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> 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
by 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.