First off, the work is not complete yet. E.g. there is no CMYK image mode. You can open a CMYK image with automatic conversion to sRGB, you can also do a soft-proof, and you can export CMYK images (JPEG, TIFF, PSD). This part is comparatively cheap to do, but it needed some infrastructure in place and, above all, it needed someone to write the code.
The previous attempt to add CMYK exporting didn't go well. The developer implemented all that in a new set of plugins instead of building the functionality into existing code. This wouldn't work. The developer apparently wasn't interested to do it right or did not have the time, he wouldn't say.
So there's the architectural aspect of this and then there's availability of a contributor willing to hacks on this.
Years of docs gone because one unnamed maintainer forgot to update hosting. With no backups. The official roadmap https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Roadmap#GIMP_3.0 has been inaccessible for 3 months, which the blog glosses over as no big deal. This kind of amateurism is uncommon to Blender and Krita but rather common to GIMP; some of their maintainers have even been banned from twitter.
I have a hard time seeing anything named "Gimp" ever becoming a great alternative for Photoshop.
Names have a lot of meaning, you think about it constantly, if you are thinking about a crippled person unconsciously even while developing software, maybe that is why Gimp is in the state it is.
Many Open Source projects are just named damn stupidly, like with the KDE suite does it really make any sense naming your projects starting with "K" just to follow the KDE ?
Or with Gnome you have so many stupid project names, beginning with the whole name "Gnome". All I can think is a forest gnome when I think about that desktop environment. Maybe it's supposed to be Ge-nome, but who thinks it's a good idea to call a desktop environment a small dwarf like bearded old person .. Combine that with Gnome Gimp, you have a crippled forest gnome handling your image editing, nice.
Everytime I try Linux and it's modern desktop environments, the application names just make me cringe, it's like somebody just decided that "Yeah hey naming conventions for software don't matter, just call it the terminal emulator "Kerminal" or whatever shit that suites the stupid naming scheme.
This sort of comments really annoys me. Google call it's mail client gmail and everone is fine with it, kde does the same a few years before and call it's mail client kmail and people complains about the name all the time. Same thing with apple and it's i-names scheme for their hardware and software products.
I'm not sayint that the k-names are great and new kde applications try to avoid using it, but then a big company does it and has a big marketing budget, nobody minds it.
Yeah it's cheesy but if you want to appear professional it just doesn't kut it, at least not to me .. I mean KDE is great and all, but I wish there was some committee or some board of members trying to actually design the whole user experience.
But this is many times the problem with open source desktop environments, and I don't really see any easy way to fix it .. some people have tried to create unified experiences, but those are mostly forgotten with time.
> Yeah it's cheesy but if you want to appear professional it just doesn't kut it, at least not to me
You misread your parent commenter. They meant "cheesy" as a negative thing.
> I wish there was some committee or some board of members trying to actually design the whole user experience
There is: the Visual Design Group [1].
> But this is many times the problem with open source desktop environments
Oh, and Gnome too: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design
So that's two of the two major open source DE that actually have teams "trying to actually design the whole user experience".
Feel free to join them.
About Gimp, this is a word that does not mean anything in most parts of the world.
But actually, I think most people don't care that much. Names is not the among the problems people mention when they struggle with the open source world.
Well GMail rhymes nicely, Gee-mail, and it's pretty obvious what it does.
KMail doesn't have the same rhythm to it, it sounds slightly middle eastern or german, like maybe it's a Polish software package or something..
The difference is these big companies spend a lot of time thinking about the application names, iPhone is genius in how simple it is.
I mean there are good names also, Linux in itself is a good name for example, it's unique and doesn't sound dorky. And Firefox and some others, I'm not blaming all of them.
Gimp might have been a good name in the mid-to-late 90s when the development of Gimp and Gnome began, but still sticking to it just doesn't make much sense to me.
"GMail" doesn't make me think of that hillbilly scene in Pulp Fiction every time I try to use the program though. It was a funny scene but not the sort of thing I want to be associated with professionally. If someone says "I use [the] GIMP" I'm not going to be able to avoid thinking "oh like those hillbillies he he he" - I might be able to avoid saying that out loud.
Being associated with uninventive names like GMail, Linux or Konqueror is a pretty comfortable level of goofiness for a professional setting. They don't mean anything, maybe we can all groan at how uninventive they are, but at least they are boring and have no real connotations and won't tempt me to make a joke that'd annoy HR. I wouldn't be the only one thinking that either.
That’s the one. Anytime I read about Gimp, my head goes „Bring out the Gimp.“ and I can’t take it seriously anymore.
Then again, we’re just old people remembering an old movie, so maybe this doesn’t even ring true for young people anymore?
> Many Open Source projects are just named damn stupidly
Stupid like "windows" for a windowing system or "word" for a word processor or "mail" for an email client or "iMessage" for a messaging system, or Pages, Numbers, or everything starting with an "i" from Apple, or everything g by Google or the endless stream of startup named like their name was created using one of those "startup name generator"?
I am a non native english speaker, if I had not discovered much of the software I know of,including Photoshop, in the late 80s when I was a kid and didn't know English I would have thought software companies were run by idiots.
But lucky me (and them) Photoshop now for me it's just a name with no actual meaning.
Is Krita worse than Photoshop as a name? Is Blender worse than Maya?
are Chrome or Safari or Edge really better than Firefox?
For context: I am not a native English speaker. My command of the English language is more than adequate for writing academic texts in English (ie, research).
I am aware of "gimp" as a derogatory term, but it pops up so infrequently, its primary connotation for me has become this piece of software.
I imagine plenty of other non-native speakers would similarly only have a loose connotation to the meaning as an insult.
In other words, while names may sometimes be important, I think this case is not an instance of that for the majority of people on the planet.
As a non-native English speaker myself, I've known about GIMP the software years before I was familiar with "gimp" as an insult. It's kind of like Git, an odd British insult that we in the free software community know as the leading version control system.
Proprietary software is often stupidly named too, yet we take it seriously. I feel like for some people it's not the name, but the lack of associated cost that moves GIMP to the 'hobby utility' category for them.
(And yes, I'm aware Linus named Git as an insult on purpose and that he wanted to call Linux something weird too, like Freax - the questions is, why does it matter?)
I think why it matters to some people, though surely not everyone, is that words and names can evoke real responses in those people. And I mean real, like memories, feelings, associations, et cetera. Sometimes the real response is strong, even psychosomatic.
I don't think these people are faking it. Words have always seemed to have power.
When my wife and I were considering names for our child, there was one name in particular where she said that she could never name her child that. She had hated (HATED, apparently) a girl with the same name in primary school. The look on her face. The real emotions in her eyes. That name was definitely out.
I have seen people get in physical fights purely over a few words and name-calling.
I personally do not feel this way about words. I think we should not let words have such power over us. But for some people, words do matter that much.
As such, we have a choice when naming something. We can either ignore this power of words and risk having the name itself hold back adoption of the [product, service, whatever], or we can be aware of this power and conscious and conscientious in choosing how to name the thing.
You are right, but that could apply to any word or name regardless of its usual meaning or usage.
To me Gimp is a pretty meaningless word, though I guess that's mostly because I'm a non-native speaker and the word seems to be used so infrequently that I have a hard time judging how it's perceived in general. But usually people don't think twice about the name of brands or products if they're used to it, and are able (though not always willing) to see things in context. I doubt that Gimp's popularity would increase with a name change, critics mainly seem to have issues with the UI. Either way I use it because it does everything I need with a pretty reasonable learning curve.
I appreciate this perspective and generally agree with it, but I am also of the opinion that society evolves and so what is very inconsiderate today wasn't socially viewed as such back then. Going forward, I probably wouldn't name it GIMP, but this is decades old software.
There are people who assume malice on the part of the developers refusing to change a name that has over 20 years of 'name recognition' behind it, for better or worse. It's those people that, despite understanding their concerns to a large degree, actually make it less likely that naming will be considerate in the future.
It also doesn't help that the suggested replacement names are not much better, GIMP was forked as Glimpse because of the name. Glimpse has all sorts of potentially creepy/negative behaviors associated with it as well if one goes into it trying to analyze the name as flawed.
> I am aware of "gimp" as a derogatory term, but it pops up so infrequently, its primary connotation for me has become this piece of software.
This is also the way our language perception generally works: The word is just the signifier, a variable. The meaning, the significate, is not inherent in the word itself.
If enough people say "gimp" and mean the software, that becomes the default inference.
You'd never get to the end state you describe if people are uncomfortable recommending the software because of the name. Word-of-mouth fails when the literal word is something you won't say.
They should change the name; it's difficult to understand why the maintainers are so attached to something so self-defeating.
That was my point: while you may have some/strong inhibitions due to this name, I don't. To me, "git" is far worse - probably because of gaps in my English, but still. You don't get why they don't change the name; I would rather folks spend effort on improving Gimp than changing its name. (Same for git btw.)
I think name changes are like bug fixes: the later in the life cycle you go for it, the more expensive. Whether that is worth the cost... in the case of Gimp and git: for you maybe yes, for me decidedly no. Doesn't mean either of us is more right than the other, but does say something about how we feel about using and talking about these pieces of software.
I think the reason people have more of a problem with GIMP is that it's a sex thing, not that it's an insult. Whereas "git" doesn't really mean anything specific as far as I know.
Edit: Apparently gimp is also an insult directed to disabled people (I just learned).
- random three-letter combination that is pronounceable, and not
actually used by any common UNIX command. The fact that it is a
mispronounciation of "get" may or may not be relevant.
- stupid. contemptible and despicable. simple. Take your pick from the
dictionary of slang.
- "global information tracker": you're in a good mood, and it actually
works for you. Angels sing, and a light suddenly fills the room.
- "goddamn idiotic truckload of sh*t": when it breaks
Wait, really? The name of the tool is something to think about "constantly"? Why?!
To me, seriously dismissing a tool because of the name is like failing an IQ test. It is a sign of someone that wants to be spoon-fed by any sort of shit that is offered by the big companies, as long as it is packaged in nice colors.
Why? Because if you use the application, you are thinking about the name of the application. You think about "Launching Affinity Photo" for example. What if the name of the software was CripplePhoto, I mean that wouldn't be too nice to think about, or "ShitSoft FecesEditor".
Or even more not so extreme examples, for examples let's say your music player would be called "Brown Juice" or something like that, would you be happy about that application, vs for example "iTunes" or "Soundamp" or whatever.
You know these are extreme examples but just show you that the power of words is very clear in what kind of images they create in our thinking, I bet if Gimp would change their software name to something like "GNU PhotoEdit" or something like that, more people would be willing unconsciously to work and improve it also vs working on this "Gimp" that still uses that silly logo with the Gnome Mascot. It's very unprofessional and you wont attract the best designers or developers if you don't think about the big picture.
That's just my view on the thing. The package and nice colors matter, but of course the interiors and working of the software is that matters more, and on that frontend Gimp just doesn't cut it. What I'm trying to say is that maybe they could make the software better by changing it's name and design.
I mean, no professional uses Gimp for photo editing, at least I don't know anyone besides some hobbyist who rarely use photo editing, they might use Gimp. Or am I wrong ?
> What if the name of the software was CripplePhoto
Argumentum ad absurdum.
> I mean, no professional uses Gimp for photo editing
Perhaps because the lack of CMYK, the limited architecture for plugin, or the outdated UI have more to do than the name?
If the name was the real bottleneck for adoption, you can be sure that you'd see someone creating a fork with different branding and being widely successful. Oh, wait. It has been tried already! [0]
> I mean, no professional uses Gimp for photo editing, at least I don't know anyone besides some hobbyist who rarely use photo editing, they might use Gimp. Or am I wrong ?
Check out https://www.rosiehardy.com/. Rosie is a commercially successful photographer who has been using GIMP for years.
I associate gimp with that full body leather suit.
Its weird when people complain about minor things like multiple windows or name when actually doing something with the program is much more complicated.
this is what gimp was named after to begin with (specifically in reference to pulp fiction). it used to even be called "the gimp" i believe. so it kind of stands out above the crowd of mediocre open source software names by being fully intentionally awful
Much worse is naming a database with that intentionally awful name "Oracle", which immediately brings to mind that intentionally awful company run by that horrible lawnmower.
Oh wait. That's who makes it. I guess they spoiled their own name. Never mind.
...Somebody once called me the Emily Litella of the net.
Well, if you think about it "iMail" can be thought of combining "I" or "Me" and "Mail". So, "My Mail" or "Mail for Me".
How does "KMail" sound like phonetically ? KayMail ? KeiMeil ?
It just doesn't give the same vibe. The designers at Apple know that "iPhone" means something to the user.
Even gPhone would be better, but Google has that covered already.
KDE doesn't really stand for anything or it's phonetical counterpart doesn't communicate anything meaningful to the user.
I just looked it up and, K used to stand for "Kool", but already that is not a real word, doesn't look good or even sound good, at least to my ears or thinking.
Also iMac came from "Internet" back then, so it had multiple meanings behind it.
If naming is such a crucial point for free software adoption, how do you explain the success of a widely used version control system whose name is a slang word for "a foolish or contemptible person"?
I don't care too much what the names are, but it annoys me that apps have secret, hidden true names. Want to launch an app with a command line argument? Time to start grepping system files.
So not at all real names. The search for obvious reasons also works with descriptions and a label "File Manager" is much easier to understand and search for than "nautilus".
I'm happy to see that they have taken this direction. So much more clear and better than previously. Now I wish Gimp would be one of those softwares taking direction from that. Still, the whole "Gnome desktop" sounds silly.
As an aside, I don't think it's the "content" of the word GIMP that's the problem necessarily. Just that because it's a single syllable, people don't instinctively recognize the pattern of sounds. Especially for non-native speaker, or people that don't know what you are talking about off the top of their head.
As opposed to Gee Mail or Eye Tunes. Don't think either would do so great as "Gail" or just "Tunes". One thing I noticed in a foreign country is that our brains fill in the details a lot when listening and that extra syllable really narrows down the possible words and sounds that you might be hearing.
You are writing this from your english centric world vision. The world is big and most people dont care what's the meaning or if it even has a meaning...
> We really need an open source alternative to Photoshop. I just don’t know if gimp will ever be it.
I guess it depends on what you need it for. As someone who's a software developer and occasionally dabbles in video game development or some very basic design, GIMP is perfectly suitable for what I need. I actually haven't used Photoshop in years and don't really feel like anything at all is missing for my use cases.
Things like sometimes creating images for my blog posts, or favicons for my sites. Or touching up photos or removing some details, or maybe creating some textures for a video game/visualization. GIMP is just there and works well enough. For even more basic (or batch) processing, I'd also recommend XnView: https://www.xnview.com/en/ or IrfanView: https://www.irfanview.com/
That said, the quality of FOSS software is all over the place:
* since the UI/UX revamp, I'd say that Blender is one of the better and more high quality packages out there, what FOSS *should* be like
* software like GIMP, LibreOffice and Kdenlive take a middle spot: fully functional, decent quality, good enough to be a daily driver
* software like Inkscape and OpenShot are at the bottom of the barrel: only workable if there are no alternatives, bad performance and unstable, bad UI/UX and so on
If you’re happy with the feature set of ~Photoshop CS2 you may want to check out Photopea [0]. It runs in your browser, has a similar UI to Photoshop and (for me) has all bells an whistles. It’s also open source [1].
Ad supported. I think they got an ad free paid version. Been using it for years and I believe it covers over 90% of non professional photoshop use cases.
If gimp copied photoshops interface there would no be question it's a replacement for 99% of use cases. Unfortunately, Adobe owns that. Along with IP for many other features. Repeal software patents and software intellectual property, and we will have competition.
Krita addresses the painting parts of Photoshop. It's still a long way from replacing the photo editing part of photoshop, and it might be a distraction if they even had plans to do that.
I have used a standard installation from Debian for years. Mine starts in about three seconds. Is that too slow? Also: How fast does Photoshop load? Surely slower than three seconds.
Also: Have you considered contributing a patch to do background loading after GNU Image starts?
> We really need an open source alternative to Photoshop. I just don’t know if gimp will ever be it.
If they are just, now, adding CMYK support (Photoshop has had CMYK for many years, as CMYK has been critical for printers), I suspect that you may be correct.
I wonder why more companies don’t get behind GIMP as a real alternative to Adobe. I remember Blender getting picked on all the time before it got its big sponsorships. It got a real roadmap and development was done and was greatly improved on a feature and artist experience level.
The UI is absolutely horrendous and despite decades of opportunity to fix it, there’s been zero attempt.
Blender has made some big UI gains. I used it a long time ago, and the hidden menus and backwards control scheme made it unusable for anyone with basic computing knowledge (right click was select? Insanity) and doubly so for anyone with 3D knowledge. They revamped it a few years back and it’s usable now. I went from a blender hater to happily dropping paid 3D software and preaching about how good blender is.
Companies could throw money at gimp. But that doesn’t mean it’ll ever have a control scheme that’s usable to the 99.9% of people with prior digital art experience who go in expecting something similar to 99.999% of other software, only to find it’s completely backwards.
Literally just putting aside all other development plans and going all in for a year on making the UI usable would launch the project to success.
And comments like this always get a “well, it’s open source so you could fix it yourself if it’s that bad!” I could and so could others. But there’s usable software out there, and instead of dedicating loads of time to trying to fix a decades-old mess, we’d all rather just use a better product even if it costs money and get to work, or make something different from the ground up.
How much of this is just personal opinion rather than just canon?
I love the GIMP, use it all the time, find it super-intuitive, and last time I had to use Photoshop I felt like a fresh vim user who couldnt wait to figure out how to get the hell out of there.
I'm not the original commenter, and I agree it's opinion, but it's definitely one shared by every artist and designer I've ever spoken with. The only people I know who use GIMP are engineers and devs - either folk who are die-hard OSS supporters, or people who need to do a quick image adjustment and can't be bothered Googling the ImageMagick incantation for it. Not a sign of a healthy, competitive graphics suite.
I suspect if you surveyed 1000 art professionals, you'd get very few who like or use GIMP. You're going to get a very different result with something like Blender and 3D designers though, which really should make the GIMP devs pause and think what it is that Blender does well that GIMP doesn't.
It's probably personal opinion. I'm not a photo editor, I have never used Photoshop so that has not introduced bias.
But I have found Gimp to be wildly inconsistent in the UI. I never remember how to draw a circle, for example, when I just want to add something to a screenshot because you have to use the circle cut tool and then choose a different option which I never remember because it is unintuitive. Yet its easy to have a paintbrush that draws one of those texture patterns that I can't imagine anyone ever using.
The fact it’s been struggling to get widespread support for decades and there’s always someone complaining about the UI is a sign.
Most people don’t even think about photoshop UI. Same with Microsoft paint: users can get in and start figuring out what they want to do just by clicking around.
I've used GIMP sparingly but the tools pane/window gets lost, it's a clumsy interface. Krita is nice (except GIMP has some nice GNOME-ish human interface touches that are better.)
I can't explain how but my tools pane was lost when I opened GIMP to inspect it during my previous comment (not visible and Tools menu -> show tools did not make it show up). Now, resetting tools window locations (in settings) did fix it. But it explains my confusion and exasperation the last few times using GIMP. (version 2.10.x)
Honestly, if there have been decades of efforts and it’s still this bad, that’s even less motivation to give them money.
It’s like: if you’re a large manufacturer, would you prefer investing in a city where government officials pocket the cash and roads don’t exist but with handwavy excuses that something might improve with a little more cash, or invest literally anywhere else where the roads improve every year and things are getting cleaner?
Gimp seems to be spinning its tires for infinity. I’ve tried it once a year or so for 15 years. It hasn’t changed much. It’s incredible. Almost no company is going to throw them cash and it’s obvious why.
Your analogy falls short for a very predictable reason. There are exactly zero paid developers in the GIMP project.
The right kind of an analogy would be an investor stumbling upon a tiny community of developers that has been serving hundreds of thousands of users for the past 25+ years without pay.
Being able to open a PR and getting accepted to be merged are 2 totally different things.
IMO, one of the core reasons why UI/UX in open source applications (that aren't backed or actively contributed by dedicated staff in big companies that keeps them on a salary for the sole purpose of contributing) is because it's more widely accepted for programmers to contribute to open source than UI/UX designers.
In this case the best one can do is design mockups, but then who implements it? Who even has to be convinced that the mockup is a step forward or backwards, the moment every design decision is treated as having the same value as the next one, on the grounds of "it's just an opinion"?
My point is, we don't lack programmers/developers we lack UI/UX people willing to contribute, and we also lack the former to actually listen to what they have these people to say instead of dismissing their suggestions as "not data driven enough", "too opinionated" etc.
There’s a certain section of open source devs who fight tooth-and-nail against better UX as they see any attempt at making a software easier to use as ‘dumbing things down’.
It’s why as a UX designer I don’t contribute to open source projects any more as the fight just isn’t worth it.
GIMP is peak that attitude. It could be a top-quality mainstream open source image editor if they wanted it to, but they don’t.
Photopea is the work of one guy, Affinity Photo was made by a small team, so it’s clear it’s not manpower but attitude.
They’ve got things just how they like it and the last thing they want is to make things easier and have a bunch of n00bs running around and spoiling things, thank you very much.
> There’s a certain section of open source devs who fight tooth-and-nail against better UX... GIMP is peak that attitude.
Except the GIMP team worked with a UX architect for several years. That's how you got single-window mode, convenient rectangular/ellipse selection and cropping tool, polygonal selection tool built into lasso, the unified transform tool, and more.
And even after Peter (the UX guy) departed, the team still made a bunch of UX improvements (and continues making them, time-permitting).
> Affinity Photo was made by a small team, so it’s clear it’s not manpower but attitude.
Serif Ltd. is 200 to 500 employees. They have paid developers working full time. They had the funds to start from scratch and build on their previous experience creating similar applications.
Well, your argument inspires some thought... if one guy made Photopea, why don't a couple of FLOSS devs just copy it? (as a separate project, not as part of GIMP)
Starting from scratch usually sounds like a great idea. You don't have to deal with legacies and workarounds, what's not to like about that? :) So I get it why people think it's best to start GIMP anew. I also get it why people are reluctant to do so. While you are working on something new, you also typically don't have a working program for years. And when they already have software that works, that means maintaining two code bases at once.
In case of GIMP, the existing team is already stretched thin and has to deal with too many reports and requests to handle. In the past 4 years, the amount of reports in the issue tracker more than doubled, but the team hasn't grown accordingly. I don't think it's realistic to expect that the team would be able to maintain the current code base while starting anew. If the current progress is already commonly referred to as glacial, what do you think will happen if they start reimplementing GIMP from scratch?
And I get it why you are referring to Photopea here. I think Photopea is a formidable effort. But it's been under development for 10 years already. That's quite a long time. And Ivan didn't have another image editor to maintain while working on that project. AFAIK, he originally intended the write a web app to merely open and show a PSD file in the browser. That's a quite different development trajectory.
There’s perfectly good software out there. I’d rather get work done and use that, than spend forever trying to make sense of some mess of an ancient project’s code and trying to fix it. There are even free projects with usable UI that would be a better use of time if I were to want to contribute to something. Krita’s been mentioned here a few times and it seems to have a brighter future.
> Companies could throw money at gimp. But that doesn’t mean it’ll ever have a control scheme that’s usable to the 99.9% of people with prior digital art experience who go in expecting something similar to 99.999% of other software, only to find it’s completely backwards.
For what it's worth, GIMP does indeed have about a million dollars sitting in their donation account. So money isn't their issue, project management is.
I believe it is intentionally gimped because they are not allowed to make the UX too close to Photoshop(which, unfortunately happens to have the most intuitive / comfortable interface for photo editing) or else they would be sued by Adobe. Blame the horrendous interface on Adobe and their aggressive enforcement of software patents.
Nonsense. You can 100% copy ux of a product. There are many mac apps that closely replicate Photoshop (affinity, pixelmator, acorn)and none of them were sued by Adobe.
Also i think Photoshop is intuitive mainly because everybody is so used to it. Gimp just has very bad ux because they cant colectivelly agree and unify the ux. If the ux was very different but very good it might be even advantage but now its lot worse PS.
Flash 4 had a very nice interface full of palettes. Flash 5 dropped them all in favor of a "smart" inspector that never showed me what I wanted to see without a couple of extra clicks and a half-second wait. This was about half of why I dropped out of the animation industry, it was a complete flow-killer.
This happened because Adobe sued Macromedia over palettes.
Annoyingly enough, the interface has not substantially changed in the intervening years despite Adobe eating MM.
My personal experience is that GIMP is not quite at feature parity with Photoshop 3 or 4. It's definitely nowhere near Photoshop 5, and there are some features and workflows I used in Photoshop 2.5 that are missing from GIMP--just not many. The UX of GIMP also continues to be a major problem. GIMP is just the most famous alternative to Photoshop, that doesn't mean that it's a good substitute for Photoshop for most Photoshop users.
I think people who consider GIMP a good substitute for Photoshop probably haven't ever used Photoshop seriously, or have photo editing needs that fall in a very narrow range.
Companies which don't want to pay for Creative Cloud can more easily pay for one of the various alternatives--the particular alternative that works for you will be different.
If it were only that - there are features that will never be implemented if certain utterances by core devs are any indication.
I am more a PSP than a PS guy and I really tried to use GIMP for my image editing needs on kubuntu. I even ran a pinned patched version of it fixing the save/export "bug" (Another boneheaded ideological dev decision).
A few months back I wanted to add a few straight lines to an image. In PSP these would be vector object that can be adjusted in size, color and position. In GIMP not so much. It has only the pencil tool with an alt mode holding shift that does straight lines.
However I needed to adjust the lines distance from each other slightly - What followed was a lot of cursing and repeated attempts, switching to the path tool followed by discarding that idea and switching to making a layer per line. After finishing I deleted what I had done and did the same by starting PSP 9 in WINE in about 30 seconds.
I did some googling and found the reason why GIMP lacks any useable Vector functions is that vector functions belong in a Drawing program not a Manipulation program. And GIMP is the latter. This is a paraphrased from memory quote by a GIMP dev.
That probably means that not putting any vector function in (even though stuff like the Text function really benefits from vector layers) was a decision long ago that passed into ideological canon by now and is probably a huge task to implement.
So I am currently back to using a PSP version from 1998 for editing images on ubuntu. Even though its buggy as hell. Newer version after the Corel acquisition sadly come with a DRM service that balks at wine. I have licences for a few of those I would love to use.
Vector layers was a 2006 Google Summer of Code project. It was too ambitious, it wasn't completed, whatever good bits were done got merged years later so that the code wouldn't be lost completely, and there is still no user interface for any of that.
But the sole reason this project was assigned was because people behind GIMP were quite open to having better drawing tools in the program. They just lacked the time and the motivation to work on that.
When your program is primarily intended for image manipulation and you have a crapton of requests from users to add image manipulation tools, filters, and whatnot, how else do you prioritize your work? Especially when you program's architecture turns out to be inadequate for complex features and you have to rearchitect and repurpose 800K LOC, not to mention updating it for the next generation of the UI toolkit that is a moving target of its own?
For every user complaining about not having shape tools you'll get three complaining about the UI, another two or three complaining about not having non-destructive editing, another two demanding layer styles, then an assorted group of individuals wanting CMYK image mode, LAB image mode, more use of GPU, AI features, more filters, better HiDPI support, and the list goes on. All the while you have essentially one person doing 50% of all work and a small team of people all working on small items. All the while there are free/libre applications like Inkscape that have been providing better drawing tools for years.
So I'll ask again: given all that, how else do you prioritize your work?
Good to hear that its not pure hard-headedness that caused this.
Sure, but when I look at the development of image editing tools in the 90ies then vector shapes and layer pretty much was widespread by 1998. If I were to guess then the functionality just came with support for TT Fonts and became a standard feature for image manipulation applications.
Again I tried really hard to make GIMP work for me - I still found myself hunting for the right tool icon time and time again (I think something is fundamentally wrong there but I cannot with certainty say what) This might be where the UI criticism comes from. I bet you would learn the symbols in the end and . I still got so annoyed by the save function insisting to save as some weird format I didn't want to use that I had to patch that out. But then in the end what killed it for me was the vector lines thing.
This just backs up the point the great grand parent comment made: GIMP just barely has feature parity with Photoshop 3 and even then lacks features that were in PS3. As a project GIMP is impressive and the devs do good work. Unfortunately for many end users it's useless because it lacks particular features.
> This just backs up the point the great grand parent comment made: GIMP just barely has feature parity with Photoshop 3 and even then lacks features that were in PS3.
CMYK image mode being pretty much the only missing feature from Photoshop 3.0?
I think people tend to forget all the hoops they had to jump through years ago.
Do you remember how you couldn't edit text layers until version 4.0 or 5.0?
Or how most filters and some selection tools didn't work in 32-bit mode until fairly far in the CS release series?
I distinctly and fondly remember Photoshop 4 and 5 coming out and the features they added. I used Photoshop pretty heavily from 2.5 through 7. I still use my old-ass copy of 7 for Windows today because it's got features other editors lack and I am really familiar with the UI. I don't forget having to jump through hoops in Photoshop 3. But I had to jump through fewer in 4 and pretty much none in 5 and onwards.
So GIMP not having CMYK, or any color space support besides RGB, is actually sort of amusing. Just through version 7 Photoshop added vector shapes, history brush, adjustment layers, and a bunch of other stuff GIMP still lacks. It's an FOSS project so it's not like I'm saying the GIMP developers are bad, they clearly are quite talented.
What I'm saying is GIMP today is not as capable as Photoshop from 25 years ago. It's good enough for a lot of people but useless for others. I've been hearing your arguments about GIMP for as long as it has existed. It has a lot of capability and works for your use case so that must mean it just works for everyone. It's great that it works for some people. But you can't pretend Photoshop hasn't improved faster than GIMP. If you need anything beyond basic destructive editing GIMP is just not appropriate.
Most of this is just down to GIMP being an almost entirely destructive editor, and destructive editing just never was any good at respecting the user's time and effort. The only reason to implement destructive editing in the past has been limited computer resources, not because it's actually a good paradigm in virtually any way.
GIMP development started in 1995. First version of Adobe Photoshop with adjustment layers was released a year later, in 1996. The notion just wasn't there.
I'm not sure what you are implying or how we got from "why it was originally designed that way" to "still not available".
If you still want talking about notions and time, GEGL as the non-destructive backend for GIMP was started by Rhythm&Hues developers in early 2000.
We could have a long conversation about priorities and availability of developers and refactoring and all the reasons resulting in non-destructive editing not yet available, if you like.
> My personal experience is that GIMP is not quite at feature parity with Photoshop 3 or 4. It's definitely nowhere near Photoshop 5
Layer Effects are the only 5.0 feature from Photoshop that GIMP doesn't yet have.
There's also a million things GIMP does better or does at all compared to all the versions of Photoshop you mentioned. I can give you examples or you can spare me the time and just admit you've seen Photoshop 3/4/5 so long ago that you don't quite remember what it was like :)
Probably GIMP. Last time tried to use GIMP, I spend about an hour trying to work out how to remove an alpha channel without also applying it.
I could clearly see the image I wanted in the red, green and blue channels. But because the alpha channel was filled with full transparent, all I could see outside of individual color channel mode was the checkered background. Deleting the alpha channel or converting the image format from RGBA to RGB just erased the entire image to black.
I eventually found the solution in the eraser tool, which had an erase alpha mode. I had to set it to a really large size and go over the entire image.
Would probably have been faster to just write a script in python.
Really? Can you make a shape then adjust it after you made it? Cause I cannot find that - as soon as I fill or stroke the vector it drops into bitmap and can only undone not adjusted.
I wrote above that Photoshop 5.0 (which GIMP was compared against) did not have vector objects, Photoshop 6.0 was the first version to have it. I'm getting a feeling that you are talking about something else here.
One of my guesses as outsider to both 2d and 3d software industries. Is lifetime of the projects created in each software and the workflows around it. With Gimp/Photoshop the drawing will be usually done by one person and once it's done it's mostly done. With 3d software used for games and animations and movies projects are much bigger, made by teams of many people, projects lasting up to few years. Art pipelines and processes get built around the tools, which might be at least partially reused across the projects within same studio. It's less unusual to have inhouse software developers for creating specialized addons and tools.
With that in mind seems believable that companies where long term impact of investing in tools is clearer are more likely to consider investing in open source tools for the sake of long term benefits. In comparison with 2d drawing industry where investment in tooling is mostly limited to skill and experience of individual persons working with specific software.
There is also fact that final output of 2d drawing software is plain image which have relatively simple widely used standard formats (for practical reasons the Photoshop files are still commonly exchanged but sooner or later result is treated as plain image). With 3D software the complexity of output and integration with other software is much bigger. This encourages other big software companies to invest in Blender for the sake of better integration with their tools. Unity, Unreal consuming 3d models produced in blender, there is interest for both good workflow and integration, as well general accessibility to tools required during game development because more game developers means more potential game developers buying their software. Nvidia and AMD interested in better support for their hardware, so that end users are more likely to buy it.
My uniformed guess. Blender was created as a an internal product by a company using it. While not very successful, it had marked oriented approach from a start.
GIMP was always a toy for programmers, without any vision behind for how to actually make it a product that commercial users would want. It’s a big job to move a ship like that.
Not a big company, but there is the Zemarmot project. One of the project members implement things in GIMP, which are needed for Zemarmot. So there are people using GIMP professionally and extending it accroding to their needs.
You also have to take into account the cost difference. Other DCCs cost orders of magnitude more than Photoshop does. The value of a free program really inspires more faith.
Also blender was regularly used to make content with input from the community. Multiple shorts that dog fooded it and provided improvements through the process, while inspiring many to see what’s possible.
GIMP doesn’t have any of that. Photoshop can be had now for $10/mo or something cheap like that. It’s not thousands of dollars a year like for DCCs. It doesn’t have productions driving features in it , or creating content regularly to inspire people.
Krita does better here because they do small but more engaged community outreach to create content with Krita and have it feed back into the app
> Also blender was regularly used to make content with input from the community. Multiple shorts that dog fooded it and provided improvements through the process, while inspiring many to see what’s possible.
The Blender Foundation and community made that happen! No glib “if you don’t like it, fix it!” type comments. I’m not suggesting that you personally have said that, but look at the context and process of Blender’s development and success. The people at the Foundation, along with a buoyant community have worked hard and listened to the criticisms and transparently worked on them. It’s been a long slog.
Why would they? Companies don’t need an alternative to Adobe. The licensing costs are a drop in the bucket.
Would it be nice to have? Sure. But there are tons of alternatives to Photoshop that just don’t compete on market share, despite photoshop lagging behind in many areas.
If companies were backing an OSS editor though, Krita is by far more favoured by professional creatives. It’s more familiar coming from Photoshop, has better extensibility+Python scripting+Qt which is great for pipelines and has a much better handling of color science and other features important for professionals.
No I’m not because Adobe has pricing structures for non-profits and other markets.
In the context of this discussion, the question was why companies aren’t funding GIMP development, and the ones that can’t afford a $20/mo aren’t the ones who would be funding development anyway.
Yes, of course there’s a market for free stuff. But the price of admission into the existing paid for products is low enough that there’s little motivation to fund it.
edit: never mind i had somehow missed the GIMP Python extensions. So extensibility is not a point in favour of Krita, though looking at both APIs, I prefer the Krita API though that’s subjective
The last time I used Gimp, the Gimp Python extension was an optional module that wasn’t included in the build I had
But it’s been a while clearly and I missed it. I’ll edit my prior comment
Probably many factors at play. One of them being that the UI in Gimp is pretty bad to start with compared to commercial alternatives. Working with Text for example is atrocious in Gimp compared to Photoshop
But it's like saying "it's broken, therefore I'm not going to fix it".
I think a lot of things in Gimp are not broken, there is a worthy foundation to build upon. The text UI is bad but it's not the cornerstone of the product, it can be fixed without rearchitecting it. The library approach to graphical ops is more important, and it looks promising to me.
Look how much has Inkscape's UI improved, to say nothing about Blender.
The Blender Foundation is a well oiled machine that actively seeks funding and offers easy ways to contribute. It all described here: https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/
Blender is, after Linux, the golden child of FOSS for professional level tooling and I’d argue the model for running an open source project.
The problem is directional. Other FOSS out there seem to clearly understand what are the pain points and adress them as fast as they can while adding new features. Gimp feels slow in that regard. Maybe not enough dev resources or no clear focus among all devs.
because GIMP UI is terrible and the GIMP team has hard time questioning their UI choices. It was the same thing for blender for years, artists were telling the team that toolbars on the bottom of a window was a stupid idea, that the 3D view needed a visual nav gizmo and so on and so forth only to be rebuked by "gatekeepers" opposed to any sort of change. Yet Blender really took off with 2.8, only when it did its visual overall...
If you're going to write a software for artists, design the UI for artists, not developers... "just learn the UI" doesn't cut it. The problem isn't resource oriented, it's "we don't want to change anything because we think there is nothing wrong with the UI".
While every software is different, there are rules to UX/UI and GIMP is breaking too many of them. Also the bar to contribute is C and GObject knowledge which is quite high. Blender UI can be modified with Python so it's much easier for a designer to make prototypes.
In the meantime, many companies use Affinity[1] (commercial) as an alternative... But Adobe stuff is still the default software to "learn" with, so most designers insist using it... and personnel costs are much higher than licensing costs.
As image processing is a relatively processor intensive activity, Mac used to be, and is still (it seems) the OS of choice for this work. GIMP's native Mac support too came quite late. This is another reason which adversely affected adoption.
This post is completely on the money. As distasteful as this will be to proponents of FOSS - especially those that “hate” all things Apple, a majority of professional design and photo work is done with them, which has a massive impact on the hobbyists market. Until Macs are treated as a first class citizen, success will likely be completely out of reach. Demonstrate usability and performance with the platform the pro’s use and the trickle down effect will be there. Blender, who use their own UI kit on the Mac just like Adobe does, is successful because it’s approachable (now at least, I’m still a right-clicker) and performant on all platforms. They talk about, and with, pro users and where Blender fits in. I’d now say that if anyone wants to play around or learn 3D modelling for animation, games and FX, Blender is as good as any place to start.
Very true as well. Rarely do I not have both installed - I've just made a point of pushing artists to Krita as much as possible because too many who I know try the GIMP, get upset/annoyed, and give up.
You don't usually personally contribute major things to OSS because it's a shrewd business move, but because you want it to exist, you want to share, and you reasonably enjoy the process.
(Corporations pouring paid hours into Linux, Blender, Postgres, etc are a different case.)
Do explain more. My mentality is that FOSS exists and has thrived through viable business models. Very few people just do charitable OSS work without deriving any benefits from it. Those that do, don't end up lasting very long:
I was being facetious - I'm sure everyone is also aware that you could hire devs to code for you. But not to dismiss your point, it is interesting that companies exist purely for the purpose of working on arbitrary free software requests.
Way back when in the 00s I did some triage to what it would take for adding nondestructive editing. It was basically a complete rewrite of the whole code base. Given that it's 20 years later and it's still not in the main trunk I'd trying to fix gimp is the lost cost falicy
My question is, “Why do this now?” Print has been an increasingly-niche distribution format for many years, and anyone targeting print already has Adobe CC and will never be switching to GIMP for print work.
I’m not trying to be negative for negative’s sake, because I’d truly love for something to be to images what Blender is to 3D. I just wonder if anyone’s thinking about the costs-vs-payoff here.
I never use GIMP in depth but I imagine if they can't even read CMYK file before, it would be a big flaw.
I don't work in printing or publishing but I have opened hundreds of CMYK files in Photoshop for further editing. Also lots of (most of?) PDFs use CMYK.
The sad part is that CMYK color space is really important (and that is just one little part) to be able for a tool to be used in the professional print world. There are printing houses mainly for consumers who really don’t care what you throw at them. But these companies have technical designers (I don’t know the correct term for a photoshop user who only works with colorspace correction etc) who prepare the media for print.
In smaller print houses there is a stricter process. They define tight requirements what you can send to them. And PDF with all the bells in whistles in the correct colorspace etc is defacto standard. So for an FOSS tool it is sadly a lot work to implement all these things to support the print Workflows which are dominated by Adobe.
The question is if this must come from a single tool. Photoshop is already a tool with too many faces.
I'm a software developer in a printing house. Print is far from dead.
People are printing less paper, but today anybody can print a custom photo album, or T-shirt, or business cards, or custom pens, or mouse pad, or vehicle C-pillar sticker, or literally hundreds of other custom items. All that runs on CMYK.
So the original source for custom things is probably a jpeg image, does it matter to convert it to CMYK before before giving it to the shop vs converting it right before giving it to the printer?
If you don’t care about color, then it doesn’t matter.
If you do care, as most professionals should, it matters greatly. RGB and CMYK have extremely different gamuts of reproduction, not even counting what your output medium is capable of rendering (whether that’s your display range or your ink+surface range)
No, it's not. The vast majority of consumer-oriented printing originates in a jpg or png image. The file format really isn't that important, the point GP was making is that these images are in RGB space. That's actually correct.
Work that comes in from professional design shops come in as CMYK. But not from small businesses that are not in a tech field, such as grocery stores, restaurants, sports teams, children's or senior's activities, security firms, hardware stores, hair stylists, etc. All that comes in as RGB.
I agree with other folks in this thread who think that the name "The Gimp" (Pulp Fiction reference) is too offensive and something with this name can probably never gain mass adoption because it's a hurtful thing to say. The word gimp is a somewhat-outdated word to insult a crippled person. An in-context usage would be e.g. evil bullies at a playground back in ~1910 beating up a crippled kid while calling him a gimp. The Pulp Fiction scene is a reference to this context, where a character is temporarily restrained (gimped) by that sex suit. I really don't see how software named "Gimp" could be discussed on corporate email threads and stuff without that being rude. It's pretty similar to if the software were named "Little Cripple".
Agreed completely. It is annoying how this is constantly brushed off by some people, especially the project contributors. We should just 'get over it'. Well I can get over it, but how can I pitch this to my boss with a straight face? Or deploy it to 500 users on company managed devices?
When the new hire is offended by the icon on their desktop that says GIMP, I should just say to them, "get over it"?
"git" means asshole and nobody seems to have a problem with that. I remember my parents being shocked when I first told them that my software was on "GitHub".
The difference is that asshole isn't a term that preys on the weak. Asshole can describe anyone you don't like, whereas terms like "gimp", "midget", or "retard" are terms that belittle those who might not be able to fully defend themselves in a physical fight. It's a whole 'nother level of cruelty that implies bullies beating someone up and then laughing.
So what's actually holding back development? GEGL is 22 years in and still isn't fully implemented. I've heard different explanations. The main one being that the people working on GIMP are (allegedly) hard to work with, so it's hard to get people with the needed skills to stick around.
GIMP is a huge code base primarily in C and GObject. This is not a popular combination.
The UI toolkit is GTK, it's not exemplarily maintained for operating systems other than Linux.
A lot of potential new stuff used to be held back by the lack of a complete GEGL port. I think the public perception is that it is still the case (it is not).
Long development cycles used to demotivate contributors. You could write a new cool feature, and most users wouldn't see it until 3-4 years later. This has been resolved as well. Since 2.10, stable releases get new features backported from the unstable branch.
Organizationally, there is no structure like a foundation in place to help financing development. It's being talked about in the project for the past few years, no action has been taken yet.
There was some talk about making it possible to write plugins with Rust. Beyond that — no, I don't think so. I really hope not. If you start rewriting GIMP in Rust, you can pretty much kiss non-destructive editing goodbye. There will simply be no time for anything else.
I didn’t mean rewriting, not initially at least, but rather building new parts in Rust, as that would remove large parts of what is currently done manually or with macro magic (inside GLib or elsewhere).
But I can see how not having enough people can make even that very difficult.
Honestly, I wish they would just get GIMP 3 out the door, GTK+ 2 isn't holding up. At this point, most people who are serious about editing images are probably on HiDPI screens. GIMP doesn't work properly on Mac laptops released since 2015, for example, and the rest of the industry has followed suit too.
So, GIMP gets CMYK support, a basic image processing feature, 24 years after it launched, and meanwhile there's this other front-page thread [0] in which the author argues that GIMP is a competitor to Photoshop. What a joke.
Most people do not use CMYK much in Photoshop. CMYK is much more useful in a tool like Adobe Illustrator. It is a nice feature but for a pretty niche segment.
AFAIK, anything to be printed requires CMYK support for decent results --- otherwise there's no control over printed colors. Printing might have gone out of fashion in recent years, but for the better part of the two decades it hadn't been the case.
Most companies/consumers only need professionally printed stuff like that rarely though, and when they do they go to see a printing professional who will do the necessary conversions for them.
For web use, app use, or other display-based use, RGB (and related) is usually enough, and that’s what people have been using the GIMP for.
Was it because non RGB color spaces were hard, due to the program being designed around RGB and the assumption of RGB is everywhere in the codebase?
Or is it something particularly tricky about CMYK?