Isn't that the beauty of OSS? People can fork projects for whatever reason they want to.
They are not at all hostile to GIMP--they encourage donating to the GIMP org--but I think their reasons for an alternative are sound:
Glimpse Image Editor is an optional alternative intended to assist users that are offended or made uncomfortable by the "gimp" name, and assist free software advocates that encounter barriers when they recommend the GNU Image Manipulation Program to friends, family, coworkers and employers.
However, Glimpse does have some other differences from GIMP which might interest you:
We also focus on making the software more "enterprise ready" so it is easier to modify and distribute for schools and workplaces. That means fewer "easter eggs", improved build and packaging tooling/documentation, backported fixes on a known-stable base we support for at least a year, and a more efficient Windows installer. We also plan to have a more predictable release cadence, as that will assist IT departments with their software deployment schedules.
> One of the aspects of Trustworthy Computing is that you can trust what's on your computer. Part of that means that there's absolutely NOTHING on your computer that isn't planned. If the manufacturer of the software that's on every desktop in your company can't stop their developers from sneaking undocumented features into the product (even features as relatively benign as an Easter Egg), how can you be sure that they've not snuck some other undocumented feature into the code.
If Gimp implementors had spent less time on "light-hearted and fun" and more on boring but actually important stuff like rendering text well, I might not have spent the last decade or so steering everyone I possibly can away from Gimp and toward Photoshop for professional work.
I took a chance on the Gimp because I believed in the cause - I wanted it to be a viable alternative to Photoshop. It very nearly cost my firm a contract big enough that losing it would probably have put us out of business - and would certainly have put me out of a job. Software that screws up that badly doesn't get a second chance.
Well, I suspect they build the thing to the degree they need the thing. I use GIMP for some stuff but I can't draw on it like I can draw on Krita, for instance. Pity it didn't work for you.
> I took a chance on the Gimp ... It very nearly cost my firm a contract big enough that losing it would probably have put us out of business... Software that screws up that badly doesn't get a second chance.
I'll be 100% blunt and unpleasant here, OK?
You tried using this software in production without prior testing. And yet somehow the developers of that software are to blame? I'm afraid, this means that in the decade that passed since then you learned nothing.
Who said anything about a lack of prior testing? I hadn't used it with such a business-critical client before, but that's not the same as saying I hadn't used it before.
It's also not the same thing as saying I am, or then was, a fool. But your own uncharitable and erroneous assumptions are your concern, not mine, for all that they and others like them have long since ceased to surprise me in the context of criticizing a beloved FSF flagship product.
I mean, look, I get it, okay? You're a Gimp contributor [1], it's easy to feel attacked when somebody criticizes your work, especially when that work is very meaningful to you. But that's no excuse to deliberately mischaracterize what I've been saying, as you have done in this thread. If you think I'm wrong, you can find a way to say so that doesn't require also calling me incompetent.
As I said, I understand that it's easy to feel attacked when someone criticizes your work. But that's still no excuse to make it personal, the way you're doing here, or the way you have considerable prior form [2] for doing. It's not just that this sort of behavior on your part is rude and uncalled for, although it is also those things. Such behavior - and I'd think this would be important to you, even if simple courtesy evidently is not - gives an extremely poor representation of the same project you're trying to defend.
I'm not going to get any further into this with you, because there's clearly no point in doing so. Your mind is, by all the available evidence, extremely made up, and I don't come to Hacker News to be pointlessly insulted.
But, to briefly reiterate in parting what others have already said at length, you might consider changing your behavior, whether to maintain civility in discussions of this sort, or if you can't manage that, then simply to avoid engaging in them at all. What you're doing right now does neither the Gimp, nor its current and past contributors, any good at all.
I can't find a specific criticism of the GIMP in any of your posts in this thread. Saying something is bad and not professional is in no way actionable. It's also very easy to disagree with.
You've just spent a lot of time writing this to refute my argument but all you really said is that I mischaracterized what you've been saying.
Well, nope, I did not. In this particular thread, you took literally zero responsibility for your decision. You blamed it all on software and developers.
Look, it's not a heavily guarded secret that GIMP is not great for certain workflows and tasks. It's not a big fucking secret. The text tool, in particular, would do with a rewrite (which might happen at some point, among gazillion other things). Literally everyone who tried it knows that.
It was your responsibility to pick the right tool for the job, and you messed up. So how about, instead of telling me to change my behavior, you start with yourself, step the hell up and start admitting your failures? Like a grown-up, you know.
Oh, and you'd make a great pair — Niccolo and you. It takes a special kind of a person to attack someone, shower him in expletives, then follow him around internet to tell everyone how bad that person is. You'd make great friends.
Okay, no, that's fair. You're absolutely right! I messed up. I made a mistake.
Specifically, I took the people who promote the Gimp at their word when they said it was, in every respect, a viable libre replacement for Photoshop. And I took the Gimp's ability to do trivial work acceptably, if without much comfort in the UI, as cause for confidence that it would do significantly complex work acceptably, as well. You're right, though. When quality of results really counted, I was wrong to rely on the Gimp.
Those claims of quality are still made on Gimp's behalf, maybe you know. RMS has been known to repeat them in public. It may interest you to hear that, when he and I had this same argument, I recall there being a great deal less swearing involved, and many fewer personal attacks. I have to admit, I don't really find those additions to be an improvement.
It's odd, though. By default, the claim is still that Gimp is a viable libre replacement for Photoshop. But as soon as someone happens to criticize some specific aspect of Gimp's functionality - in this case, its ongoing inability to render text at a level of quality comparable with Photoshop and with its commercial competitors more generally - suddenly "everybody knows" that that specific part of the Gimp isn't ready for prime time, never has been, and anyone would have to be a complete muppet to imagine it was intended for serious use.
I don't really know why that is. But, whatever the reason, it definitely doesn't incline me to feel differently about the software. I can't in good conscience recommend anyone use a tool that even its own strongest advocates so readily agree is so frequently unfit for purpose. That would be a worse mistake than to ever have thought the Gimp to be reliable in the first place.
Can't you just point to a concrete, specific problem with the Gimp (apart from its name, or the fact that it has a couple of easter eggs)? This is getting too abstract to be useful.
> Specifically, I took the people who promote the Gimp at their word when they said it was, in every respect, a viable libre replacement for Photoshop.
You know what, this is where I completely agree with you. I'm very much against the idea of promoting GIMP as a Photoshop replacement because it will always lead to frustration. It cannot be otherwise. The software was never designed for that.
There are unavoidable similarities, some tools are specifically designed like Photoshop's ones simply because the way it's done in Photoshop makes sense for GIMP as well. But that is pretty much it.
> Those claims of quality are still made on Gimp's behalf, maybe you know. RMS has been known to repeat them in public.
I never heard RMS saying any such thing. But then again, how would I know? I don't follow him, I can't stand the guy.
> But as soon as someone happens to criticize some specific aspect of Gimp's functionality - in this case, its ongoing inability to render text at a level of quality comparable with Photoshop and with its commercial competitors more generally - suddenly "everybody knows" that that specific part of the Gimp isn't ready for prime time, never has been, and anyone would have to be a complete muppet to imagine it was intended for serious use.
I'm afraid you are conflating things here. So lemme unload a little.
Like every other software (incl. Photoshop), GIMP has loose ends, bad design decisions, etc. As a team member, I don't mind admitting it. Noone in the team minds publicly admitting it. There's no point arguing against obvious things.
So... Can you do serious work with GIMP? Yes, we've seen use cases of complex work. Commercial-grade work, shitload of layers etc.
Do you need workarounds? Depends on the project and the kind of manipulations involved.
Are there things impossible to do as compared to Photoshop? Yes, of course. All the 3D stuff, vector layers, smart objects are among the first things I can think of.
Are things getting better? Yes. Just two days ago I was talking to our guy who does a lot of work on performance. He has a test project file from a user. A real project, 500+ layers, over 1GB large. GIMP used to just crash on it. Now? No crashes, pretty much usable.
Would you be pleased if you tried again? I don't know, that is not up to me to decide.
I doubt I would, not least because most of my use cases for image editing these days revolve around photography, and FOSS library support for late-model Nikon raws just isn't where I need it to be. No shade on the devs and maintainers, it's a closed format and they have no support. But I still can't get the quality out of Darktable that I can from Lightroom, so I use Lightroom. (I'd miss my Loupedeck a lot, too.)
I did pull down the current Gimp yesterday to do a quick test of text rendering cases similar to the ones that it failed so badly on back a decade ago. The results were the same as I remember them: aliasing everywhere, illegible at small sizes even in very high-DPI files. If I had to guess, I'd think Gimp just always rasterizes text at 72dpi and then nearest-neighbors it up to match the file resolution, but that's just a guess based on the behavior I'm seeing; I haven't been into the code.
Granted, high-DPI displays were quite rare back in 2009-2010. Print workflows weren't, though. In 2020, displays >72dpi are rapidly becoming the default. Print still exists, too. Both of those are things you'd expect to see well supported in a tool whose homepage advertises it as suitable for photographers and graphic designers, among others.
> We also focus on making the software more "enterprise ready" so it is easier to modify and distribute for schools and workplaces. That means fewer "easter eggs",
Honestly, I don't understand how can people be so severely misguided. If one place would benefit greatly for easter eggs in free software is precisely a school.
But if they are backporting useful documentation, well, it's alright. There's nothing wrong with a fork, but the stated reasons are dumb.
> Honestly, I don't understand how can people be so severely misguided.
Sounds like a good description of school administration to me.
Creativity is critical to a good education, but it's also difficult to measure. Educators want to be able to show (to themselves and others) that they're being effective in a measurable way, so unless you're being creative in a specific and controlled fashion, it's a distraction.
To be honest Gimp is a terrible and embarrassing name, that IMO should have been changed years ago by the original creators. This is a world class incredible piece of software with over two decades of legacy, not some toy project.
"At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a single word popped into my mind while we were tossing out name ideas. It only took a few more minutes to determine what the 'G' stood for."
I thought the name was funny and cool when I first dabbled with Linux as a teenager in the early 00s, sorta added to linux feeling rebellious and more hackery.
But nowadays where it has to be used across so many schools because its the only application they can afford I do think it was inappropriate and should have been changed.
Then again I think a better future is possible for image editing, cloning Photoshop poorly isn't the only solution to the problem.
I personally really don't think that some US schools anecdotally not using GIMP because of it's name is worth ruining decades of tutorials and documentation for the entire rest of the world.
FWIW, GIMP has been installed on every single educational computer I've interacted with from pre-elementary school to college, in both French (Québec, France, Morocco), Arabic (Morocco) and English (Québec) schooling systems.
That wasn't really common sense in that definition of the term, rather it was thinking of advantages versus disadvantages. I don't think that considering the reality of people outside of your own group is "prejudice", yet it is common sense.
Forget "common sense." Make the argument that something makes "good sense" and support that argument with logical reasoning and evidence.
"It's just common sense" is simply an excuse to stop thinking, be it about the characteristics of the natural world, (which is, I think, what Einstein was getting at), or about human behaviour and characteristics. Things called "common sense" may even make good sense. So think about them and make the relevant case. Things called "common sense" are also often really just plain nonsense when dragged out into the light of proper critical analysis based on solid evidence.
Sure, I already made that argument. Renaming it is only a benefit for a small subset of the global population and only because of their own biases, as such it shouldn't happen.
Common sense is also the good sense that should be expected of the common man.
Our first interaction was indeed far from being pleasant. However, they now seem to have a much better understanding of just how much effort it takes to rebrand something like GIMP and they now realize the technical implications of rebranding as far as functions in the source code (broken plugins).
They also reportedly started moderating their community with regards to how much crap it is allowed to post about the original GIMP project :) Which is also really good to know.
Finally, the guy who maintains the rebranding fork has been a regular on our IRC channel since last autumn or so. I think things are slowly getting better.
I'm not sure how much time they are going to need to roll out the first release of their own GEGL-based image editor, I'm not even sure if there's even any code to build and see. But personally, I think they'd have far less friction if they started out with that part.
All in all, I wish angry people left them alone. I don't think it's in anyone's real interests to have all this shit swinging. And I definitely don't like the idea of GIMP being in the center of this.
It's an unofficial fork and rather than reading a whole weird thread of people arguing about this fork, read the quick summary they have on their site:
"Our contributors have used the GNU Image Manipulation Program for a long time, but like any free software project it has finite resources and has to prioritise some changes over others. That can mean good usability improvements and functional changes the community suggests go unaddressed because other changes take priority.
What the Glimpse project aims to do is inject some new ideas, energy, contributions and money into a free software program that most enthusiasts and power users take for granted. We also want to expand the adoption of this great piece of free software, and offer a valid alternative for end users that have become disgruntled with the GNU Image Manipulation Program and are tempted to switch back to using proprietary software.
The very first thing we focused on with 0.1.0 was our own rebrand. We chose a new name and commissioned a professional logo, and our efforts to replace the existing “gimp” branding throughout the software and its dependencies is something we continue to make excellent progress on today.
However, we want to go further, and we will do that by focusing on usability changes, UI themes, icon packs, and better installation mechanisms. We believe that by making changes and improvements in those areas, that will create a better overall user experience that broadens the appeal of the application and introduces more people to the world of free software.
Finally, we also want to make it easier for power users to find and install third party plug-ins. Initially that will take the form of an optional installer containing a selection of plug-ins already, but that is an area we can hopefully develop more over time."
I’ve been using Gimp non-professionally for almost eight years now and the latest releases this last couple years have made it such a pleasure to use. Great job team.
Okay, I was just going to comment on how much I enjoy using Gimp, and the stories I've been hearing over the years about bad usability baffle me. I've really only started using it recently, and it's been an absolute joy to use.
I think Gimp has the same problem a lot of FOSS seems to have. They are extremely powerful on the right hands but because open source community doesn’t have that much of an UX designers, they are really unoptimal to use and the learning curve is so steep most people won’t bother
I think it's more of a philosophy problem. In FOSS you have the power and will to get things done, so you don't want to be waiting for sketches or in an endless discussion about details with a designer.
Commercial products work on different timelines and have different goals, and ultimately the developers are often not the users so they don't really care one way or other to follow somebody else's design.
Ideally you get somebody who is both a great designer and a coder but those are few (Asesprite comes to mind)
UX designers want money, and free software projects are rarely a paying gig.
GIMP collaborated with a UX architect between 2005 and 2012. That guy was paying for this stuff to his employees out of his pocket when he was able to.
I mean, everybody wants money in the end. I don't think that making free software is somewhat different from say, hobbyist painting or making unsolicited redesigns on Dribbble. It's just easier to share and useful to a larger audience.
However I think that people are okay with doing stuff for free as long as it is fun. Being your own master is fun, but if you need to collaborate it will quickly become work.
I think that a lot of people were trained on photoshop, and interpret all deviations from the photoshop interface as suboptimal and not intuitive - because for someone who has exclusively used photoshop, they are suboptimal and not intuitive.
For people moving in the other direction, it's photoshop that's not intuitive. I don't want a single-window interface.
I have tried and failed at using both. I guess the topic of advanced image manipulation itself is too complex to allow for a simple, intuitive interface.
I wouldn't mind an entry-level image manipulation system that starts by giving me only a few obvious functions, and lets me grow into more advanced functions as I learn more, but that's probably too much to expect.
On the other hand, serious image manipulation is no doubt a serious skill that requires training that I simply lack. Someone with no programming training failing to grasp Python or Java doesn't mean there's anything wrong with Python or Java.
The thing that gimp is really missing in my opinion is non-destructive effects. I want to be able to toggle stuff on and off, not permanently change the image. When I looked it up it sounded like it was on the roadmap but there were architectural blockers.
In college they taught us Adobe tools. Around the same time I was picking up FLOSS and dual booting Redhat. And GIMP's UI used different terminology and menu nesting. Some of GIMP's choices seemed confusing or redundant.
I've grown more accustomed to GIMP since my job doesn't justify Adobe prices. But it's still quirky to me.
You know, I'm still perplexed that, in Photoshop, you activate all tools from the toolbox except the effin unified transform tool which you need to call from menu (or learn the shortcut, I believe it's Ctrl+T). Photoshop is actually full of weird stuff like that. At my previous job, whenever I pointed that out to our designer, he went, like, 'Yeah, but what do you want? This software is 30 years old'. That's something I don't commonly hear people admitting on interwebz though :)
These are really great changes. I haven't 100% adapted to the latest with Gimp but hope to get more time in for play. The broad changes in 2.10 were driving me crazy on a recent, more serious comic art project, so I reverted to 2.8.
Since that time though, I'm getting used to the changes, and the non-destructive techniques are really appreciated, especially compared to the old contingency methods I was using like saving backup layers.
Gimp is, to me anyway, almost a completely different app now.
A previous version of 2.10 broke so many things for me on macOS it was unusable. I also went back to 2.8, 2.8.22 specifically. The things that broke were tiny little trivial sounding behaviors that would be hard to document in a ticket, or subtle to describe, yet with huge workflow impact. I feel little hope anyone working on the project noticed what they had broken, or will understand what was lost, or would think that any of the tickets, if reported, would merit prioritization, but together they added up to quite a setback. I'm thinking it will take a few rounds of major updates to make it worthwhile for me to try again.
I began using Gimp since 2.10.14 (upgraded to 2.10.20 today) and I'm loving it. I'm curious as to what did you find frustrating? As compared to the latest version, did you find 2.8 to be more stable?
Still think Affinity Photo for £23.99 one-time is a better option if you're on Windows/Mac though. I've easily switched from Photoshop which I've never been able to do with GIMP.
Never heard of them, thanks for the reference looks like a great high quality app, just bought it on iPad (was only $9.99 atm).
On macOS I use Pixelmator which is one of the best quality Apps I have on macOS, was also only a small 1 time purchase.
Edit:
Spent the last 1hr playing with it on Windows, gorgeous iOS & Mac App of the year quality Apps like this never exist on Windows, at USD $25 it's a steal (50% off until June 20). Finally a Photoshop replacement quality App for my hobby design tasks that I don't need to maintain a subscription for.
You shouldn’t trust Pixelmator. They basically took every single complaint about Pixelmator, sat on those for years, and instead of improving Pixelmator they pretty much abandoned it and suddenly released Pixelmator Pro with all those features and fixes instead
It’s the same as Flexibits updating Fantastical, switching to a subscription model (the app used to be €6 but now is €50/y) and both putting old features behind paywalls and ‘unlock this with premium’ buttons everywhere that you can’t hide
I just can’t & won’t trust companies that pull switcharoos like that
Affinity are good folks as far as I can see, and haven’t pulled stunts like that yet
Edit: well I guess HN loves everything moving to a subscription world. What the hell..
I've yet to pay twice for Pixelmator which I've used for years & they've never nagged me once, will gladly pay again in a heartbeat.
It's great they offer a different & improved SKU as I don't see how they could develop such a quality App for a low 1 time payment & was concerned for their sustainability, happy to hear they offer a quality upgrade that I can upgrade to support continued development of their quality app.
The biggest example is single window mode. This was the most requested and most upvoted request for years. It was quite obvious that behind the scenes they decided/realized ‘hey, if this feature is that important to people let’s purposely hold it back until we can use it to force people to upgrade. Genius!’
I understand that there is a limited support window and I understand that sustainable software development requires version upgrades, but the way Pixelmator did it left a foul taste in many many users their mouth.
but for me, i didnt like the ui of pixelmator pro, and am glad they left the older one alone, and made the totaly redesigned one a separate app, as i would have just abandoned it for afinity or something else (not saying pixelmator has a perfect ui by any stretch tho)
What bugs me about Pixelmator is that they will not take your money unless you buy the product through the Mac app store, and that means that if you want to run it on older hardware or an older version of MacOS you're SOL.
Contrast with Affinity, which supports lots of older versions of MacOS and will happily take your money on their own website. Affinity is the clear winner in this contest for me.
The latest Pixelmator won't work on MacOS 10.12, which was released 4 years ago. 10.12 most certainly has both Core Image and the App Store.
Older versions of Pixelmator did work on 10.12. If you can find one, you can download it. But you can neither purchase it or activate it beyond the 30-day demo period.
How is it unreasonable when other programs do work and your computers still works otherwise fine? Why waste money by dumping an otherwise capable computer just because of Apple's arbitrary planned obsolescence?
Features-wise, possibly. If you like your software to be Free (as in "libre") it's probably not better than GIMP. For some people, like the ones who support the FSF, this matters.
Um, yes it does? I'm not a paying supporter and I didn't mean it that way, but I can assure you there are more than 4800 people in the world that care about Free software. Even if there were only 4800, would it really change my point?
A gentle reminder that Krita is free and basically on par with PS. I was struggling to migrate to Linux for years till Krita matured and adopted Photoshop keybindings.
Good job! Haven't opened gimp or photoshop in years but looking at it, it seems to resemble photoshop _A_LOT_ as far as UI is concerned and that's probably a good thing: photoshop folks would feel more at home. Specifically what really impresses me is how visually similar it looks(to me anyway), knowing that GTK is powering it. Very impressive!
Before I got into programming as a teenager, GIMP was one of the first "advanced" pieces of software I really dove into. I learned so much just messing around, creating wallpapers, editing screenshots from games, making photo-manipulation "art", logos for imaginary companies (and later even a few real ones). I am so grateful such a wonderful, free, open source piece of software existed for me to play with, I think it's part of what sparked my interest in computing.
Automating some tedious tasks to generate 1000's of image sets with python-fu was one of the things that made me love programming. Also was my introduction to lisp when i tried first with script-fu, but that was mostly incomprehensible to me since im dum.
In a similar vein, the thing that got me to try Linux when my previous computing/programming experience was VBScript in high school and Matlab in my ChemE degree, was a bash one liner that renamed and organized by date some photographs that a group of many friends had taken from a vacation trip. I thought it was incredible that that kind of power was available a terminal away, and also a first class feature.
Gimp has fallen far behind of what is an advanced software. The GUI is atrocious and it's still using GTK2 which is blurry on my scaled screen. And as it seems there is no way out anytime soon.
The GUI is perfectly fine. I use it all the time and it does everything I need. Sometimes I have to look up how to do something but that's true of any program. What exactly is it missing?
This is what I sounded like when I was trying to convince my non-nerd friends that they should use Linux on their laptops. People have different requirements. If a modern interface that isn't blurry on modern screens is one of those requirements, then so be it. Convincing them that their requirement is wrong isn't going to fix GIMP
GTK2 doesn't "scale" at all, so whatever is making it blurry on your computer isn't that. Probably you've got a desktop that's trying too hard to scale things. I hate blurriness so I turn all "scaling" off and just set my screen DPI to its real physical value (Xorg, criminally, lies to apps and says it's 96 by default - I force it in .xinitrc with xrandr). DPI-aware apps Just Work, and if it uses raw pixels, it just looks small. I believe for GTK2 you can load a pre-scaled theme, which will solve the too-small thing.
Agree, the only difficulty to work with DPI is when you have several physical screens. X, from what I understood, combines them to one single virtual screen, with a single DPI setting :-/
props to the team! but having learned on photoshop i could just never get used to gimp. and me most used functions being smart select and smart fill -- does gimp do that yet? in any case i dropped both for photopea. i still can't get my head around how nicely it works in a browser tab
Funny, I always just assumed that "gimp" is the English word for German "Gimpel". Turns out, it's not. In English it's a bullfinch.
BTW that's my main use for Wikipedia, more than actually looking an article up: find the German Wikipedia page and switch to English or Swedish or whatever to find the appropriate translation of the thing or concept. Especially when a dictionary would give you dozens of translations in different fields, Wikipedia's disambiguation pages are close to perfect.
Using Wikipedia with English as a second language in general is wonderful. If a german article is not complex enough, I continue with the English article which is often more rich in information. On the other way around, if an English article is to hard to grasp for me, I switch to the German article and quickly get the basics. After that, I continue in English if there were still some questions left open. Of course there are topics that are best to be read in German because that’s the language of the people that spark the most interest in that topic.
Of course applies to speakers of every other language that speak English as a second language or any other language that is well represented on Wikipedia.
The thing that always irritated me about GIMP is that any functionality gaps between it and Photoshop would always be summarily dismissed as “oh no, you’re just used to Photoshop”.
It looks like it may have been fixed now, but I distinctly remember GIMP having separate tools for “scale”,
“move”, and “rotate”, each of which had slightly different UIs. People didn’t find that confusing because it was “different from Photoshop”, they found it confusing because that’s a terrible UI.
I think you are talking about the Unified Transform tool in GIMP. It's been around for 6 years or so, but we only made it part of a stable release two years ago.
Right? Data structure wise, layers are a stack. We've got fancier things we could use to generate images.
What about a digraph? A node graph editor for compositing would be pretty cool. It'd get you kind of what you have in blender / unreal / unity's vfx graph / shader graph.
I like the push for everything to be non destructive, but it'd be cool if I could, in a reduced input "live" kind of way, see before/after choices -- so I can make adjustments like an optometrist.
I make a lot of texture masks for interactive 3d stuff, the digraph approach would be nice if it let me bitpack things in a more complicated way into color channels than what's possible now.
Maybe what I'm actually asking for is more photoshop-y like tools in blender?
I think if you go too far down this path you end up with a tool that’s utterly incomprehensible to the majority of your user base. Layers may be simplistic, but they’re relatively easy to understand.
Weeeeeellll, GIMP is based on an image processing engine that is built around direct acyclic graphs. We are still not sure how much of that we will expose to users when the time comes to work on non-destructive editing. But it's a possibility.
Can I apply a drop-down shadow to a layer in GIMP, move that layer around and disable or tweak (color, distance, fade, orientation, etc.) the drop-down shadow as will in a non-destructive way for the underlying image/pixels ?
I found that my GIMP skills increased significantly after browsing through the great tutorial collection, "Meet the GIMP!". I'm not an artist by any stretch, but even just learning how to use layers and layer masks properly made a huge difference.
Bloom is a standard effect in CGI and game dev to simulate the diffusion effect of really bright light sources that can be witnessed in real-world photography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_(shader_effect)
It's time to pick a name that's not offensive. Far more than the UI, this has hurt the project more than its contributors can imagine. I've given up evangelizing it because of responses I've gotten to the name.
Like, call it "Imp". Short, cute, and the icon/mascot practically draws itself. It's not rocket surgery.
I wonder what the overlap is between people who screamed "if you don't like the name, fork it!" for 20+ years and people who lost it over Glimpse doing exactly that.
Before I switched to MacOS, Gimp was my goto photo editor and I still have much love for this most excellent piece of software. Even though the interface was a bit clunky in some ways, it was one of the early/ best great apps for desktop Linux.
A lot of people forget that the G in GTK stands for Gimp, it is arguably the foundation of much of modern Linux GUI.
This makes me want to take a swing at desktop Linux again.
> A lot of people forget that the G in GTK stands for Gimp
Source? It's always stood for Gnome Toolkit. You must be confusing this with the GDK (GIMP Drawing Kit) that's between the library layer and the display server. The GDK is part of the toolkit.
> GTK was originally designed and used in the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) as a replacement of the Motif toolkit; at some point Peter Mattis became disenchanted with Motif and began to write his own GUI toolkit named the GIMP toolkit and had successfully replaced Motif by the 0.60 release of GIMP.[36] Finally GTK was re-written to be object-oriented and was renamed GTK+.[37] This was first used in the 0.99 release of GIMP. GTK was subsequently adopted for maintenance by the GNOME Foundation, which uses it in the GNOME desktop environment.
Source is ME. Gnome came a year or more after GTK+ did. The whole reason I got interested in Gnome was because it used GTK which I was doing some small pet projects in at the time.
But also, it's not too hard to find outside sources. I don't think it's ever been called the Gnome ToolKit by any official source Gnome/ GTK organization.
You may know this, but there is an official version of GIMP for macOS[1]. There are a couple weird things like non-native open/save dialogs, but it's surprisingly usable.
> "A lot of people forget that the G in GTK stands for Gimp, it is arguably the foundation of much of modern Linux GUI."
I didn't know that. I'd always assumed the G in GTK stands for GNU. Well, indirectly it does, I guess.
Cool to know. But from other comments in this discussion, I get the impression that right now the limitations of GTK are one of the biggest things holding Gimp back.
Am I the only one that looks at the gimp ui screenshot and feels there's something terrible wrong with the ui. It looks like the whole interface was diseigned for a different text size and now all the proper spacing between elements is gone.
I was all ready to move away from Photoshop and try Gimp.
I needed to add some arrows to some screenshots for some documentation and thought, "this should be easy, now's the right time to try it out".
After installing Gimp and googling for 10 minutes, I gave up because all the solutions seemed ridiculously overcomplicated for something so basic as a line with an arrow end.
There's no simple way to do something even this basic in Gimp. So it's back to Photoshop or even Paint.net for me.
I had a similar experience. Since I use GIMP a fair amount for work (just programmer art for documentation), I thought it would be simple. After some comments here on HN, I tried Inkscape which worked excellently.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadThey are not at all hostile to GIMP--they encourage donating to the GIMP org--but I think their reasons for an alternative are sound:
Glimpse Image Editor is an optional alternative intended to assist users that are offended or made uncomfortable by the "gimp" name, and assist free software advocates that encounter barriers when they recommend the GNU Image Manipulation Program to friends, family, coworkers and employers.
However, Glimpse does have some other differences from GIMP which might interest you:
We also focus on making the software more "enterprise ready" so it is easier to modify and distribute for schools and workplaces. That means fewer "easter eggs", improved build and packaging tooling/documentation, backported fixes on a known-stable base we support for at least a year, and a more efficient Windows installer. We also plan to have a more predictable release cadence, as that will assist IT departments with their software deployment schedules.
https://github.com/glimpse-editor/Glimpse
Whimsy is a wonderful thing, taken in moderation. It has no place in tools meant for serious work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustworthy_computing
They have a blog post from 2005 on the matter: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/larryosterman...
> One of the aspects of Trustworthy Computing is that you can trust what's on your computer. Part of that means that there's absolutely NOTHING on your computer that isn't planned. If the manufacturer of the software that's on every desktop in your company can't stop their developers from sneaking undocumented features into the product (even features as relatively benign as an Easter Egg), how can you be sure that they've not snuck some other undocumented feature into the code.
Hmm.
I took a chance on the Gimp because I believed in the cause - I wanted it to be a viable alternative to Photoshop. It very nearly cost my firm a contract big enough that losing it would probably have put us out of business - and would certainly have put me out of a job. Software that screws up that badly doesn't get a second chance.
I'll be 100% blunt and unpleasant here, OK?
You tried using this software in production without prior testing. And yet somehow the developers of that software are to blame? I'm afraid, this means that in the decade that passed since then you learned nothing.
It's also not the same thing as saying I am, or then was, a fool. But your own uncharitable and erroneous assumptions are your concern, not mine, for all that they and others like them have long since ceased to surprise me in the context of criticizing a beloved FSF flagship product.
No, you still haven't learned a thing.
As I said, I understand that it's easy to feel attacked when someone criticizes your work. But that's still no excuse to make it personal, the way you're doing here, or the way you have considerable prior form [2] for doing. It's not just that this sort of behavior on your part is rude and uncalled for, although it is also those things. Such behavior - and I'd think this would be important to you, even if simple courtesy evidently is not - gives an extremely poor representation of the same project you're trying to defend.
I'm not going to get any further into this with you, because there's clearly no point in doing so. Your mind is, by all the available evidence, extremely made up, and I don't come to Hacker News to be pointlessly insulted.
But, to briefly reiterate in parting what others have already said at length, you might consider changing your behavior, whether to maintain civility in discussions of this sort, or if you can't manage that, then simply to avoid engaging in them at all. What you're doing right now does neither the Gimp, nor its current and past contributors, any good at all.
[1] https://www.gimp.org/author/alexandre-prokoudine.html
[2] https://www.gimpusers.com/forums/gimp-developer/21084-alexan...
Well, nope, I did not. In this particular thread, you took literally zero responsibility for your decision. You blamed it all on software and developers.
Look, it's not a heavily guarded secret that GIMP is not great for certain workflows and tasks. It's not a big fucking secret. The text tool, in particular, would do with a rewrite (which might happen at some point, among gazillion other things). Literally everyone who tried it knows that.
It was your responsibility to pick the right tool for the job, and you messed up. So how about, instead of telling me to change my behavior, you start with yourself, step the hell up and start admitting your failures? Like a grown-up, you know.
Oh, and you'd make a great pair — Niccolo and you. It takes a special kind of a person to attack someone, shower him in expletives, then follow him around internet to tell everyone how bad that person is. You'd make great friends.
Specifically, I took the people who promote the Gimp at their word when they said it was, in every respect, a viable libre replacement for Photoshop. And I took the Gimp's ability to do trivial work acceptably, if without much comfort in the UI, as cause for confidence that it would do significantly complex work acceptably, as well. You're right, though. When quality of results really counted, I was wrong to rely on the Gimp.
Those claims of quality are still made on Gimp's behalf, maybe you know. RMS has been known to repeat them in public. It may interest you to hear that, when he and I had this same argument, I recall there being a great deal less swearing involved, and many fewer personal attacks. I have to admit, I don't really find those additions to be an improvement.
It's odd, though. By default, the claim is still that Gimp is a viable libre replacement for Photoshop. But as soon as someone happens to criticize some specific aspect of Gimp's functionality - in this case, its ongoing inability to render text at a level of quality comparable with Photoshop and with its commercial competitors more generally - suddenly "everybody knows" that that specific part of the Gimp isn't ready for prime time, never has been, and anyone would have to be a complete muppet to imagine it was intended for serious use.
I don't really know why that is. But, whatever the reason, it definitely doesn't incline me to feel differently about the software. I can't in good conscience recommend anyone use a tool that even its own strongest advocates so readily agree is so frequently unfit for purpose. That would be a worse mistake than to ever have thought the Gimp to be reliable in the first place.
You know what, this is where I completely agree with you. I'm very much against the idea of promoting GIMP as a Photoshop replacement because it will always lead to frustration. It cannot be otherwise. The software was never designed for that.
There are unavoidable similarities, some tools are specifically designed like Photoshop's ones simply because the way it's done in Photoshop makes sense for GIMP as well. But that is pretty much it.
> Those claims of quality are still made on Gimp's behalf, maybe you know. RMS has been known to repeat them in public.
I never heard RMS saying any such thing. But then again, how would I know? I don't follow him, I can't stand the guy.
> But as soon as someone happens to criticize some specific aspect of Gimp's functionality - in this case, its ongoing inability to render text at a level of quality comparable with Photoshop and with its commercial competitors more generally - suddenly "everybody knows" that that specific part of the Gimp isn't ready for prime time, never has been, and anyone would have to be a complete muppet to imagine it was intended for serious use.
I'm afraid you are conflating things here. So lemme unload a little.
Like every other software (incl. Photoshop), GIMP has loose ends, bad design decisions, etc. As a team member, I don't mind admitting it. Noone in the team minds publicly admitting it. There's no point arguing against obvious things.
So... Can you do serious work with GIMP? Yes, we've seen use cases of complex work. Commercial-grade work, shitload of layers etc.
Do you need workarounds? Depends on the project and the kind of manipulations involved.
Are there things impossible to do as compared to Photoshop? Yes, of course. All the 3D stuff, vector layers, smart objects are among the first things I can think of.
Are things getting better? Yes. Just two days ago I was talking to our guy who does a lot of work on performance. He has a test project file from a user. A real project, 500+ layers, over 1GB large. GIMP used to just crash on it. Now? No crashes, pretty much usable.
Would you be pleased if you tried again? I don't know, that is not up to me to decide.
I did pull down the current Gimp yesterday to do a quick test of text rendering cases similar to the ones that it failed so badly on back a decade ago. The results were the same as I remember them: aliasing everywhere, illegible at small sizes even in very high-DPI files. If I had to guess, I'd think Gimp just always rasterizes text at 72dpi and then nearest-neighbors it up to match the file resolution, but that's just a guess based on the behavior I'm seeing; I haven't been into the code.
Granted, high-DPI displays were quite rare back in 2009-2010. Print workflows weren't, though. In 2020, displays >72dpi are rapidly becoming the default. Print still exists, too. Both of those are things you'd expect to see well supported in a tool whose homepage advertises it as suitable for photographers and graphic designers, among others.
Honestly, I don't understand how can people be so severely misguided. If one place would benefit greatly for easter eggs in free software is precisely a school.
But if they are backporting useful documentation, well, it's alright. There's nothing wrong with a fork, but the stated reasons are dumb.
Sounds like a good description of school administration to me.
Creativity is critical to a good education, but it's also difficult to measure. Educators want to be able to show (to themselves and others) that they're being effective in a measurable way, so unless you're being creative in a specific and controlled fashion, it's a distraction.
"At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a single word popped into my mind while we were tossing out name ideas. It only took a few more minutes to determine what the 'G' stood for."
But nowadays where it has to be used across so many schools because its the only application they can afford I do think it was inappropriate and should have been changed.
Then again I think a better future is possible for image editing, cloning Photoshop poorly isn't the only solution to the problem.
FWIW, GIMP has been installed on every single educational computer I've interacted with from pre-elementary school to college, in both French (Québec, France, Morocco), Arabic (Morocco) and English (Québec) schooling systems.
― Albert Einstein
"It's just common sense" is simply an excuse to stop thinking, be it about the characteristics of the natural world, (which is, I think, what Einstein was getting at), or about human behaviour and characteristics. Things called "common sense" may even make good sense. So think about them and make the relevant case. Things called "common sense" are also often really just plain nonsense when dragged out into the light of proper critical analysis based on solid evidence.
Common sense is also the good sense that should be expected of the common man.
Cloning Photoshop, poorly or otherwise, has nothing to do with GIMP.
As a GIMP contributor, I have to disagree here.
Our first interaction was indeed far from being pleasant. However, they now seem to have a much better understanding of just how much effort it takes to rebrand something like GIMP and they now realize the technical implications of rebranding as far as functions in the source code (broken plugins).
They also reportedly started moderating their community with regards to how much crap it is allowed to post about the original GIMP project :) Which is also really good to know.
Finally, the guy who maintains the rebranding fork has been a regular on our IRC channel since last autumn or so. I think things are slowly getting better.
I'm not sure how much time they are going to need to roll out the first release of their own GEGL-based image editor, I'm not even sure if there's even any code to build and see. But personally, I think they'd have far less friction if they started out with that part.
All in all, I wish angry people left them alone. I don't think it's in anyone's real interests to have all this shit swinging. And I definitely don't like the idea of GIMP being in the center of this.
I'm glad that sensible minds have prevailed and you've found a way to work alongside each other.
It's an unofficial fork and rather than reading a whole weird thread of people arguing about this fork, read the quick summary they have on their site:
"Our contributors have used the GNU Image Manipulation Program for a long time, but like any free software project it has finite resources and has to prioritise some changes over others. That can mean good usability improvements and functional changes the community suggests go unaddressed because other changes take priority.
What the Glimpse project aims to do is inject some new ideas, energy, contributions and money into a free software program that most enthusiasts and power users take for granted. We also want to expand the adoption of this great piece of free software, and offer a valid alternative for end users that have become disgruntled with the GNU Image Manipulation Program and are tempted to switch back to using proprietary software.
The very first thing we focused on with 0.1.0 was our own rebrand. We chose a new name and commissioned a professional logo, and our efforts to replace the existing “gimp” branding throughout the software and its dependencies is something we continue to make excellent progress on today.
However, we want to go further, and we will do that by focusing on usability changes, UI themes, icon packs, and better installation mechanisms. We believe that by making changes and improvements in those areas, that will create a better overall user experience that broadens the appeal of the application and introduces more people to the world of free software.
Finally, we also want to make it easier for power users to find and install third party plug-ins. Initially that will take the form of an optional installer containing a selection of plug-ins already, but that is an area we can hopefully develop more over time."
https://glimpse-editor.github.io/about/#why-are-you-forking
[0] https://glimpse-editor.github.io/about/#is-forking-the-proje...
Commercial products work on different timelines and have different goals, and ultimately the developers are often not the users so they don't really care one way or other to follow somebody else's design.
Ideally you get somebody who is both a great designer and a coder but those are few (Asesprite comes to mind)
UX designers want money, and free software projects are rarely a paying gig.
GIMP collaborated with a UX architect between 2005 and 2012. That guy was paying for this stuff to his employees out of his pocket when he was able to.
However I think that people are okay with doing stuff for free as long as it is fun. Being your own master is fun, but if you need to collaborate it will quickly become work.
For people moving in the other direction, it's photoshop that's not intuitive. I don't want a single-window interface.
I wouldn't mind an entry-level image manipulation system that starts by giving me only a few obvious functions, and lets me grow into more advanced functions as I learn more, but that's probably too much to expect.
On the other hand, serious image manipulation is no doubt a serious skill that requires training that I simply lack. Someone with no programming training failing to grasp Python or Java doesn't mean there's anything wrong with Python or Java.
I've grown more accustomed to GIMP since my job doesn't justify Adobe prices. But it's still quirky to me.
Since that time though, I'm getting used to the changes, and the non-destructive techniques are really appreciated, especially compared to the old contingency methods I was using like saving backup layers.
Gimp is, to me anyway, almost a completely different app now.
Still think Affinity Photo for £23.99 one-time is a better option if you're on Windows/Mac though. I've easily switched from Photoshop which I've never been able to do with GIMP.
On macOS I use Pixelmator which is one of the best quality Apps I have on macOS, was also only a small 1 time purchase.
Edit:
Spent the last 1hr playing with it on Windows, gorgeous iOS & Mac App of the year quality Apps like this never exist on Windows, at USD $25 it's a steal (50% off until June 20). Finally a Photoshop replacement quality App for my hobby design tasks that I don't need to maintain a subscription for.
It’s the same as Flexibits updating Fantastical, switching to a subscription model (the app used to be €6 but now is €50/y) and both putting old features behind paywalls and ‘unlock this with premium’ buttons everywhere that you can’t hide
I just can’t & won’t trust companies that pull switcharoos like that
Affinity are good folks as far as I can see, and haven’t pulled stunts like that yet
Edit: well I guess HN loves everything moving to a subscription world. What the hell..
It's great they offer a different & improved SKU as I don't see how they could develop such a quality App for a low 1 time payment & was concerned for their sustainability, happy to hear they offer a quality upgrade that I can upgrade to support continued development of their quality app.
I understand that there is a limited support window and I understand that sustainable software development requires version upgrades, but the way Pixelmator did it left a foul taste in many many users their mouth.
but for me, i didnt like the ui of pixelmator pro, and am glad they left the older one alone, and made the totaly redesigned one a separate app, as i would have just abandoned it for afinity or something else (not saying pixelmator has a perfect ui by any stretch tho)
They introduced a new and improved product based on feedback. Do you think they should have done that for free?
Personally I prefer subscription model.
Contrast with Affinity, which supports lots of older versions of MacOS and will happily take your money on their own website. Affinity is the clear winner in this contest for me.
Affinity does everything in the CPU, which is also why it's slower - Pixelmator gets a lot of GPU acceleration.
(And frankly, complaining that it doesn't work on versions of Mac OS released over 9 years ago seems unreasonable.)
Older versions of Pixelmator did work on 10.12. If you can find one, you can download it. But you can neither purchase it or activate it beyond the 30-day demo period.
It was advanded - 10 years ago.
This is what I sounded like when I was trying to convince my non-nerd friends that they should use Linux on their laptops. People have different requirements. If a modern interface that isn't blurry on modern screens is one of those requirements, then so be it. Convincing them that their requirement is wrong isn't going to fix GIMP
Scaling is evil. DPI is the one true king.
I'm running GIMP 2.10.x on a HiDPI display (2560x1440, laptop). Nothing is blurry.
What version do you have? Sounds like 2.8.something.
> And as it seems there is no way out anytime soon.
The last section of the release notes kind of covers that.
I also find it frustrating using gimp after using photoshop for so many years. But I don't want to go back to my windows box just for photoshop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZmaeC_Ma5A
the whole thing is just 2MB of JS written by one guy!
[0] https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Basic_Scheme/
BTW that's my main use for Wikipedia, more than actually looking an article up: find the German Wikipedia page and switch to English or Swedish or whatever to find the appropriate translation of the thing or concept. Especially when a dictionary would give you dozens of translations in different fields, Wikipedia's disambiguation pages are close to perfect.
Of course applies to speakers of every other language that speak English as a second language or any other language that is well represented on Wikipedia.
It looks like it may have been fixed now, but I distinctly remember GIMP having separate tools for “scale”, “move”, and “rotate”, each of which had slightly different UIs. People didn’t find that confusing because it was “different from Photoshop”, they found it confusing because that’s a terrible UI.
Feel like we're doomed to the ideas of the Photoshop team from 20 years ago.
What about a digraph? A node graph editor for compositing would be pretty cool. It'd get you kind of what you have in blender / unreal / unity's vfx graph / shader graph.
I like the push for everything to be non destructive, but it'd be cool if I could, in a reduced input "live" kind of way, see before/after choices -- so I can make adjustments like an optometrist.
I make a lot of texture masks for interactive 3d stuff, the digraph approach would be nice if it let me bitpack things in a more complicated way into color channels than what's possible now.
Maybe what I'm actually asking for is more photoshop-y like tools in blender?
https://www.youtube.com/user/MeetGIMP
You're right that it's not that related to a bloom filter data structure.
It's time to pick a name that's not offensive. Far more than the UI, this has hurt the project more than its contributors can imagine. I've given up evangelizing it because of responses I've gotten to the name.
Like, call it "Imp". Short, cute, and the icon/mascot practically draws itself. It's not rocket surgery.
https://glimpse-editor.github.io/
A lot of people forget that the G in GTK stands for Gimp, it is arguably the foundation of much of modern Linux GUI.
This makes me want to take a swing at desktop Linux again.
Source? It's always stood for Gnome Toolkit. You must be confusing this with the GDK (GIMP Drawing Kit) that's between the library layer and the display server. The GDK is part of the toolkit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK
"GTk (GIMP Toolkit), the windowing toolkit that now lies at the core of the Gnome desktop, was originally written as part of GIMP."
> GTK was originally designed and used in the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) as a replacement of the Motif toolkit; at some point Peter Mattis became disenchanted with Motif and began to write his own GUI toolkit named the GIMP toolkit and had successfully replaced Motif by the 0.60 release of GIMP.[36] Finally GTK was re-written to be object-oriented and was renamed GTK+.[37] This was first used in the 0.99 release of GIMP. GTK was subsequently adopted for maintenance by the GNOME Foundation, which uses it in the GNOME desktop environment.
But also, it's not too hard to find outside sources. I don't think it's ever been called the Gnome ToolKit by any official source Gnome/ GTK organization.
[1]: https://www.gimp.org/downloads
GTK -> GIMP Toolkit -> GNU Image Manipulation Program Toolkit -> GNU's Not Unix Image Manipulation Program Toolkit -> ...
I didn't know that. I'd always assumed the G in GTK stands for GNU. Well, indirectly it does, I guess.
Cool to know. But from other comments in this discussion, I get the impression that right now the limitations of GTK are one of the biggest things holding Gimp back.
I needed to add some arrows to some screenshots for some documentation and thought, "this should be easy, now's the right time to try it out".
After installing Gimp and googling for 10 minutes, I gave up because all the solutions seemed ridiculously overcomplicated for something so basic as a line with an arrow end.
There's no simple way to do something even this basic in Gimp. So it's back to Photoshop or even Paint.net for me.
Please somebody tell me I was mistaken.