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GIMP is such a strange tool. I actually have used it, semi-frequently - since the 90s! The overall experience of using it has only changed a little in that time

GIMP is such a strange tool. I actually have used it, semi-frequently - since the 90s! The overall experience of using it has only changed a little in that time. And it gets the job done. I guess that makes it successful! What else has been so stable? But of all the software I have ever used, GIMP is the most difficult to learn. I memorized a few tutorials, this must have been around Y2K, to do the a couple things. And basically I have never figured out how to do anything else in it. After twenty years. Sometime, more than a decade ago, they made the tool icons both harder to recognize visually more unpredictable in their toolbox layout, and that still slows me down, too. I just can't think of anything else I've had this kind of relationship with - other tools, I either master, or I move on from. GIMP is an odd one.

Lipsey 6y ago
I found it odd coming from tools like Macromedia Fireworks or Coreldraw because I was expecting to add shapes, fill and pan objects in the canvas. But as soon as I grasped the difference between vector based and raster based tools and why layers are important it became easy.
edgyquant 6y ago
Yeah you just described me too. I learned it as GIMPShopPro (a resin for Windows that looked liked photoshop) and when I switched to Linux in 2007ish I learned the basics of normal GIMP and have used it weekly ever since without learning anything new. Never thought about it until now.
darig 6y ago
I've also been using GIMP since the 90s... but I'd say the overall experience has changed drastically and done so many times. I use a lot of Plug-ins, and somewhere in the mid 2000s the communication between them stabilized and sped up dramatically to the point that I all but ditched photoshop. Then I switched to an all mac shop, but GIMP's X11 interface on a mac was terrible, so I was back on photoshop. Then, fairly recently, GIMP switched to all native windows on mac, with tons of new windowing and tiling options that feels as responsive as photoshop, so I'm back to 100% GIMP. I'm leaving out a ton of bug fixes and optimizations and new features over the years that were game changing to my processes. It's never stopped getting better. The only software I'd say has improved so much so consistently is OBS.
shawnz 6y ago
As a counterpoint I often hear people make this argument but I've never found that to be the case. I find Gimp to have a simple interface in which it's easy to find all the features. However I never used Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. I have found that people who cut their teeth on Photoshop seem to consistently find the Gimp UI confusing.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Cut my teeth on PSP then Photoshop in college. Soon thereafter started with GIMP and indeed the different naming and menu organization was a hurdle. Though it wasn't too bad. Still Photoshop was always ahead in features and most things were more logical.
- TylerE 6y ago
  Gimp, today, feels like a bad knockoff of what Photoshop was in about 2002. And Photoshop has gotten a _lot_ more powerful and useable since then.
- herbst 6y ago
  I too used and liked Gimp ever since. I was forced to use the adobe stack for a while and never managed liking it, it still feels like a huge blackbox to me. IMO not everyone is made for (or rather trained to) understand and use overly complex uis.
usrusr 6y ago
Quite similar situation here: it's the tool that I know but that I will never master. I'm not bothered much by the UI though, it gets the job done well enough for the occasional pixel task. What I mind much more is the atrocious startup time (might be a peculiarity of wingimp)
- kazinator 6y ago
  It's starting in about 3 seconds for me, on a laggardly 2013-vintage Core i5 CPU, 32 GB RAM, Windows 10. I know what you're talking about; historically there used to be a long pause in the startup progress bar of the Windows verison, stuck on scanning system fonts or something. But I don't see that in the current version (2.10.22).
- riidom 6y ago
  Check your version and likely you should update (if you don't rely on plugins that aren't ported yet). Startup time was increased by a huge amount some time ago (can't remember when exactly).
  - prokoudine 6y ago
    Summer 2018 when async fonts loading was introduced.
agumonkey 6y ago
It's funny because GIMP is one of the tools I hate the most. It's really hard to describe how quickly I want to say no to just about everything that it does. I'm quite open[0] but I'd rather write perl script with imagemagik than use gimp. [0] i can love both emacs and vi and even ed, I've used just about any 2d/3d program ever
- nnq 6y ago
  The same here :) I love to work with other software considered user hostile by others, but Gimp... WTF. It's like they took the most horrible stuff from Photohop s horrible UI and mixed it with more horrible ideas... But PS manages to be horrible and still productively usable and had all the required features, like non destructive editing smart objects etc. Something like Affinity Photo is the other end of the spectrum, with nice and intuitive UI for almost everything... Though it stills falls short of old Corel Photopaint's nice and intuitive UIs
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    I think GIMP kinda suffers the same fate as intel. I remember a lot of efforts went into creating the underlying core for image processing (GEGL ?) but then nothing happened. It's stuck at the blender 2.7 way of life. They may try to revamp ergonomics and performance. But that's their choice.
- tartoran 6y ago
  Gimp has script fu / python / scheme. It is quite capable of automating and generating images. Gimp is the kind of software you may hate at first but then start to love it for how extensible friendly it is.
  - ThePadawan 6y ago
    I tried to automate a simple workflow (resize, reduce color to grayscale) using GIMP just last week. I would want to run this on ~100 files in a folder. This takes a few lines of calls to imagemagick/gm or ~10 lines of python + Pillow. Do you have any resources how to do this in GIMP? After googling for a good while, I could not for the life of me figure out how to even get started with this. I don't want to write an extension for GIMP - I want to use GIMP like I would an image manipulation library.
gorgoiler 6y ago
Adding a second UI to the codebase (with a friendlier, less conflict inducing name) would be a fantastic addition to the project. Something along the lines of a cooperative fork, I suppose, focused on exposing a minimal set of features but keeping the underlying image processing models. Fewer buttons. Distilled UI. Having a single rapid workflow for saving an edited PNG. [...and this is almost exactly what Glimpse is, thank you other commenters!: https://glimpse-editor.github.io/ https://glimpse-editor.github.io/ ]
- kazinator 6y ago
  > Having a single rapid workflow for saving an edited PNG. You mean instead of two rapid workflows? 1. File -> Overwrite Existing <whatever>.png. First time it is used, there is prompting. After that, no prompting. Has no hotkey. 2. Or use Export As, which has a Shift-Ctrl-E hotkey. The first time you use Export As, there is prompting. But after the first use, the "Overwrite Existing <whatever>.png" menu item (for workflow 1) disappears from the File menu and is replaced by "Export To <whatever>.png". This action has no prompting at all, and has Ctrl-E as the hot key. Workflow 1 has less initial prompting than 2; it goes straight to the Export dialog (for setting parameters) without prompting for a filename or overwrite confirmation; it's good if you're editing many images and saving just once.
  - gorgoiler 6y ago
    Thanks. I feel stupid now. I guess I would have expected this to be called “save”?
    - noir_lord 6y ago
      Not same thing, Save implies you want to save the work in progress, so xcf typically (thats the gimp project format, so you can do things like undo stuff etc). Export is well export "Take this project and make it <Foo> format with <Bar> quality" settings. It's the way many print/graphics packages split it conceptually.
    - shawnz 6y ago
vmception 6y ago
That started off surprisingly generous. GIMP is 25 years old and still sucks. And as we have all learned over that same time span, free stuff has competition and quality controls too.
starky 6y ago
I learned on software like PaintShop Pro and Photoshop, so I find GIMP to be incredibly frustrating software. I use it at work for editing and cropping photos since I don't have access to Adobe's suite and I'm fairly quick at those few tasks. But I just can't be bothered to learn anything more than that when I find it so frustrating and inefficient to use.
- jansan 6y ago
  I am actually using PaintShop Pro 7.04 until today. It is good enough for 95% of my bitmap graphics work and it just feels so easy to use.
megameter 6y ago
The way I would put it is: GIMP has features, not workflow. There are a lot of things that are possible, but not by combining the basic tools and metaphors in sensible ways: each time is more like diving into the command line options of a GNU tool, finding the exact thing, and if you really, really need to automate it, it goes in a script where it can be safely forgotten. Which is, certainly, a way of doing, but not one conducive to pleasurable use or professional scenarios where you need to have it pass through multiple hands.
- tsjq 6y ago
  >The way I would put it is: GIMP has features, not workflow. very well said. totally agree with this
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Actually, the way I would put it is that GIMP is the perfect example of why companies hire UX designers. GIMP is textbook example of how software can technically have all the same features, but be insanely hard to use and utterly confusing to anyone without a guide. Compare it to Photoshop which does more or less the same things but anyone can naturally pick up and use.
  - pja 6y ago
    Can they though? I'll admit it's a long time since I've sat in front of a Photoshop window, but I remember it being just as complex to use. Is this just partially a "what you're used to is easy & anything different is hard" thing? What exactly makes Photoshop easier to use in your opinion? This is a genuine question - I see this asserted so often, like it's a truism, but nobody ever seems to give specific examples.
    - asddubs 6y ago
      I still remember that time I tried selecting something and moving the pixels of my selection, rather than the whole layer in GIMP. I ended up having to google it and it was a 3-key combination shortcut. I don't remember how to do it in photoshop, but I'm pretty sure I didn't have to google "how to move a selection" that time I used it.
throwawaylolx 6y ago
I only ever use GIMP out of necessity and when I do I can't wait to stop using it. I never had a pleasant experience using GIMP and it almost never failed to frustrate me. Just yesterday I had to use it, and this is what my search history looked like: https://i.imgur.com/ZP3U17i.png https://i.imgur.com/ZP3U17i.png . I'm pretty fluent in Photoshop and I've also begrudgingly used GIMP for many years. It's a very bizarre tool.
- sildur 6y ago
  Both, Photoshop and GIMP are really complex programs with steep learning curves. I tried to do some editing in Photoshop, since I now have a license, and I was totally lost. I tried to add some guides so I could draw a rectangle to cut a image. I tried dragging from the border of the image, as I do with GIMP, and no way. So I resorted back to GIMP, not wanting to spend half an hour trying to learn how to select and cut an image in Photoshop when I already know how to do it in GIMP.
- thraway123412 6y ago
  This looks like another instance of "I don't know how to use gimp, but I know how to use photoshop, therefore gimp is a very bizarre tool." I'm pretty fluent in Gimp, and I only ever use Photoshop out of necessity, and I'm always totally lost when I need to do that.
- kazinator 6y ago
  > this is what my search history looked like > gimp resize image Image -> Scale Image Very bizarre, indeed! Scaling the image is a "Scale Image" command in an "Image" menu. > gimp rotate layer Layer -> Transform -> Rotate { 90° Clockwise, 90° Counter-Clockwise, Arbitrary Rotation ...} Totally undiscoverable. Rotating a layer is buried in the completely unrelated Layer menu and obfuscated by terminology. The user has to be a propeller-head who knows bizarre jargon, such as that a rotation is a kind of "transform" and might be hiding under a menu item labeled that way. To add insult to injury, this menu item has not moved in at least 15 years to a more obvious place. Gimp clearly likes existing users better than new ones. > gimp rescale interactive In the latest stable Gimp (2.10.22) which I just installed last night, there is a surprise: I can't find the Rotate tool button. Aha, there is an "all in one" transformation tool. The Gimp version I previously used still had separate toolbar buttons for different transforms. I see that we can right click on the all-in-one transformation button, and then pick a specific kind of transform. We want Scale, which is also available as the familiar Shift-S hotkey. The Tool Options dialog comes up for the tool. I see that the very first item is a bunch of icon-labeled buttons next to a Transform: label. They all have tooltips: "layer", "selection", "path" and "image". Aha: Transform -> "image" must be what we want. We click on that. Now we proceed to interactively rotate the image, and apply that change using the Scale button on the rotate dialog. In summary: Shift-S to scale, pick "image", do the interactive scale, and click "Scale" to make it stick. For your other queries, you just have to know how to work with transparent layers in Gimp. Gimp is not a carbon copy of Photoshop. You were not born knowing how to erase pixels transparently in Photoshop.
moonbug 6y ago
You'll be wanting Glimpse https://glimpse-editor.github.io/ https://glimpse-editor.github.io/
app4soft 6y ago
> GIMP is such a strange tool. GIMP is less strange than AzPainter[0], even less strange than GrafX2[1]. FTR, Grafx2 (GrafX 2.0 and beyond) would celebrate its own 25th Anniversary next year.[2] But really, development of the first version of GrafX2 (GrafX 1.0) started in 1995.[3] > GRAFX 2.00 Beta 90% (11/01/1996) - Wired'96 release > This version was 1st shown at the Wired'96 demo party in Belgium. We gave it to many people there, so let's start history from here. Note that there were a few different "90%" versions because we didn't want to change the number just for tiny bug-fixes. > GRAFX 1.0? -> 1.02 (09/??/1995 -> 07/??/1996) > Forget it! So, Grafx2 & GIMP are age-mates, but GrafX2 maybe is 'older brother'. [0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter [1] http://grafx2.chez.com/ http://grafx2.chez.com/ [2] http://grafx2.chez.com/index.php?article4/version-history http://grafx2.chez.com/index.php?article4/version-history [3] http://grafx2.chez.com/index.php?article7/1990s http://grafx2.chez.com/index.php?article7/1990s
swebs 6y ago
>I just can't think of anything else I've had this kind of relationship with - other tools, I either master, or I move on from. GIMP is an odd one. I feel the same about Latex
pjmlp 6y ago
I share the sentiment, for a while I was also big into Gimp, even bought books as means to support some of the developers, eventually as I went back to Windows as my main driver, I ended up settling in Paint.NET. It does everything I need in a couple of mouse clicks without going through tutorials every time I need to handle some images.
taharvey 6y ago
Interesting milestone, worth reflecting on the broader failures of OSS. Open source user-facing software like Gimp, Openoffice & inkscape were supposed to be the wave of the future that would eclipse their commercial counterparts over the next decade. But OSS developers turned out to be daft to UI/UX concerns and lacked user-centric empathy to make software that would ever really matter in the marketplace. Meanwhile the OSS marketplace that did takeoff in stunning ways were developer frameworks, libraries and building blocks (ie. everything on Github). Which developers then used to build the far more insidious world of SaaS. Where couldn't even own the software at any price, and more dastardly... you can't own your data.

Lipsey 6y ago

I found it odd coming from tools like Macromedia Fireworks or Coreldraw because I was expecting to add shapes, fill and pan objects in the canvas. But as soon as I grasped the difference between vector based and raster based tools and why layers are important it became easy.

edgyquant 6y ago

Yeah you just described me too. I learned it as GIMPShopPro (a resin for Windows that looked liked photoshop) and when I switched to Linux in 2007ish I learned the basics of normal GIMP and have used it weekly ever since without learning anything new. Never thought about it until now.

darig 6y ago

I've also been using GIMP since the 90s... but I'd say the overall experience has changed drastically and done so many times. I use a lot of Plug-ins, and somewhere in the mid 2000s the communication between them stabilized and sped up dramatically to the point that I all but ditched photoshop. Then I switched to an all mac shop, but GIMP's X11 interface on a mac was terrible, so I was back on photoshop. Then, fairly recently, GIMP switched to all native windows on mac, with tons of new windowing and tiling options that feels as responsive as photoshop, so I'm back to 100% GIMP. I'm leaving out a ton of bug fixes and optimizations and new features over the years that were game changing to my processes. It's never stopped getting better. The only software I'd say has improved so much so consistently is OBS.

shawnz 6y ago

As a counterpoint I often hear people make this argument but I've never found that to be the case. I find Gimp to have a simple interface in which it's easy to find all the features. However I never used Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. I have found that people who cut their teeth on Photoshop seem to consistently find the Gimp UI confusing.

paulryanrogers 6y ago
Cut my teeth on PSP then Photoshop in college. Soon thereafter started with GIMP and indeed the different naming and menu organization was a hurdle. Though it wasn't too bad. Still Photoshop was always ahead in features and most things were more logical.
TylerE 6y ago
Gimp, today, feels like a bad knockoff of what Photoshop was in about 2002. And Photoshop has gotten a _lot_ more powerful and useable since then.
herbst 6y ago
I too used and liked Gimp ever since. I was forced to use the adobe stack for a while and never managed liking it, it still feels like a huge blackbox to me. IMO not everyone is made for (or rather trained to) understand and use overly complex uis.

usrusr 6y ago

Quite similar situation here: it's the tool that I know but that I will never master. I'm not bothered much by the UI though, it gets the job done well enough for the occasional pixel task. What I mind much more is the atrocious startup time (might be a peculiarity of wingimp)

kazinator 6y ago
It's starting in about 3 seconds for me, on a laggardly 2013-vintage Core i5 CPU, 32 GB RAM, Windows 10. I know what you're talking about; historically there used to be a long pause in the startup progress bar of the Windows verison, stuck on scanning system fonts or something. But I don't see that in the current version (2.10.22).
riidom 6y ago
Check your version and likely you should update (if you don't rely on plugins that aren't ported yet). Startup time was increased by a huge amount some time ago (can't remember when exactly).
- prokoudine 6y ago
  Summer 2018 when async fonts loading was introduced.

agumonkey 6y ago

It's funny because GIMP is one of the tools I hate the most. It's really hard to describe how quickly I want to say no to just about everything that it does. I'm quite open[0] but I'd rather write perl script with imagemagik than use gimp. [0] i can love both emacs and vi and even ed, I've used just about any 2d/3d program ever

nnq 6y ago
The same here :) I love to work with other software considered user hostile by others, but Gimp... WTF. It's like they took the most horrible stuff from Photohop s horrible UI and mixed it with more horrible ideas... But PS manages to be horrible and still productively usable and had all the required features, like non destructive editing smart objects etc. Something like Affinity Photo is the other end of the spectrum, with nice and intuitive UI for almost everything... Though it stills falls short of old Corel Photopaint's nice and intuitive UIs
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I think GIMP kinda suffers the same fate as intel. I remember a lot of efforts went into creating the underlying core for image processing (GEGL ?) but then nothing happened. It's stuck at the blender 2.7 way of life. They may try to revamp ergonomics and performance. But that's their choice.
tartoran 6y ago
Gimp has script fu / python / scheme. It is quite capable of automating and generating images. Gimp is the kind of software you may hate at first but then start to love it for how extensible friendly it is.
- ThePadawan 6y ago
  I tried to automate a simple workflow (resize, reduce color to grayscale) using GIMP just last week. I would want to run this on ~100 files in a folder. This takes a few lines of calls to imagemagick/gm or ~10 lines of python + Pillow. Do you have any resources how to do this in GIMP? After googling for a good while, I could not for the life of me figure out how to even get started with this. I don't want to write an extension for GIMP - I want to use GIMP like I would an image manipulation library.

gorgoiler 6y ago

Adding a second UI to the codebase (with a friendlier, less conflict inducing name) would be a fantastic addition to the project. Something along the lines of a cooperative fork, I suppose, focused on exposing a minimal set of features but keeping the underlying image processing models. Fewer buttons. Distilled UI. Having a single rapid workflow for saving an edited PNG. [...and this is almost exactly what Glimpse is, thank you other commenters!: https://glimpse-editor.github.io/ https://glimpse-editor.github.io/ ]

kazinator 6y ago
> Having a single rapid workflow for saving an edited PNG. You mean instead of two rapid workflows? 1. File -> Overwrite Existing <whatever>.png. First time it is used, there is prompting. After that, no prompting. Has no hotkey. 2. Or use Export As, which has a Shift-Ctrl-E hotkey. The first time you use Export As, there is prompting. But after the first use, the "Overwrite Existing <whatever>.png" menu item (for workflow 1) disappears from the File menu and is replaced by "Export To <whatever>.png". This action has no prompting at all, and has Ctrl-E as the hot key. Workflow 1 has less initial prompting than 2; it goes straight to the Export dialog (for setting parameters) without prompting for a filename or overwrite confirmation; it's good if you're editing many images and saving just once.
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  Thanks. I feel stupid now. I guess I would have expected this to be called “save”?
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    Not same thing, Save implies you want to save the work in progress, so xcf typically (thats the gimp project format, so you can do things like undo stuff etc). Export is well export "Take this project and make it <Foo> format with <Bar> quality" settings. It's the way many print/graphics packages split it conceptually.
  - shawnz 6y ago

vmception 6y ago

That started off surprisingly generous. GIMP is 25 years old and still sucks. And as we have all learned over that same time span, free stuff has competition and quality controls too.

starky 6y ago

I learned on software like PaintShop Pro and Photoshop, so I find GIMP to be incredibly frustrating software. I use it at work for editing and cropping photos since I don't have access to Adobe's suite and I'm fairly quick at those few tasks. But I just can't be bothered to learn anything more than that when I find it so frustrating and inefficient to use.

jansan 6y ago
I am actually using PaintShop Pro 7.04 until today. It is good enough for 95% of my bitmap graphics work and it just feels so easy to use.

megameter 6y ago

The way I would put it is: GIMP has features, not workflow. There are a lot of things that are possible, but not by combining the basic tools and metaphors in sensible ways: each time is more like diving into the command line options of a GNU tool, finding the exact thing, and if you really, really need to automate it, it goes in a script where it can be safely forgotten. Which is, certainly, a way of doing, but not one conducive to pleasurable use or professional scenarios where you need to have it pass through multiple hands.

tsjq 6y ago
>The way I would put it is: GIMP has features, not workflow. very well said. totally agree with this
ehsankia 6y ago
Actually, the way I would put it is that GIMP is the perfect example of why companies hire UX designers. GIMP is textbook example of how software can technically have all the same features, but be insanely hard to use and utterly confusing to anyone without a guide. Compare it to Photoshop which does more or less the same things but anyone can naturally pick up and use.
- pja 6y ago
  Can they though? I'll admit it's a long time since I've sat in front of a Photoshop window, but I remember it being just as complex to use. Is this just partially a "what you're used to is easy & anything different is hard" thing? What exactly makes Photoshop easier to use in your opinion? This is a genuine question - I see this asserted so often, like it's a truism, but nobody ever seems to give specific examples.
  - asddubs 6y ago
    I still remember that time I tried selecting something and moving the pixels of my selection, rather than the whole layer in GIMP. I ended up having to google it and it was a 3-key combination shortcut. I don't remember how to do it in photoshop, but I'm pretty sure I didn't have to google "how to move a selection" that time I used it.

throwawaylolx 6y ago

I only ever use GIMP out of necessity and when I do I can't wait to stop using it. I never had a pleasant experience using GIMP and it almost never failed to frustrate me. Just yesterday I had to use it, and this is what my search history looked like: https://i.imgur.com/ZP3U17i.png https://i.imgur.com/ZP3U17i.png . I'm pretty fluent in Photoshop and I've also begrudgingly used GIMP for many years. It's a very bizarre tool.

sildur 6y ago
Both, Photoshop and GIMP are really complex programs with steep learning curves. I tried to do some editing in Photoshop, since I now have a license, and I was totally lost. I tried to add some guides so I could draw a rectangle to cut a image. I tried dragging from the border of the image, as I do with GIMP, and no way. So I resorted back to GIMP, not wanting to spend half an hour trying to learn how to select and cut an image in Photoshop when I already know how to do it in GIMP.
thraway123412 6y ago
This looks like another instance of "I don't know how to use gimp, but I know how to use photoshop, therefore gimp is a very bizarre tool." I'm pretty fluent in Gimp, and I only ever use Photoshop out of necessity, and I'm always totally lost when I need to do that.
kazinator 6y ago
> this is what my search history looked like > gimp resize image Image -> Scale Image Very bizarre, indeed! Scaling the image is a "Scale Image" command in an "Image" menu. > gimp rotate layer Layer -> Transform -> Rotate { 90° Clockwise, 90° Counter-Clockwise, Arbitrary Rotation ...} Totally undiscoverable. Rotating a layer is buried in the completely unrelated Layer menu and obfuscated by terminology. The user has to be a propeller-head who knows bizarre jargon, such as that a rotation is a kind of "transform" and might be hiding under a menu item labeled that way. To add insult to injury, this menu item has not moved in at least 15 years to a more obvious place. Gimp clearly likes existing users better than new ones. > gimp rescale interactive In the latest stable Gimp (2.10.22) which I just installed last night, there is a surprise: I can't find the Rotate tool button. Aha, there is an "all in one" transformation tool. The Gimp version I previously used still had separate toolbar buttons for different transforms. I see that we can right click on the all-in-one transformation button, and then pick a specific kind of transform. We want Scale, which is also available as the familiar Shift-S hotkey. The Tool Options dialog comes up for the tool. I see that the very first item is a bunch of icon-labeled buttons next to a Transform: label. They all have tooltips: "layer", "selection", "path" and "image". Aha: Transform -> "image" must be what we want. We click on that. Now we proceed to interactively rotate the image, and apply that change using the Scale button on the rotate dialog. In summary: Shift-S to scale, pick "image", do the interactive scale, and click "Scale" to make it stick. For your other queries, you just have to know how to work with transparent layers in Gimp. Gimp is not a carbon copy of Photoshop. You were not born knowing how to erase pixels transparently in Photoshop.

moonbug 6y ago

You'll be wanting Glimpse https://glimpse-editor.github.io/ https://glimpse-editor.github.io/

app4soft 6y ago

> GIMP is such a strange tool. GIMP is less strange than AzPainter[0], even less strange than GrafX2[1]. FTR, Grafx2 (GrafX 2.0 and beyond) would celebrate its own 25th Anniversary next year.[2] But really, development of the first version of GrafX2 (GrafX 1.0) started in 1995.[3] > GRAFX 2.00 Beta 90% (11/01/1996) - Wired'96 release > This version was 1st shown at the Wired'96 demo party in Belgium. We gave it to many people there, so let's start history from here. Note that there were a few different "90%" versions because we didn't want to change the number just for tiny bug-fixes. > GRAFX 1.0? -> 1.02 (09/??/1995 -> 07/??/1996) > Forget it! So, Grafx2 & GIMP are age-mates, but GrafX2 maybe is 'older brother'. [0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter [1] http://grafx2.chez.com/ http://grafx2.chez.com/ [2] http://grafx2.chez.com/index.php?article4/version-history http://grafx2.chez.com/index.php?article4/version-history [3] http://grafx2.chez.com/index.php?article7/1990s http://grafx2.chez.com/index.php?article7/1990s

swebs 6y ago

>I just can't think of anything else I've had this kind of relationship with - other tools, I either master, or I move on from. GIMP is an odd one. I feel the same about Latex

pjmlp 6y ago

I share the sentiment, for a while I was also big into Gimp, even bought books as means to support some of the developers, eventually as I went back to Windows as my main driver, I ended up settling in Paint.NET. It does everything I need in a couple of mouse clicks without going through tutorials every time I need to handle some images.

taharvey 6y ago

Interesting milestone, worth reflecting on the broader failures of OSS. Open source user-facing software like Gimp, Openoffice & inkscape were supposed to be the wave of the future that would eclipse their commercial counterparts over the next decade. But OSS developers turned out to be daft to UI/UX concerns and lacked user-centric empathy to make software that would ever really matter in the marketplace. Meanwhile the OSS marketplace that did takeoff in stunning ways were developer frameworks, libraries and building blocks (ie. everything on Github). Which developers then used to build the far more insidious world of SaaS. Where couldn't even own the software at any price, and more dastardly... you can't own your data.