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First Preview of GIMP 2.0 Ready for Testing
molnarcs writes "The first preview of GIMP-2.0 is available. It can be installed side-by-side with GIMP 1.2 - so there is no need to uninstall 1.2 to test it. According to this README, some parts (gimp-perl and GAP) were removed from the main package, and will be released as separate modules. Use the mirrors listed on the homepage to download the source code. (Also available for FreeBSD via ports)." Apparently the GIMP is finally adding CYMK support, for those of you working in the print world.
Having CMYK support is all fine and dandy but it won't get you far in the printing world without support for colour profiles and colour calibration. Linux sadly lags behind others (Windows, MacOS) in this area, and having Gimp support CMYK is like fitting racing wheels onto a horse and shoving it onto the Indycar track ...
Mod away...
"The GIMP" (proper name include "The") takes some time to learn. You can use many of the skills you learn in using Photoshop, however getting to the tools you are familiar with is an exercise in creative thinking. The Interface is different, so if the tool you are looking for is (as an example) adjusting the gama for a layer, you have to navigate through different menus than you would under Photoshop, or PSP.
Whether that makes it "harder" than the other tools is a matter of interpretation.
The largest problem with learning The GIMP right now is that if you go to a bricks and mortar book store, you will be hard pressed to find a "Teach yourself" or "24 hours" type book, especially for the current version. There are tutorials online, and some of the techniques documented in earlier books (look at the online used books) are still useful.
Photoshop has been around longer, and has more marketing muscle behind it because Adobe has earned quite a bit of money off the product. As a result of those two factors (and perhaps a dozen others I am not aware of) it is easier to find people willing to earn money teaching you how to use the product. If you drop over $200 on a piece of software, wouldn't you want to make sure you had some pretty good ideas on how to use it?
The GIMP on the other hand is more of a play with this tool, and see what you can do, how about that tool, etc.
Just my thoughts, others may think otherwise.
-Rusty
You never know...
Someone responded saying the problem has been partially solved in later versions of gimp, with "docking" ability. But I think Photoshop and its imitators have shown that a true MDI workspace is ideal for image editing.
For the story of why MDI wasn't adopted earlier, read the following:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7379
Putting my own personal bias into it, attitudes like Sven's (for example, an exerpt from a message on 2002-12-10 08:31: "WiW is evil! Why do you want to put a large window all over your screen that hides everything but your application? Because your desktop sucks? Then get a better one.") are what I see as the big imediment towards adoption of open source. If someone in a commercial project vocally complained that the customers of that project wanted dumb things and that their environments were inferior, he or she would be fired.
I understand that these people have given freely of their time to improve GIMP, but they also claim to want widespread adoption of it; something that won't happen if they establish a mental wall between their personal agendas and the desires of other users.
Yes, let's cram all of the tools and images into one single toplevel window so that everything is restricted to one of my monitors instead of being able to spread out across all 3.
What genius! We'll conquer the world yet...
Well, that's kind of the beauty of open source. I'm not disagreeing with Sven's opinion, just his closed-mindedness to other opinions. I'm all in favor of leaving MDI as a selectable option, like it is in NetBeans IDE, for instance. There will always be people in both camps, so neither one would really die out once they were both adopted.
If the goal is to increase GIMP market share, then Photoshop customers are GIMP customers. People who do graphic design for a living may have brand loyalty to Photoshop, but only because it's been so consistently powerful and usable for their purposes. If GIMP were truly "better", there would be a changing of the guard.
When I write a word document, I keep Word maximized. When I browse the web, I keep Mozilla maximized. When I need to do both, I keep them both maximized and switch windows. The times when I actually need visual attention to more than one program, however, I'll unmaximize and do split screen. But discounting programs like taskbar icons and IM, that is a rare occasion indeed.
On the other hand, it's quite frequent, when using the GIMP, for me to inadvertently click on a program in the background, and have to manually re-raise each GIMP window. Additionally, the unnecessary window decorations (full titlebar, outline, etc) waste a great deal of screen real estate when applied to several windows of the same program.
Your opinion is your own, and valid to you. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that open-mindedness to the preferences of others will win many more converts than proselytizing.
Apparently you don't know what you're talking about..and neither do the people who modded you insightful GIMP 1.3.x/2.0 does a lot to address the user interface issue; (most, AFAIK) of the previously isolated windows can be docked.
I can confirm that the OP didn't know what he was talking about.
On a more serious note, the perception that the Gimp has a terrible user interface is a fallacy. Most people who complain are Photoshop users. D'uh! It's got a different UI to Photoshop, try using it for more than 5 minutes and you'll find that it's quite a nifty UI that is arguably better.
Of course, most people are referring to Windows and their poor taskbar being clogged up. D'uh! Get a decent OS or WinXP that'll solve that for you.
On an even more serious note, there's some awesome UI improvements in Gimp2. Not only does it use the graceful gtk2, it has some awesome UI touches like being able to group together dialogues in a tabbed dialogue. Gimp2 takes all that was good about the Gimp UI and improves on it whilst dropping a lot of the deadwood.
I'm glad that they didn't listen the whining Why isn't it like Photoshop crowd and stuck to what is a good plan.
And I, for one, welcome our new Gimp overlords.
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Are you takign the course to learn image manipulation, or to learn the UI. If you are taking it for the UI, then no, it won't help. You will have to learn that on your own. To learn the tools - yes, you will have to translate that knowledge though. Allow me to give my experience as a Photoshop user moving to Gimp
...) are a right-click menu on the image. This saves screen space by not displaying the menu at all times, but is confusing at first.
I find Gimp hard to use. The Slashdot & Linux community will say that it just takes "getting used to" but I suspect that is the same crowd who will tell you that applications don't need to look & act in a consistent manner. I think the cause is that Gimp uses a number of old-skool interface concepts that fewer and fewer apps use these days.
Gimp uses the multiple-dynamic-windows approach, rather than the docking toolbar approach. This is the biggest headache, and probably the only one that it is impossible to "get used to." When you click on a tool, tool windows may appear, disappear, or resize. They may appear or resize right in front of another window that you need to see. Sometimes running a filter opens one or more windows, but you don't realize it because they open on top of each other and you may see only one of them, or none of them. Compare to MS Office, OpenOffice, or Photoshop, where the existing tool windows simply change their content.
Because Gimp "tool" windows are "top-level" windows, you cannot use alt-tab to switch between Applications anymore since you will have 5-10 more windows to go through. It also clutters the taskbar. (Some environments can group windows to help with this, but this causes other problems) If another window obscures Gimp, you can't simply click on one Gimp window and they all are visible. You must click on each window, or you must minimize the other application. Essentially, it has to have it's own desktop.
Gimp has a "main" window which has a menu for commands like File and Help. The image manipulation options (File, Edit, Select, Filters,
Gimp options are powerful and highly technical. For example, Photoshop has a median filter that asks you for the radius. Gimp has a median filter that asks you for radius, adaptive Y/N, recursive Y/N, black level, and white level. It is an excellent filter, but it is confusing at first.
It's tough to imagine these things without seeing it. I hope that Gimp 2.0 offers a more toolbar approach that is more consistent with the way most applications work. I think that will really help to make it more mainstream.
I love gimp, but latey it seems to be falling farther and farther behind the windows alternatives, at least in the area of digital photography manipulation. Don't get me wrong, it can still do all the things that it needs (I think), but the ease of use and UI from programs such as photohop, elements, and even ms pictureit/digital image pro make it pale in comparision.
A couple of quick examples of things I'd like to see (which aren't in the last gimp 1.3.2x version I have installed):
- crop which dims the area outside the crop to give you a better feel of what the cropped image will look like
- a "straighten image" function like MS has in their product, where you simply click a line on the horizon (or whatever) and the image is rotated and cropped automagically
- auto-[levels,colors]
Though I'm not sure if the gimp needs this sort of functionality, or if a branch using it's libs for digital imaging (gimp-elements?) needs to be branched off and started.
You didn't tap its power. Yes it looks like ass, and it seems really braindead, but looks can be deceiving. If you come from Windows, you'll have a hard time guessing what the dialog can do.
Say you have an image that you want to reopen and edit to create a totally new image. You can't remember its exact name, though, because you initially added this file to your home directory months ago and since that time you've made several versions of images derived from this original already --always keeping part of the name of the original in the names of its derived images. Let's say the file has "cat" somewhere in its name. So there are several maybe a dozen and a half "cat" images that are associated with this original all jumbled in your home. And some of these are .jpgs some are .pngs, and some are "master images" in Gimp's native xcf format that have color tinting or have been cropped. And these files are all mixed up among a thousand or so other files in your home dir. You don't want any jpegs or processed .xcf's --just the original. How to find the one you want?
Well this apparently stupid looking file selector actually has some powerful tools to help you find that one desired file very quickly. Down in the file name text area you can type *cat*.xcf and hit TAB and then the listing of files in the right pane of the dialog will change. Only those master images with "cat" and suffix .xcf will appear now. Instead of a rightpane list of 987 filenames, now there's maybe only six files to choose from. (I am basing this description off of an example I am trying out as i write this). Let's say you can't tell at a glance which .xcf file out of these six filenames is the one that you wanted to start with. Clicking once on each of these filenames will give you a graphic preview of the file to the right of the 'selection' text area.
So the GIMP fileselector is actually a shitload faster than many people think.
I long for "shortcut" buttons in the Gnome/GTK+ fileselector dialog (Ximian has long had these and I can't understand why Gnome hasn't incorporated them already). Basically a "home" shortcut would satisfy me. Others pine for a shortcut to removable media. But I also wonder how many of the people who piss and moan for that kind of feature are still unaware of how fast you can use TAB autocompletion to navigate directories in the file selection dialog? Once you learn that you can do this, and get some practice using it, I can't imagine that you'd believe that poking through a visual tree of directories and subdirectories could ever be as fast. TAB completion rules. Of course it assumes you know something about your filesystem. But then, UNIX was created for intelligent professionals unafraid of a keyboard, not porn surfers who always need one hand free.
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