6 ms·

How is gimp now ? https://www.gimp.org/ https://www.gimp.org/ While I am not a professional artist, gimp has served me well in this role for many years .

dathinab 2y ago
it really depends on what your needs are, it can be anything from okay but inconvenient to switch (different UX) to not competitive at
jddj 2y ago
Give me a few days/weeks each time to get used to the at times perfectly backwards UI and it's great
zbrozek 2y ago
It's powerful and the UI is atrocious. I'm an occasional user and there's nothing I can do in under ten minutes of futzing or seeking tutorials.
- ghufran_syed 2y ago
  so maybe gimp + a gpt model?
  - das_keyboard 2y ago
    This might be a pretty big idea. Since GIMP is highly scriptable afaik it should be possible to have an AI do all the work. But as always... you would need a lot of training data.
    - EasyMark 2y ago
      You could definitely script it in python
    - zelphirkalt 2y ago
      It should be possible to create a community pool of training data. Some place people can donate data to.
- Gigachad 2y ago
  I’ve encountered plenty of things you just flat out can not do in gimp. The latest one is you can’t highlight text. Something incredibly basic that other programs have had since the 90s.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    You can highlight text in GIMP: (1) Create new layer from visible. (2) Select the text using the text tool. (3) Set zoom to 100%. (4) Screenshot. (5) Paste screenshot. (6) Floating layer to new layer. (7) Align screenshot layer with the new-from-visible layer. (8) Difference layer mode. (9) If the selection did not fit on screen, duplicate the new-from-visible layer. (10) Merge down. (11) Select the selection box with the fuzzy select tool. (You may need to delete the regions of the merged layer that represent the GIMP UI to do this.) (12) Select → Remove Holes. (13) Invert selection. (14) Delete. (15) Invert selection. (16) Delete. (17) Fill (with a block colour of your choice). (18) Hide the layer, then goto step 2 until all of the selection is accounted for. (19) Merge all the block colour layers together. (20) Re-order the block colour layer under the text layer. (21) Reduce opacity to taste. See! It's theoretically possible to assign the desired pixel values using GIMP, therefore GIMP is perfect and has no problems at all. In fact, you can automate this with a very simple combination of AutoHotKey and Script-Fu (passing control data from Script-Fu to AutoHotKey using PixelGetColor), which is practically as good as having it built-in. (More seriously: you can probably do gimp-vectors-new-from-text-layer, segment it into glyphs, take only the glyphs within a selection, split those into lines, find bounding boxes for those lines, and fill them with the current foreground colour, but there appears to be no way to query the current text selection from Script-Fu, so you'd have to use this with the Lasso selection tool or something.)
  - lewiscollard 2y ago
    https://imgz.org/i8CEMAJq.png https://imgz.org/i8CEMAJq.png Create a transparent layer. Paint on it in a colour of your choice. Set layer mode to "darken only" or "lighten only" depending on your background. "Difference" is fun too. I've been using GIMP for longer than I care to remember and I am painfully aware of what is not great in its UI, which is something that seems to have gotten _worse_ over time. This isn't one of them; to paraphrase, that's just knowing how to use basic features that GIMP and other programs have had since the 1990s.
- Archelaos 2y ago
  This is also my experience as an occasional user. What I cannot explain is that even after more than two decades, no better open source alternative with a comparable range of functions has emerged. (Krita comes close, though.)
- 4ggr0 2y ago
  Exact reason why I love Paint.NET[0] Has all the features I need and you can install plugins, and I think that it's very intuitive. Used it to refine DALL-E pictures for my hobby-project. I work on a MacBook and Paint.NET is windows-only. There's a Windows VM on my MacBook with one single reason for its existence, I'll let you guess what that is. [0]https://getpaint.net/ https://getpaint.net/
- pessimizer 2y ago
  > I'm an occasional user and there's nothing I can do in under ten minutes of futzing or seeking tutorials. This is true of occasional users of Photoshop, too. If you don't know how to use Photoshop, its UI is an atrocity.
  - throw46365 2y ago
    Right -- you have to know something that people don't ever tell you: Photoshop is a medium as much as it is an application. As a medium it has fundamentals, and once you know those fundamentals, you're not really chained to Photoshop. In my experience it's the occasional users of Photoshop who have the most trouble switching to anything else, because for them it is still icons and buttons and sliders and menu items they expect in certain places. If you've spent enough time with Photoshop and learned what is really happening, what blend modes are, how layers work deeply, switching is easier because it's much easier to recognise those same principles elsewhere. This, I think, is why Adobe has the predatorily priced Photoshop plan and is unwilling to put true power into Photoshop Elements (which was last a "cut down Photoshop" back at version 3.0 or so). They know that the underlying skills are portable.
bravetraveler 2y ago
Just a disclaimer: I haven't ever edited for anything serious. I'd be fine with an open 'paint' from Windows That said, I haven't noticed much change with GIMP over the years. It's... fine. The timeless one. Other/newer editors are around though. I hear good things about Krita
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  According to a video I saw recently of a presentation by one of the main contributors to GIMP, it is even getting CMYK Support, a much belabored point of criticism in the past. Some significant improvements are coming.
  - bravetraveler 2y ago
    Happy for those who have been waiting :) My requirements are well below that!
Lariscus 2y ago
I replaced Gimp with Krita. It is often said that Krita is made for digital painting rather than photo editing but I haven't missed any features so far.
- Aerroon 2y ago
  From my experience Krita didn't feel much better than GIMP. Stuff like the eraser being hidden under brushes is just weird compared to my previous experience.
  - hellcow 2y ago
    If you're doing digital painting, it's probably just what you're used to. I disliked Krita until I spent a few weeks learning it. Once I found the "Krita way" of doing things, it was actually a much better experience than Photoshop offered for digital painting. I'd recommend finding a YouTube video where an artist takes you through how they use Krita to see some of the workflow and most common shortcuts.
- raverbashing 2y ago
  Krita is made for artists, not as a demo of a widget library (I'm half serious)
  - Aissen 2y ago
    It's the other way around. The widget library was built for Gimp, then took a life of its own. Note that Gimp still has not released a version ported to GTK 3 (but the port is done since last year, in the 3.0 branch), released 13 years ago. GTK 4 has been released 4 years ago.
acomjean 2y ago
I started using GIMP again. I used color adjustment and creating images using 5-7 layers with layer masks and not normal blending. It worked well. I always find the program not quite intuitive initially but once I get it, it’s not bad. For sorting and basic photography edits I use Dark table. Still getting used to it. I showed a couple of those GIMP created pieces and people seemed to like them. My theory is people look at the final image and don’t care much how you got there.
telesilla 2y ago
I'm happy with Photopea, I'm a casual user of photpshop and this is a fine enough alternative for what I need to do (no extra plugins etc).
pawelmurias 2y ago
Gimp is horrible. It's existance propably has a negative value on society by discouraging kids from pursuing art when they try it.
- dathinab 2y ago
  I wouldn't agree with the first two parts of your sentence. But definitely with the last part.
- DesiLurker 2y ago
  I am an sw engineer and I dread having to use gimp. the main thing gimp designers dont understand is that when I am doing 'something' I dont wanna have to come out of that context and enter another context of 'how does this f*king s/w works' and remember that for another occasional thing i'll do a month down the road. Adobe could not have paid money and made gimp worse that it is right now UX wise.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Why in the world would anyone use gimp for “art” when there is krita and Inkscape?
keiferski 2y ago
Gimp really ought to rebrand myself. I mean come on, who wants to use a program with that name? Even IMP is a hundred times better and lends itself to some impish branding assets.
- dathinab 2y ago
  for non native English speakers this often isn't an issue as the English word gimp is rarely used, so there is a good chance to more associate it with the software then the meaning behind the word.
  - keiferski 2y ago
    It’s a terrible name, period. A substandard piece of software already has enough issues with marketing itself. Naming it with a word that means “cripple”, no matter how often it is used, is just such a poor decision that it’s not really surprising that no one cares about the app.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Yeah I would love for them to change the name. I always wince when talking about it to someone who doesn’t know what it is. I have fallen back to “GNU Image”with some crowds :)
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  Probably no one who really needed it would care abouy the name.
oniony 2y ago
I'm a casual user, and GIMP is totally usable and powerful, but some of the UI/UX choices are a little bizarre. For example: * Open a document, draw a selection box to copy a piece out and then close this document: it asks you if you want to save because the selection is actually part of the document. (I understand that if you had a complicated selection you might want to preserve it, but if it's a simple rectangle I think the default should probably be to assume you don't want it.) * Pasting an image into a document: it does this weird thing where it doesn't create a layer automatically and you have to decide each time whether you want a layer or to collapse the weird pseudo-layer thing down onto the existing layer. I'd rather it just created a layer. (Maybe there's a setting for this, I haven't looked too hard.) * I find I end up fighting with the multipurpose resize/skew/rotate tool. I can't remember exactly why, but it's a little unintuitive.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Yep I’ve used it for all sorts of things like UI widgets and basic photo editing and animated gif creation. I wouldn’t know where to start with photoshop. I imagine going the other way after being a pro with photoshop for years would be jarring and make you think it’s the worst software ever created because you have muscle memory for everything in photoshop.
stephen_g 2y ago
I wanted to like Gimp, but I bought Pixelmator Pro on my Mac because I just couldn’t… Hard to describe, it’s just clunky if you know the professional tools well. But plenty of people do use it, so your mileage may vary. I hope the rough edges are polished down over time, but not at the moment for me.

dathinab 2y ago

it really depends on what your needs are, it can be anything from okay but inconvenient to switch (different UX) to not competitive at

jddj 2y ago

Give me a few days/weeks each time to get used to the at times perfectly backwards UI and it's great

zbrozek 2y ago

It's powerful and the UI is atrocious. I'm an occasional user and there's nothing I can do in under ten minutes of futzing or seeking tutorials.

ghufran_syed 2y ago
so maybe gimp + a gpt model?
- das_keyboard 2y ago
  This might be a pretty big idea. Since GIMP is highly scriptable afaik it should be possible to have an AI do all the work. But as always... you would need a lot of training data.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    You could definitely script it in python
  - zelphirkalt 2y ago
    It should be possible to create a community pool of training data. Some place people can donate data to.
Gigachad 2y ago
I’ve encountered plenty of things you just flat out can not do in gimp. The latest one is you can’t highlight text. Something incredibly basic that other programs have had since the 90s.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  You can highlight text in GIMP: (1) Create new layer from visible. (2) Select the text using the text tool. (3) Set zoom to 100%. (4) Screenshot. (5) Paste screenshot. (6) Floating layer to new layer. (7) Align screenshot layer with the new-from-visible layer. (8) Difference layer mode. (9) If the selection did not fit on screen, duplicate the new-from-visible layer. (10) Merge down. (11) Select the selection box with the fuzzy select tool. (You may need to delete the regions of the merged layer that represent the GIMP UI to do this.) (12) Select → Remove Holes. (13) Invert selection. (14) Delete. (15) Invert selection. (16) Delete. (17) Fill (with a block colour of your choice). (18) Hide the layer, then goto step 2 until all of the selection is accounted for. (19) Merge all the block colour layers together. (20) Re-order the block colour layer under the text layer. (21) Reduce opacity to taste. See! It's theoretically possible to assign the desired pixel values using GIMP, therefore GIMP is perfect and has no problems at all. In fact, you can automate this with a very simple combination of AutoHotKey and Script-Fu (passing control data from Script-Fu to AutoHotKey using PixelGetColor), which is practically as good as having it built-in. (More seriously: you can probably do gimp-vectors-new-from-text-layer, segment it into glyphs, take only the glyphs within a selection, split those into lines, find bounding boxes for those lines, and fill them with the current foreground colour, but there appears to be no way to query the current text selection from Script-Fu, so you'd have to use this with the Lasso selection tool or something.)
- lewiscollard 2y ago
  https://imgz.org/i8CEMAJq.png https://imgz.org/i8CEMAJq.png Create a transparent layer. Paint on it in a colour of your choice. Set layer mode to "darken only" or "lighten only" depending on your background. "Difference" is fun too. I've been using GIMP for longer than I care to remember and I am painfully aware of what is not great in its UI, which is something that seems to have gotten _worse_ over time. This isn't one of them; to paraphrase, that's just knowing how to use basic features that GIMP and other programs have had since the 1990s.
Archelaos 2y ago
This is also my experience as an occasional user. What I cannot explain is that even after more than two decades, no better open source alternative with a comparable range of functions has emerged. (Krita comes close, though.)
4ggr0 2y ago
Exact reason why I love Paint.NET[0] Has all the features I need and you can install plugins, and I think that it's very intuitive. Used it to refine DALL-E pictures for my hobby-project. I work on a MacBook and Paint.NET is windows-only. There's a Windows VM on my MacBook with one single reason for its existence, I'll let you guess what that is. [0]https://getpaint.net/ https://getpaint.net/
pessimizer 2y ago
> I'm an occasional user and there's nothing I can do in under ten minutes of futzing or seeking tutorials. This is true of occasional users of Photoshop, too. If you don't know how to use Photoshop, its UI is an atrocity.
- throw46365 2y ago
  Right -- you have to know something that people don't ever tell you: Photoshop is a medium as much as it is an application. As a medium it has fundamentals, and once you know those fundamentals, you're not really chained to Photoshop. In my experience it's the occasional users of Photoshop who have the most trouble switching to anything else, because for them it is still icons and buttons and sliders and menu items they expect in certain places. If you've spent enough time with Photoshop and learned what is really happening, what blend modes are, how layers work deeply, switching is easier because it's much easier to recognise those same principles elsewhere. This, I think, is why Adobe has the predatorily priced Photoshop plan and is unwilling to put true power into Photoshop Elements (which was last a "cut down Photoshop" back at version 3.0 or so). They know that the underlying skills are portable.

bravetraveler 2y ago

Just a disclaimer: I haven't ever edited for anything serious. I'd be fine with an open 'paint' from Windows That said, I haven't noticed much change with GIMP over the years. It's... fine. The timeless one. Other/newer editors are around though. I hear good things about Krita

zelphirkalt 2y ago
According to a video I saw recently of a presentation by one of the main contributors to GIMP, it is even getting CMYK Support, a much belabored point of criticism in the past. Some significant improvements are coming.
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  Happy for those who have been waiting :) My requirements are well below that!

Lariscus 2y ago

I replaced Gimp with Krita. It is often said that Krita is made for digital painting rather than photo editing but I haven't missed any features so far.

Aerroon 2y ago
From my experience Krita didn't feel much better than GIMP. Stuff like the eraser being hidden under brushes is just weird compared to my previous experience.
- hellcow 2y ago
  If you're doing digital painting, it's probably just what you're used to. I disliked Krita until I spent a few weeks learning it. Once I found the "Krita way" of doing things, it was actually a much better experience than Photoshop offered for digital painting. I'd recommend finding a YouTube video where an artist takes you through how they use Krita to see some of the workflow and most common shortcuts.
raverbashing 2y ago
Krita is made for artists, not as a demo of a widget library (I'm half serious)
- Aissen 2y ago
  It's the other way around. The widget library was built for Gimp, then took a life of its own. Note that Gimp still has not released a version ported to GTK 3 (but the port is done since last year, in the 3.0 branch), released 13 years ago. GTK 4 has been released 4 years ago.

acomjean 2y ago

I started using GIMP again. I used color adjustment and creating images using 5-7 layers with layer masks and not normal blending. It worked well. I always find the program not quite intuitive initially but once I get it, it’s not bad. For sorting and basic photography edits I use Dark table. Still getting used to it. I showed a couple of those GIMP created pieces and people seemed to like them. My theory is people look at the final image and don’t care much how you got there.

telesilla 2y ago

I'm happy with Photopea, I'm a casual user of photpshop and this is a fine enough alternative for what I need to do (no extra plugins etc).

pawelmurias 2y ago

Gimp is horrible. It's existance propably has a negative value on society by discouraging kids from pursuing art when they try it.

dathinab 2y ago
I wouldn't agree with the first two parts of your sentence. But definitely with the last part.
DesiLurker 2y ago
I am an sw engineer and I dread having to use gimp. the main thing gimp designers dont understand is that when I am doing 'something' I dont wanna have to come out of that context and enter another context of 'how does this f*king s/w works' and remember that for another occasional thing i'll do a month down the road. Adobe could not have paid money and made gimp worse that it is right now UX wise.
EasyMark 2y ago
Why in the world would anyone use gimp for “art” when there is krita and Inkscape?

keiferski 2y ago

Gimp really ought to rebrand myself. I mean come on, who wants to use a program with that name? Even IMP is a hundred times better and lends itself to some impish branding assets.

dathinab 2y ago
for non native English speakers this often isn't an issue as the English word gimp is rarely used, so there is a good chance to more associate it with the software then the meaning behind the word.
- keiferski 2y ago
  It’s a terrible name, period. A substandard piece of software already has enough issues with marketing itself. Naming it with a word that means “cripple”, no matter how often it is used, is just such a poor decision that it’s not really surprising that no one cares about the app.
EasyMark 2y ago
Yeah I would love for them to change the name. I always wince when talking about it to someone who doesn’t know what it is. I have fallen back to “GNU Image”with some crowds :)
zelphirkalt 2y ago
Probably no one who really needed it would care abouy the name.

oniony 2y ago

I'm a casual user, and GIMP is totally usable and powerful, but some of the UI/UX choices are a little bizarre. For example: * Open a document, draw a selection box to copy a piece out and then close this document: it asks you if you want to save because the selection is actually part of the document. (I understand that if you had a complicated selection you might want to preserve it, but if it's a simple rectangle I think the default should probably be to assume you don't want it.) * Pasting an image into a document: it does this weird thing where it doesn't create a layer automatically and you have to decide each time whether you want a layer or to collapse the weird pseudo-layer thing down onto the existing layer. I'd rather it just created a layer. (Maybe there's a setting for this, I haven't looked too hard.) * I find I end up fighting with the multipurpose resize/skew/rotate tool. I can't remember exactly why, but it's a little unintuitive.

EasyMark 2y ago
Yep I’ve used it for all sorts of things like UI widgets and basic photo editing and animated gif creation. I wouldn’t know where to start with photoshop. I imagine going the other way after being a pro with photoshop for years would be jarring and make you think it’s the worst software ever created because you have muscle memory for everything in photoshop.

stephen_g 2y ago

I wanted to like Gimp, but I bought Pixelmator Pro on my Mac because I just couldn’t… Hard to describe, it’s just clunky if you know the professional tools well. But plenty of people do use it, so your mileage may vary. I hope the rough edges are polished down over time, but not at the moment for me.