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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
by 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 agoActually, 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 agoCan 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 agoI 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.
- pja 6y agoFair. I think you’re expected to float the selection into a new layer and then move the layer, but this is such a common operation for people to want that it ought to be directly available from the Move tool.
- chmod775 6y agoThis is how I've been doing it since forever and and at the very least didn't have to Google it. I did not know another way existed... which also just illustrates the point.
- pessimizer 6y agoIt doesn't really, because you don't know how to do it in Photoshop either. I've been recently learning Photoshop for the first time after being a long term GIMP user, and I don't find it intuitive at all. If you didn't need google or books to use Photoshop, somebody should tell the enormous industry of websites and books sold to teach it.
- kazinator 6y agoYour comment seems disingenuous, because the predominant user interface paradigm in all sorts of programs (file managers, vector editors, text editors, ...) on all sorts of platforms is that when you select something, you can click and drag that selected thing. This is a thing that is different in GIMP: that the selection specifies an area of the image which is affected by operations, rather than an object to manipulate. "I did not know another way existed" seems outlandish. I mean, launch any paint program developed for any platform in the last 40 years; chances are you can select a rectangle and just drag it. There is a rhyme and reason to the way GIMP does it, and you can learn it quickly, but it's going to cause complaints. It could be that 99% of the anti-GIMP ranting is caused by this one issue.
- chmod775 6y ago>Your comment seems disingenuous Your comment seems like you missed what was being talked about. In fact you appear to think I was arguing a point antipodal to what I was actually saying. "I did not know another way existed" was referring to a second way to do it in GIMP.
- coldtea 6y ago>Is this just partially a "what you're used to is easy & anything different is hard" thing? I woulnd't say so. Some programs are plainly more confusingly designed.
- bloopernova 6y agoBack in the late 90s when I used Photoshop as part of my Project Support / Sysadmin 50/50 position, I used books that taught me how to do certain things. I think it's just that Photoshop is that much more popular so has orders of magnitude more people writing books and HOWTOs.
- ehsankia 6y agoI disagree, I picked up photoshop at the age of ~13 and did most things mostly naturally. I've tried GIMP 4 or 5 different times at various ages and I've never been able to achieve anything without hours of effort and guides.
- acomjean 6y agoPhotoshop has a whole industry around teaching how to use it. They have photoshop conferences, books and magazines. Not something you expect for a piece of software that’s intuitive.
- ehsankia 6y agoSo does Microsoft Word. I think you're missing the point. Yes, Photoshop has a lot of more advanced options, but the power of UX is being able to balance basic features and advanced features. Sure someone may not be able to do insane tricks, but doing basic stuff is far more discoverable and intuitive to do.
- Naracion 6y agoAlso in addition to other sibling comments--note that OT mentioned having been using GIMP for 20 years and still being unable to figure out anything new aside from the tutorials he studied. So being "used to" GIMP is evidently (although currently sample size 1) not enough for it to be "easy to use". Edit. I'm not saying Photoshop is easier to use--it might be just as difficult but with better resources available people might be able to learn it better.
- sunwukung 6y agoI used PS and many other 3D graphics apps commercially for over 10 years, Gimp is sadly not a patch on it. UX is a thing, and Gimp doesn't have that. As a now software engineer, I can see the thought process behind the application, but it's workflow is treacherous. I switched out to Affinity a few years ago, because PS became too bloated/heavy, and Gimp just doesn't cut it for real work imho. I mention this because it was easier to pick up Affinity after a couple of hours than wrestling with Gimp. Same goes for Blender Vs Max/Maya. I hate to say this, because I would like these tool to be more accessible to all
- ngold 6y agoBeen using gimp for 20 years, every couple years I try and fail to do even the most basic stuff in photoshop. Then I give up and go back to gimp.
- pessimizer 6y agoPhotoshop doesn't have a great UI, it was just very early, good enough, and targeted at professionals. GIMP is better in every way for me so far (I've just recently become a Photoshop user), except that CMYK doesn't work well or seamlessly yet on GIMP, making it unusable in a professional context. Other proprietary photo editors that worked with CMYK from their beginning are passing the GIMP as photoshop competitors.
- dalbasal 6y ago>> GIMP is the perfect example of why companies hire UX designers. Whole I agree that this is UX design, but I suspect that UX can be (and often is) a product of the type of organisation producing it moreso than the "UX designer hired to do UX." UX for something like Gimp is very hard. The metaphors have to encompass a ton of stuff and the UX needs A web app created by a bank, electric company or somesuch will tend to be different from an app created by an SV-ish company in a pretty predictable way. Similarly, Gimp seems like a relative of other GNU/OSS software... Calibre comes to mind. Different types of organisations or ways of doing things have different strengths and weaknesses. Th
- ampdepolymerase 6y agoCalibre may not be pretty but for a CRUD app it is usable. People who have complaints about Calibre generally have issues with its chrome and dated layout but nobody dislikes it because it is hard to use. A default GTK style UI always looks terrible on Windows and Mac, both of which have much higher requirements for user interface defaults. This is especially so with Amazon and iBooks setting differing expectations for how an eReader should look like. The issue with GIMP is with both its UI and its UX. Trying to get work done in GIMP is difficult and challenging. It is not a mere CRUD app like Calibre.
- dalbasal 6y agoPeople like Calibre. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just using it as a type example. Gnu-ish software is different in a recognizable way from Google, MSFT, etc. Different enough that both strengths and weaknesses are different. With Calibre, most users won't feel like they have a grasp of what the software is and what you can do with it... compared to an Apple product. But, it's super powerful and the answer to a lot of "how do I X?" queries is use calibre. Without calibre, the operative answer would probably be "you can't."
- mattkevan 6y agoWhile I like and appreciate Calibre, its a fantastically useful piece of software and I use it all the time, its UI veers closer to outsider art than what could be considered best-practice interface design. GIMP, however, is more like when an ecosystem is cut off for millions of years and there’s no natural predators so things evolve in strange and highly localised ways. GIMP is the duck-billed platypus of software.
- ghaff 6y agoHonestly, I wouldn't pick Photoshop as a particularly shining example of UX. It's probably better than GIMP. But it's also a product that has accreeted features and ways of doing things over the years and is pretty squarely targeted at people who use it all the time professionally. There are lots of different ways of doing the same or similar things.
- howlgarnish 6y agoHaving many ways to do a thing is arguably better than GIMP, where there's exactly one way to do a thing and you need to find the right option from the right menu under the right icon to use it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tambourine_man 6y ago>technically have all the same features >does more or less the same things Photoshop has way more features than GIMP. GIMP has some severe basic wholes like lacking CMYK support after 25 years. I think they rather wait for printers to be obsolete than actually spend time implementing the color mode.
- kazinator 6y ago> Compare it to Photoshop which does more or less the same things but anyone can naturally pick up and use. Trolling is not appropriate in HN.
- colejohnson66 6y agoHow is that trolling?
- kazinator 6y agoFeeding the flame war with obviously false bullshit. "People are born with the ability to use the program that I offer in contrast to the impossible-to-use crap being discussed. Literally anyone. Even babies who couldn't latch on to a boob for the first two months of their life can use it, whereas that other monstrosity requires a Ph. D. in computer graphics or signal processing." Come on; it's not 1995, and this is not comp.sys.os.advocacy.
- ehsankia 6y agoWhile I didn't claim anything close to that, and the evidence I have is only anecdotal between me and a dozen peers, I myself learned to use Photoshop at the age of 13, yet the half a dozen times I had to use GIMP, I spent over an hour every single time trying to do basic things such as moving pixels around and doing basic transformations. Look around the thread and you will hear dozens of similar stories. I'm sorry but I didn't know telling my own experience counted as trolling.
- kazinator 6y agoIn GIMP, selection works in a way that runs counter to the predominant user interface paradigm. A selection isn't an object that the user can pick up for direct manipulation. Rather, it's a delimited region of the image which confines the effects of editing. Thus, you can't just select a rectangle (or whatever) and then drag it to move the pixels. So yes, that will perplex the average user. Scratch that, probably every user. In Gimp, the move tool selects the entire layer which contains the pixels that you're pointing to, and moves that. The selection "cross-cuts" through layers. So that is to say, you can make a selection in one layer (say by picking out a shape), and then switch to another layer where that original selection is still in effect and delimits the edit operations. The way you move pixels in GIMP, though it doesn't conform to certain well-established user interface conventions, is learnable (and even discoverable). By the time you used it half a dozen times, you should have picked it up on it. The way you're evaluating these programs is the equivalent of comparing cars by kicking their tires, slamming the door, and honking the horn. > I didn't know telling my own experience counted as trolling. Exact words: "Compare it to Photoshop which does more or less the same things but anyone can naturally pick up and use." That doesn't at all look like telling one's own experience. Also, your experience consists of evaluating use cases from Microsoft Paint on advanced image editing tools, then it's not relevant enough. Your comment amounts to what HN calls "shallow dismissal".
- rozab 6y agoI really, really wish there was a paint.net clone for Linux. Paint.net is windows freeware, closed source since an early release, which is both feature rich and a pleasure to use. It covers 99% of use cases ordinary people have. I believe the author closed the source after some other projects tried to use it commercially. It still gets regular updates. There's an attempt at a clone, Pinta, which was based off the early open source version but it didn't get much further than mspaint functionality.
- dreen 6y agoYeah, I switched from GIMP to PaintNET and loved it for my simple needs, but because Pinta wasnt what I hoped it would be nowdays I just use http://www.photopea.com http://www.photopea.com on any system, its basically PaintNET in the browser.
- executesorder66 6y agoYou can also try this: https://github.com/maoschanz/drawing https://github.com/maoschanz/drawing