4 ms·

I have a great deal of historical fondness for GIMP, dating back to the Spencer Kimball/Peter Mattis Gimp 0.5x. One of their last contributions to GIMP before m

by mschaef 12y ago

I have a great deal of historical fondness for GIMP, dating back to the Spencer Kimball/Peter Mattis Gimp 0.5x. One of their last contributions to GIMP before moving on was to develop GTK as a part of the non-Motif GIMP 0.9x series. Gimp thus acted as a natural rallying point for would-be Gnome developers as they reacted to KDE's choice of the non-open-source-at-the-time QT toolkit. Gimp really has been very important to the open source GUI landscape.... That makes it all the more sad that Gimp development seems to have stalled, relative to other open source imaging packages. Gimp was 8bpp in 1995 and 19 years later Gimp is still 8bpp. I had had a great deal of hope for the GEGL architecture, but these days I get the distinct impression that the project picked an architecture that was beyond the ability of the available developers to complete in a reasonable amount of time. Krita, Paint.NET, and the GIMP-based Cinepaint are all existance proofs that it's possible to implement high color depth image editing in open source in less than 20 years.

StevePerkins 12y ago
Thanks for that. I'm a fairly casual user of GIMP, using it just to tweak graphics for web pages rather than "serious" creative design work. I use GIMP simply because I wasn't aware that any other acceptable open-source Photoshop-alternatives even exist. How would you compare Krita, Paint.NET, and the Cinepaint fork for untrained web graphic users?
- mschaef 12y ago
  If all you're doing is tweaking icon-style graphics for web pages then Gimp is still a good choice. Where Gimp really starts to fall short is when you need color management, alternative color spaces, and bit-depths beyond 8bpp. For me personally this means that I don't use Gimp for photo editing; For that, I switched to Adobe Lightroom a few years ago. It's not open source, but it's inexpensive, it works very well, and has a feature set that's closely aligned to a photographic workflow.
- paulmd 12y ago
  I have not used the other two for comparison, but Paint.Net is my go-to recommendation for casual graphics editing. It's not Photoshop or Illustrator, of course, but all the features you need for basic photo adjustments and light-duty layout type stuff. At a glance, Krita looks pretty nice for doing artworks from scratch.

by mschaef 12y ago

StevePerkins 12y ago

Thanks for that. I'm a fairly casual user of GIMP, using it just to tweak graphics for web pages rather than "serious" creative design work. I use GIMP simply because I wasn't aware that any other acceptable open-source Photoshop-alternatives even exist. How would you compare Krita, Paint.NET, and the Cinepaint fork for untrained web graphic users?

mschaef 12y ago
If all you're doing is tweaking icon-style graphics for web pages then Gimp is still a good choice. Where Gimp really starts to fall short is when you need color management, alternative color spaces, and bit-depths beyond 8bpp. For me personally this means that I don't use Gimp for photo editing; For that, I switched to Adobe Lightroom a few years ago. It's not open source, but it's inexpensive, it works very well, and has a feature set that's closely aligned to a photographic workflow.
paulmd 12y ago
I have not used the other two for comparison, but Paint.Net is my go-to recommendation for casual graphics editing. It's not Photoshop or Illustrator, of course, but all the features you need for basic photo adjustments and light-duty layout type stuff. At a glance, Krita looks pretty nice for doing artworks from scratch.