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Interesting to read GIMP should add live adjustment layers from Photo. Using Affinity for 4 years I’m getting more and more to the point of dropping it complete

Interesting to read GIMP should add live adjustment layers from Photo. Using Affinity for 4 years I’m getting more and more to the point of dropping it completely. So many nice features in theory, put in practice the number of never-got-fixed bugs piles up every day, making it a nice toy app but useless if you depend on one of the broken functions, or lost your work in one of the frequent crashes of file corruptions, or unable to save situations. I always advocate to deliver a dependable app (fixing bugs, keep it in maintainable state) before adding nice functionality which always raises the risk of breaking something. Affinity products are dirt cheap (for the average hacker news reader), so choosing GIMP or Photo is mostly no matter of cost, but of other factors. As even Affinity struggles with resources (to fix bugs) despite selling tons of licenses, how should the GIMP developers stem such an challanging feature?

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
The thing is, Photoshop has had non-destructive adjustment layers since version 4. 1997 I think. They are common to basically all other photo editors and it's really an essential part of most photographers' workflow. And this isn't just "nice functionality" -- it's absolutely core to the compositing model. This sort of thing is built into operating system graphics layers now, and there are other, newer apps on Linux (Krita for one, I think) that can do it. This is all the stuff GIMP users are promised for the future when the new GEGL gets integrated. But that's just like Infrastructure Week: it never arrives. I'm not saying it is easy to implement; I don't know where I would personally start on much of this stuff. But I do think that it is indicative of the GIMP project's peculiar focus on scripting that something as crucial as the compositing engine in a photo editing application is routinely outsourced to another project. It's such a basic function in other applications that it has to be holding back donations from interested users. (I'm not sure where you're using Affinity Photo but on the Mac it has crashed on me about a dozen times since 2015. It does not strike me as more bug-ridden than GIMP!)

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

The thing is, Photoshop has had non-destructive adjustment layers since version 4. 1997 I think. They are common to basically all other photo editors and it's really an essential part of most photographers' workflow. And this isn't just "nice functionality" -- it's absolutely core to the compositing model. This sort of thing is built into operating system graphics layers now, and there are other, newer apps on Linux (Krita for one, I think) that can do it. This is all the stuff GIMP users are promised for the future when the new GEGL gets integrated. But that's just like Infrastructure Week: it never arrives. I'm not saying it is easy to implement; I don't know where I would personally start on much of this stuff. But I do think that it is indicative of the GIMP project's peculiar focus on scripting that something as crucial as the compositing engine in a photo editing application is routinely outsourced to another project. It's such a basic function in other applications that it has to be holding back donations from interested users. (I'm not sure where you're using Affinity Photo but on the Mac it has crashed on me about a dozen times since 2015. It does not strike me as more bug-ridden than GIMP!)