> For instance, we’re quite proud that a XCF file made by a small company for their logo in 1998 still renders the same way in the latest version of GIMP
How do they pronounce “XCF” such that it’s “a XCF file” and not “an XCF file”? “Xeceff”?
Non-destructive filter layers caught my eye, and has been something I've missed since moving off Windows/Photoshop to Linux. Looking around it seems like they introduced this in V3, which is great to see.
As usual, whenever GIMP is involved, all we get are negative, often unfounded comments about an excellent piece of free software that is massively used and developed with very limited resources, doing its job really well.
There’s something so pleasant about having GIMP around, efficient and so far removed from the disgusting greed that drives so many of the projects featured here.
You know what? The hate GIMP gets in the comments is entirely self-inflicted. Everyone praises Krita and Blender because their UIs are consistent and look good. GIMP, on the other hand, looks like a toddler worked on it: switches are huge compared to text, buttons and text have no padding and are squeezed together, and icons are oversized and scattered everywhere.
People might say, "You can just join the project and fix it yourself." But the team and community actively resist change and sabotage efforts to make GIMP more mainstream.
I appreciate the backwards compatibility they highlight in the article, and more generally the ownership oss gives you over your files. My small business uses gimp, canva, and Inkscape, and they all have their purpose, but one of the complaints we have with canva is that it’s really hard to get the original files backed up somewhere, aside from canva itself. You have to download each file individually , which is quite a pain (please correct me if there’s an easier way!). Gimps openness is an obvious path for oss, but really is a great feature. If the gimp team stops, we’ll still be able to edit our gimp files. If the canva team stops, we mostly lose all the canva stuff.
I don't get everyone's complaints about the interface. I've been using it for years, once you learn where things are I can get what I need done. The learning curve (finding where functions are, the right tools for each job, etc.) wasn't much different from other software like Blender or Darktable (or even Davinci Resolve).
The panels concept might be the most intuitive part of it, but Blender also has different panels and modes. And the tools being combined into few buttons is similar to CAD programs I've used.
Anyone enlighten me on actual usability problems (and not pedantry like "the spacing of these buttons is uneven"?) Perhaps I've gotten used to using unintuitive software.
> Anyone enlighten me on actual usability problems
I wasn't able to use the "move" tool to move a semi-transparent layer, it kept on switching my selection to the layer below it and moving that. That violated my expectation.
The solution was to use a modifier key, but it took me a while to find it.
It is also in the tool options control pane ( Pick layer or guide | move the selected layers).
Not going to say your expectation is wrong, I too almost always want the tool to operate on the selected layer rather than whatever layer has the pixels. But moving the layer with the pixels is not a bad default, it makes single click quick layer alignment moves possible.
Also, salutes, sort of unrelated, but your post made me look into quick selection based editing, And there are some good operations I have never used in there including alt to move the selection and ctrl + alt to move what is in the selection.
Basically every complaint about GIMP is also valid for photoshop. People claiming PS is "intuitive" or "easy to use" literally just means they already know the keybindings/icons/quirks of photoshop specifically. It's okay! I have the exact same experience the other way around when I have to use photoshop
It's lovely to see such a positive changelog combining the efforts of multiple foss developers, some of which are brand new contributors fixing bugs. Especially in this dark age of opensource closing contributions to defend against endless AI slop committers.
> The new project file format will follow a more common “zipped XML” structure. While the technical details are still being designed and implemented, this change will allow for faster saving since we’ll only need to update parts of the file instead of the whole thing each time.
How even you do that without file fragmentation, zip doesn't exactly have defragment without complete file rewrite. Feels like if they want to have incremental changes SQLite would be better option as you can just VACUUM while file is not being accessed
We didn't go into this in the news post since it was a quick overview, but GIMP uses GEGL for its main color and pixel engine. GEGL has a feature where you can automatically sync data between "buffers" in memory and in file - so as you're editing the image/layer/etc in GIMP, the buffers in the new format will automatically auto-save the data from the canvas.
It's still in-progress, so we'll have more technical details in the 3.3.2 release news.
GIMP is excellent software. I've been using it at least every couple of days for 20+ years, and it's never once crashed or given me any kind of reliability issue, has always done the trick, and has been extremely resistant to enshittification. It's a reliable workhorse I'd always trust to insert into a workflow.
I don't understand the frequent comparisons to Blender at all, to be honest.
I enjoy Blender, but it's a specialist application with a highly complex, mostly unintuitive user interface that requires training and has a steep learning curve.
When people start using Blender, they generally start with a written or video tutorial series and are prepared to put in hours to get productive.
I'm sure Blender's UI is fine for what it does, but it's certainly not any easier to use than e.g. LightWave/Modo/Cinema4D was, and arguably harder.
Are people really saying GIMP is somehow harder than that?
Blender in the early days before the UI upgrade was like GIMP now: irrationally difficult to use.
Blender is still not beginner-friendly, but that's true of all 3D modeling software. There's a limit to how friendly you can make the UI without making it burdensome to accomplish things.
GIMP is just user-hostile, and deliberately so. GIMP's UI is not laid out logically, nor does its illogical UI make possible any additional functionality. The programming team has made such minimal effort to make the UI better that it's big news when they make even minor UI improvements.
The problem is that there's not just one "user". Tons of people have used GIMP for decades and are use to how it works - so changes to be less "user-hostile" can make it hostile to existing users.
For instance, we were repeatedly told that copy+paste creating a floating selection instead of a new layer was confusing and aggravating for users. So we changed it in 3.0 to make a new layer like other software. While we got praise from some people, we started getting new complaints that we'd broken people's workflow (see https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/1vmrza2/it_is_not_str... for a wide range of user feedback as one example)
That doesn't mean we don't try to improve things (obligatory link to our user design feedback site: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work_it...), but making big changes is difficult when you have an existing user base who are using your software successfully as-is.
Consider that the overwhelming majority of this thread on a tech-focused forum have issues with the UI. That should tell you something about how ridiculously illogical the UI is compared to every other program in the space.
GIMP has been catering to the extremely tiny niche of people who "successfully" use its software since at least the Slashdot days. And it's remained a niche product while all of its competitors in the opensource space have grown.
To your first point, it's difficult to know people's frame of reference online. I've listened to many complaints on forums, only to find out the person was thinking of older versions of GIMP and it no longer applied (like multi-window mode being default, outlining text being an ordeal, etc). We also see plenty of feedback like https://lemmy.world/post/50729195/25325527, so it's not always easy to figure what's universally illogical.
I'm not deflecting or saying that GIMP's UI is perfect the way it is - there's a lot of improvements I want to make to the non-destructive filter UI alone. But we can see that real people use the software for real work, so we try to keep existing users in mind when making UI improvements since it impacts them and what they do. There's been some well intentioned UI/UX requests I've implemented that ended up breaking a lot of people's workflows, and those still weigh on my soul. :)
I wish I could enjoy GIMP but that interface is not easy to use. Krita is so much more intuitive and feels like FOSS Photoshop with little to no friction.
Is there any value in really learning gimp? As in, more than just rudimentary tasks you must do. Photoshop has the artistic aspect of doing interesting things in photography editing. I am wondering if gimp is "equally fun" here and it's just a different learning curve.
Adding to the mass of one off experiences, last week I had to modify a plan with basic stuffs: colored rectangles, dashed lines and text, at various angles. Tried gimp for the 4th time in my life (most of my life I've been using cracked Paint Shop Pro or Paint.net). Could absolutely bot figure out anything about the UI, littérally nothing about the UI follow standards or is intuitive. Tried Pintea, I found almost everything I needed instantly, the only think I couldn't figure out was how to rotate text, except by rotating the whole layer, which worked.
32 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 13.3 ms ] threadHow do they pronounce “XCF” such that it’s “a XCF file” and not “an XCF file”? “Xeceff”?
There’s something so pleasant about having GIMP around, efficient and so far removed from the disgusting greed that drives so many of the projects featured here.
People might say, "You can just join the project and fix it yourself." But the team and community actively resist change and sabotage efforts to make GIMP more mainstream.
Preparation for the future XCF (24.09.2023)
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/work_items/10076
Someone proposed newer ser-/deserialization approaches, but this didn't result in a discussion.
I appreciate the backwards compatibility they highlight in the article, and more generally the ownership oss gives you over your files. My small business uses gimp, canva, and Inkscape, and they all have their purpose, but one of the complaints we have with canva is that it’s really hard to get the original files backed up somewhere, aside from canva itself. You have to download each file individually , which is quite a pain (please correct me if there’s an easier way!). Gimps openness is an obvious path for oss, but really is a great feature. If the gimp team stops, we’ll still be able to edit our gimp files. If the canva team stops, we mostly lose all the canva stuff.
The panels concept might be the most intuitive part of it, but Blender also has different panels and modes. And the tools being combined into few buttons is similar to CAD programs I've used.
Anyone enlighten me on actual usability problems (and not pedantry like "the spacing of these buttons is uneven"?) Perhaps I've gotten used to using unintuitive software.
I wasn't able to use the "move" tool to move a semi-transparent layer, it kept on switching my selection to the layer below it and moving that. That violated my expectation.
The solution was to use a modifier key, but it took me a while to find it.
Not going to say your expectation is wrong, I too almost always want the tool to operate on the selected layer rather than whatever layer has the pixels. But moving the layer with the pixels is not a bad default, it makes single click quick layer alignment moves possible.
Also, salutes, sort of unrelated, but your post made me look into quick selection based editing, And there are some good operations I have never used in there including alt to move the selection and ctrl + alt to move what is in the selection.
How even you do that without file fragmentation, zip doesn't exactly have defragment without complete file rewrite. Feels like if they want to have incremental changes SQLite would be better option as you can just VACUUM while file is not being accessed
It's still in-progress, so we'll have more technical details in the 3.3.2 release news.
Thanks to all the contributors.
I enjoy Blender, but it's a specialist application with a highly complex, mostly unintuitive user interface that requires training and has a steep learning curve.
When people start using Blender, they generally start with a written or video tutorial series and are prepared to put in hours to get productive.
I'm sure Blender's UI is fine for what it does, but it's certainly not any easier to use than e.g. LightWave/Modo/Cinema4D was, and arguably harder.
Are people really saying GIMP is somehow harder than that?
Blender is still not beginner-friendly, but that's true of all 3D modeling software. There's a limit to how friendly you can make the UI without making it burdensome to accomplish things.
GIMP is just user-hostile, and deliberately so. GIMP's UI is not laid out logically, nor does its illogical UI make possible any additional functionality. The programming team has made such minimal effort to make the UI better that it's big news when they make even minor UI improvements.
For instance, we were repeatedly told that copy+paste creating a floating selection instead of a new layer was confusing and aggravating for users. So we changed it in 3.0 to make a new layer like other software. While we got praise from some people, we started getting new complaints that we'd broken people's workflow (see https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/1vmrza2/it_is_not_str... for a wide range of user feedback as one example)
That doesn't mean we don't try to improve things (obligatory link to our user design feedback site: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work_it...), but making big changes is difficult when you have an existing user base who are using your software successfully as-is.
GIMP has been catering to the extremely tiny niche of people who "successfully" use its software since at least the Slashdot days. And it's remained a niche product while all of its competitors in the opensource space have grown.
To your first point, it's difficult to know people's frame of reference online. I've listened to many complaints on forums, only to find out the person was thinking of older versions of GIMP and it no longer applied (like multi-window mode being default, outlining text being an ordeal, etc). We also see plenty of feedback like https://lemmy.world/post/50729195/25325527, so it's not always easy to figure what's universally illogical.
I'm not deflecting or saying that GIMP's UI is perfect the way it is - there's a lot of improvements I want to make to the non-destructive filter UI alone. But we can see that real people use the software for real work, so we try to keep existing users in mind when making UI improvements since it impacts them and what they do. There's been some well intentioned UI/UX requests I've implemented that ended up breaking a lot of people's workflows, and those still weigh on my soul. :)
(Obligatory plug for our UX tracker if you feel like providing specifics on UI problems you've encountered: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work_it...)