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I really want Gimp to succeed. It's a software I've been trying to use since more than 20 years now but the UX is so clunky.... and different than Photoshop. Mu
by 10729287 2y ago
I really want Gimp to succeed. It's a software I've been trying to use since more than 20 years now but the UX is so clunky.... and different than Photoshop. Muscle Memory is a thing.
I'm moving my main machine from macOS to Linux (which I also used partially since 20years), moving from a mac mini M1 to a lovely Lenovo M75Q-1 and so far the experience has been great.
I'm a (enthusiast) photographer and I have big hopes for that 3.0 release of Gimp. I'm ready to learn something else and freeing myself from Adobe.
If I can manage my workflow, that will probably seal the deal. Everything else works fine and is unbelivably smooth while macOS had been very frustrating lately.
- cadamsdotcom 2y agoExciting to be trying something new! Curious what drove the switch? You say macOS had been very frustrating lately, anything that made it particularly so?
- 10729287 2y agoI've always been tempted by Linux as my main driver, being myself an idealist. But making the move always been hard while I always had linux secondary machines around. My main reproaches towards macOS are weird choices Apple is imposing his users or the lack of compatibility with other systems : - Mail.app and the way it persists with its ridiculous way of handling attachements (I use Thunderbird) - Having to install additional apps to have an decent window manager or finder : Alt-Tab, Rectangle, new file menu - Not being able to pop a calendar while clicking on the clock - SMB compatibility is hell - Finder is hell - ... Too much customisations needed while Linux "just works". The recent position of the brand toward politics made me take the plunge.
- prox 2y agoI would love Gimp to succeed but Gimp is made by coders for coders (as you might expect from a open source program) and not by visual artists for visual artists. I don’t have a lot of hope. For years I have been using Affinity and it’s been really good, haven’t looked back. Unfortunately it’s not on linux.
- homarp 2y ago>for coders https://www.gimp.org/news/2025/01/27/gimp-team-zemarmot-fosdem-2025/ https://www.gimp.org/news/2025/01/27/gimp-team-zemarmot-fosd... Gimp is being used,and improved along the way, to make an animation movie. Jehan (scenarist, technical) of that movie is also a core maintainer.
- npteljes 2y agoGimp is nearing 30 years old, and it has been used for at most a handful of animation movies. I think, regarding its usage, that this is more of an outlier, than a main purpose of the software. So I don't think that this example refutes OP's point.
- homarp 2y agoand I think otherwise https://girinstud.io/news/2018/04/zemarmot-main-contributor-of-gimp-2-10-0-rc1/ https://girinstud.io/news/2018/04/zemarmot-main-contributor-...
- npteljes 2y agoI do know about the movie, and having one (upcoming even) movie being made about GIMP doesn't say anything about its usage, or it not being made for coders. Being made for coders is a bad claim as well, at most, it's a jab at its user interface, which, I think, is no worse then Photoshop's by the way, it's just that people are familiar with one, and the not the other. A good refutal of the for-coders claim would be that it's one of the default image editor most commonly included with major Linux distributions. That's a much larger thing than it being just made for coders.
- npteljes 2y agos/about GIMP/with GIMP/
- prmoustache 2y ago
- Zardoz84 2y agoThe UI improved years ago. And they revamped the UI in Gimp 3.0 and latest InkScape.
- t3rra 2y agoIt isn't alternative to photoshop though, what about darktable (https://www.darktable.org/ https://www.darktable.org/)? I could be wrong but it is more of an alternative to lightroom afaik. Have you used?
- 10729287 2y agoThanks for the suggestion. I've never been really into the "catalog" apps, starting from itunes. Always been more of a winamp guy ;) I like to browse my files from the explorer and not having to deal with a software to navigate or a software to catalog files and corrupting my filetree. I've been using gimp since one week and so far, once you start trying to understand what's going on (something I never allowed it since 20 years I've tried), it's really not that bad.
- MrDrMcCoy 2y agoDarktable may have a catalog, but like you, I've never seen the value in that. It's primary purpose is as a RAW editor, and it's pretty good at that. Highly recommend it as a first pass for any digital photography. That, or Rawtherapee.
- dsego 2y agoThere is also rawtherapee.
- 4k93n2 2y agogimp became way less annoying once i discovered the command pallette (the forward slash key), you can pretty much do everything with it. i even use it to switch tools sometimes sinces its easier than trying to look through all the tool icons or having to long press them
- robinsonb5 2y agoThanks for that - I've been using GIMP regularly more than two decades and didn't know about that trick!
- gloflo 2y agoIt was easier when the icons had color and were not grouped into multiple tools behind one icon.
- cmyk_student 2y agoYou can change both if you like (it's one of the first things I do whenever I install GIMP on new systems)! In 2.10, you can change the icons in Preferences under the Icon Theme section, and remove tool groups in the Toolbox section. In 3.0 it's even easier, as both options are available in the Personalize tab of the Welcome Dialogue. I'm hoping this will help make that feature more discoverable. :)
- gloflo 2y agoThank you! This comment made my day.
- archerx 2y agoTry Krita, it’s free, opensource and what gimp should have been all along.
- snvzz 2y agoDifferent focus. Krita is for free drawing, gimp is a photoshop replacement. I do agree they probably would benefit from trying Krita.
- threeducks 2y agoI often hear that Krita has a different focus, but does it lack anything that GIMP has? (disregarding obscure features like bell pepper brush)
- tux3 2y ago(And I'm sure someone has ported the pepper brush as well!)
- archerx 2y agoI haven't missed anything in my usage, I just wish it had photoshop's easy automation tools where I could record and save my actions but Krita has scripting support so I'll learn that eventually.
- prmoustache 2y agoYes it does. I am mostly using krita for painting and gimp for general editing and composing usually so I haven't double-checked every single feature on both but I have one example: krita can open a pdf but cannot save it and doesn't even have a "print" functionality. Found out when trying to sign a contract with krita on my convertible thinkpad. Gimp makes it a breeze in comparison. I am sure there are other features missing in both directions. It is great to have choice.
- noisem4ker 2y agoKrita is a better Photoshop than GIMP, in my opinion. I don't care what its intended usage is.
- pjmlp 2y agoI just want to draw lines and geometric shapes, without having to deal with paths, like in any other sane graphical program. Has this been finally sorted out?
- soulofmischief 2y agoInkscape is an SVG editor. It's in the name. I for one love having a tool with semantics so close to the format, instead of dealing with Illustrator's nonsense. Sometimes Illustrator is the right tool, but as a web developer, Inkscape is the only sane tool for manipulating SVG.
- pjmlp 2y agoThe point is this a solved problem in every other paint program out there since Xerox, no one is asking for drawing SVG. But it never gets sorted out due to whatever ideologic feeling Gimp developers have with offering only paths as option.
- soulofmischief 2y agoMy post was irrelevant anyway, somehow I misread and thought you were replying to a post about Inkscape. Sorry about that!
- pjmlp 2y agoNo issues, I imagined just as much.
- bonoboTP 2y agoYou might like Pinta. It's my favorite no nonsense image editor for basic drawing and quickly changing stuff. Not for big projects, just editing a few pixels, resizing, brightness, cropping, painting, flood filling, basically classic MS Paint but with layers. It's a fork of Paint.NET, which happens to be my favorite image editor on Windows. The Mono-based port is a bit flaky and crashes sometimes, but the Gimp UX is just unusable for me, so Pinta it is. I tried gimp many times, but I just end up reading forums and often the program either can't do the small stuff I want, or it takes 5 minutes of clicks.
- billfruit 2y agoIn a recent attempt to use Gimp for a small project, a few features I found were lacking: 1. Viewing the layer boundaries of all layers. Very helpful in seeing the total layout of the project. 2. Select multiple layers and do operations like move/align.
- capitainenemo 2y agoYou can move multiple layers if they are in a layer group, at least in gimp 2.10 The group also shows the outline of the bounding box of all layers in it, although that's not quite the same as the layer outlines ofc.
- cmyk_student 2y agoI think both of those are resolved in GIMP 3. You can multi-select layers, and when you do it shows the total boundary for all selected layers. If you're willing to try it out, feel free to share if there are other issues you'd like us to look at!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tasuki 2y ago> I'm a (enthusiast) photographer and I have big hopes for that 3.0 release of Gimp. I'm ready to learn something else and freeing myself from Adobe. GIMP is for general graphics stuff. Try DarkTable, which was made specifically for photography editing and is very good at it.
- mamonoleechi 2y agoI switched from Photoshop CS to Gimp, and it took me 5 years at the time :) I kept on working on CS for that time, and ran gimp on the side on a VM running linux (it was the crunchbang distribution, a cool debian distrib). Gimp's Dotfiles on Linux are really well done, once your settings are done, you keep them forever (i barely changed them now for a decade). I was really used to Photoshop (used it from photoshop 4 to CS) ; a good idea would be to change Gimp's bindings to the one you have on photoshop. Some stuff won't work as well as Photoshop, the best is to experiment, and find alternatives maybe not in the most optimal way. I used to produce pictures, and then tried to do the same thing on Gimp, using the same source files. Stopping when I was stuck, trying to find other ways to work.