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If they are already proficient with Photoshop, pimp Gimpshop to them.
Otherwise, like you say, show them, The GIMP with some good tutorials.

If they are already proficient with Photoshop, pimp Gimpshop to them.
Otherwise, like you say, show them, The GIMP with some good tutorials.

Why does it require my images to be uploaded to be edited? (I do not want any of my copyrighted media to cross the line of possession demarcation.)

Because Flash plug-ins don't have access to your filesystem, duh.

Am I the only one noticing this "service" appears to be only intended for amateurs in image manipulation?

It's a Flash site. Duh. You can't get professional tools over Flash, last time I checked Photoshop was over a gig.

How is this ANY better than the FREE GIMP?? http://www.gimp.org/

Well, for one, the name "Photoshop Express" doesn't bring to mind crippled people and/or bizarre sexual acts. (Besides, there are better free paint programs than GIMP... Paint.NET springs instantly to mind.)

The other questions, you'll have to address to Adobe.

Why is it ONLY Flash 9 based?

Because it uses Flex 2.

Why not download something locally that checks in for updates and new features only but runs locally? (Sometimes I require the ability to edit images in the field while only having a remote EDGE Cell Connection.)

Adobe invented AIR for this use case. There will be an AIR version that should probably do just this.

Why is it so DOG Slow?

Wasn't too bad for me. I would assume it's because their server is swamped since the headline is all over the net. Slashdotting++?

How do you turn on the decades-old proven standard Photoshop tool bars?

You don't. It's not a photoshop replacement. It's not meant to be a photoshop replacement.

Why does it require my images to be uploaded to be edited? (I do not want any of my copyrighted media to cross the line of possession demarcation.)

That's a privacy issue no doubt. But I'd assume that the server is doing a lot of the "photoshop" work. I doubt it's possible in Flex. So it needs the photos on the server to do that.

Does Adobe use retain share or gain any legal use of my uploaded images?

Maybe. They shouldn't but I wouldn't put it past them.

Am I the only one noticing this "service" appears to be only intended for amateurs in image manipulation?

Hopefully not since that's who it was designed for.

How is this ANY better than the FREE GIMP?? http://www.gimp.org/

If you're a "non-rank non-amateur" it probably isn't. I don't find the GIMP particularly easy to use. I'd use this photoshop express tool to put a stack of photos up, quickly page through, crop and edit some of them and then share them with whomever I wanted to. But I'm pretty amateur in my needs. Still, that's the use case it's targetted for and I'd argue that for that particular case (upload, resize, crop, rotate, remove red eye, change saturation, publish to facebook) it's probably way easier and faster to use than the GIMP.

Why is it ONLY Flash 9 based?

Why not download something locally that checks in for updates and new features only but runs locally? (Sometimes I require the ability to edit images in the field while only having a remote EDGE Cell Connection.)

Why is it so DOG Slow?

How do you turn on the decades-old proven standard Photoshop tool bars?

Why does it require my images to be uploaded to be edited? (I do not want any of my copyrighted media to cross the line of possession demarcation.)

Does Adobe use retain share or gain any legal use of my uploaded images?

Am I the only one noticing this "service" appears to be only intended for amateurs in image manipulation?

How is this ANY better than the FREE GIMP?? http://www.gimp.org/

And chances of infection go from unlikely to zOMG what happened to your tool?? Running executables from shady sources? No wonder you guys have problems with viruses.

If were going to talk about free photoshop, I propose we link to it. And free illustrator, and free indesign.

Read the ToS:

Section 8 (a):

Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

Thanks I will stick with GIMP instead.

Of course, if you need free stuff, there is always The Pirate Bay.

http://www.gimp.org/

> Frankly, the Community could start charging for this software and my company would gladly pay whatever they asked. These three programs are absolutely invaluable to us.

Feel free to suggest that your company make a donation; I suggest the cost of the equivalent Adobe product.

These are the links I could find :

GIMP : http://www.gimp.org/donating/
Scribus : http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Scribus_Public_Wiki:Site_support
Inkscape : http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Inkscape_Wiki:Site_support

Agreed. It's more difficult to sell when it has a name that is hard to pronounce.

Why do open source software authors give their projects self-defeating names?

Another example: GIMP which means:
gimp -- noun -- disability of walking due to crippling of the legs or feet
Not too smart to give your project a name that means "cripple".

I agree with the other comment, change the name to OurSQL, EasySQL, or ProSQL. I like the last, ProSQL. (All those others are for amateurs.)

GIMP already has their own UI redesign team.

The choice in distributions is worth more to linux then having one unified "distro". From what I have seen, distributions usually just do the packaging of the various programs. Distrobutions are the ones that package the .rpm, .ebuild, .deb, whatever files. They don't actually write the applications themselves usually.

Quite a few of the applications are usually done by the GNOME/KDE/Xfce/etc devs. That is why we have all these apps starting with a K in them! Look at the long list of apps that are "official" for GNOME. Same for KDE. It is up to the KDE/GNOME/Xfce folks to make a "unified" interface as far as the user is concerned with GUI.

Getting things to work on various hardware (not printers and some other things) is up to the kernel developers. These things get written as kernel modules. So problems with hardware X is either one of two things, the kernel lacks support for hardware X, or whatever distro you are using fails to properly detect/autoconfigure the kernel to load the drivers for hardware X.

The rest of the applications are done independently or are part of the GNU tools. Examples of independent apps include Firefox, The GIMP, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, etc. The GNU tools are things like cat, make, wget, etc.

In short, distros just do the packaging, and change a few/alot settings on the window manager to give the distro a unique feel. Yes some distros do alot of work as far as auto-detection of hardware, but there is much more to the opensource development process then just the distro.

A lot of the strengths of linux comes from the fact that various distros are able to try out things, and other distros are free to copy, or not to copy. In reality there are only about 10 or so major distros. Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, ... the big names (I'm not going to try to give a full listing, no need to create any flames). There are hundreds of distros, but for all practical purposes, there are a limited selection of distros designed with new users in mind. I'd not be counting things like CentOS, gentoo, slackware or puppy linux for this "problem". CentOS is more or less a server distro, and puppy linux solves a unique problem. Gentoo and slackware are just.. um.. not something I'd hand the CD to a new user and say "go install it". This is another example of why a single "super" distro just won't cut it. Finally you have to remember that alot of the developers are doing this work on their own time, its hard to dictate to folks what they have to work on if you are not paying them ;)

http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/

Now will you stop bashing Macs?

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. (more...)

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. (more...)

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. (more...)

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. (more...)

Simply put, the only things on my machine that should phone out should be voluntarily invoked by me - the user. Namely the web browsers, software update, ssh, etceteras.

Adobe's behavior of late (and it will only get worse) is why applications like Little Snitch exist.

This kind of thing is why I wish The GIMP or similar would get useable* for those of us with hundreds of gigs of Photoshop documents.

* Open, Save, full support for all blending modes, masking modes, layer groups, and fonts/text editing capability up to at least Photoshop CS. I don't need the thing to handle Exactly Like Photoshop, but if it's going to be the "photoshop competitor" every FOSS advocate claims it is (instead of, say, the Paintshop Pro competitor that it actually is), then it ought to at least be able to handle my existing documents as well as OpenOffice handles .doc files.

http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/ might help, I haven't looked at it much. The first link seems to have the type you can drag/drop but I'm not certain since I don't have much experience with installing software on OS X. http://www.wilber-loves-apple.org/forum.php?id=1 has dmg files.

I tried really hard to make "Betelgeuse Has A Posse," but the only image editor I have is Paint, and that's really also the extent of my image editing skills anyway. :(

It needs higher bit depths and Lab mode to be optimized for photography work

I have read that higher bit depths will be the goal of GIMP 2.6, based on the GEGL library. So the high-end photo editing is definitely a goal for GIMP.

And I'm sure the prepress folks will tell you it needs CMYK too.

Well, CMYK is only needed for the final output. Before that, you are only interested in color management and soft proofing to ensure that whatever you are editing will be printed in the right way. And for the CMYK output, there is a nice Separate plug-in (or maybe Separate+) that provides fine control over the CMYK rendering, the amount of black pull, etc. The main feature that would still be missing for some types of printing jobs is the lack of support for spot colors. But apart from that, I think that most of the support for high quality print output is already there.

The real question is, what the heck is taking GEGL so long?!

The answer is unfortunately very simple: not enough contributions. The number of active GIMP and GEGL developers is probably much smaller than you think.

Most developers work on GEGL during their spare time and this is not always easy. When you only have a handful of active developers and they can only spend a few hours per week on improving the code or discussing enhancements, it is difficult to do everything quickly. Also, there was a gap of several years during which almost nobody worked on GEGL.

I think that if only a few percent of the people who complain about GIMP or GEGL would try to start contributing to the projects, then GIMP would have had perfect support for 16 bits per color channel since several years. Note that there are many ways to contribute and there is room for everybody. Besides programmers who help with the code, the contributions to the documentation, translations, bug reports, web site and tutorials are always appreciated.

You can donate less to help organizing Gimp related conferences, so you and Gimp developers can share some time, sometimes a beer is more valuable than money to motivate someone to implement something.

http://www.gimp.org/donating/

I like GIMP http://www.gimp.org/ and use it a lot. My work requires treating several hundred photos per day. GIMP adds to a photo some magic. No other soft does it to my knowledge. Thank you guys. Thank you Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis. Thank you Jernej Simoni for Windows installer http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html

Oh, you mean like this?

No, that's not the problem.

The Gimp developers do intend to bring CMYK to the app, but the underlying graphics engine is based around 8bpp RGB. Rather than hack the old engine to work with CMYK and higher bit depths, they decided to build the future Gimp on a generic graphical library called GEGL. That meant waiting until GEGL had a stable API and worked well enough to be better than the existing 8bpp engine in production use.

GEGL will most likely be in 2.6, along with the new MMIWorks-designed UI UI

high-end photo manipulation

"High-end"? Without the ability to work in, or convert to, a printable color space, or without full support for ICC profiles? I'm not sure what your definition of "high-end" is.

Did you have a look at the release notes linked from the article? Did you see the section titled "Color Management and Soft-proofing"? There is even an extra page of the release notes that focuses only on color management in GIMP 2.4.

In case you did not read it, GIMP 2.4 does support ICC profiles and allows you to convert images to the appropriate color spaces. You can also identify the areas using colors that are outside your printable gamut, etc. It looks like GIMP is able to do more than you think.

high-end photo manipulation

"High-end"? Without the ability to work in, or convert to, a printable color space, or without full support for ICC profiles? I'm not sure what your definition of "high-end" is.

Did you have a look at the release notes linked from the article? Did you see the section titled "Color Management and Soft-proofing"? There is even an extra page of the release notes that focuses only on color management in GIMP 2.4.

In case you did not read it, GIMP 2.4 does support ICC profiles and allows you to convert images to the appropriate color spaces. You can also identify the areas using colors that are outside your printable gamut, etc. It looks like GIMP is able to do more than you think.

Do these gimp guys ever see what they are they making?

Look at the screenshots http://www.gimp.org/screenshots/ page. They are using some junk javascript which doesn't even resize even properly. How can they do it? They claim to have best image editor on Linux but they don't know how to present those images? I am really frustrated.

GIMP lacks Quality assurance not only in application but website too.

Adobe has real problems, then. Here's the bio of their CEO, Bruce Chizen. Mattel Electronics merchandising. Microsoft eastern region sales manager. VP sales of Claris (remember Claris?). Zero background in any industry that uses Adobe graphics products.

He's identified the marketing problem: "These products are designed to appeal to a younger generation of Internet users for whom paying $400 for a packaged software product is a thing of the past." That's reasonable enough. The going rate for a photo editing program is somewhere below $99. Adobe Photoshop Elements is at $99, it does most of what most people want to do, and people buy it at retail. Adobe's problem there was that they thought they could raise the price of Photoshop from year to year, and that didn't work. The price trend for software is down, not up.

Since they acquired Macromedia, the Macromedia products have gone downhill. Dreamweaver 8 and later are horrid; Adobe can't get FTP to work reliably, create HTML that will pass validation, or make the view in Dreamweaver match the view in the browser. The newer versions are notably worse than the old ones. I just hope they don't break the Flash player engine, which is an elegant and delicate little piece of software. That thing does more in 2MB of code than most programs today do in 200MB.

On the video side, Adobe's problem is that the low end has been taken over by tools that come free with Macs and cameras, while the high end has been taken over by tools from high-end players like Avid. Premiere was once considered a high-end tool; now it's a low end tool with a high end price. Not good.

Open source isn't helping that much here. There's still no good open source replacement for Dreamweaver. Nvu, which had real promise, was abandoned by Linspire back in 2005. There's a fork, called Kompozer, but even its authors just call it "Nvu's unofficial bug-fix release". The Gimp has its enthusiasts, but it's not really targeted at graphic artists. Look at its web site. Would you get a graphics tool from those people?

This is a new feature in the soon to be released Gimp 2.4, check the release notes at:
http://next.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.4.html

She does look the image I had when reading the comment...

Yep, and when the application can't adopt, its a problem of the app.

Gimp doesn't adopt, it simply does its own thing, which seems to be CSDI,

Gimp isn't a Gnome up to begin with, to this day it doesn't use a single gnome lib.

Well, they have an "expert team" that also collected scenarios and workflows to deal with. Although the site seems to be temporarily offline, it is available through google's cache: http://gui.gimp.org/ (Original Site) http://209.85.129.104/search?q=cache:Zr49_iZjaaoJ:gui.gimp.org/+gimp+ui&hl=de&client=firefox-a&gl=de&strip=1 (Google text-only cache)

"Instead of opening up Photosho.. err, GIMP and cranking out a bunch of comps that are just mashups of existing UI concepts, why not talk to your users and design around their workflow and needs?"

Basically, you and many other people seem to be doing two big mistakes:

1. You think that there is no *real* usability work ongoing. Wrong. Check http://gui.gimp.org/ which is reflecting a work in progress to create UI/functionality specs based on a usability research of November 2006. GIMP team just welcomes more input from users which the whole blog is about. Now you see how wrong you were? :)

2. People think hat GIMP developers don't know about CMYK/LAB or don't want to implement it. Wrong, so much wrong. Consider release cycles, consider day jobs, consider lack of contributors. C'mon guys, do you really think developers are your personal slaves???

The main issue with Gimp is simply that you can't have one window for everything, you always need half a dozens of windows, even if you are just editing a single image, that simply annoys.

I manage a small but successful wedding photography company. We use almost exclusively open source software including DigiKam, ShowFoto and of course, the Gimp.

I wanted people to switch to Krita for the deeper color support and integration with DigiKam and ShowFoto, but the thing is unusable! There (currently) aren't nearly as many editing tools while and the UI may look more like Photoshop, it's sure doesn't behave like it.

After about 2 weeks of trying to use it, I had to go back to Gimp and put Krita off for futher evaluation in a year or two.

Some things Gimp has going for it:

1) It works pretty well (not great, not all the features that Photoshop has, but good enough for many uses)
2) The new 2.4 version is a huge improvement in usability (All color items in their own menu? Yes!, All special effects scripts in one place? , Yes!)
3) The extensive set of plugins http://registry.gimp.org/ which allow for added (and usually tested) functionality
4) Enough people use it that most major bugs are squashed before a release is made

Not that it matters, but since you asked...

Photoshop -> GIMP
Avid -> LIVES - Note: I am not a video editor and have no idea if this program is any good.
Quicken -> GNUCash, among others.

I guess what I'm saying is that, based on your definition of "silly", there's quite a bit of silliness going on in the world today. *grin*

Imagine the fun he'll have tweaking Linux. I suppose he'll have to learn how to do some coding, too. That might just be necessary to get some of those tweaks to work. I enjoy reading PC Magazine, even though I know they favor Microsoft's products. They did have something nice to say about GIMP once.
So the magazine is not all just about Microsoft. They were trying to point out that there was some good free software alternatives.

I want to be fair, but today I am finding out that the Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse has a little bug when I run it on a PC with my Knoppix 3.4 remaster. Sometimes the cursor will jump around, all over the screen, but soon settles down. My Dell (Logitech) optical mouse does not do that. I tried it on two PC's same thing happens. Probably the knoppix driver, but it does correctly identify the mouse on boot-up. I'll reboot this machine into Fedora Core, and see how it performs there. Just an occasional bug, but makes me wonder if I would have had better luck with a more expensive mouse. I have two of these mice, and both react the same.

Rapidweather

If you don't like it, change it...use the deweirdifyer. Or xnest on Linux. Problem solved. I went more in-depth in my comment below.

It amazes me that I haven't yet found one mention of DeWeirdifyer. I personally like the way GIMP works, but hey, for those that want them all in one window (which is annoying to me), Deweirdifyer is your ticket on Windows (assuming it's still compatible, I haven't used it in a while personally). For Linux, a quick google of "gimp one window" will find directions on how to do it with things like xnest.

Seriously, stop whining and do a bit of googling. I like the GIMP interface like it is, and I'd be upset if they all of a sudden switched it to a single-window system, and I'd need a de-deweirdifyer, which I'm guessing would be a lot harder to come by.

If you don't like it, this is open-source - there's usually a way to make it just like your little heart desires, probably two or three ways.

I can't help but think of Blender, which, once I spent a few days running through some tutorials that pulled me up the steep learning slope, is far and away the most intuitive user interface I have ever had the pleasure of using. It gets all kinds of guff becasue it's different, but it's really very easy once you get past the "Aah it's different and I hate it" stage.

Qualitative methods like the ones you suggest -- observations, interviews, ethnographic methods, contextual design -- are some of the best methods out there to uncover the data you suggest should be collected. In fact, my HCI class focuses exclusively on these methods. They're cheap, they're fast, and you got a lot of data very quickly.

ingimp doesn't intend to supplant these techniques. In fact, it would be a mistake for people to assume it could or should. And the GIMP project already has a good group of people who are using the very techniques you propose (see http://gui.gimp.org/ ).

However, GIMP is a very general purpose application and there are limited resources to improve it. How should future development efforts be prioritized? Are most users experts or novices? Do they use it to color correct images, crop and resize them, or are they doing more sophisticated things like graphic design over hours of use? What are common workflows? Are they the same workflows we assume people are doing, or are they completely counter to our expectations?

Quantifying broad usage is not something that can be done by qualitative methods alone, but it can help to focus future development efforts if you can better characterize your user base, how they're using the software, and how many people are using it in various ways. With this data, you can optimize for the minority or the majority -- at least you know who you are optimizing for.

One of the benefits of this data is that longitudinal patterns of usage can be discovered that wouldn't come out in laboratory based usability studies. For example, if a new feature is added, these stats can help you determine whether people are adopting and using the new features as expected. Longitudinal data is rare -- we're building a longitudinal data store right now unlike any other in the open source community.

One of the challenges that is glossed over is that creating a sustainable usability infrastructure is no trivial task. We're collecting data in a very unobtrusive way that requires very little effort on the part of the user, and that data has a fairly high degree of ecological validity -- people are using the software in their own environments, not in an artifical usability lab. Again, while not a replacement for qualitative methods, the data we collect do help answer other questions valuable to guiding development efforts in a resource-constrained environment. Other ideas on creating a self-sustaining usability infrastructure, which does not overly burden the developers or users, are certainly welcome.

On a final note, there are benefits to this data beyond usability itself. For example, we've found that people use the most frequently used command stats to discover features/commands/plug-ins they weren't previously familiar with, and which they find valuable. The data set is a bit richer than it at first seems.

Michael Terry

We're working to be a part of the official Debian distribution, we have a single Windows installer, and we're readying a Mac port -- we want to make it as easy as possible to download and use this distribution so it's not just "self-selecting geeks" :)

But self-selection will always be a problem. If you have ideas on how to get around self-selection bias in human subjects research -- where people must volunteer to participate -- please let us know! :)

And just to clarify, we're not trying to find usability problems as much as we are trying to quantify behavior/activity/system setups. Other efforts are helping to identify critical usability issues (see http://gui.gimp.org/ ). Our data provide an additional perspective on GIMP usage in the wild -- data that exist nowhere else. We're also quite unique among both commercial and open source projects: No other software collects this type of usage data, makes the data collection and dissemination process as transparent as we do (especially since it is open source), and makes all the collected data available for anyone to analyze. We're building a very valuable repository not only for understanding GIMP's usage in the wild, but also for research involving data mining, intelligent user interfaces, and so on.

Michael Terry

And before it gets mentioned, 'GNU Image Manipulation Program" is a fine (if long) name, but no one, not even the official web site calls it that.

The very first sentence on gimp.org is: "GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program."

There is a very active group of individuals who are currently doing things like expert walkthroughs and observational studies: See http://gui.gimp.org./

Our data is intended to complement this data by quantifying the ubiquity of tasks/activity/system setups. For example, what are typical resolutions of monitors? This type of information can help focus design by indicating what types of interaction designs are feasible and not feasible given the hardware of current users. What we've seen so far is a far greater number of 1024x768 resolutions than anticipated. Breaking these numbers down to see where in the world these resolutions are being reported is one of the next steps we plan to do to better contextualize the data. See http://www.ingimp.org/stats/monitors.

We also have some emperical data to support the notion that the multiple windows design choice is not the best. Our data indicate that the percentage of the monitor covered by the document window is typically about 50% for most users (again, see http://www.ingimp.org/stats/monitors ). Most Photoshop users seem to maximize their document windows; with GIMP, this seems to happen much less frequently, probably because doing so obscures GIMP's other windows.

Michael Terry

It's pretty easy to see if there is active work going on for it:
1. Go to http://gimp.org/
2. Note that they've had a couple of development releases in the last couple of months
3. Click on the NEWS links to find out what's being fixed/worked on.

Because involvement in human-subjects research is voluntary, there will always be a self-selection bias. However, we can still estimate the representativeness of the population by understanding the types of people likely to download and install ingimp, and those who are not. If you fall in the latter camp -- you'd never want to use ingimp -- we really want to talk to you. Send us an email at the email address given on the site: http://www.ingimp.org/contact.

In any case, having some data is better than having no data at all. Currently, there is a very active and vibrant group of individuals working on GIMP usability issues (see http://gui.gimp.org/ ). ingimp's data complements this other data to help quantify the ubiquity of behavior/activity/computer hardware setups in the wild.

Michael Terry

I never tried it, but it seems like Gimp does run Photoshop plugins as well