13 ms·
GIMP 2.99.18: The last development preview before 3.0
- infotainment 3y ago> Brush tools now have an additional “Expand Layers” option. When checked, painting past the layer boundaries will cause them to automatically expand so you don’t have to manage the layer size yourself. If you want to expand the layer beyond the current size of the canvas, you’ll need to also check the “Show All” option in the View menu. Seriously GIMP devs, instead of this overengineered solution, just get rid of layer boundaries. There's a reason no other layer-based image editor has them: they make absolutely no sense and are terrible UX.
- garaetjjte 3y agoWhen I paste other images as layers I don't want boundaries to be automatically lost.
- spoiler 3y agoI second this. If someone really wants to add a boundary, they can use either a mask or selection
- mort96 3y agoYou say "just", but I imagine the idea that layers have boundaries is a deeply ingrained assumption throughout the code base at this point. I would love for layers to not have boundaries, but I think prioritizing it below shipping GIMP 3 with GTK 3 support is correct.
- __s 3y agoI think their "just" is saying this option should be on by default & mostly hidden
- xyzzy_plugh 3y agoIndeed, I am pretty sure this is how Photoshop has worked under the hood since forever. No point in persisting a sparse layer.
- mort96 3y agoThat's not how I read it. The fact that layers have boundaries shows up all over the place in GIMP, turning on "auto expand layers" in the brush tools by default wouldn't do that much to "get rid of layer boundaries".
- 123yawaworht456 3y agoI also second this. I've been using GIMP on and off for occasional image editing for about 8 years now, and I still don't really grasp how do layers work in it. I really wish it had Photoshop compatibility mode for hotkeys and behavior. The former is a very common tweak.
- madog 3y agoThere is PhotoGIMP[1] that copies the hotkeys and tool layout. It doesn't replicate behaviour exactly obviously but it does make it actually usable for me as someone who used Photoshop a lot in the past, and was eternally confused by GIMP. 1: https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP
- FreeFull 3y agoHow would that work for having a layer larger than the image?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- beAbU 3y agoThe layer is automatically masked by the boundaries of the image. This is how it works in most other layer based tools that I've seen.
- dijit 3y agoIsn't this a severe limitation of rasterized image editors? (Speaking from ignorance as someone who only did some mild graphics design work using fireworks in the mid-00's for forums). Would it mean that anything that exists outside of the visible canvas would be cropped on save?
- bennettbackward 3y agoNot if you're saving to the GIMP project file format. You'd lose it if you saved to a raster image but you'd also lose layers, vectors, etc. too.
- blkhawk 3y agowait GIMP does vectors now? I hope you don't mean that stupid useless plugin that renders to a bitmap layer and you can't adjst again afterwards? Or has that improved while I wasn't looking?
- woodrowbarlow 3y agopaths and text are vectorized. most tools/effects can't be used on vector layers unless you rasterize them.
- reddalo 3y agoI still don't get it: what are layer boundaries?
- rcxdude 3y agoLayers in GIMP can be smaller than the image they are part of. So if you try to edit a layer outside of it's boundaries you don't get anything. Pretty much all editors do this as an optimisation (no point storing an entire layer if it's almost entirely empty transparent pixels), but GIMP is unusual in exposing this to the user and expecting them to increase the layer size manually. In other editors the layer is conceptually the full size of the image and these boundaries are managed automatically. (In fact, usually the layers are unbounded in size and can expand to be larger than the canvas. Very useful if e.g. you are importing a background image and want to be able to shift it around a bit)
- simcop2387 3y agoNot just smaller, but you can even have them be larger than the image. Then you can move the layer around and have the image essentially acting as a cropping window into that layer. I most commonly experience that when I've imported/pasted in a larger image as a layer
- beezlewax 3y agoThey can be larger than the image in photoshop etc too
- timeon 3y agoNice solution would be having this boundary stretching automatically as proposed in this thread but also exposing 'bounded layers' as separate tool like frames in Indesign.
- kookamamie 3y agoDon't worry, no one gets them.
- tejohnso 3y agoI've found the people who have the biggest problem with GIMP are the ones that have expectations that come from using other image editors.
- spoiler 3y agoWhat's wrong with learning from other software in the domain? Especially from ones that the whole industry endorses? I don't mean to be rude to the work done to make Gimp, but the harsh truth is that Gimp's UX has been a joke for over a decade
- tambourine_man 3y agoPerhaps because there’s an editor that’s been the industry standard for 30+ years.
- walteweiss 3y agoWho cares about 30+ years at this point? It could be great back then, but right now it’s awful, especially if compared to Pixelmator Pro.
- tambourine_man 3y agoI like Pixelmator for multiple reasons, but it’s a toy next to Photoshop. And so is everything else. There’s simply no competition, unfortunately.
- walteweiss 3y agoWhat do you mean? In which use case? I use Pixelmator Pro exclusively for years now, and I don’t need Photoshop, it’s just an abomination to me.
- tambourine_man 3y agoFor professional image editing. Printing, advanced retouching, photomontage, etc. If you just need to crop, erase a pimple or a coke can on the floor, basically anything will do. Pixelmator doesn’t even support CMYK editing, it only exports in it. It’s not even in the convention for serious image workflow.
- Joeboy 3y agoNot a fan of "this" comments but, very much this. The way layer boundaries work in Gimp is tremendously confusing and annoying. Perhaps the existing code makes it difficult, and I get the impression the devs have been stuck dealing with other tech debt for a long time. But this should really be high on the list of things to address.
- roelschroeven 3y agoI honestly don't see the problem with layers that have boundaries that are independent from the image boundaries. Maybe it's because I learned my way around Gimp before I used any other image editor, but it makes perfect sense to me. When I crop, resize, move, ... a layer, its boundary is cropped, resized, moved, ... accordingly. What happens if you move a layer without boundaries, like in Photoshop? That's probably intuitive to people who are used to Photoshop, but not to me. What happens to contents that now fall out of the image boundary? To explain layers in raster image editors to novices, they are often compared to transparent slides. Well, layers with boundaries are simply such slides. If I move a slide, the slide moves, including its boundaries; same with other operations.
- walteweiss 3y agoYeah, except it’s not slides. It’s a virtual canvas and there is no reason in the whole world for it to behave like it’s something physical, when it’s not. It makes zero sense, there shouldn’t be any checkbox in the first place. Just make it how it should be and never ask me. There’s enough checkboxes already. How can you develop a tool for designers if you never ask them first?
- aaroninsf 3y agoI genuinely don't understand why the solution this layer-boundary BS is not to just default the layer boundary to the image boundary, or the contents of the layer, whichever is larger, always, done and done. What am I missing? I don't care if it's "efficient," we're talking about environments which have orders of magnitude more resources and efficient disk caches and god knows what else. It's nearly 2025.
- philsnow 3y agoI found myself just liberally doing “layer to image size” all over the place and was generally happier after doing it.
- moomoo3000 3y agoOne idea: Layer boundaries could be disabled by default. If you open an image that uses layer boundaries, they would be enabled for that image.
- zdimension 3y agoI've read the whole thread of comments and I'm really confused. For context I'm a long time GIMP user and used Photoshop a few times at a very basic level. Layers having boundaries feels... obvious to me? Like, when I scale a layer, the boundaries are what I'll be scaling. When I crop a layer, I'm cropping the boundaries. If I have a large image and insert a small icon in the middle, should the icon's layer take the full size of the canvas? What exactly is supposed to happen if I insert an image that's larger than the canvas? A layer in GIMP having boundaries is equivalent, to me, to a shape in Inkscape having a size.
- Joeboy 3y agoFor example, does it not seem intuitive to you that it should be possible to take a brush tool and paint on the canvas? In GIMP, you can usually do that, but sometimes you can't, for reasons that are initially baffling. Once you figure out it's to do with layer boundaries it becomes merely annoying and frustrating. Once you get used to doing "Layer to image size" things get a bit easier, but needing to a) know that and b) constantly do that is not a useful feature.
- zeroimpl 3y agoThere’s several things which break down if you eliminate layer boundaries. Can you still have a layer that is bigger than the image boundary, or would pixels get cropped when they move outside? What happens if you apply a noise filter? Does it generate an infinitely large layer with noise? Or only generates noise on the visible portions? Or some other arbitrary rect in between? And how would you handle the case of a small layer with a weird blend mode like multiply/subtract? With no boundaries it now must apply to the entire image below. I’m sure there are solutions to these individually but it’s clearly a very complex problem to solve all these kinds of cases in an intuitive way.
- clementmas 3y agoThey didn't want to have a version 2.100
- clementmas 3y agoThey didn't want to have a version 2.100
- fch42 3y agoGimp 3.0 deserves to be called "Duke Wilber Forever", with a suitable logo image (hint, hint). Congrats to the team for finally having the finish line in sight !
- dogtierstatus 3y agowhat is the context of Duke Wilber?
- kstrauser 3y agoWilber is the mascot. Duke, as in Duke Nukem.
- _nivlac_ 3y agoI am very grateful for GIMP, but I hope that the UX can be improved. It gets the job done, but it always feels a bit janky to me. Wish it felt more professional like Photoshop. I didn't think this sort of polish was possible for a free program, but after seeing MuseScore and Blender, it gives me hope that it could happen. I know how entitled I sound asking for this ;)
- duffyjp 3y agoI’ve been using Krita for a year or so now. At first I found the UI very confusing, but after learning the top bar is just as important as the side bar it really works. YouTube videos of pros using it will blow your mind. It’s really powerful. https://krita.org/en/ https://krita.org/en/
- _nivlac_ 3y agoAppreciate the recommendation, thank you!
- bemusedthrow75 3y agoKrita is really very impressive. I am that kind of decades-long hosted-linux-from-a-Mac-desktop user who checks out desktop linux every six months or so to see if the daily driver situation is ready. I edit quite a lot of photos and even though Darktable is a mess, I could use it and it's not the only option. I edit vector graphics and I think Inkscape is fine. I like FreeCAD. All of my coding tools appear to run in Electron, etc. etc. But GIMP isn't an option. It's not even close to being what basic quick correct photo editing needs in terms of a workflow. And I'm simply never going to change what is not really a particularly deep or exotic workflow to fit it. Krita is _sooooo_ close, and it's not even trying to be a photo editor first and foremost.
- billfruit 3y agoPhotoshop UI is janky and unintutive, it is only that people have got used to it.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago> One area we’re “ahead of schedule” on is the much-requested non-destructive editing! This is the purest of comedy. I applaud it. And I think a twenty-seven-year-younger version of me who first used adjustment layers in Photoshop in early 1997 [0] might find it even funnier to imagine this future. This isn't "skating to where the puck was". This is "skating to where the rink was before they tore it down and built a shopping mall, that they tore down to build offices that they are now going to tear down to build a retirement home for GIMP developers". [0] when, I note, GIMP already existed. OK so they got a bit distracted building a GUI toolkit, and we should not forget the significant value it added. It's the real transformational product of the entire endeavour. But seriously: this wasn't voodoo, weird niche case or hypothetical stuff by the early 2000s, when they were still building a GUI image editing app that really relied on advanced users having Lisp knowledge. And they continued to kick it down the road for literal decades.
- thanatos519 3y agoI'm not even sure the first hack at this will remotely approach the full potential of non-destructive editing: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/9244 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/9244
- bemusedthrow75 3y agoPart of the problem GIMP has is that they chase perfect ideas at the expense of good ones. Adobe don't. The Adobe codebase is cruft that has taken a similarly long time to shake out. Lightroom was seemingly built like a skunkworks project almost like a desktop webapp (scripting around a core renderer, SQLite, simpler mode-oriented GUI) to avoid the intransigence and friction of Photoshop's codebase. But this is what GIMP is up against. Cruft that earns money, that is driving not just what users want but how they think about what they want. For GIMP to be more successful it doesn't need live non-global filters like blurs, but it would have been enormously beneficial to the project if it had global adjustment layers, say, 15 years ago. Then youtube would have been filled with tutorials, there would have been momentum around the project, some commercial support interest, etc. Kicking the can down the road has consequences. This great Ondsel blog article about how difficult it is to merge major changes into an open source project goes into it in some detail: https://ondsel.com/blog/freecad-topological-naming/ https://ondsel.com/blog/freecad-topological-naming/ Some decisions need to be taken at the right time; if you don't, you need a whole separate kind of energy to get them done without stopping everyone else. (The successful Affinity suite is a result of taking some right decisions back in 2010 or 2011)
- vallode 3y agoAnother comment mentioned GIMP may have assumptions of bad UX within their codebase which makes me think about long-lived and large scale projects like this in general. The technical debt of GIMP has been slowly amassing (like all projects) since 1995 (wow!) and I assume that as every year goes by it gets increasingly difficult to do a large scale re-write of any part of the logic. Tools like Photopea[1] come along and throw a fresh perspective at things all the time, these tools never have the breadth and depth of feature support that GIMP has but basically always manage to "one-up" it over something. How long will it take before GIMP has usability on-par with Photoshop? How long until it attains the aesthetic coherence necessary to win people over visually? I love GIMP, but is the battle against 20 years of technical debt even winnable? [1]: https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/
- diggan 3y agoThe example to point to is Blender, for inspiration on how to manage this successfully. Ton has done a heck of a job making Blender into a real alternative, even with the codebase existing and being worked on since 1995. The UX and UI overhaul in 2018 (Blender 2.8) was a big undertaking, that had a big impact on the success of Blender, maybe something similar would be possible for Gimp too. Granted, Ton figured out a project of that scale needed funding, but overall, Blender is a huge success as a FOSS tool. Maybe the Gimp and Blender developers so sit down together and have a chat, the tools are often used together after all.
- bemusedthrow75 3y agoExactly this -- as I just simultaneously pointed to in my sibling comment about the wonderful rebirth of FreeCAD.
- CmykStudent 3y agoBlender actually hosted the GIMP team last year (https://developer.gimp.org/conferences/wilberweek/2023-amsterdam/ https://developer.gimp.org/conferences/wilberweek/2023-amste..., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnHFG_SBc6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnHFG_SBc6c), so there have been on-going conversations between the two projects. :)
- mort96 3y agoGIMP is one of those things which make me wonder what GNU actually is. It's the GNU Image Manipulation Program, but it's very obviously dramatically and chronically understaffed. What about the GNU project is preventing them from putting more resources into their image editor? This is not a criticism of the individuals who write code for GIMP.
- reddalo 3y ago"GNU" as in GNU-licensed program. It's not maintained directly by the Free Software Foundation.
- mort96 3y agoYou're just making this up aren't you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP#History The application subsequently formed part of the GNU software collection And it's part of the list of "GNU Software" on this page: https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html (And no, that's not a list of all GPL-licensed software, it's a list of GNU software). You're correct that it's not "maintained directly by the FSF", that's not how GNU operates, but I feel that GNU and the FSF has a responsibility for the health of the projects which are part of the GNU project.
- arp242 3y agohttps://www.gimp.org/develop/ https://www.gimp.org/develop/ says "historically part of the GNU Project". I don't really know the current status or feelings of the GIMP developers, but I know GTK and GNOME have formally disassociated themselves from GNU, but it took them many years to get de-listed on that GNU packages page as Stallman flat-out refused to do so, as he believed that projects are unable to disassociate from GNU. The GnuTLS people have had similar problems. It's still listed on that project page. My point is: that page only reflects what Richard Stallman considers to be part of GNU, not what the developers of that project feel.
- 3y ago
- rullopat 3y agoProbably the last time I've heard: "Gimp 3.0 is coming soon" 3G networks didn't exist yet.
- blkhawk 3y agoGIMP is infuriatingly good. Its mostly great but has some weirdness that ruins everything in the end. Its issues are like the Spam in that Monty Python sketch. My personally biggest issue I run into almost every time I try to use it is the lack of vector layers for text and some mild primitives like lines, squares and circles you can adjust the properties of after you initally drew them. The other annoyances like for instance the "professional" feature of only saving to xcf can actually very easily be patched if you can compile gimp yourself. They still show a annoing level of pigheadedness from a project otherwse so nice.
- pentagrama 3y agoThere is a 3.0 beta to try?
- kzrdude 3y agohttps://www.gimp.org/downloads/devel/ https://www.gimp.org/downloads/devel/
- transfire 3y agoI used to use Gimp for simple editing needs about a decade ago. I got fairly good at using it back then, but haven’t needed it in a long while. Yesterday I needed to draw an outlined circle… and couldn’t figure out how.
- kstrauser 3y agoHah! That was my exact example of its UI weirdness. It’s not that it’s different from Photoshop, but that it’s different from every other tool I’ve ever used to put a circle on the screen. A friend gave me, erm, a backup copy of Deluxe Paint for Amiga way back when. If GIMP were half as approachable as DPaint, I’d still be using it.
- doubled112 3y agoAhh yes, there is no circle tool, right? It is still select a circle and stroke it?
- kstrauser 3y agoHere's a tutorial from this month explaining how to do it: https://alvinalexander.com/gimp/gimp-how-to-create-draw-circle-in-gimp-tutorial/ https://alvinalexander.com/gimp/gimp-how-to-create-draw-circ... So yeah, looks like it.
- e12e 3y agoIt's frustrating, but as another comment mentions, the way to draw and stroke paths in gimp is select>stroke selection. Terrible ux for "i just want a circle" - but (forces) open the door to quite powerful path>stroke workflow. https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/696/make-an-outline-with-gimp-like-in-photoshop#697 https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/696/make-a...
- kstrauser 3y agoI say this as a programmer: that's such a programmer excuse for an awful UI. I'm not directing that at you, but at the group who decided how to draw circles on the screen. Option A: Build a function that calls all the appropriate actions in sequence, then stick it on a menu. Option B: Tell users that they're better off doing it manually. ...which inevitably leads to: Result C: Why don't more people want to use it?, and Result D: Appealing to programmers who think that's a great idea because it worked OK for themselves, and building more features with the same paradigm, creating a feedback loop.
- jrm4 3y ago[flagged]
- ghosty141 3y ago? What is so bad with the GIMP name vs Krita? For me the main reason why I dont use GIMP is missing features and how its ergonomics are worse than photoshop.
- arp242 3y agoHaving a tantrum every time GIMP is mentioned is profoundly more childish. They don't want to change the name, possibly because they have different priorities than you. It is what it is. Deal with it.
- jrm4 3y agoAnd I'm criticizing their priorities, which I can do -- especially if you choose to be in the realm of GNU and open source. I understand their "rights," it is absolutely their choice. But... It has been this way for a long time, but what they don't understand is they could very likely be doing greater good to stick it to, e.g. Adobe with just a little bit of humbling, which would buy a whole lot more popularity and acceptance.
- arp242 3y agoOf course you can offer (constructive) criticism. But raising the same thing every time GIMP comes up goes well beyond that and is just disruptive. You need to accept that your criticism has been heard, and that it has been rejected. And I actually agree a different name would be in the project's best interests. But I also accept that reasonable people can disagree, and that I'm not the one maintaining GIMP.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jrm4 3y ago
- unregistereddev 3y agoI'd like to congratulate the GIMP team on the upcoming major release. Lots of volunteer work goes into open source projects, and it's remarkable for a codebase to keep evolving over the course of nearly 30 years. To everyone complaining about the UX, let's either accept that GIMP does not have the development resources of Photoshop or else propose specific improvements in the GIMP project backlog.
- hitekker 3y agoOr suggest alternatives to GIMP. The image editor space is an open market, not a fan subreddit.
- timka 3y agoIsn't the very concept of "open market" meaningless in the context of free (libre) software? I mean people keep comparing GIMP with Photoshop and that's obviously incorrect. I'd more or less agree that the "market" of free software image editors is an "open market" and GIMP is a big player there so to say.
- miramba 3y agoI don’t understand the negativity in may comments, professionals use photoshop or some other tool anyway (if they can afford it), Gimp was always a free, mostly useful alternative for amateurs like me and I am grateful to the contributors.
- canadiantim 3y agoI use GIMP so often, if the devs ever read this thank you very much!!!
- mixmastamyk 3y agoI love gimp and have used it for ~twenty-five years now without issue. Thank you folks. (Entitled haters that always show up can take a hike. Time to get the downvotes out.)
- jononor 3y agoCongratulations to GIMP team! The 3.0 series represents several thousand hours of work over more than one decade. Soon that is over the finish line :)
- peter-m80 3y agoOpen gimp. Try to draw a circle (the outline, not a filled one). You can't.
- Xaiph_Rahci 3y ago> You can't. Ellipse Select Tool 🡢 Draw Circle 🡢 Edit 🡢 Stroke Selection 🡢 Stroke
- mixmastamyk 3y agoOpen inkscape, and use the right tool for the job.