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GIMP 3.0 is on the way
- albertzeyer 2y agoI find it a bit weird that Gimp does not use the latest GTK (i.e. GTK4, which was considered stable since 2020), even though GTK originates in the Gimp project itself. It actually seems to be quite a bit behind: This is now the first release of Gimp which started to use GTK3, i.e. before, it even still used GTK2 (reached end-of-life in 2020)?
- soulofmischief 2y agoFrom the second paragraph of the article: > GTK 4 has been available for a few years now, and is on the project's radar, but the plan was always to finish the GTK 3 work first.
- mdaniel 2y agoMaybe so, but did you actually open that "on the radar" link? It was closed WONTFIX because moving to the latest release of their bespoke library was considered "tech debt" :-/ https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/6440#note_1272638 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/6440#note_12726... I actually think it was terribly disingenuous of LWN to use "on the radar" language pointing at a closed issue. Maybe there is another issue (hiding in the 12,000 issues) that is actively tracking the Gtk4 migration, but that one ain't it
- cmyk_student 2y agoWe actually had a Google Summer of Code project this summer that explored porting one of our main GTK3 widgets to be compatible with GTK4. It's definitely on our radar, but it's not a major focus at this point.
- mdaniel 2y agoDo you have the correct issue that one could follow since 6440 isn't it? Also, since you're here: is it just a matter of glucose, and thus if someone were to port it to GTK4 that patch would be accepted, or it's quite literally "no user cares about library versions"?
- cmyk_student 2y agoIf someone submitted a patch that ported everything in GIMP to GTK4, I'm quite sure it'd be accepted after review. The trouble is that GTK4 deprecates or breaks a number of things as well. For instance, while the icon scaling system is much more flexible in GTK4, it's different than in GTK3 so all that work would have to be redone. GtkTreeViews are also becoming obsolete, and since GIMP relies on that for the layer/path/channel views, it'll be another big change. At the moment, new development is encouraged to follow the GTK3 -> GTK4 migration guidelines (e.g. use gtk_widget_set_visible () rather than gtk_widget_show (), don't use gtk_widget_destroy () since it's been removed, etc). I don't know a specific issue tracking GTK4 at the moment, but I can check.
- skerit 2y agoTrue but the leap from GTK2 to GTK3 is a lot bigger than from GTK3 to GTK4. I'm not sure when the "port" to GTK3 started, but if it was from before GTK4 was a thing, it makes sense that they wanted to finish the GTK3 stuff first.
- onli 2y agoHaving had to migrate a very simple project from GTK2 to GTK3, I don't think it's all that weird. The migration was utterly difficult, in the areas that hit me seemingly no effort was made to give proper migration paths. Only with some later published documentation (+ help from chatgpt) was it possible to restore some functionality later, after the initial migration. Finally that even meant calling the xlib directly. And note that the software used wxWidgets, so most of the changes were encapsulated there. Only a very small part of GDK/GTK was used directly, with wnck already used as a helper layer (but the functionality in question broke there as well). So even if GTK came from GIMP, if the later development in GTK was not made specifically for and by the GIMP project, the migration must have been a nightmare. Especially in a project that had so many other things to worry about, non-destructive editing alone. And to repeat such a migration now again for GTK4 will not be very enticing.
- mid-kid 2y agoFrom what I've heard surrounding this, GTK3 to GTK4 isn't as big of a jump as GTK2 to GTK3 was. The GTK3 port was finished first because there was already work in place for that, but we can expect a GTK4 port to be faster. That said, I haven't seen many apps that aren't specifically GNOME apps start using GTK4 in the first place, and as such I'm currently not using any GTK4 applications. I expect it to take a while before more things move to GTK4.
- creshal 2y agoGTK stands for "Gnome first every other user literally does not matter break them hard, break them often, make them give up ToolKit" these days, and has for quite a while.
- hulitu 2y agoThe funniest thing is that GTK used to stand for "Gimp toolkit". How times fly.
- sirwhinesalot 2y agoGTK4 removed a bunch of APIs for stupid reasons and GIMPs move to 3 started before 4 even existed. Had 4 at least tried to maintain some degree of compatibility then switching from 3 to 4 near the end would have been feasible. But that's not the case. If you aren't Gnome, GTK is not for you.
- kuschkufan 2y agoGuess what the "G" in GTK stands for historically
- pjmlp 2y agoThat was before GNOME took over, as it was supposed to be the answer against KDE and original Qt license. And here we are, having written articles about Gtkmm to The C/C++ Users Journal, I no longer care and run systems from Microsoft/Apple/Google instead.
- mattl 2y agoI think Harmony was the Qt replacement but I don’t think it lasted very long.
- pjmlp 2y agoThat was after Nokia acquisition from Trolltech. https://blogs.kde.org/2009/01/14/cute-harmony-qt-goes-lgpl/ https://blogs.kde.org/2009/01/14/cute-harmony-qt-goes-lgpl/
- mattl 2y agoDevelopment ceased at the end of 2000, when Qt was released under the GPL, removing the perceived need for the Harmony Project to exist. In January 2009 Qt itself was made available under the GNU LGPL, along with the previous license options.
- heavensteeth 2y ago
- themerone 2y agoGTK has become the Gnome toolkit , and the Gnome developers don't care about developers outside their umbrella.
- hulitu 2y ago> I find it a bit weird that Gimp does not use the latest GTK Which is ? GTK 6 ? GTK is a moving target (like a lot of libraries those days). /s
- skowalak 2y agoReally looking forward to see more non-destructive editing. For me this has been one of the major reasons not to use GIMP in the past. The integration of GEGL is a huge milestone for GIMP imho.
- canistel 2y agoCMYK, finally. Hopefully this will lead to wider adoption, especially in the professional circles...
- rafaelmn 2y agoHow relevant is print these days ? Coming from that background it's depressing to see my former coworkers working in a shrinking market, and the only people in graphics I know that are making reasonable money are in digital. Not to say that it's irrelevant just that at this point it feels like it kind of missed the boat in this space.
- martin_a 2y ago> How relevant is print these days? Still quite relevant, especially in some areas. Think about packaging and labeling, there's just not really a way around print in these areas. Besides that, digital print is the future. Print also needs to become clever and data-driven, more personalized and tailored to the recipient, but that's hard work. Example: Just last week I received a catalogue with the fall/winter collection of a larger clothing brand. I threw it away immediately. Lots of things in it that are not my size, or my style or whatnot. A personalized product would have helped. Pick articles similar to those I own (you got this data from my previous orders), only show articles that are available in XXL or larger (look at the sizes I kept and did not return) and that's it. "Hey Martin, these are _your_ pieces for the winter season, enjoy!" Maybe it's only 16 pages then instead of 50+ but it would have been a much better experience for me. Also cheaper to print and ship for the store but with a much higher value. But yeah, programmatic printing is hard(er) to do then order 100k catalogues from the cheapest shop you'll find.
- kookamamie 2y agoI don't think anyone working in print would use Gimp, though?
- martin_a 2y ago
- account42 2y ago[flagged]
- lastdong 2y agoFinally updated UI! I really hope it inspires more updates and brings in even more people, just like when Blender revamped their UX a few years back and saw an amazing boost in popularity.
- rkharsan64 2y agoDoes this change include any UX improvements? The article only mentions updated visuals and theming. From the discussions I've read, it's the UX of GIMP that holds it back.
- pessimizer 2y agoIt's just Photoshop addicts needing the UI to be identical to Photoshop because when they use GIMP their muscle memory is broken. To be fair, though, all industry professionals are forced to be Photoshop addicts. But Photoshop's UI is objectively awful; it's the 10,000 hours you spent in it that makes it seem sane. You could have learned Thai in 10,000 hours, too. The real weaknesses in GIMP have been in its lack of some necessary functionality, especially some that is necessary for print. The great thing about being GPL is that when the stuff is eventually added, you own it forever.
- cameronh90 2y agoPhotoshop's UX is poor, but everyone is used to it. GIMP's UX is even worse, and nobody is used to it. And based on those screenshots in the article, it has, if anything, got even weirder and less intuitive. I'd probably try and power through if there was even close to feature parity, but it's only just now catching up with where Photoshop was in 1994.
- KaiserPro 2y agoGimp's UX was ok in 0.9, same with photoshop. GIMP was meant to be a drop in replacement for early photoshop, so it makes sense that it follows that UX idea.
- 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- siliconpotato 2y agobecause of the unpleasant name of the app (which the devs refuse to change), lets normalise pronouncing the G in GIMP like the G in GIF...
- peter-m80 2y agoI see what you did there
- Euphorbium 2y agoGimp pronounced like jimp? Might save this disgusting name.
- losthalo 2y agoAnd thus the Gimp-Jimp wars began, even more brutal than the XEmacs-GNUEmacs wars.
- soulofmischief 2y agoI started using GIMP around 2003 as a small child, and I remember being hyped for 3.0 and non-destructive editing even back then. I'm in my thirties now. Slow and steady wins the race. Congrats to the GIMP team, can't imagine the catharsis they will experience when 3.0 officially drops.
- verisimi 2y agoIndeed, you can't hurry v3.
- trumpeta 2y agoangry Python noises
- asddubs 2y agonot sure if i would call taking 20 years for a release "steady"
- glonq 2y agoCongrats to the GIMP team for being more spry than the HURD team ;)
- prmoustache 2y agoThere have been many many releases between 2.0 and 3.0. And many releases in the 2.99.x branch specifically. Many other projects would have simply switched to a different versionning scheme and got rid of beta versions to simply iterate on releases like web browsers do nowadays.
- asddubs 2y agoYes, my comment was mostly meant tongue-in-cheek. I have my gripes about GIMPs UI but I have all the sympathy in the world for complicated updates taking a long time when done by volunteers, especially because they wanted to combine all plugin-breaking features into one release.
- peter-m80 2y agois it possible to draw a circle without using a combination of 3 different tools?
- kookamamie 2y agoNo, that kind of technology is still beyond us.
- pjmlp 2y agoor any other kind of geometric form, withouth going into path land, nope.
- peter-m80 2y agoI found a simple 8-step guide to draw a circle: https://alvinalexander.com/gimp/gimp-how-to-create-draw-circle-in-gimp-tutorial/ https://alvinalexander.com/gimp/gimp-how-to-create-draw-circ... Please gimp devs, fix the basics
- asddubs 2y agoor move a selection on a layer without having to know a 3-key combination shortcut
- rererereferred 2y agoUse Inkscape for that.
- peter-m80 2y ago
- papaman 2y ago[dead]
- joaomacp 2y agoI use Gimp from time to time, and often get frustrated with its... unique UI. It's nice to see they're hearing feedback and working on it :D A tip for others that feel the same: if you've used Photoshop before and are used to its UI, try the free Photopea website. It's a Photoshop "clone" that works really well in web (I believe it's a solo dev doing it too). It's replaced Gimp for me lately.
- Mashimo 2y agoYes, even though I never use photoshop and used Gimp for over 15 years it's a frustrating UI. I dislike it. Non destructive editing is a big upgrade though. I also use Photopea from time to time. Can recommend.
- GaggiX 2y agoIf only a mad man would make a Photopea/Photoshop clone open source, then everyone (who has the skills) would be able to not only use a decent open source image editor, but one that can be fully customized to your needs.
- cranberryturkey 2y agoHave you tried Krita yet?
- mfld 2y agoI like using pinta for the "easy" cases.
- 0points 2y agoI would recommend Krita instead of a website. Websites are not automatically free or opensource, they also require internet access and can sneakily copy the files you are working with. If photopea is free today, it may cost money tomorrow. Krita exists for Windows and macOS too nowadays. https://krita.org/en/ https://krita.org/en/
- porridgeraisin 2y ago
- chris_wot 2y agoCMYK - the K is Klein, or black. Surely not key? Or has something changed?
- RugnirViking 2y agoKlein? that means small. Schwartz is black
- chris_wot 2y agoI completely stand corrected.
- mqus 2y agomini-nitpick for everyone that might be confused: it's "schwarz" (without t), Schwartz is a name of a lot of people.
- mauricioc 2y agoValid point, but I will also amend your nitpick: Schwarz is also a name of a lot of people :) Both refer to hair colour, I think. "Schwartz" was a valid spelling for the colour many centuries ago (see, e.g., item 15 in [1]), which makes sense since both spellings are pronounced the same way. Surnames don't follow spelling changes, so that's the only situation in which both variants coexist now. In maths, you have the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality and Schwartz's theory of distributions. [1] https://woerterbuchnetz.de/?sigle=DWB&lemid=S04549 https://woerterbuchnetz.de/?sigle=DWB&lemid=S04549
- cozzyd 2y agoIt's a pity there's no schwarz-schwartz like there is Lorenz-lorentz
- zuminator 2y agoSurely is key. The "key" plate in printing is the main plate with the most detail in the color separation, and it's typically black, hence key equals black.
- lovegrenoble 2y agoaffinity is the best one: https://affinity.serif.com https://affinity.serif.com Affinity V2 Universal Licence For macOS, Windows & iPadOS
- david_draco 2y agoDoesn't seem to be open source: https://opensource.org/licenses?ls=affinity https://opensource.org/licenses?ls=affinity
- lovegrenoble 2y agoNot open source, but too good for a few bucks...
- adham-omran 2y agoUnfortunately, they seem to have moved to a different vendor for payment processing in the past year or two and now I get "The product you selected is not available in your location." Lucky me I still have V1 from a few years back, it's a shame though.
- rmsaksida 2y agoAffinity is good but it's a shame they don't have a Linux version.
- lovegrenoble 2y agoTo run on Linux: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/182758-affinity-suite-v2-on-linux-wine/&/topic/182758-affinity-suite-v204-on-linux-wine/= https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/182758-aff...
- macronitis 2y ago[flagged]
- rererereferred 2y agoWasn't there already a fork that changed the name?
- Farfignoggen 2y agoDoes Gimp 3.0 still behave the same for GIF Animations and I use that feature extensively and the behavior for that needs to remain the same for cropping, scaling, and frame rates editing or I'll have remain on the older GIMP. So there needs to be someone testing Gimp 3.0 against the previous version to see of any behaviors are not the same and sometimes that can affect workflows greatly!
- rererereferred 2y agoSounds like you would be great at it since you know the feature inside-out! You can download the RCs and send bug reports.
- cmyk_student 2y agoHi! I don't think there's been any specific changes for GIF animations, outside of improvements (like fixing a bug where overwriting a GIF animation without the GUI would lose the animation status, or adding the ability to import non-square pixel resolutions). But yes, please test and let us know - we'll be happy to look at it and fix as we can!
- bastloing 2y agoGimp seems way to complicated still. I played around with krita, it's way better for what I do.
- vanderZwan 2y ago> GIMP 3.0 supports palettes outside of the "Standard Red Green Blue" (sRGB) range, such as "Cyan Magenta Yellow Key" (CMYK) and (CIELAB). This expanded color support, especially for CMYK, is essential to those who work with print and desktop publishing. However, GIMP continues to use sRGB, grayscale, and indexed colors for storing color information internally for now. Conversion to other color spaces is done on output, where necessary. The wording here is confusing, because it makes it sound like CMYK/CIELAB will only be applied at the very end of the image transformation pipeline. That would really limit the usefulness of adding these extra color spaces, since doing the manipulation in a different color space than RGB is often the point. But the linked blog post on GIMP.org[0] words it a little differently: > What it means for color correctness in particular is that we will now do color conversion only when needed (last-second conversion) and therefore won’t lose information when it could have been avoided. For instance, say you color-pick color from an image: if we were to convert to an intermediate format, before using it on a second image (which may or may not be in another color format), we’d do 2 conversions. Which means more possibility of precision loss. The issue is even more flagrant if the input and output formats are the same (i.e. no conversion should happen at all). And this will be even more a problem when we will have core CMYK backend (we really want to avoid doing a round-trip to an intermediate format with CMYK, which doesn’t have bijective conversion with most other color models, even when working unbounded and ignoring precision issues). That sounds more like the information of the original color space will be kept as well, and transformations will be applied only when necessary, to avoid lossy roundtrips. Which is not quite the same. [0] https://www.gimp.org/news/2024/02/21/gimp-2-99-18-released/#color-space-invasion https://www.gimp.org/news/2024/02/21/gimp-2-99-18-released/#...
- chongli 2y agoThis doesn’t make any sense to me. If I have 2 CMYK images open I should be able to colour pick and copy/paste between them and do any other sorts of manipulations with them without any colour space conversions taking place. The only colour space transformation that should happen when working with a CMYK image is when the image is displayed on screen. The CMYK data is interpreted with the attached colour profile (perhaps provided by the commercial printer I’m using) and then the colours are converted to RGB via my monitor’s profile and displayed on screen. None of these converted colours are ever saved in the file, and they need to be updated whenever any part of the image is altered (say using a dirty region -> repaint system). Now if I do happen to open both a CMYK image and an RGB image and then try to copy and paste part of the RGB image into the CMYK one then a one-time conversion to CMYK needs to take place. Otherwise if I’m working only with CMYK images then no conversions should take place. It sounds to me like the GIMP may have been written so that all of its operations are specialized to work with RGB pixels and so they cannot implement native editing on CMYK images without doing round trip conversions all over the place? If that’s the case then they need to buckle down and do the hard work of rewriting everything to be colour space independent. I also want to note that Photoshop added CMYK support in version 2.0 which was released in 1991. This was before they even added layers! Photoshop was essentially designed for print almost from the very beginning. Having all the colour space stuff figured out before adding huge numbers of features was a major advantage. Trying to retrofit CMYK support into the GIMP seems like a bit of a nightmare.
- James_K 2y agoI'm told it's taken them two decades to release this essential feature. What have they been doing for all this time? I think they need to talk to people who edit photos, and focus their efforts on the many low-hanging fruit which would drastically improve the UX of their app (much like Blender did). Perhaps they are doing this to a degree, I see mentions of UI changes, but I wonder why they only think of it now and if they're involving the right people.
- squigz 2y agohttps://developer.gimp.org/core/submit-patch/ https://developer.gimp.org/core/submit-patch/
- James_K 2y agoI fell for this before. Wasted a few weeks' free time adding thumbnails to the GTK file chooser, only to find out that the library itself has bugs which they refused to fix that make it difficult to do. Now I just have a patched version installed locally. The only way to improve these projects is to change how they're managed, which you can't do with a patch.
- tuna74 2y agoThere is thumbnails support in the GTK4 file chooser now. That probably required shitloads of fixes in GTK, but now it works. The way to change projects is to write good code and work together with the other devs that made something you wanted to contribute to and then improve it together.
- James_K 2y agoI fundamentally disagree. The problem isn't that there were no thumbnails, but that it took decades to implement them. The cause of that problem can't seriously have been that people weren't programming hard enough. I think lots of code was likely written in that time. If we assume, as you seem to, that the issue was not enough code being written, then GTK would need to increase its count of contributors by 120 times to ship that feature in the span of two months. Your implication here is that it takes thousands of people multiple months to program a file chooser with thumbnails. I think one person should be able to do it in that time, and that the problem was something other than writing code. What has changed about the project to guarantee that the next important feature won't take 20 years to implement?
- lottin 2y ago> this release has transitioned to using GTK's header bar component, typically used to combine an application's toolbar and title bar into one unit This is a step backward. Access to the window manager menu becomes difficult as a result.
- extraduder_ire 2y agoDo you mean the menu you get from holding super and right clicking on the window? I don't think I ever access that menu from the titlebar. But that's mostly because the unity DE is where I built most of my muscle memory.
- hu3 2y agoI used GIMP earlier today. So thank you all involved! After so many years I keep going back to it for quick edits.
- inferiorhuman 2y agoAfter so many years I keep going back to it for quick edits. Interesting. I found that the UI changes, especially the export nonsense, made GIMP less useful and more of a colossal hassle for quick edits.
- mdaniel 2y agoI got excited because I thought the headline meant it was out, but no, the first sentence says "3.0 is on the way" but given this project's release cadence that sentence could mean any number of time units
- superkuh 2y agoI hope this doesn't lead distros to drop gtk2 libraries. There are still many programs beyond gimp that use them. But without a big name like gimp to justify their continued packaging we may lose them.
- mdaniel 2y agoSurely there is no sane distro that would just YOLO a "Depends:" for an application, and what are depends declarations for except for dragging gtk2 or gtk0.59beta libraries in to support the requested install
- superkuh 2y agoYeah. I thought the same thing before it happened to the gtk1 libs and the programs I used to use (xmms, etc) stopped being supported generally.
- nox101 2y agoI'm happy gIMP is still being worked on. That said, I'm a photoshop user and I find all my personal needs are covered by Photopea (https://photopea.com https://photopea.com). It feels like it duplicates all of the photoshop features I regularly use including non-destructive editing, smart layers, and non-destructive layer blending options like stroke, outline, outer-shadow, inner-shadow, solid-color, that I use often. And it runs instantly on any machine I'm at It's not open source though so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯