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Mmm... Hostile how? Improve how? :) If you want to write a public API to access text layers and then patch the PSD plug-in for text layers support, you are wel

Mmm... Hostile how? Improve how? :) If you want to write a public API to access text layers and then patch the PSD plug-in for text layers support, you are welcome. If you want to make the tool's options dock optionally horizontal and docked to the top (a-la Photoshop, Inkscape etc.), you are welcome. If you want to improve OpenEXR support, you are welcome. If you want to improve the text tool (easy text on path etc.), you are welcome. There are hundreds of things GIMP could do better. We know that. We welcome contributions. The only thing we don't feel good about is when people tell us to make GIMP look and work like Photoshop "because Photoshop". GIMP is not a clone of Photoshop. We need better reasons than that. Apart from this, you are welcome to come and propose changes. Edit: to be fair, two other topics we don't exactly like are project name change and save/export :)

deleted 8y ago
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jay_kyburz 8y ago
Yes, but the number one thing wrong with GIMP is that it is hard to use, "because Photoshop" is what everybody knows. Perhaps GIMP would have more users and more contributors if it embraced a few things that have become de-facto standards in image manipulation. I switched to Affinity a few years ago, and it was tough to "unlearn" photoshop, but it was worth it. (But it could have more painful if Affinity was as weird as GIMP)
- prokoudine 8y ago
  > Perhaps GIMP would have more users and more contributors if it embraced a few things that have become de-facto standards in image manipulation. Such as...?
  - mschaef 8y ago
    I was about to say 'draw a shape with a toolbar button'... but after looking at historical Photoshop toolboxes, it doesn't appear to have had that feature either. :-) (Pixelmator, however, does...) I almost hate to write what I'm about to write, but... When I needed to add some text and labeling to an image, it was easiest just to drop the $30 on a Pixelmator license. For dealing with RAW photos from a handful of cameras, it was $120 on a license for Adobe Lightroom. Both have generally served their purposes well. Some of those features I could've implemented myself, but some I couldn't, and none of that work fits into a schedule full of other obligations. (Technical and otherwise.) I think the difficulty with open source end user app development is that it can ask a burden of its community that few people have the skills to bear up to and even fewer have the time or inclination to do so. From my point of view, this leaves me with a combination of gratitude for the people like yourself that actually do step up, but also a degree of frustration that there's no easy way to make the situation better. At the end of the day, I think the strength of OSS application software is that, by virtue of being OSS, it's possible for it to be things that closed software cannot.

deleted 8y ago

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jay_kyburz 8y ago

Yes, but the number one thing wrong with GIMP is that it is hard to use, "because Photoshop" is what everybody knows. Perhaps GIMP would have more users and more contributors if it embraced a few things that have become de-facto standards in image manipulation. I switched to Affinity a few years ago, and it was tough to "unlearn" photoshop, but it was worth it. (But it could have more painful if Affinity was as weird as GIMP)

prokoudine 8y ago
> Perhaps GIMP would have more users and more contributors if it embraced a few things that have become de-facto standards in image manipulation. Such as...?
- mschaef 8y ago
  I was about to say 'draw a shape with a toolbar button'... but after looking at historical Photoshop toolboxes, it doesn't appear to have had that feature either. :-) (Pixelmator, however, does...) I almost hate to write what I'm about to write, but... When I needed to add some text and labeling to an image, it was easiest just to drop the $30 on a Pixelmator license. For dealing with RAW photos from a handful of cameras, it was $120 on a license for Adobe Lightroom. Both have generally served their purposes well. Some of those features I could've implemented myself, but some I couldn't, and none of that work fits into a schedule full of other obligations. (Technical and otherwise.) I think the difficulty with open source end user app development is that it can ask a burden of its community that few people have the skills to bear up to and even fewer have the time or inclination to do so. From my point of view, this leaves me with a combination of gratitude for the people like yourself that actually do step up, but also a degree of frustration that there's no easy way to make the situation better. At the end of the day, I think the strength of OSS application software is that, by virtue of being OSS, it's possible for it to be things that closed software cannot.