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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 Pho

by 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.
- krautsourced 8y ago
  I think that's more a thing of personal preference. Many developers (me included) consider working on UIs a chore compared to implemented new features. And since they are free to do whatever they want, they stick to the features. Commercial apps are usually pretty far from "unlimited funds". However, they know how important a good UI is for applications when you ask people to pay money for it, so they pay people to work on the UI and not on anything else. It's out of their hands, thus, it get's done.
- djschnei 8y ago
  > I wouldn’t say it isn’t already on par or more powerful than Photoshop. Having just woken up, deprived of my morning caffeine, this sentence sent my brain for a real loop :)
  - knodi123 8y ago
    his main point is powerful, but there's not enough funding for him to spend time on phrasing.
    - djschnei 8y ago
      hahah well done
- nothis 8y ago
  I'm sorry but I believe this a mistake in priorities. This is an image editing program. The UI is the core functionality. They could cut half their features and focus on a better UI and it would make it a better program. There are web-based photoshop clones that offer better usability than GIMP. I shiver in disgust saying this out loud but it's true at this point. They're slow, more minimalist in terms of features but they don't have buttons that overlap or scroll bars popping up out of nowhere. The GIMP UI is an unusable mess. It's the UI equivalent of "programmer art".
- mygo 8y ago
  > the efforts are probably spent on core functionality over aesthetics. This is the fatal error. Humans are the ones using that tool. What you call aesthetics is functionality. We’re not talking about making it prettier we’re talking about making it more usable. On top of that, it’s an image editing tool. It’s a tool that people use for the purpose of creating visual, often-times “aesthetic” works, and yet the UI is not important? Well then more humans making the decision to use it is not important.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > aesthetics It's not aesthetics. You make it sound trivial. People aren't talking about things like how the icons are designed. They mean the workflow.
  - adiusmus 8y ago
    Correct. I can get things done faster in krita than gimp. And that is basic tasks.
- briandear 8y ago
  “Aesthetics” is dismissive to what UX is about. I am certain there are some that would prefer doing image editing at the command line if they were in charge of UI which is exactly the wrong answer for this type of software.
- laythea 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." In my opinion, GIMP is the evidence that these efforts are misplaced, and focus should be the UI (at least after core functionality exists). No point is a fancy pants program that nobody actually wants to use.
ensiferum 8y ago
In my experience these problems typically boil down to not having a "product manager" or "product owner" who has both the skills and the authority to drive the usability side of the product.
- eitally 8y ago
  Not to mention a team of willing designers, developers and testers to get the work done.
dzmien 8y ago
Well, given that it is open source software, have you ever considered contributing? I'm not trying to be dick. I know that just because you can spot flaws doesn't necessarily mean you know how to improve them, nor are you obligated to just because it is open source. But I bet you could offer some valuable feedback and/or ideas.
- wastedhours 8y ago
  I think the barriers are quite often that collaboration around contributions happens in developer centric platforms. Am not sure what it is for GIMP, but often it's Github or IRC or some message board, which works really well for developer contributions, but then for things like UI design, marketing proposals, social media sign off etc... it's less than ideal. I'd like to help contribute to some projects where I can lend a (non-development) hand, but being code-based projects, they don't feel set up to accept it.
- billyhoffman 8y ago
  There is a tremendous amount of inertia that most be overcome to make changes to the UI. I don't just mean technical inertia which is probably large given GIMP's size and long history, but also people inertia. UI tends to be the ultimate bikeshedding [1] blackhole. Few people have an opinion about how a denoising filter should be implemented. Several orders of magnitude more have feelings about the UI should look and the workflow should function. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
  - wongarsu 8y ago
    The most viable path would likely be to fork GIMP (while merging in their updates), make a better UI without being bound to the original project, and if the new UI turns out to be much better offer to merge it back into the GIMP project. You could conceivably raise enough money from stakeholders to do this properly with a few experienced UI developers, proper user testing etc.
dahart 8y ago
> And I don’t get why it’s this hard for open source projects to realize that I don’t know, but I’ll throw out my theory. Note I’m very much a fan of open source even though this might sound negative. I would also love to see GIMPs UI get an overhaul. In short, I think it’s harder to prioritize open source features for multiple reasons. When you don’t have paying customers, it’s very hard to prioritize the feedback you get. When you do have paying customers, you tend to prioritize in proportion to the account size, for better or worse. As a blanket general statement that is not always true, but more true than not, paying customers are trying to get something specific done for their job, while free customers are exploring. I say this from the point of view of owning a web startup with a freemium model, so I’ve had a lot of first hand requests from both paying and free customers. I haven’t had an OSS project with as much success, so there might be some different trends when all users are free users. The other aspect is that developers of OSS projects have fewer deadlines and can choose what they work on. UI coding is usually less fun than writing filters or architecting an image cache. I know that personally, when I’m left to my own devices, I’m not usually working on the hard or boring things that would have the biggest impact for others, I’m working on the fun things that are most fun for me. There’s also the issue that OSS projects are created by programmers for programming reasons, and they aren’t often able to hire designers and artists like a for-profit shop.
- jancsika 8y ago
  I'm sure there are people who are UI experts who would be willing to improve FLOSS UIs in their spare time. The problem is that the current developer base of many FLOSS project don't understand that a) decent UI requires an expertise and b) knowing how their poor UIs are implemented doesn't count as expertise in UI development. For example-- if I write to a FLOSS mailing list that the way they are using realloc leaves some stale pointers that can cause crashes, they very quickly fix the problem. But if a UI expert posts something about a similarly severe and easily fixed UI bug, they'll get at least 5 authoritative-sounding responses from people who know absolutely nothing about UI design. Such a UI developer would definitely need a full-time salary to deal with that kind of social situation.
  - gurkendoktor 8y ago
enriquto 8y ago
What is exactly the problem with gimp's UI? I find it intuitive and very easy to use (but then, I have not used many other interactive imaging programs). Is it missing something important? Has too many useless features? GIMP's UI is alright for me, what I need are more features that are sorely lacking: 1) ability to work with images having an arbitrary number of spectral bands 2) floating-point pixel values 3) complex-valued pixels and their natural operations 4) images of arbitrary size, without need to open the whole image at once (which may not actually fit in memory) 5) save the processing graph and apply it to other images with a command line tool
- ginko 8y ago
  This. If anything GIMP is missing features for me. Especially the non-destructive editing and disk paging support you mentioned feel sorely lacking. Floating point pixel values should be supported as of GIMP 2.10, though.
  - enriquto 8y ago
    > Floating point pixel values should be supported as of GIMP 2.10, though. True! I have just updated to 2.10 and it can open floating-point tiffs of one or three channels. The support is very limited, though. It seems to ignore negative values or values higher than 1, so it is mostly useless to me. Yet, I'm very happy to see new advances!
- cmpb 8y ago
  Off-topic: Googling "complex-valued pixels" didn't bring up anything, but I'm interested in finding out more about that. What pixel-related information do the real/imaginary parts represent? What sort of applications does that have?
  - enriquto 8y ago
    Radar images (e.g., those publicly available from the Sentinel 1 satellite) typically come as complex-valued images. You look at the norm of the complex numbers to understand the structures, but for interferometry you need the phase also. If you compute the Fourier transform of a scalar-valued image, you obtain a complex-valued image. It would be nice to be able to process these transforms with gimp (e.g., to "paint" a few parts in black to set those frequencies to zero, thereby defining a band-pass filter).
sleepychu 8y ago
What do you want changed about the UI? I don't even look at it most of the time. Single window mode/quick toggling of that was the biggest change for me.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > I don't even look at it most of the time What do you do instead? Are you using GIMP entirely through the scripting interface? How are you using a graphical image editor without looking at the user interface?
  - emidln 8y ago
    Open an image and then use shortcuts.
    - chrisseaton 8y ago
      Like with your monitor off or something? How do you not look at the UI when editing an image?
      - Grue3 8y ago
        You can press Tab and hide pretty much all UI except the drawing window. If you mean on-canvas tools, they are all pretty great (except maybe Text tool) and often superior to Photoshop (for example consider Unified Transform tool from 2.10).
jrockway 8y ago
Does Photoshop have a good UI? Everything good is hidden 36 levels deep somewhere, or requires you to press control-shift-command-alt-option-windows key + F26. There are just too many special-use-case tools to make a "good" UI. Learn it and forget about what it looks like, it's the only way you'll ever be happy.
- scriptproof 8y ago
  Paint.net and Krita both have a simple and intuitive UI. Gimp could get inspiration from them, even for the basic operations.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  I somewhat agree, I used Gimp before trying Photoshop and now I'm very used to the Gimp menus and it's easy for me to find tools. I had to use Photoshop CS5 at work a few weeks ago and 80% of my time was trying to find what I needed.
- open-source-ux 8y ago
  "Does Photoshop have a good UI?" No, Photoshop has never had a good UI (neither has Illustrator). The problem is that people who use Photoshop on a regular basis have memorised the keyboard shortcuts and steps needed to complete tasks. The Photoshop way of doing things, no matter how clunky or unintuitive, is now the natural way of doing things for them (and their frame of reference when trying out another app). It's no different to a lot of other software e.g. the programmer who won't consider any other editor unless it has the same task flow and keyboard shortcuts they've spent so long committing to memory. This puts rival apps in a difficult position. Should they copy the same clunky, unintuitive way of doing things to attract users? Or forge a different path? In the case of Photoshop, copying the UI and task flow means users can also take advantage of the gargantuan volume of existing Photoshop books, tutorials and training available.
  - com2kid 8y ago
    I disagree. Illustrator is a pain, fine, whatever. Photoshops UI is optimized for its workflows. I was able to learn Photoshop easily enough, I've been able to learn other image manipulation programs quickly, but despite having spent many hours in GIMP, I hate every minute of using it. If I go "create new image", there isn't an option to create a new image that is the size of the image on my clipboard. There is not a dedicated "interact with this selection" tool, like the arrow tool in PS, instead there is a tool that sometimes draws new boundaries, bit the rectangle select tool also moves newly pasted layers, which is a different action than the move tool, which is also confusing. Pasting just sucks. Why is it a new floating layer that I then have to right click on and say "new layer", just create a new layer, not this annoying psuedo-layer thing. Everytime I want to move something I have selected, I want to scream. I create a selection, so, move tool right? NO. The move tool lets me move layers I have made. Joy. In fact after having spent a couple minutes on it, I still can't figure it out, but then again why GIMP is so damn confusing I have to figure things out every time I use it? Good programs are learned, GIMP is suffered through. The way to move something that is selected is the same in literally every other image manipulation program ever made, but GIMP has to be different. Hilariously enough, all other transforms on selections are super easy, just not translates. Actually, you know what, I just looked it up. To move the selected pixels, the user is supposed to control-alt-drag, then release control and alt, and keep dragging. One of the most common interactions in an image manipulation program is hidden behind a double-meta with a click drag attached to it, and then a release of that double-meta? That is jaw droppingly bad UI.
mschuetz 8y ago
A proper and intuitive UI is one of the hardest and most time consuming things to do. From a design perspective, it takes a lot of effort, trial&error and user feedback to find out what works and what doesn't work, and to create something that's coherent and intuitive, rather than a patchwork of individual and differently behaving tools. From an engineering perspective, it's a very time consuming task. The work of doing a proper UI may be even bigger than the work on doing the actual image processing and other software core engine tasks.
- rootlocus 8y ago
  There are plenty of drawing applications that have great UIs. The easiest solution for GIMP would be to copy one of them (arguably Photoshop, because it's closest in terms of expectancy / user-base).
mschaef 8y ago
> 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). Firefox has a lot more commercial support than something like Gimp, which is supported primarily through contributions in various forms. What this means is that it's harder to turn down contributions and harder to implement the kind of process that'd be required for a more coherent UI. As simple as it might seem at first, it really is a whole 'nother ball game.
k_bx 8y ago
Single-window mode has been a huge jump towards usability, and I'd imagine that involved quite some work. Text tool had a lot of work to make it better. Also, latest release should've removed the annoyance of font-loading process blocking start of the app (also a major usability issue). I have a feeling that in many ways it's just a lack of resources to move things faster.
adiusmus 8y ago
Last time I used gimp it wouldn’t save a file in different format - I had to export it. For someone that just wants to grab an image, touch it up and resave it, gimp just irritates. There’s at least another 50 of these kinds of small annoyances that add up to one large dealbreaker for me. Of course none are bugs - it’s likely just intended behaviour that the developers think is great. For what I need to do Krita is much better. I haven’t used photoshop for over a decade.
- boudin 8y ago
  That's more a question of wording rather than an issue. In gimps export is for formats with which you lose information (your layers for example), save is for formats allowing you to re-open you file as you let it and continue working on it
  - igouy 8y ago
    That's — "small annoyances that add up to one large dealbreaker". I should be able to find the command to save my file without needing to know about that lossy distinction. If there's a potential problem the software can ask me how it should be resolved, when it needs to be resolved.
  - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
    It still should be an option under save-as. I can do this with paint.net. I do this all the time with Corel Painter. Any work in progress gets saved in a way that opens with the layers (corel's format). When I'm done, I can simply collapse the layers and save in a number of formats. No big deal. I understand that some formats simply don't allow the layers. That shouldn't be an issue, though. All it takes is a popup telling the user about this.
    - gnulinux 8y ago
      > It still should be an option under save-as. Why? I don't understand this. You're not "saving" what you see on the monitor by storing the information to a .png file; the moment you "save" you'll lose some information decided by an algorithm you do not understand, so it really is not "saving" anything, it's "exporting" what you see on the monitor to a different format. When you actually click the "save" button in gimp it stores the content in a format it can recover 100% of the information you'll need tomorrow. These sort of terminological differences between Photoshop, Paint.NET, Gimp, Krita etc... do not point a deficiency in Gimp, rather just a cultural difference decided by rational arguments. I think people should be more thoughtful about what are the targets of Gimp Project, Gimp does not want to be a Photoshop clone, they're trying to make a great image manipulation program; and as software engineers they make their own decisions how to structure/name their program.
rushabh 8y ago
Great UI comes from a strong leader who has specific tastes that everyone may not agree to. Execution of such a vision has to be highly controlled and it means at times taking tough decisions and throwing away someone’s work. Open source is usually built with consensus and that is why it’s hard to follow “one vision”. Also hard to chuck out contributed code / features, specially when its voluntary since it’s not welcoming for new contributors.
jandrese 8y ago
Personally I've found GIMP's UI to be easier than Photoshop's, but I started out with the GIMP. I wonder if maybe they shouldn't go with a XUL like system where the UI can be greatly customized by third parties. Someone would undoubtedly create the Photoshop clone UI and make a bunch of people happy.
- tannhaeuser 8y ago
  That's how GTK (The GIMP Toolkit) started, isn't? I'd rather have them focus on GIMP's core features, maybe UI enhancements, but certainly not on platform-building. Edit: or rather, create a SketchUp clone with good 2D projection/export (Blender isn't for casual use)
  - jandrese 8y ago
    Pretty much. The GIMP developers couldn't find a toolkit that fit their needs so they wrote their own. Other people with the same problem then used their toolkit. Back when the GIMP was developed your options were pretty limited. There was Athena Widgets which are basically the cave drawings of the computer world. Motif which had licensing issues. OpenWindows widgets which were notoriously buggy and ugly. There wasn't much else to choose from. There's a reason GTK exploded so quickly after release.
- mschaef 8y ago
  I don't know if XUL is the right choice, but I think this general direction might be a good idea. The idea of an independant open source project focusing itself on producing a commercial quality UI seems a little ludicrous to me. This type of UI requires continued multi-disciplinary effort and process over a timeframe of years. And this is the exact weak spot of projects funded entirely/mostly on a volunteer/contribution basis. This idea of a highly customizable toolkit (a la Emacs for graphics), in contrast, goes to the strengths of the open source model. Open source projects tend to be developer-heavy, and developers tend to like to build frameworks/abstractions... so a natural fit. Frameworks tend to be easier to use when the underlying code is available for various kinds of inspection, so the open source model fits there too. I'm not saying it'd necessarily be a cakewalk, but it seems like a closer fit to that OSS is really good at. (Of course, frameworks are more complex and expensive to develop than single applications, so this idea has that going against it.)

by nothis 8y ago

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.
krautsourced 8y ago
I think that's more a thing of personal preference. Many developers (me included) consider working on UIs a chore compared to implemented new features. And since they are free to do whatever they want, they stick to the features. Commercial apps are usually pretty far from "unlimited funds". However, they know how important a good UI is for applications when you ask people to pay money for it, so they pay people to work on the UI and not on anything else. It's out of their hands, thus, it get's done.
djschnei 8y ago
> I wouldn’t say it isn’t already on par or more powerful than Photoshop. Having just woken up, deprived of my morning caffeine, this sentence sent my brain for a real loop :)
- knodi123 8y ago
  his main point is powerful, but there's not enough funding for him to spend time on phrasing.
  - djschnei 8y ago
    hahah well done
nothis 8y ago
I'm sorry but I believe this a mistake in priorities. This is an image editing program. The UI is the core functionality. They could cut half their features and focus on a better UI and it would make it a better program. There are web-based photoshop clones that offer better usability than GIMP. I shiver in disgust saying this out loud but it's true at this point. They're slow, more minimalist in terms of features but they don't have buttons that overlap or scroll bars popping up out of nowhere. The GIMP UI is an unusable mess. It's the UI equivalent of "programmer art".
mygo 8y ago
> the efforts are probably spent on core functionality over aesthetics. This is the fatal error. Humans are the ones using that tool. What you call aesthetics is functionality. We’re not talking about making it prettier we’re talking about making it more usable. On top of that, it’s an image editing tool. It’s a tool that people use for the purpose of creating visual, often-times “aesthetic” works, and yet the UI is not important? Well then more humans making the decision to use it is not important.
chrisseaton 8y ago
> aesthetics It's not aesthetics. You make it sound trivial. People aren't talking about things like how the icons are designed. They mean the workflow.
- adiusmus 8y ago
  Correct. I can get things done faster in krita than gimp. And that is basic tasks.
briandear 8y ago
“Aesthetics” is dismissive to what UX is about. I am certain there are some that would prefer doing image editing at the command line if they were in charge of UI which is exactly the wrong answer for this type of software.
laythea 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." In my opinion, GIMP is the evidence that these efforts are misplaced, and focus should be the UI (at least after core functionality exists). No point is a fancy pants program that nobody actually wants to use.

ensiferum 8y ago

In my experience these problems typically boil down to not having a "product manager" or "product owner" who has both the skills and the authority to drive the usability side of the product.

eitally 8y ago
Not to mention a team of willing designers, developers and testers to get the work done.

dzmien 8y ago

Well, given that it is open source software, have you ever considered contributing? I'm not trying to be dick. I know that just because you can spot flaws doesn't necessarily mean you know how to improve them, nor are you obligated to just because it is open source. But I bet you could offer some valuable feedback and/or ideas.

wastedhours 8y ago
I think the barriers are quite often that collaboration around contributions happens in developer centric platforms. Am not sure what it is for GIMP, but often it's Github or IRC or some message board, which works really well for developer contributions, but then for things like UI design, marketing proposals, social media sign off etc... it's less than ideal. I'd like to help contribute to some projects where I can lend a (non-development) hand, but being code-based projects, they don't feel set up to accept it.
billyhoffman 8y ago
There is a tremendous amount of inertia that most be overcome to make changes to the UI. I don't just mean technical inertia which is probably large given GIMP's size and long history, but also people inertia. UI tends to be the ultimate bikeshedding [1] blackhole. Few people have an opinion about how a denoising filter should be implemented. Several orders of magnitude more have feelings about the UI should look and the workflow should function. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
- wongarsu 8y ago
  The most viable path would likely be to fork GIMP (while merging in their updates), make a better UI without being bound to the original project, and if the new UI turns out to be much better offer to merge it back into the GIMP project. You could conceivably raise enough money from stakeholders to do this properly with a few experienced UI developers, proper user testing etc.

dahart 8y ago

> And I don’t get why it’s this hard for open source projects to realize that I don’t know, but I’ll throw out my theory. Note I’m very much a fan of open source even though this might sound negative. I would also love to see GIMPs UI get an overhaul. In short, I think it’s harder to prioritize open source features for multiple reasons. When you don’t have paying customers, it’s very hard to prioritize the feedback you get. When you do have paying customers, you tend to prioritize in proportion to the account size, for better or worse. As a blanket general statement that is not always true, but more true than not, paying customers are trying to get something specific done for their job, while free customers are exploring. I say this from the point of view of owning a web startup with a freemium model, so I’ve had a lot of first hand requests from both paying and free customers. I haven’t had an OSS project with as much success, so there might be some different trends when all users are free users. The other aspect is that developers of OSS projects have fewer deadlines and can choose what they work on. UI coding is usually less fun than writing filters or architecting an image cache. I know that personally, when I’m left to my own devices, I’m not usually working on the hard or boring things that would have the biggest impact for others, I’m working on the fun things that are most fun for me. There’s also the issue that OSS projects are created by programmers for programming reasons, and they aren’t often able to hire designers and artists like a for-profit shop.

jancsika 8y ago
I'm sure there are people who are UI experts who would be willing to improve FLOSS UIs in their spare time. The problem is that the current developer base of many FLOSS project don't understand that a) decent UI requires an expertise and b) knowing how their poor UIs are implemented doesn't count as expertise in UI development. For example-- if I write to a FLOSS mailing list that the way they are using realloc leaves some stale pointers that can cause crashes, they very quickly fix the problem. But if a UI expert posts something about a similarly severe and easily fixed UI bug, they'll get at least 5 authoritative-sounding responses from people who know absolutely nothing about UI design. Such a UI developer would definitely need a full-time salary to deal with that kind of social situation.
- gurkendoktor 8y ago

enriquto 8y ago

What is exactly the problem with gimp's UI? I find it intuitive and very easy to use (but then, I have not used many other interactive imaging programs). Is it missing something important? Has too many useless features? GIMP's UI is alright for me, what I need are more features that are sorely lacking: 1) ability to work with images having an arbitrary number of spectral bands 2) floating-point pixel values 3) complex-valued pixels and their natural operations 4) images of arbitrary size, without need to open the whole image at once (which may not actually fit in memory) 5) save the processing graph and apply it to other images with a command line tool

ginko 8y ago
This. If anything GIMP is missing features for me. Especially the non-destructive editing and disk paging support you mentioned feel sorely lacking. Floating point pixel values should be supported as of GIMP 2.10, though.
- enriquto 8y ago
  > Floating point pixel values should be supported as of GIMP 2.10, though. True! I have just updated to 2.10 and it can open floating-point tiffs of one or three channels. The support is very limited, though. It seems to ignore negative values or values higher than 1, so it is mostly useless to me. Yet, I'm very happy to see new advances!
cmpb 8y ago
Off-topic: Googling "complex-valued pixels" didn't bring up anything, but I'm interested in finding out more about that. What pixel-related information do the real/imaginary parts represent? What sort of applications does that have?
- enriquto 8y ago
  Radar images (e.g., those publicly available from the Sentinel 1 satellite) typically come as complex-valued images. You look at the norm of the complex numbers to understand the structures, but for interferometry you need the phase also. If you compute the Fourier transform of a scalar-valued image, you obtain a complex-valued image. It would be nice to be able to process these transforms with gimp (e.g., to "paint" a few parts in black to set those frequencies to zero, thereby defining a band-pass filter).

sleepychu 8y ago

What do you want changed about the UI? I don't even look at it most of the time. Single window mode/quick toggling of that was the biggest change for me.

chrisseaton 8y ago
> I don't even look at it most of the time What do you do instead? Are you using GIMP entirely through the scripting interface? How are you using a graphical image editor without looking at the user interface?
- emidln 8y ago
  Open an image and then use shortcuts.
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    Like with your monitor off or something? How do you not look at the UI when editing an image?
    - Grue3 8y ago
      You can press Tab and hide pretty much all UI except the drawing window. If you mean on-canvas tools, they are all pretty great (except maybe Text tool) and often superior to Photoshop (for example consider Unified Transform tool from 2.10).

jrockway 8y ago

Does Photoshop have a good UI? Everything good is hidden 36 levels deep somewhere, or requires you to press control-shift-command-alt-option-windows key + F26. There are just too many special-use-case tools to make a "good" UI. Learn it and forget about what it looks like, it's the only way you'll ever be happy.

scriptproof 8y ago
Paint.net and Krita both have a simple and intuitive UI. Gimp could get inspiration from them, even for the basic operations.
PascLeRasc 8y ago
I somewhat agree, I used Gimp before trying Photoshop and now I'm very used to the Gimp menus and it's easy for me to find tools. I had to use Photoshop CS5 at work a few weeks ago and 80% of my time was trying to find what I needed.
open-source-ux 8y ago
"Does Photoshop have a good UI?" No, Photoshop has never had a good UI (neither has Illustrator). The problem is that people who use Photoshop on a regular basis have memorised the keyboard shortcuts and steps needed to complete tasks. The Photoshop way of doing things, no matter how clunky or unintuitive, is now the natural way of doing things for them (and their frame of reference when trying out another app). It's no different to a lot of other software e.g. the programmer who won't consider any other editor unless it has the same task flow and keyboard shortcuts they've spent so long committing to memory. This puts rival apps in a difficult position. Should they copy the same clunky, unintuitive way of doing things to attract users? Or forge a different path? In the case of Photoshop, copying the UI and task flow means users can also take advantage of the gargantuan volume of existing Photoshop books, tutorials and training available.
- com2kid 8y ago
  I disagree. Illustrator is a pain, fine, whatever. Photoshops UI is optimized for its workflows. I was able to learn Photoshop easily enough, I've been able to learn other image manipulation programs quickly, but despite having spent many hours in GIMP, I hate every minute of using it. If I go "create new image", there isn't an option to create a new image that is the size of the image on my clipboard. There is not a dedicated "interact with this selection" tool, like the arrow tool in PS, instead there is a tool that sometimes draws new boundaries, bit the rectangle select tool also moves newly pasted layers, which is a different action than the move tool, which is also confusing. Pasting just sucks. Why is it a new floating layer that I then have to right click on and say "new layer", just create a new layer, not this annoying psuedo-layer thing. Everytime I want to move something I have selected, I want to scream. I create a selection, so, move tool right? NO. The move tool lets me move layers I have made. Joy. In fact after having spent a couple minutes on it, I still can't figure it out, but then again why GIMP is so damn confusing I have to figure things out every time I use it? Good programs are learned, GIMP is suffered through. The way to move something that is selected is the same in literally every other image manipulation program ever made, but GIMP has to be different. Hilariously enough, all other transforms on selections are super easy, just not translates. Actually, you know what, I just looked it up. To move the selected pixels, the user is supposed to control-alt-drag, then release control and alt, and keep dragging. One of the most common interactions in an image manipulation program is hidden behind a double-meta with a click drag attached to it, and then a release of that double-meta? That is jaw droppingly bad UI.

mschuetz 8y ago

A proper and intuitive UI is one of the hardest and most time consuming things to do. From a design perspective, it takes a lot of effort, trial&error and user feedback to find out what works and what doesn't work, and to create something that's coherent and intuitive, rather than a patchwork of individual and differently behaving tools. From an engineering perspective, it's a very time consuming task. The work of doing a proper UI may be even bigger than the work on doing the actual image processing and other software core engine tasks.

rootlocus 8y ago
There are plenty of drawing applications that have great UIs. The easiest solution for GIMP would be to copy one of them (arguably Photoshop, because it's closest in terms of expectancy / user-base).

mschaef 8y ago

> 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). Firefox has a lot more commercial support than something like Gimp, which is supported primarily through contributions in various forms. What this means is that it's harder to turn down contributions and harder to implement the kind of process that'd be required for a more coherent UI. As simple as it might seem at first, it really is a whole 'nother ball game.

k_bx 8y ago

Single-window mode has been a huge jump towards usability, and I'd imagine that involved quite some work. Text tool had a lot of work to make it better. Also, latest release should've removed the annoyance of font-loading process blocking start of the app (also a major usability issue). I have a feeling that in many ways it's just a lack of resources to move things faster.

adiusmus 8y ago

Last time I used gimp it wouldn’t save a file in different format - I had to export it. For someone that just wants to grab an image, touch it up and resave it, gimp just irritates. There’s at least another 50 of these kinds of small annoyances that add up to one large dealbreaker for me. Of course none are bugs - it’s likely just intended behaviour that the developers think is great. For what I need to do Krita is much better. I haven’t used photoshop for over a decade.

boudin 8y ago
That's more a question of wording rather than an issue. In gimps export is for formats with which you lose information (your layers for example), save is for formats allowing you to re-open you file as you let it and continue working on it
- igouy 8y ago
  That's — "small annoyances that add up to one large dealbreaker". I should be able to find the command to save my file without needing to know about that lossy distinction. If there's a potential problem the software can ask me how it should be resolved, when it needs to be resolved.
- Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  It still should be an option under save-as. I can do this with paint.net. I do this all the time with Corel Painter. Any work in progress gets saved in a way that opens with the layers (corel's format). When I'm done, I can simply collapse the layers and save in a number of formats. No big deal. I understand that some formats simply don't allow the layers. That shouldn't be an issue, though. All it takes is a popup telling the user about this.
  - gnulinux 8y ago
    > It still should be an option under save-as. Why? I don't understand this. You're not "saving" what you see on the monitor by storing the information to a .png file; the moment you "save" you'll lose some information decided by an algorithm you do not understand, so it really is not "saving" anything, it's "exporting" what you see on the monitor to a different format. When you actually click the "save" button in gimp it stores the content in a format it can recover 100% of the information you'll need tomorrow. These sort of terminological differences between Photoshop, Paint.NET, Gimp, Krita etc... do not point a deficiency in Gimp, rather just a cultural difference decided by rational arguments. I think people should be more thoughtful about what are the targets of Gimp Project, Gimp does not want to be a Photoshop clone, they're trying to make a great image manipulation program; and as software engineers they make their own decisions how to structure/name their program.

rushabh 8y ago

Great UI comes from a strong leader who has specific tastes that everyone may not agree to. Execution of such a vision has to be highly controlled and it means at times taking tough decisions and throwing away someone’s work. Open source is usually built with consensus and that is why it’s hard to follow “one vision”. Also hard to chuck out contributed code / features, specially when its voluntary since it’s not welcoming for new contributors.

jandrese 8y ago

Personally I've found GIMP's UI to be easier than Photoshop's, but I started out with the GIMP. I wonder if maybe they shouldn't go with a XUL like system where the UI can be greatly customized by third parties. Someone would undoubtedly create the Photoshop clone UI and make a bunch of people happy.

tannhaeuser 8y ago
That's how GTK (The GIMP Toolkit) started, isn't? I'd rather have them focus on GIMP's core features, maybe UI enhancements, but certainly not on platform-building. Edit: or rather, create a SketchUp clone with good 2D projection/export (Blender isn't for casual use)
- jandrese 8y ago
  Pretty much. The GIMP developers couldn't find a toolkit that fit their needs so they wrote their own. Other people with the same problem then used their toolkit. Back when the GIMP was developed your options were pretty limited. There was Athena Widgets which are basically the cave drawings of the computer world. Motif which had licensing issues. OpenWindows widgets which were notoriously buggy and ugly. There wasn't much else to choose from. There's a reason GTK exploded so quickly after release.
mschaef 8y ago
I don't know if XUL is the right choice, but I think this general direction might be a good idea. The idea of an independant open source project focusing itself on producing a commercial quality UI seems a little ludicrous to me. This type of UI requires continued multi-disciplinary effort and process over a timeframe of years. And this is the exact weak spot of projects funded entirely/mostly on a volunteer/contribution basis. This idea of a highly customizable toolkit (a la Emacs for graphics), in contrast, goes to the strengths of the open source model. Open source projects tend to be developer-heavy, and developers tend to like to build frameworks/abstractions... so a natural fit. Frameworks tend to be easier to use when the underlying code is available for various kinds of inspection, so the open source model fits there too. I'm not saying it'd necessarily be a cakewalk, but it seems like a closer fit to that OSS is really good at. (Of course, frameworks are more complex and expensive to develop than single applications, so this idea has that going against it.)