I find easy to work around. I wonder if Photoshop has a pile of quirks that its users are used to find find weird when they aren't there and a different sent of quirks are.
- RankingMember 8y ago
  This is the thing that the open source projects whose UIs I've been disappointed by always seem to tout: customization. I think it's great you can customize stuff, but I posit that the vast majority of people just want something that's ready to roll out of the gate. Something that's endlessly customizable isn't necessarily a "pro" to me; if people need to customize something a bunch to make it usable for them, you've built a framework instead of an application.
- omegabravo 8y ago
  I had no idea. For those people that last successfully used gimp >5 years ago. Windows > Single Window Mode. Windows > New Toolbox Windows > Dockable Dialogs > Tool Options It is hard to convey how much more comfortable I feel with the program with these tiny settings changes. I wonder how many other people are in the same boat as I. I spend a lot of time in a grid style interface, so it is great to see: * View > Show Grid * View > Snap to Grid Click once somewhere. Hold shift to draw a point to point line. Hold shift and control to have wider snapping of angles and click again, hold control and shift to get 15 Degree increment angles. I will use Gimp a lot more now. Previously I was trying to use Pinta, but it would crash regularly on me making it almost unusable.
  - kens 8y ago
    I agree with omegabravo. I expected Single Window Mode to be pointless but tried it recently, and it's so much better. No more trying to find the dialog that's under the other dialogs; everything is just there. If you're a GIMP user, give it a try.
  - MaDeuce 8y ago
    Nor did I. I've been using gimp a few times a year for 15+ years -- i.e., never enough to build much muscle memory. Your suggestions will make a huge difference for me.
nothis 8y ago
I want to support GIMP but, especially for fast, professional use, the UI makes it impossible. Their raw features are on par with anything I'd want to do in Photoshop, it's 100% a UI issue at this point. And I don't get why it's this hard for open source projects to realize that (the only notable exception I know is Firefox, which I love).
- rasengan 8y ago
  Sometimes when there isn’t unlimited funding and the ability to spend unlimited time, the efforts are probably spent on core functionality over aesthetics. GIMP is a highly featureful project with powerful scripting capabilities. I wouldn’t say it isn’t already on par or more powerful than Photoshop.
  - RankingMember 8y ago
    GIMP still lacks non-destructive editing, does it not? That alone is a huge deficiency in comparison to Photoshop.
    - acomjean 8y ago
      Photoshop had non-destructive editing now? Its been a while ,but I thought that was lightroom that had the non-destructive editing features. Photoshop for me was about layers and masks
      - tokyodude 8y ago
        Photoshop had non-destructive editing for 15-20 years. I think the issues are getting confused. Yes, Lightroom saves a separate file from your photos of the changes so in that sense it's non destructive, the original files are not changed. Photoshop is non-destructive in that you can load an image into a layer and apply tons of layers above that layer each of which edits the layers below it in some way. The pixels in the image layer are never changed so it's also "non-destructive". But saving the file does overwrite the old photoshop file with your changes, unlike lightroom.
ape4 8y ago
It has improved in recent years - looks more like Photoshop now.
ginko 8y ago
I never understood that complaint with the Blender UI. If anything Blender's UI even before the whole 2.5 change was a lot more streamlined and less stupid point&click than for instance Maya. It essentially felt like Emacs for 3D editing. But maybe that's because I started out on Blender and only had a cursory look at Maya. Same with GIMP. I have years of experience working with GIMP so if you sat me in front of photoshop I'd probably be a lot less productive with it. Maybe when people say "improve the UI" they just mean "Make it more like the program I'm already used to".
- mrspeaker 8y ago
  Blender has slowly improved over years - things got more consistent and (given the complexity of the domain) it made the standard operations more obvious. I'm excited to see the 2.8 changes, but I certainly don't mind it as it is. GIMP, however... makes me (every so slightly) annoyed every time I use it. I have to google so many task that should just be intuitive. It does the job, and I still use it as my primary editor - but it's not something I look forward to opening... but it could be! I'm hoping it'll get there eventually!
  - Meai 8y ago
    2.8 is a massive improvement imo, tooltips and nicer icons for everything.
- wongarsu 8y ago
  >It essentially felt like Emacs for 3D editing. Which is exactly the complaint :D Blender has a very efficient UI that is great for power users, but it has a much bigger learning curve than the competition with their point&click UIs. Add to that that most people are trained on Maya/3ds Max/Cinema 4d, learning Blender is a big investment with uncertain payoff. Basically the same reason why very few people use Emacs or Vim nowadays.
  - gnulinux 8y ago
    > Basically the same reason why very few people use Emacs or Vim nowadays. Wow, this is such a bold statement; do you have any evidence to support this? In my experience a very great majority of engineers use vim or emacs. In US, I've never been in a culture where emacs or vim is used by a minority. In my current work, which is a startup in Boston, everyone except 2 developers use emacs. I googled for evidence to support me, but I couldn't find any solid evidence neither supporting nor disputing me.
thrillgore 8y ago
Blender and Krita benefit from having leadership that drives the roadmap for features off real-world use cases. KDE and the Blender Foundation have generally steered these projects right, and the usability shows when compared to GIMP, where said leadership isn't as pronounced.
nkkollaw 8y ago
Well, it's basically unusable if you have a hidpi monitor--which is more and more people every day. If you don't, it's barely usable, with very bad UX defaults.

There are actually many different ways you can customize the UI to your liking, including themes among other things. You can also run GIMP in window mode which encapsulates all sub windows into a single app window, just like the other apps you mentioned. If none of these are your cup of tea, please make a PR - It’s open source. :) That said, Krita and Blender are very very nice.

nothis 8y ago
I know it's well-meaning but this is not the issue. It's not about "customization" or singular problems with a simple fix. It's about having a well-ordered, uncluttered, snappy GUI that never gets in the way. As a default. Until the GIMP team realizes that this isn't a separate issue but the central purpose of an image editing program, it will never be a serious option for professional work. They should invest those $100k into hiring a professional UI designer and intensive user testing.
- lbriner 8y ago
  Agreed but it's harder than that. You could get a professional UI designer but their results are not objectively good or bad, they are subjective. The benefit of a larger UI-focussed organisation, e.g. Adobe or Apple, is that you have a large enough team of UI professionals so that work is peer-reviewed and controversial ideas have to be justified. I assume that the Gimp team would be too small to have that kind of group-based UI sign-off?
  - nothis 8y ago
    I'd say a professional UI designer is capable of producing objectively good results. He'd first sit experienced photographers and graphic designers in front of GIMP and identify their biggest gripes with the UI and then would develop a hierarchy of measures to fix them. And test the results. Honestly, they'd probably have to spin it off into a separate, UI-focused project that starts with minimal features and gradually adds more every time a good UI solution is found. In the order of what real-world users identify as the most needed features. In other words, I believe what GIMP needs is a partnership with an idealistic professional workplace willing to use it as an experiment and communicate their day to day issues.
- ricardonunez 8y ago
  I agree with you until the hiring. The work that needs to be done is hard and hiring just one designer will not fix it. Maybe hiring one person to manage that part of the project. They need to pay an agency to do the work. The UX/UI needs major work and a lot of testing. That donation is good but the project will probably need more funding.
  - nothis 8y ago
    I definitely agree about the team size/cost. I have to say, it baffles me how much time programmers are willing to put into open source works but apparently it's impossible to find UI designers who are willing to do the same. I don't think it's a lack of enthusiasm, I think it's probably more of a social/clique thing and open source projects would benefit greatly from opening themselves up to contributers outside the realms of programming, signaling respect for that kind of work.
    - mschaef 8y ago
      > I have to say, it baffles me how much time programmers are willing to put into open source works but apparently it's impossible to find UI designers who are willing to do the same. So you're surprised it's hard to find UI designers willing to work for free? I'd argue the surprising part is that there are programmers that ARE willing to work for free or reduced rates on open source. Both of these disciplines take time and effort to learn and then perform. The people that do them not only pay these costs, but have their own obligations to themselves and their loved ones they might need to help support. It doesn't surprise me at all that the vast majority of people with these skills choose (or are forced by circumstance) to do something else.
- interfixus 8y ago
  My one or two cents: I have done professional work in GIMP, plenty of it. And certainly, this or that could be better thought through, and more smoothly laid out. But on the whole - and being accustomed over the better part of twenty years - I don't quite see the major problems everyone is on about. The Photoshop thing, on the other hand, on the rare occasions I am forced to venture there, strikes me as a confusing mess that I'm always happy to leave behind as soon as possible. Plus of course it requires one kind or another of strange proprietary OS in order to function.
  - ufmace 8y ago
    I always wonder if all of these "bad UI" complaints translate to "it isn't exactly like Photoshop". I only use the basics in Gimp myself, and I know it has a few quirks that I find easy to work around. I wonder if Photoshop has a pile of quirks that its users are used to find find weird when they aren't there and a different sent of quirks are.
RankingMember 8y ago
This is the thing that the open source projects whose UIs I've been disappointed by always seem to tout: customization. I think it's great you can customize stuff, but I posit that the vast majority of people just want something that's ready to roll out of the gate. Something that's endlessly customizable isn't necessarily a "pro" to me; if people need to customize something a bunch to make it usable for them, you've built a framework instead of an application.
omegabravo 8y ago
I had no idea. For those people that last successfully used gimp >5 years ago. Windows > Single Window Mode. Windows > New Toolbox Windows > Dockable Dialogs > Tool Options It is hard to convey how much more comfortable I feel with the program with these tiny settings changes. I wonder how many other people are in the same boat as I. I spend a lot of time in a grid style interface, so it is great to see: * View > Show Grid * View > Snap to Grid Click once somewhere. Hold shift to draw a point to point line. Hold shift and control to have wider snapping of angles and click again, hold control and shift to get 15 Degree increment angles. I will use Gimp a lot more now. Previously I was trying to use Pinta, but it would crash regularly on me making it almost unusable.
- kens 8y ago
  I agree with omegabravo. I expected Single Window Mode to be pointless but tried it recently, and it's so much better. No more trying to find the dialog that's under the other dialogs; everything is just there. If you're a GIMP user, give it a try.
- MaDeuce 8y ago
  Nor did I. I've been using gimp a few times a year for 15+ years -- i.e., never enough to build much muscle memory. Your suggestions will make a huge difference for me.

nothis 8y ago

I want to support GIMP but, especially for fast, professional use, the UI makes it impossible. Their raw features are on par with anything I'd want to do in Photoshop, it's 100% a UI issue at this point. And I don't get why it's this hard for open source projects to realize that (the only notable exception I know is Firefox, which I love).

rasengan 8y ago
Sometimes when there isn’t unlimited funding and the ability to spend unlimited time, the efforts are probably spent on core functionality over aesthetics. GIMP is a highly featureful project with powerful scripting capabilities. I wouldn’t say it isn’t already on par or more powerful than Photoshop.
- RankingMember 8y ago
  GIMP still lacks non-destructive editing, does it not? That alone is a huge deficiency in comparison to Photoshop.
  - acomjean 8y ago
    Photoshop had non-destructive editing now? Its been a while ,but I thought that was lightroom that had the non-destructive editing features. Photoshop for me was about layers and masks
    - tokyodude 8y ago
      Photoshop had non-destructive editing for 15-20 years. I think the issues are getting confused. Yes, Lightroom saves a separate file from your photos of the changes so in that sense it's non destructive, the original files are not changed. Photoshop is non-destructive in that you can load an image into a layer and apply tons of layers above that layer each of which edits the layers below it in some way. The pixels in the image layer are never changed so it's also "non-destructive". But saving the file does overwrite the old photoshop file with your changes, unlike lightroom.

ape4 8y ago

It has improved in recent years - looks more like Photoshop now.

ginko 8y ago

I never understood that complaint with the Blender UI. If anything Blender's UI even before the whole 2.5 change was a lot more streamlined and less stupid point&click than for instance Maya. It essentially felt like Emacs for 3D editing. But maybe that's because I started out on Blender and only had a cursory look at Maya. Same with GIMP. I have years of experience working with GIMP so if you sat me in front of photoshop I'd probably be a lot less productive with it. Maybe when people say "improve the UI" they just mean "Make it more like the program I'm already used to".

mrspeaker 8y ago
Blender has slowly improved over years - things got more consistent and (given the complexity of the domain) it made the standard operations more obvious. I'm excited to see the 2.8 changes, but I certainly don't mind it as it is. GIMP, however... makes me (every so slightly) annoyed every time I use it. I have to google so many task that should just be intuitive. It does the job, and I still use it as my primary editor - but it's not something I look forward to opening... but it could be! I'm hoping it'll get there eventually!
- Meai 8y ago
  2.8 is a massive improvement imo, tooltips and nicer icons for everything.
wongarsu 8y ago
>It essentially felt like Emacs for 3D editing. Which is exactly the complaint :D Blender has a very efficient UI that is great for power users, but it has a much bigger learning curve than the competition with their point&click UIs. Add to that that most people are trained on Maya/3ds Max/Cinema 4d, learning Blender is a big investment with uncertain payoff. Basically the same reason why very few people use Emacs or Vim nowadays.
- gnulinux 8y ago
  > Basically the same reason why very few people use Emacs or Vim nowadays. Wow, this is such a bold statement; do you have any evidence to support this? In my experience a very great majority of engineers use vim or emacs. In US, I've never been in a culture where emacs or vim is used by a minority. In my current work, which is a startup in Boston, everyone except 2 developers use emacs. I googled for evidence to support me, but I couldn't find any solid evidence neither supporting nor disputing me.

thrillgore 8y ago

Blender and Krita benefit from having leadership that drives the roadmap for features off real-world use cases. KDE and the Blender Foundation have generally steered these projects right, and the usability shows when compared to GIMP, where said leadership isn't as pronounced.

nkkollaw 8y ago

Well, it's basically unusable if you have a hidpi monitor--which is more and more people every day. If you don't, it's barely usable, with very bad UX defaults.