7 ms·

Still no adjustment layers, still no layer styles. It’s so easy to just critique away…but really? Really? Those are just absolutely essential image editing sof

Still no adjustment layers, still no layer styles. It’s so easy to just critique away…but really? Really? Those are just absolutely essential image editing software features. What have they been prioritizing ahead of that?

dontbenebby 4y ago
And no macOS native gui ;_; It’s almost unusable in OSX because of that.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- smoldesu 4y ago
  To each their own, but if GIMP got a "Logic Pro"-style rewrite then I'd probably be looking for a new raster graphics editor.
  - dontbenebby 4y ago
    I’m not familiar with that program, what about the UI is especially bad/weird?
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      Everything, subjectively. Logic Pro is the epitome of Apple leaning fully into 'Form as an excuse for function' and it's one of the most hilariously useless pieces of paid software ever devised. Apple refuses to give it Pro Tools functionality because it's not a 'real DAW' and hobbles multiple features to Garageband-level functionality. I'd prefer to keep my ugly-but-capable GIMP on every platform rather than having a single half-decent MacOS version that bends over backwards to foreign HID.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
failedartifact 4y ago
Its open source, so feel free to prioritise your own workload into making this feature.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Unless you are ideologically inclined, it would be a better use of your resources to just pay for photoshop. As much as it angers people on this website, the subscription model provides a constant stream of funding that has gone in to keeping the tool the best on the market and for anyone using it professionally, it delivers far more value than it's cost.
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    I don't think you have to be ideologically inclined. Photoshop is already turning on the milking machine. Subscription. Check. Paid add ons. Check. Paid color palette. Check and mark.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      "This guy couldn't find the scale tool in GIMP... charge him $9.99 each month until he learns his lesson."
    - nickthegreek 4y ago
      Agreed, luckily, Affinity exists and they are not only resisting subscriptions but also sell cross platform licenses.
      - rnd0 4y ago
        Shit, I missed the boat on that one. What's ironic is that I bought Affinity but still continue to use GIMP shrugs One of these days I'll sit down with Affinity. One of these days...
      - Ygg2 4y ago
        That assumes that Affinity doesn't get bought by Adobe, or their license model never changes. Which in today's world is a fools errand.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pengaru 4y ago
> What have they been prioritizing ahead of that? There are very few active maintainers, what few there are have been scratching their own itches.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  That's evident. I've used the tool periodically and I can't think of anything that's improved in the last 10 years. I think it actually got worse when they made all the icons greyscale and hid some under others. You still have 3 different tools for moving, resizing, and rotating when every other program has them all in one.
  - pengaru 4y ago
    It's disappointed me as well over the past 5-10 years. The switch from save->export seemed arbitrary and pointless. And the last time I tried putting text into an image with their text editing tool, the widget was so buggy I gave up - and that was in a release that shipped in debian stable at the time. But it's just a bummer, not a source of anger/furor/vitriol for the project. I don't get why so many folks are talking shit like they didn't get their refund.
    - robinsonb5 4y ago
      Oh that particular change drives me crazy. It's not the switch per se, it's the lecture I receive when I slip up and use the muscle-memory procedure of File->Save As with a .tif extension, like I did for the first decade of using GIMP. The software has quite clearly identified what I'm trying to do, so refusing to comply and forcing me to jump through an arbitrary hoop is akin to jeering the words "You didn't say 'Simon Says'"! The new text widget has improved recently, and it's certainly an improvement on the original. It's still a great piece of software, and I'm very grateful that it exists, but when I use it, it's generally a version from the 2.4 series, because it suits my workflow better. (When there's no image open the older versions just have a small unobtrusive toolbox window open, which you can use as a drop target for files picked from a file browser; the newer versions have a large empty window which gets in the way.) [For those who say "fork it yourself", I have contributed to development in the distant past - dithered gradients were my addition, and I wrote a plugin (subsequently adopted by someone in Japan but long-since abandoned) for separating RGB images to CMYK layers, and saving them as a CMYK TIFF. But despite briefly maintaining a PPA with a patched version without the "no image open" window I quickly decided life was too short to spend my hobby time trying to hold back that particular tide.]
kome 4y ago
I am a simple person, I like GIMP; and I have no idea what "no adjustment layers, still no layer styles" is
- diag 4y ago
  It's about non destructive editing, a very powerful tool for professional workflows especially for fine tuning changes and making things repeatable.
- llanowarelves 4y ago
  Once you have worked with them, you won't want to work without them.
  - rnd0 4y ago
    and yet I've worked without them just fine for 15 years or more
- azertykeys 4y ago
  For instance - in Photoshop, one can add an adjustment layer on a picture that alters the saturation and color balance of that image. One can then copy that layer for use later, or edit that layer on the fly if one decides it's not right. Or delete it entirely, much later in the editing process.
wetpaws 4y ago
Just use Krita.
NoThisIsMe 4y ago
They've been working on this for like a decade, in a sense. They're rewriting the core as a library, GEGL, which supports non-destructive editing as well as other long-requested features. My impression is GEGL is largely done; the remaining work is to port GIMP to it. Realizing these gains for non-destructive editing is planned for v3.2, which is probably years away still. The other major initiative since forever has been porting to GTK 3.
- torginus 4y ago
  Sorry, come again? Porting to GTK 3? GTK 4 has been out for years.
  - robinsonb5 4y ago
    Yes, which means GTK3 is finally a stable target! ;) I'm fully aware that (a) I'm a dinosaur, and (b) not the target audience of the GTK project in its current form, but I still miss things like the tear-off menus, and the tab-completion and wildcard filtering in the file dialog (without the current keyboard focus complications) from GTK1.2!
  - asveikau 4y ago
    https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/migrating-3to4.html https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/migrating-3to4.html Does it really make sense for them to break so many things? Doesn't show a lot of respect for people who adopt the library.
the-smug-one 4y ago
"Øyvind Kolås raises funds for his work on GEGL, GIMP’s new sophisticated image processing core. This work is crucial to implement features such as non-destructive editing in GIMP, including features known as adjustment layers and layer effects in similar software. Øyvind is the GEGL maintainer and its primary developer who has been working on it since mid-2000s. "
- jhoechtl 4y ago
  > Øyvind Kolås raises funds for his work on GEGL, GIMP’s new sophisticated image processing core GEGL aka duke nukem forever
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
At this point I don’t think it’s controversial to say that this project existing has harmed creative tools on Linux. If another project had become the de-facto we’d have all those basic features. Instead we’re stuck with something that almost provides the basics ok, because it exists people treat it like a solved problem, and it has such a history no one’s allowed to say it just frankly isn’t usable for it’s one job.
- Nition 4y ago
  In some ways the de facto standard now is http://www.photopea.com http://www.photopea.com in a browser.
  - wankle 4y ago
    GIMP I've used for years and years, never heard of photopea, was the comment a SPAM Ad spot?
    - mardifoufs 4y ago
      No, photopea is pretty well known now. Mentionned a few times on HN too
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      Photopea is almost more well known than gimp these days.
      - denkmoon 4y ago
        Who knows why you're being downvoted, and I'd say it's _more_ well known than GIMP. My sister has used Photopea. She's as far from a sophisticated computer user as you can get. Regular people can stumble across Photopea, they certainly don't know about GIMP.
      - Agrue8u 4y ago
        Haven't used photoshop in 10 years. I have gimp, never use it. Paint.net is my basic image tool, along with IrfanView, for which I have a license circa 2004. I also use Scribus, FOSS version of InDesign. But never heard of Photopea until today...
smallerfish 4y ago
Adjustment layers are on the 3.2 roadmap. https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#gimp-32 https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#gimp-32 No idea what the timing of that version is.
- kasabali 4y ago
  hopefully before the next decade
josefx 4y ago
> What have they been prioritizing ahead of that? Gnome integration and Wayland as far as I can tell from its roadmap. So basically staying functional under the ADHD driven development model that is the Linux desktop environment. A bit hilarious that Gimp now has a hard time staying up to date with Gnomes Gtk when Gtk was originally an UI lib for Gimp.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  > A bit hilarious that Gimp now has a hard time staying up to date with Gnomes Gtk when Gtk was originally an UI lib for Gimp. Yet not terribly surprising. GIMP provided a useful alternative widget framework because it helped them push boundaries. Now that's grown into its own thing, and the parent project lags since its core focus is elsewhere.
  - asveikau 4y ago
    Frankly I think gtk+ quality has been going down for a few releases.
m00x 4y ago
It's FOSS, so feel free to implement those yourself and send over a PR :)
stonogo 4y ago
No, those are absolutely essential Adobe Photoshop features. Having a different set of tools to accomplish a specific goal is fine because, bear with me, GIMP is not Photoshop. 90% of the complaining that always happens in these threads is Photoshop/Irfanview/whatever users, coming in and assuming that the purpose of GIMP is to reimplement your favorite image editing software for free. That is not the goal, and it never has been. As long as you keep pretending anyone intends GIMP to be a Photoshop clone, you'll keep being disappointed. After _three decades_ I can no longer blame anyone but the complainant.
Adj_and_Styles 4y ago
Those could had been implemented loooooooong ago. In a hacky way. The dictate was to be pure and wait for GEGL. So still nothing of that. We got layer trees at least. They could have been implemented by overloading the layer blending code, and recoded with GEGL once ready. But pure won over "we can do that too now, please do not look behind the curtain". It's really simple: adjustment is just a layer that only uses mask data and operates on the bottom layer pixels with already coded functions (levels, contrast, etc). Styles would be similar, applying plugins/scripts. If when proposed the reply is "we will not accept that kind of crude system", nobody wastes time coding a patch. That was not the only time GIMP project went the pure road. There was also drama with themes and paintbrush system. On the end, some of the old ideas managed to get there, like grey icon theme (now hated by some, the irony) or having a working paint system (I have not tested with a tablet, so no idea if any good). Even non coders were trying to help, for example contributing brushes and testing the system [0], yet they ran out of steam after some time of hitting walls. The few people involved now seem to be the ones that have been taking over after all the previous got seriously burnt (except Kolås). [0] https://www.ramonmiranda.com/gimp-paint-studio-su-pasado-presente-y-posible-futuro/ https://www.ramonmiranda.com/gimp-paint-studio-su-pasado-pre... (autotranslation work OKish)
nextaccountic 4y ago
Krita can do those things.. just saying. In a sense, Krita is not just better for painting. It's a better general purpose image editing program, specially in terms of UX

dontbenebby 4y ago

And no macOS native gui ;_; It’s almost unusable in OSX because of that.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
smoldesu 4y ago
To each their own, but if GIMP got a "Logic Pro"-style rewrite then I'd probably be looking for a new raster graphics editor.
- dontbenebby 4y ago
  I’m not familiar with that program, what about the UI is especially bad/weird?
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Everything, subjectively. Logic Pro is the epitome of Apple leaning fully into 'Form as an excuse for function' and it's one of the most hilariously useless pieces of paid software ever devised. Apple refuses to give it Pro Tools functionality because it's not a 'real DAW' and hobbles multiple features to Garageband-level functionality. I'd prefer to keep my ugly-but-capable GIMP on every platform rather than having a single half-decent MacOS version that bends over backwards to foreign HID.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

failedartifact 4y ago

Its open source, so feel free to prioritise your own workload into making this feature.

Gigachad 4y ago
Unless you are ideologically inclined, it would be a better use of your resources to just pay for photoshop. As much as it angers people on this website, the subscription model provides a constant stream of funding that has gone in to keeping the tool the best on the market and for anyone using it professionally, it delivers far more value than it's cost.
- Ygg2 4y ago
  I don't think you have to be ideologically inclined. Photoshop is already turning on the milking machine. Subscription. Check. Paid add ons. Check. Paid color palette. Check and mark.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    "This guy couldn't find the scale tool in GIMP... charge him $9.99 each month until he learns his lesson."
  - nickthegreek 4y ago
    Agreed, luckily, Affinity exists and they are not only resisting subscriptions but also sell cross platform licenses.
    - rnd0 4y ago
      Shit, I missed the boat on that one. What's ironic is that I bought Affinity but still continue to use GIMP shrugs One of these days I'll sit down with Affinity. One of these days...
    - Ygg2 4y ago
      That assumes that Affinity doesn't get bought by Adobe, or their license model never changes. Which in today's world is a fools errand.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pengaru 4y ago

> What have they been prioritizing ahead of that? There are very few active maintainers, what few there are have been scratching their own itches.

Gigachad 4y ago
That's evident. I've used the tool periodically and I can't think of anything that's improved in the last 10 years. I think it actually got worse when they made all the icons greyscale and hid some under others. You still have 3 different tools for moving, resizing, and rotating when every other program has them all in one.
- pengaru 4y ago
  It's disappointed me as well over the past 5-10 years. The switch from save->export seemed arbitrary and pointless. And the last time I tried putting text into an image with their text editing tool, the widget was so buggy I gave up - and that was in a release that shipped in debian stable at the time. But it's just a bummer, not a source of anger/furor/vitriol for the project. I don't get why so many folks are talking shit like they didn't get their refund.
  - robinsonb5 4y ago
    Oh that particular change drives me crazy. It's not the switch per se, it's the lecture I receive when I slip up and use the muscle-memory procedure of File->Save As with a .tif extension, like I did for the first decade of using GIMP. The software has quite clearly identified what I'm trying to do, so refusing to comply and forcing me to jump through an arbitrary hoop is akin to jeering the words "You didn't say 'Simon Says'"! The new text widget has improved recently, and it's certainly an improvement on the original. It's still a great piece of software, and I'm very grateful that it exists, but when I use it, it's generally a version from the 2.4 series, because it suits my workflow better. (When there's no image open the older versions just have a small unobtrusive toolbox window open, which you can use as a drop target for files picked from a file browser; the newer versions have a large empty window which gets in the way.) [For those who say "fork it yourself", I have contributed to development in the distant past - dithered gradients were my addition, and I wrote a plugin (subsequently adopted by someone in Japan but long-since abandoned) for separating RGB images to CMYK layers, and saving them as a CMYK TIFF. But despite briefly maintaining a PPA with a patched version without the "no image open" window I quickly decided life was too short to spend my hobby time trying to hold back that particular tide.]

kome 4y ago

I am a simple person, I like GIMP; and I have no idea what "no adjustment layers, still no layer styles" is

diag 4y ago
It's about non destructive editing, a very powerful tool for professional workflows especially for fine tuning changes and making things repeatable.
llanowarelves 4y ago
Once you have worked with them, you won't want to work without them.
- rnd0 4y ago
  and yet I've worked without them just fine for 15 years or more
azertykeys 4y ago
For instance - in Photoshop, one can add an adjustment layer on a picture that alters the saturation and color balance of that image. One can then copy that layer for use later, or edit that layer on the fly if one decides it's not right. Or delete it entirely, much later in the editing process.

wetpaws 4y ago

Just use Krita.

NoThisIsMe 4y ago

They've been working on this for like a decade, in a sense. They're rewriting the core as a library, GEGL, which supports non-destructive editing as well as other long-requested features. My impression is GEGL is largely done; the remaining work is to port GIMP to it. Realizing these gains for non-destructive editing is planned for v3.2, which is probably years away still. The other major initiative since forever has been porting to GTK 3.

torginus 4y ago
Sorry, come again? Porting to GTK 3? GTK 4 has been out for years.
- robinsonb5 4y ago
  Yes, which means GTK3 is finally a stable target! ;) I'm fully aware that (a) I'm a dinosaur, and (b) not the target audience of the GTK project in its current form, but I still miss things like the tear-off menus, and the tab-completion and wildcard filtering in the file dialog (without the current keyboard focus complications) from GTK1.2!
- asveikau 4y ago
  https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/migrating-3to4.html https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/migrating-3to4.html Does it really make sense for them to break so many things? Doesn't show a lot of respect for people who adopt the library.

the-smug-one 4y ago

"Øyvind Kolås raises funds for his work on GEGL, GIMP’s new sophisticated image processing core. This work is crucial to implement features such as non-destructive editing in GIMP, including features known as adjustment layers and layer effects in similar software. Øyvind is the GEGL maintainer and its primary developer who has been working on it since mid-2000s. "

jhoechtl 4y ago
> Øyvind Kolås raises funds for his work on GEGL, GIMP’s new sophisticated image processing core GEGL aka duke nukem forever

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

At this point I don’t think it’s controversial to say that this project existing has harmed creative tools on Linux. If another project had become the de-facto we’d have all those basic features. Instead we’re stuck with something that almost provides the basics ok, because it exists people treat it like a solved problem, and it has such a history no one’s allowed to say it just frankly isn’t usable for it’s one job.

Nition 4y ago
In some ways the de facto standard now is http://www.photopea.com http://www.photopea.com in a browser.
- wankle 4y ago
  GIMP I've used for years and years, never heard of photopea, was the comment a SPAM Ad spot?
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    No, photopea is pretty well known now. Mentionned a few times on HN too
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Photopea is almost more well known than gimp these days.
    - denkmoon 4y ago
      Who knows why you're being downvoted, and I'd say it's _more_ well known than GIMP. My sister has used Photopea. She's as far from a sophisticated computer user as you can get. Regular people can stumble across Photopea, they certainly don't know about GIMP.
    - Agrue8u 4y ago
      Haven't used photoshop in 10 years. I have gimp, never use it. Paint.net is my basic image tool, along with IrfanView, for which I have a license circa 2004. I also use Scribus, FOSS version of InDesign. But never heard of Photopea until today...

smallerfish 4y ago

Adjustment layers are on the 3.2 roadmap. https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#gimp-32 https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#gimp-32 No idea what the timing of that version is.

kasabali 4y ago
hopefully before the next decade

josefx 4y ago

> What have they been prioritizing ahead of that? Gnome integration and Wayland as far as I can tell from its roadmap. So basically staying functional under the ADHD driven development model that is the Linux desktop environment. A bit hilarious that Gimp now has a hard time staying up to date with Gnomes Gtk when Gtk was originally an UI lib for Gimp.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
> A bit hilarious that Gimp now has a hard time staying up to date with Gnomes Gtk when Gtk was originally an UI lib for Gimp. Yet not terribly surprising. GIMP provided a useful alternative widget framework because it helped them push boundaries. Now that's grown into its own thing, and the parent project lags since its core focus is elsewhere.
- asveikau 4y ago
  Frankly I think gtk+ quality has been going down for a few releases.

m00x 4y ago

It's FOSS, so feel free to implement those yourself and send over a PR :)

stonogo 4y ago

No, those are absolutely essential Adobe Photoshop features. Having a different set of tools to accomplish a specific goal is fine because, bear with me, GIMP is not Photoshop. 90% of the complaining that always happens in these threads is Photoshop/Irfanview/whatever users, coming in and assuming that the purpose of GIMP is to reimplement your favorite image editing software for free. That is not the goal, and it never has been. As long as you keep pretending anyone intends GIMP to be a Photoshop clone, you'll keep being disappointed. After _three decades_ I can no longer blame anyone but the complainant.

Adj_and_Styles 4y ago

Those could had been implemented loooooooong ago. In a hacky way. The dictate was to be pure and wait for GEGL. So still nothing of that. We got layer trees at least. They could have been implemented by overloading the layer blending code, and recoded with GEGL once ready. But pure won over "we can do that too now, please do not look behind the curtain". It's really simple: adjustment is just a layer that only uses mask data and operates on the bottom layer pixels with already coded functions (levels, contrast, etc). Styles would be similar, applying plugins/scripts. If when proposed the reply is "we will not accept that kind of crude system", nobody wastes time coding a patch. That was not the only time GIMP project went the pure road. There was also drama with themes and paintbrush system. On the end, some of the old ideas managed to get there, like grey icon theme (now hated by some, the irony) or having a working paint system (I have not tested with a tablet, so no idea if any good). Even non coders were trying to help, for example contributing brushes and testing the system [0], yet they ran out of steam after some time of hitting walls. The few people involved now seem to be the ones that have been taking over after all the previous got seriously burnt (except Kolås). [0] https://www.ramonmiranda.com/gimp-paint-studio-su-pasado-presente-y-posible-futuro/ https://www.ramonmiranda.com/gimp-paint-studio-su-pasado-pre... (autotranslation work OKish)

nextaccountic 4y ago

Krita can do those things.. just saying. In a sense, Krita is not just better for painting. It's a better general purpose image editing program, specially in terms of UX