Slashdot Mirror
A First Look At The GIMP 2.0
An anonymous reader writes "Brice Burgess has given everyone a good peek at what's coming in 2.0 for the GIMP in his review over on NewsForge. Don't like the old UI? It's gone. All new. There have also been megawumpus improvements in the text tool. Brice says he sees some room for improvement still, but overall he is "very impressed."" (Slashdot and NewsForge are both part of OSDN.) The new text tools are a big step up, though the interface as a whole remains a love-it-or-hate-it thing.
And still at the same low price! How do they do that?
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
"Bring out the gimp..."
"But the gimp's prelease."
Well I guess you're just gonna have to go CVS him now won't you."
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Are any of these features NOT copied from PhotoShop?
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
Let me just say that you WILL NOT be disappointed.
It's amazing all the new features, even just the small little useability things, that were added.
Watch out PHOTOSHOP!
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Looking at the pictures, the old GUI is hardly "gone". It's changed a little bit, and they've added docking capability. Great.
Great tool, but the GUI makes it difficult to find things, IMO. I was hoping for something more from a "new" GUI.
So, does it finally have mouse pointers like Photoshop, that are the size of the currently selected brush so that you can actually see how big an area you are affecting?
I'm thinking I might even switch back to Linux. One reason I originally ditched it (Mandrake 6) was because GNU/GIMP just couldn't do some of the things that Photoshop required (WRT layering, gamma settings, etc.).
i'm sure some Gimp diehards will start complaining the change of GUI, and how 'difficult' it is to get used to the new GUI :)
I was pleased to read in the blurb that the interface was improved. Looking at the screenshot, though, it doesn't seem overhauled, it seems refined. Looks like the interface still is not too great.
"I've got to stop masturbating! It makes me too lazy! Stop it, Albert. Stop it." -- Albert Einstein
That doesn't carry a bunch of GTK baggage with it and a slew of warnings and gotchas?
Ah, another fine newspost that leaves it to the pretty icon to explain what the hell the thingy in discussion actually is.
What about people browsing with images turned off, you insensitive clods?!
Anyway, the GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It's a dandy freebie Photoshop for Linux and other platforms, dude.
Or does it look like the same thing, cept it uses gtk2 and has some pretty icons?
Why show the whole desktop (complete with terminal windows and task bars) that is 66% dead space when showing off one app that isn't a task bar or a terminal window?
Bad advocacy and then some.
Beep beep.
The UI is still clunky and cluttered looking, but overall GIMP is an amazing program for the right price. It may never be a substitute for Photoshop, CAD or Illustrator, but for the weekend graphics hacker who doesn't have 600 dollars, this is a step in the right direction.
IAALS.
I was just today commenting on how every application would be improved by using Microsoft Office style non-buttons in its interface.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
What about those of us that *do* like the 1.3 GUI? Fuck you?
Fortunatly it seems that they kept it quite similar. I had these horrid visions of a photoshopesque MDI that will probably give me nightmares now. I like to manage my own windows, thank you.
..um, I mean Amsterdam!
Will this release have a compatible gimp-print plugin?
I see they didn't go with an MDI-style interface. Having independently floating windows makes GIMP practically unuseable, unless it's the only program running... [grumble]
I know im gonna get marked troll, but I really would like the option of having the gimp ui as one cohesive window with moveable panels instead of 50 windows I cannot keep track of. I think there's a reason why there arent any other applications I can think of that use that layout anymore. They have all switched the the single window approach. It may not be as powerful or whatever, but it sure is easier for some of us folk. And no, I dont know enough to submit a patch and yes, I realize that the software is free.
Tis better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt --Abraham Lincoln
Why not save yourself a gazillion bucks and export it into the excellent (and Free) Sodipodi.
It's a fantastic vector graphics editor, one that reminds me slightly of Draw on the old Acorn, but more powerful.
Beep beep.
I have been waiting , obviouslly in vain for a version of the gimp to come out with REAL CMYK capablities. I personally know of about 10 people I worked with that would jump on the Gimp bandwagon. WHY in gods name hasnt this been implemented yet ?
Been using Photoshop for over 10 years. Hard to get out of that comfort zone. Been using Gimp for some stuff lately and kinda like it.
Wake when there are gigawumpus improvements.
(Did I use that properly? Should I be ashamed?)
Will it do image slicing like Adobe's ImageReady does?
If not, it will remain virtually useless to web designers. I just don't get why on earth the Gimp doesn't have this feature, as it is incredibly simple and incredibly useful.
(Imageready is bundled with photoshop, and is essentially a photoshop modified for web-graphics work)
Oh.... the UI still needs a lot of work. It's a giant step forward, but still sucks compared to most commerical packages.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The graphic design department at my company (7000 artists) is already planning on dumping Photoshop for GIMP 2. We're going to sell our licenses to local schools and use the proceeds to buy coke and heroin. This is the best news I've heard all year!
pooptruck
I'd suggest updating that 300 baud, acoustically-coupled "modem" you have to something modern, like at least a 2400 bps. Seriously, stuff doesn't load *that* slow on a 53k, even.
"The highly anticipated version 2.0 of the GIMP, due out next month, will run under Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux"
/RANT
I think their definition of running on OS X is different from OS X users definition is. If I have to install GTK, X-Win (iirc isn't default in 10.3), and perhaps a few other GNU libs to make it work, then it doesn't run on OS X. That simple. Not that I care too much.
RANT
I think one of the big problems with GNU radicals that make the rest of the OSS advocats look bad is their total lack of care for anything not GPL and their irrational insistence that something like GIMP runs on OS X. It doesn't, it runs under X11 which runs on OS X. A big difference.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I'm sure the screenshots at Newsforge would be more impressive if the guy didn't have the ugliest desktop I've ever seen. I mean, a green background?
It should be noted that when you are trying to convince people that something is good, it helps when it also looks good.
Now, sure you can abstract the green theme (is that guy colorblind? maybe he likes red?) and see the improvements in the GIMP, but still. It just doesn't look very professional.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Can anyone tell me what the OSX-ish dock thingamabobber at the bottom of the screenshots is?
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
Docking doesn't count as "all new" re: the GUI.
Really, the fact that all tools are under a single window hasn't seemed to hurt the Adobe family of products from being wildass popular. So what, other than being different for the sake of being different, is the point? Copying popular Windows/Mac apps isn't a bad thing if it is what people really like about the user experience.
Folks seem to like the "one window to bind them" approach. Additionally I (and probably others) can't stand to use GIMP with its bazillion windows cluttering my taskbar (as it gets in the way of quickly ALT-TABing throug different apps).
Also, would it kill them to mirror the prebuilt binary/installer packages on a machine larger than a Casio calculator? I spend more time trying to get Gimp on Windows than using it.
Ok... that's it... #def rant 0.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Within a few weeks of encountering the GIMP, I prefered its interface to that of PhotoShop. Since a lot of people obviously (and vehemently disagree), well ... No accounting for taste :) However, if you use:
...)
/WM set to auto-raise, focus follows mouse. This lets all those little interface boxes sit wherever you'd like and pop up with a swipe of the mouse.
:)
a) Virtual Desktops, as many as you'd like (one per active image, perhaps? Or a "GIMP" desktop, not so bad either
b) Your DE
Works for me, anyhow
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
"There has also been megawumpus improvements int the text tool."
;)
But apparently not megawumpus improvements in spelling/typing
Yeah, why the hell would anyone want to know where they are about to paint?
moron.
I would hardly say moving the right-mouse-button menu to the top of the image window a major difference.
Definitely a major improvement (why wasn't it there to begin with), but it's still there when you right-click.
I'd prefer to use my right-mouse-button for other things.. (This is probably configureable, but I don't think it should even be the default)
All in all, it IS quite improved (I can find 'flip image' next to rotating image now) but I wouldn't say "all-gone"..
Now if only programs like DIA, who chose to perpetuate this lousy design, would also change their minds..
RANT MODE:OFF
ok, I'll be the first to admit that a lot of people won't agree with me, but I know of plenty of others that definitely will.
I'm not a Photoshop user. I use the Corel line of products. Why? Corel puts everything into one window. I'm aware of the pains in programming an interface, but I don't understand why a separate option isn't there for the rest of us?
Please?! If only the Gimp was like this, I would use it. It would be a learning curve, but I could do it. Instead, I have to make sure I have enough room on my desktop to fit all the tool windows I need, along with enough space to view the image I'm manipulating at a size bigger than 40x40. y'know? Every time I give the Gimp a try, I'm impressed with the features, but not impressed with the interface.
I just can't use it. "It's hopeless... utterly, utterly, hopeless."
but palletted drawing in The Gimp remains superior to Photoshop. Photoshop was neither designed nor marketed towards any of the markets that do pallete based art/graphic design.
A toolbar button to download the next upcoming Fark Photoshop contest.
Watch out Adobe, your days are numbered
But how does it handle RAW files from my digital camera? For post-processing this is critical.
When I first took a look at GIMP several years ago, the first thing that turned me off was all the seperate palettes are treated as apps. Saw the same thing in Sodipodi and Inkscape. Seemed that it was the trademark for open-source drawing applications. Didn't like having 5-6 tasks on my taskbar for just one app. On inkscape, if I mistakenly close the last image, the whole app closes down.
All I want are dockable or floating palettes that use a small font size(ie not screen hogs) just like PSP, Photoshop and illustrator use.
And on a second note, I don't wish to see my desktop peep through. A big gray dull background would be less distracting. I've grown way too used to MDI in Windows apps to comfortably use the open source SDI way.
Mod me down for said redunant comments.
it appears the rasterman prophesy was correct: "GIMP will reach 2.0"
I like the way you can select the colour sampling in jpeg compression (4:2:2 4:4:4 etc) nice touch. It really really really really really really needs adjustment layers like photoshop at the very least, without adjustment layers you might aswell be painting on a real canvas in terms of later adjustability. I can live with out plug-in/filter previews although you could technically add that ability automatically without even needing to modify the current plug-ins - just make the plug-in work with a second version of the image while clicking ok would apply the plugin and imeadiately re-launch the window for tweeking.
If you then added a way of remembering the settings of that particular plug-in on a layer you could add the ability to go back at any time and adjust a plug-in/layer and have that adjustment filter through to the current image - that alone would out-do photoshop!!
Adjustability is what its all about, anyone else with me?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Ha! on this screenshot, I notice that they have the all imporant toilet paper template... a must have. :)
If my enemy's enemy is my friend, what happens if my enemy is his own worst enemy?
The gimp is a fine project as projects go, but it seems to me that there are a few things gimp needs before it will be able to really compete with Photoshop
First off, brushes, Photoshop 7 has a great brush system, being able to combine brushes is great. Photoshops size, color, shape dynamics as well as jitter control via pen preassure and tilt are great.
This brings up point number 2
This is just from my experience, but getting GIMP to work with a pen/tablet is like pulling the teeth of a grumpy aligator, it's just not worth it. I have a wacom tablet that supposedly works with drivers from the wacom linux project, although I can get it to work as a mouse in X, I have had 0 luck getting it to work with gimp
The last thing is a UI improvment
I haven't used the new version yet, and its hard to tell from the screenshots, but GIMP has some major usability problems when working with multiple layers, history editing, and things of that nature. I think the multiple document interface is a good thing, and the tool selection window is not bad, but having to right-click on the document to get the standard utility menus is a pain in the rear.
Because of the afore mentioned problems I have not used GIMP extensively for actual work, instead I photoshop on my mac, but it seems to have a solid painting engine underneath it, and many of the filters are better than those available for photoshop, even if some of them are a little to flashy.
All that said, I do graphics professionally and so perhaps I just put more demand on an application than the average user, but right now gimp seems like just a nice toy untill they get some of that stuff fixed.
I do prefer to use Open Source software when possible and wait eagerly for the day when GIMP or another project is a usable alternative to Photoshop, and I will be sure to give this new release a go, but I think we may still have a while to go.
Off Topic but, if anyone has had luck getting a Wacom tablet to work under Linux with GIMP and can let me know how to do so as well I'd love to know.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Does GIMP have command line options to manipulate photos?
I.E. are there command line options to make pics 100x200, or add a shade of blue, make a thumbnail, stuff like that?
can you work with scanned currency? [slashdot]
no, but you do
...I'm afraid.
I'm really glad that the GIMP's continuing its tradition of Windows support. I can't help but think that this could do a lot to promote free software. Someone who's never used free software before may not want to leap to a whole other operating system, but if you hand them a copy of the GIMP, and tell them "It's like Photoshop, but free", they'll get right into it. If there were more applications like the GIMP, I think it'd be a lot easier to ease people towards the large scale use of free software.
Me, I'm coding a game under Windows, and using the GIMP for the art work even as we speak. Rock on, GIMP 2.0!
Have there been any improvments in the color depth? Last I knew, there were only 8 bits per channel. This was one of the areas where Photoshop could be a big win.
I view the Gimp as a very extensible, flexible program.
That being said, it's completely unusable for long periods of time by a guy who, admittedly, is NOT a graphic artist.
I use graphics programs like secretaries use computers. I want it to do what I want it to do, I don't want to know why, I don't want to know when, and I sure as hell don't want to have to spend a half hour figuring out HOW to do something. Ever tried to do something like a inner bevel in Gimp? I'm sure it can be done, but for the life of me I can't figure it out. And that, to me, is a failure of the program for users such as myself.
Maybe you graphics types find it just fine, but it certainly doesn't work for us reg'ler folks.
Blog,Twitter
You can output to CMYK in gimp2 with an ICC profile, but you can't edit CMYK directly. Gimp is still 1 and 3 band 8 bit only.
Hopefully, as GIMP closes in on PhotoShop, Adobe will realize they need to release a Linux version.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Don't get me wrong...The Gimp is great and I was impressed with all it's features. There are some very nice filters. But whenever I need to quickly do something (like get a screenshot of a webpage and quickly figure out what colors are what) I keep falling back on Paint Shop Pro. I was never able to do things quickly in the Gimp.
To that, I'll remind you that your Linux window manager probably has multiple desktops. It sounds incredibly stupid for its simplicity, but once you realize it, there's absolutely no problem with the interface.
I'll also encourage you to use 0x808080 or something similarly neutral for the background on that desktop. You'd be surprised how much the surrounding noise can affect the way you work. I even go to the extent of making all my window decorations a soft grey when I'm drawing up stock schemes or otherwise doodling.
You can also have sticky, always on top (it is done via layers) and iconify all. And many more things, it is pretty flexible. Probably just sucky defaults or hidden in a "lets simplify the interface" fury it has suffered recently (the bane of sawfish). Good luck.
Otherwise, they will NOT consider using it.
And it's the power-users that have the influence to make other people switch to/use GIMP.
Until then, we'll keep using Photoshop.
...and worth every penny.
Seriously, I suppose software like GIMP is good for people who don't have a couple of pennies to rub together, but I won't use free software unless it's better than the commercial stuff.
Multi-step undo, with the steps shown in a floating window? Don't know when it appeared in Photoshop, but I had that in version 6 what, 2 years ago?
This is why Linux will never take over the desktop. Don't chase after commercial software; jump over it. I don't see any software following a track but "Me too! Meeeee tooooo!!!"
What the heck is a megawumpus? Is that the evil creature in the new 3D version of Hunt the Wumpus?
I don't understand why anyone would want a box covering the very thing they're working on. Is there some option to make it that way, or customize it - say 'Adobe 7' or 'Corel 4.5' profiles?
I use Photoshop more than 10 hours a day - if Gimp wants users, it should make it easy for Photoshop users to migrate with as little adjustment as possible. Why would I want to throw my years of PS experience away? Adjustment is necessary, but not full-blown re-education.
Everyone and their brother are whining, WHY IS IT ALL IN TWENTY DIFFERENT WINDOWS!? Two things you might want to think about, beyond the new options for arranging and merging the dockable windows.
I have yet to see a Linux graphical desktop that does not have multiple virtual desktops all over the place. Assign one to the GIMP, and use it for nothing else. The clutter problem is solved. If you go to another desktop, all of GIMP disappears as a unit. If you go back to the GIMP desktop, they all reappear where you left them.
Also, if you force a parent frame to contain all these toolboxes, you can't put these toolboxes on your second monitor head. Not everyone has a second screen, but if you do, then the GIMP's free toolbox windows enables a whole different way of working. On your primary monitor: the current image. Maximize it and have nothing in your way. On your secondary monitor: tools, brushes, patterns, layers, options, info, saving, etc. Far less clutter to get in the way of your image window.
[
And here's the deal: if you obnoxious Linux zealots keep responding to points like this with "d00d install linux u l00s3r" and comments about how stupid windows users are, you will continue to miss the point that Linux will survive by gaining mindshare and marketshare, and this will not happen if the majority of Win32 people (yes there are lots of them that don't love Win32, but they like to be productive) have the idea that "wow, the OSS tools on Linux are really hard to use". And that's the impression people get. I would think that if they go to the effort of building and releasing binaries on Win32, they could add some MDI support so people could actually find the product useable without burning through their ALT and TAB keys. My left hand is sore after ever GIMP session on my Win32 box, and I feel like I spend half my time minimizing/restoring windows to try to find the right ones. This is a problem, period. Many solutions, but a good one would be to support MDI, like nearly every other windows app in the world.
would be to have most things accessible in one panel which can be hidden and revealed with the space bar. TV Paint was like this and you could use almost the entire screen for drawing instead of a dinky Window.
Does anyone know if v2 will support floating point or 16-bit image formats? We in the CG business could use a quality non-8bit paint package and properly supporting finer bit-depth data would go a long way towards making Gimp a standard production tool.
gimp16 looked promising, but it never went anywhere. Photoshop's 16-bit implementation is pretty weak; it can read it, but can't write it in any format other than a photoshop file and (last time I checked), it still only painted in 8-bit.
They should have been mebiwumpus and gibiwumpus, respectively... Let's just hope I haven't started any speculation on Wumpuses vs Wumpi... :-)
you ass-loving hippy - if this real marine ever meets you, I will force you to rabid teabag a pitbull.
Wumpus: Big, heavy, VERY stinky (smells 2 rooms away), slow (rarely moves), thick-skinned (needs several arrow hits, doesn't care about bats), ravenous (eats you as soon as you enter his room) and rather stupid (moves randomly).
So, the improvements aren't really welcome, right?
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There have been a few comments from people saying that they prefer a MDI interface as used by programs such as Adobe Photoshop. In other words, they want the application to manage it's own windows. Surely this is a job for your window manager?
From what I can remember, Windomaker had the ability to deal with all the windows of an application at once. A window manager I used once allowed you to put windows into logical groups so you could perform actions on all windows in a group. Fluxbox has the option of grouping windows together and selecting them with tabs. Saving window positions is an option in a fair number of window managers.
There may be room for improvement with many parts of the interface, but how to organise the windows is not one of them in my opinion. The GIMP developers need to concentrate on creating a decent image manipulation program, not a windowmanager.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.â"John Gaule
...seriously. If you want to do any serious media work (audio/video/image) then you will seriously appreciate more than one monitor. I just stuck a cheap 4mb pci graphics card in my machine, hooked it up to a spare 17 inch monitor and now when I use wavelab/photoshop or whatnot I have all of the tools on the second monitor and the media I'm editing on the primary.
I am NaN
Yes. Yes you should. In fact, many of us are already embarrased for you.
You forgot the "me" in "Wake me when..."
Does any know whether some EXIF support has been
introduced? For starter, it would be nice to just
preserve EXIF information found in the file when
the image is saved...
Correct, and until the patents expire on CMYK handling, that's all you're going to get in free software.
Everything from text layout tools (Photoshop CS uses the new InDesign text engine) to color management (Gimp's is still very poor in comparison) to widespread plug-in support by third-parties to...
Why am I even bothering? OSS people will always think of inane reasons their OSS version is superior (i.e., the multi-monitor feature, which Photoshop also does anyway).
You know, you can tell a lot about a product from its screenshots. So let's take a look at this one. First, I should say that I am not a graphics artist, nor do I play one on TV. I do some mild photo retouching, web art, icon design, stuff like that. I've used Photoshop and Illustrator, and currently use Paint Shop Pro (hey, its only $89 and it works).
...? Xtns? I have no idea.
... no idea, actually, since I assume that the second one is new. The third is probably copy (why can't I copy a circle(11) by the way?), the fourth is delete, and the fifth is - refresh? How often do you need to refresh your brushes that it gets the bottom-right corner of the window all to itself? That's prime real estate!
What's the first thing that I see? Well, we have a bunch of little windows with a terminal manager peeking through. Annyoing, but I can deal with it. Hmm - they're all showing up on the taskbar, too. More annoying, but lets move on.
Looking at what I presume is the "new" Gimp interface, on the left, the colored icons are much easier to understand at a glance. The menus, however, leave a lot to be desired. One problem with small windows is that, unless you're using Mac style menus, you have small menu labels. Like these ones. File: fair enough. Help: likewise. Xtns:
Looking at the bottom of the docked options window, I can see some buttons. I'd guess that the first one is Save, the second (greyed out) is undo/back, the third is delete (delete my ink options?) and the fourth is... erm... undo again? You've got me. Hope that they have mouseovers, but they really shouldn't have needed them.
Looking at the "Brushes, Patterns, Gra" window. Ooh, nice title. Anyway, these seem pretty reasonable, although the weird icons at the bottom are back, and different. I guess the first one is
Okay, now onto the main window. Heh - they can't seem to draw their rulers correctly so that you can see the stops and read the numbers. Oh, well. Again, we have the problem of the window size - this time the menus are readable, but one of them seems to be "La" - possibly "Lay" - and who knows how many are inaccessible off to the right? Its good to know that I can cancel my picture, however - or could in some situations whenever the button is enabled.
All in all, from a first glance (which is all many prospective users will ever give it), I'll stick with Paint Shop Pro, thankyouverymuch.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
though the interface as a whole remains a love-it-or-hate-it thing.
Or for those of us with a more flexible bent of mind, an indifferent thing. I use both Photoshop and GIMP b/c I want to know how to use both. In the great scheme of things, adapting yourself to different GUIs is relatively minor. I don't see what the religious-like hubbub is all about.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Does this version support 48-bit color (16-bit per RGB channel)? Right now I have to use Cinepaint to view and edit my 48-bit photos and I'd really rather just use the Gimp for everything.
Why that? What can you do with Photoshop that you can't do with the Gimp? Gimp now has the CMYK color scheme, so the only real pro-Photoshop argument has faded...
From the article:
"Admittedly, the current rendition of CMYK in the GIMP is far behind that of commercial offerings, but the mere existence of CMYK in the latest version means we can look forward to improved profile selection in future versions."
And that's just CMYK.
Not surprising, as MS Paint has been dead, dead, dead for many years now.
Where can i get the macosx version for (F,f)ree? Macgimp is selling it but i dont see a free download.
Does the current gimp source compile on osx? Does it need X or it works on aqua too? Am i stuck with fink?
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
You're right, Photoshop can't do multi-monitor support. Oh, wait, it can.
At least then you can just have GIMP in it's own window. I realise that your biggest problem is that nearly every other Windows app in the world supports MDI, so why doesn't GIMP? But then to that I would say that nearly every other window system in the world supports virtual windows, so why doesn't MS Windows? I mean if they're writing a cross platform application, why should they be restricted by that one without vitual window support?
Historically, Linux has survived just fine with neither.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Personally, I'm in favour of a constitutional amendment that insists patents are only valid on commercial products, but that free/oss software is immune from such. It's the only way to increase competition to benefit consumers.
Uh, that would completely crush the patent system as everyone would just make free rip-offs of absolutely everything without fear of completely stealing the ideas from someone else, and nobody would be able to make money.
Grammar not a strong point eh? Must be due to frustration of being wrong so often. Back to your roids then.
is the "Healing Brush".. That's my single favorite part of Photoshop; especially when touching up family photos from a digital camera.
It is kind of funny that one of the last major applications to migrate to GTK2.0 is the application that created GTK in the first place (hence GTK - GIMP ToolKit).
Although I guess it kind of makes sense since GTK and GIMP are pretty tightly integrated - it would be far from trivial to switch versions.
Before everyone starts falsely claiming otherwise, Photoshop DOES do multi-monitor support. Honestly, you think Photoshop wouldn't after all these years?
Really, I see no reason for having eight taskbar buttons open for one app. I have to devote an entire desktop to Gimp. You can argue with me how "bad" MDI is supposed to be until the cows come home. It hasn't affected the success of Photoshop, and it's what people want.
I've been using PS for many years and as new features are implemented I recommend PS to people but the price is prohibitive to say the least. This is where Gimp owns the competition and particularly PS. Although Gimp isn't a dupe of PS it is very, very powerful and intuitive and with the price how can it lose?
Personally I am moving into Gimp from Photoshop as well as Openoffice from MS Office because I'm just tired of the ridiculous upgrades to keep compatibility issues in check.
Open source is the single greatest thing to happen in a very long time. It has opened up a new horizon for me and the people I recommend software to. I am our company's "IT Guy" for our state and my top recommendations of late are Firefox, Openoffice, Gimp, and SuSe for those looking for a change. This is coming from a strictly Adobe/M$ house. I figured I could use the "$" now since I'm an open source fanboy now!
It's pretty cool when I can move 100's of people in the direction of open source and this filters down to their families too so I am doing my part.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Ctrl+D or image->duplicate
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The colorful icons and superior aesthetics of GTK2 (GIMP Toolkit) is the first difference you notice. The professionalism they convey is invaluable to the user's experience.
No, it isn't! Just make the goddamned software work!
To start with, the GIMP -is- MDI (multiple documents interface). All the panels are toplevel, though, which isn't the same thing. There are different sorts of MDI; you're thinking of the Childframe sort.
Also, what you call SDI is not the 'open source way'. Advanced UIs abound in the open source world.
Lack of MDI styles is a GTK-only thing. This limitation doesn't exist with other toolkits. I note you chose to mention only GTK apps there. Don't blame the whole of open source but just one of its tools, please. It's being worked on.
You're right there - think of the rumpi it would cause ...
ever used photoshop on a mac?
This guy is right. I suggested doing a piece on the GIMP on a TV show I work on. Unfortunately the producers heard the name "Gimp" and rejected it because we have a lot of young viewers. So much for mass-media OSS exposure.
Actually there is a version of gimp for win32. Gimp for Windows It uses GTK even... There is even a nicely packaged version for those unwilling brave a .zip file here.
These are up to Gimp 2.0 pre2.
Cheers,
Joe
Don't like the old UI? It's gone. All new.
Hi, could I have some of that shit you're smoking?
If by "It's gone" you mean "It's still here", then I agree with you. I'll also agree if by "All new" you meant "exactly the fucking same".
Did you look at the screenshots? Sorry, but slightly changing the shadows and highlights on some of the controls to make it look more glossy is NOT A NEW UI. How it looks is not why some people (including myself) dislike Gimp's UI. UI stands for user interface, which is something you interact with. It's the way that we interact with the program that leaves the sour taste in our mouth.
The problem for me is the tens of windows that get hidden underneath each other and provide no easy way to find the one you want short of shuffling through your windows like you're searching through a pile of papers on your desk. Highly inefficient and completely disruptive to the workflow process. Photoshop, Visual Studio, 3D Modelling programs, and numerous other things that need to handle the display of large volumes of disparate data all have slightly different approaches to solving these problems, but they all rely heavily on two proven methods of UI design: "expansion" and "tabbing". Most of them don't even bother to use the default Windows controls for this, but they all do it. Microsoft, on the other hand, has moved away from multi-window and MDI applications for a long time now, because they're cluttered and awkward for users. It's an analogy that isn't useful and doesn't make sense.
GIMP would do well, in my opinion, to take a lesson from the de-facto standards. I'm all for innovating in open source rather than just following the leader, but you really have to be careful that your "innovation" is actually an improvement or at least comparable to the standard. In this case it isn't.
Random and weird software I've written.
I like the upgrades for the new version. However, the main place were the GIMP fails time and time again is the documentation.
I don't know how many times I've run into broken links or people who don't work on a give part of the documentation any more.
If the GIMP team are going to get more people to switch over, the documentation needs to be WAY more solid than it is right now.
Dolemite
__________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
How do I draw a Line, Circle or Square?
This is a fundamental problem with Gimp that keeps it out of the hands of the main stream people. The Menu options are not simple enough for a stupid user (e.g. ME) to Open Gimp and edit an image quickly. I have to know that in order to draw a line, you select a brush and hold shift and click or some crap like that, which not only am I not going to remember, but I'm simply not going to use it!!
The Gimp is one of the legacy OSS projects that has been around for so long, but has still not understood what it takes to bring it main stream. A more intuitive interface for stupid users, an MDI layout that doesn't confuse users (e.g. ME) and most importantly, allow the user to draw a line without having to alt-shift-control-wipe-your-ass-click action.
I just can't understand it!
Lots of people (as myself) love The Gimp but can't stand the non-MDI thingie. Why is so hard for the developers to add and option for us, poor non-visionaries or the guis?
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
Not really. I find using multiple desktops for this much clumsier than the MDI capability of Windows. In fact I tried multiple desktops in Windows years before switching to Linux and after about 6 months found the whole capability annoying. The only reason I use multiple desktops under Linux is because so many applications have been written in such a way (may windows popping up in an unstructured and independent way) that there is no viable alternative.
I don't get this insistence that you find among Linux GUI developers that "multiple desktops" enables you to do everything that some other alternative window management strategy allows you to do. It doesn't, unless you look at it on a massively over-simplified level. Different window management strategies have different strengths and weaknesses, and some people find one strength or weakness better than others.
But the greatest weakness is forcing a particular desktop management strategy on other people when it may well not be the best for them.
Not that I expect anything else - the "multiple desktops roolz" camp is a fundamentalist religion, not open to rational discussion.
I still haven't heard about Photoshop Elements 3 so I decided instead to buy Photoshop Elements 2. I also can't get the 2.0 Pre 2 of the Gimp to run. Eventually once I can get Gimp 2.0 run, I will have quite a bit of graphics functionality for a total of $50. For my vector drawing needs I'll just use Sodipodi since it runs fine in Windows.
To implement a adobe style interface, you'd need a toolkit with MDI (multiple document interface) support, or write it on your own. Support for MDI in GTK is lacking. AFAIK there is MDI support in Gnome2, but it's marked as "depracated".
You won't be missed.
The UI is still clunky and cluttered looking, but overall GIMP is an amazing program for the right price. It may never be a substitute for Photoshop, CAD or Illustrator, but for the weekend graphics hacker who doesn't have 600 dollars, this is a step in the right direction.
The weekend graphics hacker who doesn't have 600 dollars probably has at least one P2P client, not to mention the latest version of Photoshop, CAD, and Illustrator fully registered.
"I've got to stop masturbating! It makes me too lazy! Stop it, Albert. Stop it." -- Albert Einstein
...is buggy.
I routinely switch between a single monitor (think notebook) and multiple monitors (think notebook with nice big monitor at work). When I'm only using the single, Photoshop often leaves certain dialogue boxes on the non-existant monitor. The effect is that the app is broken until the next time I'm at work.
I'm pretty careful, now, about where I use and leave dialogue boxes, but it still happens. The "Reset palette locations" command works for palettes, but not for dialogue boxes. Adobe confirms that this is a known bug; I can only hope they'll fix it in the next release. Otherwise, I loooooove Photoshop. Cheers!
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
Gimp's old UI was bad, and the new one is bad as well. You can tell it was made by developers and inspired by photoshop. It wasn't created by interface or interactive designers :/
If the Gimp ever wants to become a legitimate piece of software that can gain recognition within the design community, it is going to need a better UI. And by "better UI" I don't mean new icons and added widgets.
-- an annoyed designer
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
The problem is limitations in the internals of gimp, which are due to be replaced when GEGL comes along (another year or so). Then gimp will have true CMYK support.
The Gimp: It was good, it is better, it has a long way to go to be perfect.
The Gimp team: May you continue to love your work so I can continue to love your product.
Many thanks, and best of luck going forward.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
I thought there was talk about separating the GUI from the functionality entirely. That's what I would call a revolutionary GUI.
I printed out the leaked Windows NT/2K source code using that template. Now, I can violate Microsoft copyrights and crap at the same time!
I agree 100% that the GIMP is not a Photoshop replacement but it sure as hell offers a huge amount of features, and finally, a decent GUI, for $0.
I have just waded through about 20 +5 insightful modded posts about how bad GIMP 1.2's GUI was. Sigh, I know this is slashdot, but is even reading the editor's comment to much, even if RTFA is?
How on earth can you say that the GIMP 2 is crap unless you've tried it. I can see this working quite well for web graphics and standard home printer stuff, and the new interface with dockable palettes and menus in the image window saving one from having to right-click all the time are fantastic.
I don't know what pisses the PS people off more: the fact that the GIMP is finally improving or that they spent an enormous amount of money on Adobe's tools that they only use for web graphics in the end.
But most Win32 users don't have virtual desktops.
Sure they do!
And the l33t shall inherit the 34r7h.
Rotate images arbitrary values....
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Now if only the interface dialogues weren't FREAKING HUGE. :| Side by side against Photoshop- as you can see here, the GIMP eats a MASSIVE amount of real estate.
(yes, that's The Gimp running in MacX, which is HORRIBLY OLD, but that's not the point- the gui is the same physical size on any screen.)
Er, I hate to be picky about your choice of words, but c'mon. Linux was started (late) 1991. I would date the post-mindshare era as beginning in 1999 (the year I actually heard of it).
Now, we can argue how accurate either of these dates is, but when set against the backdrop of real history (the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the great dynasties of Imperial China, Dick Clark) seven years of obscurity hardly merits the phrase "historical."
Dear gods. Slicing in Fireworks and Imageready is HORRIBLE. I do all of my slicing by hand with the guides in Photoshop. I got sick of the shim gifs and whatnot that both apps would jam into my graphics, making them completely unuseable in terms of, say, integrating a menu bar into a solid interface. Yes, it's more time consuming.... but considering the amount of cleanup and kicking I've had to do to imageready and fireworks HTML to get the end result useable, well..... it's ten times faster to do it the hard way. :P
Finally a way to get anna nicole smith back to the normal proportion!
I'm running 7, and it was a known bug back when I checked out their site for possible solutions (they weren't offering any). This was pre-CS.
Since it was a known bug, though, I'd think (hope?) they fixed it in CS. Cheers!
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
What (or where) is the keyboard shortcut for switching tabs? I even have the tab extensions and this is one thing that I really want to have.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
When I tried to introduce my wife (graphic designer/QuarkXPress/Photoshop/Illustator ninja) to The Gimp 1.2, the first thing that happened was this:
Where's the shape drawing tool? Whaddya mean I have to use the selection tool to draw a circle? That's stupid. Weeellllllll, let's make a little text instead. One line? I can't auto-kern? Where the hell's the preview? Ok, there we go.....dammit, maybe not. Where in the fuc.....oh, there it is. Hey, how do I select multiple layers--the damn shift key doesn't work. The hell with this...what good is this thing, anyway?
There's a lot to be said for standardized user interface elements if you want to get the professionals on board..........
Don't Panic!
This is one thing that has always annoyed me about certain Open Source packages. GNU - Oh, that's so clever I forgot to laugh!
Do you think that Adobe would have sold Photoshop if they had named it "The WIMP" (Windows Image Manipulation Program) or "The APP" (Adobe Photo Program).
I mean, "Photo IMP" or almost anything else would have been better.
You do realize that GIMP was made for use under UNIX desktops, right? The Windows version is a port. If you want MDI, feel free to implement it, but don't expect the main authors to care about Windows.
Besides, Microsoft will probably add virtual desktop support at some point since it's a very handy feature (and they don't want UNIX desktops to have good features that Windows is missing).
Try to appreciate GIMP for what it is and give the maintainers some support instead of going on about things photoshop has that gimp doesn't.
GIMP isn't trying to replace photoshop, and I feel people don't give it as much cred as it deserves.
i really think that the new gimp could please me very much. but what really turns me off, that every tutorial i found on the net copes with the 1.x generation of the gimp, and not even the help entry in the gimp menu seems to work.
so how to start learning the gimp 2.x?
All I see is comment after comment of people who say they didn't like the screenshot therefore Gimp must suck. Or comments from people who used Gimp for 5 mins 2 years ago and after glancing at the screen shot say its hasn't changed enough. Get over yourselves people. Better yet just stick with your warezed version of Photoshop and don't comment. You bet your ass that the availability of warezed versions of Photoshop are a factor. Its probably the most warezed software after Windows and Office. Make every Photoshop user pay for their software and you'll see a bunch of Free software fans in no time.
Gimp pre2.0 is the best Free general purpose image editor ever made bar none. With it you can do most of the tasks that you need to do in Photoshop all for Free. That shouldn't be taken for granted but for some reason it is. Where people get hung up is that Gimp doesn't work EXACTLY like Photochop. Let me make a point. Once you take the time to learn Gimp you'll be just as proficient with it as you are with any other piece of software. On the other hand stick some newbie down in front of Photoshop for the first time and watch their eyes glaze over. Just because Gimp has a learning curve doesn't mean its crap. Just because their is some commercial software that is easier to use out of the box doesn't mean Gimp is crap.
I was looking forward to this thread but its apparent people are in the mood to troll and dump on Gimp. Too bad because right now the only message coming across to someone new to image editting is that anything less than a perfect Photosho clone is crap. And that's just not true.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I suppose expecting you to try the new version before bashing is expecting too much.
The "tens of windows that get hidden underneath each other" *ARE* gone. They all dock together in a tabbed window. You can have a GIMP session with two only windows open and still have access to all the bells and whistles.
So yeah, read, test, *then* bitch. Doing it in any other order risks sounding like a moron.
I am running Gimp 2 beta and it still needs Adjustment Layers like Photoshop.
Adjustment Layers allow adjustments to be made to all layers underneath on a separate and changeable adjustment layer.
Don't like your first choice for "color levels", just select the layer and change it.
Want to change the text layer that was part of an image you just "color leveled", just change the text layer.
In Gimp these adjustments are lossy and final, in Photoshop they don't have to be.
Their loss, then.
And here's the deal: if you obnoxious Linux zealots keep responding to points like this with "d00d install linux u l00s3r" and comments about how stupid windows users are, you will continue to miss the point that Linux will survive by gaining mindshare and marketshare, and this will not happen if the majority of Win32 people (yes there are lots of them that don't love Win32, but they like to be productive) have the idea that "wow, the OSS tools on Linux are really hard to use". And that's the impression people get. I would think that if they go to the effort of building and releasing binaries on Win32, they could add some MDI support so people could actually find the product useable without burning through their ALT and TAB keys. My left hand is sore after ever GIMP session on my Win32 box, and I feel like I spend half my time minimizing/restoring windows to try to find the right ones. This is a problem, period. Many solutions, but a good one would be to support MDI, like nearly every other windows app in the world.
Why do so many people assume that Linux based free software developers necessarily WANT to attract a broad Win32 user base? Linux already HAS mindshare and marketshare... more than anyone could ever have hoped for.. more than enough to sustain it's existence and progress. Stop thinking like a capitalist for one second. GIMP was ported to Windows mostly because it was relatively easy to do... not because they wanted to gain marketshare or mindshare.
Furthermore, if you Win32 users want to complain that GIMP doesn't support MDI, well, fuck you. *nix users have virtual desktops by default and THAT is the target audience. Most *nux/GIMP users love the GIMP. Many even feel it is superior to Photoshop. Consider youself lucky that GIMP runs on Windows at all, you ungrateful bastard!
-matthew
Linux: Expect less. Get more.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
That's not Gimp's fault, that's Windows fault. The Windows taskbar is a cluttered mess... to the point people actually like XP's "grouping" feature!
After trying Virtual desktops there's no coming back. On my desktop, I could very easily rearrange all those 7+ windows into several different workspaces, sticking them together into logical groups. Say, one for the browsers, another for the editor and the FTP client, and another for Photoshop / The Gimp. And still I could open a couple terminals, some file manager instances, a notepad for taking quick notes and an mp3 player without transforming my taskbar into a crowded aberration. What would certainly bring down the toughest Windows user with screen clutter and visual bloat is handled gracefully by workspaces.
I could quickly change between the browsers, the editor, gimp and the other apps with a sole keystroke, reducing the all too common Alt+Tab through several windows hassle to a bare minimum (since each workspace has its own keyboard shortcut).
Workspaces are such an efficient and wonderful feature, and I've grown so used to them, that each time I go back to Windows the UI feels terribly crippled and cumbersome.
So going back to the GIMP, its layout is clearly aimed at users who have several workspaces available (or multiple monitors, for the rich of you... :P). You usually just keep a workspace for the gimp, and have the power to arrange its tools, images and windows the way you want. It's pretty convenient, and with the 2.0 series and the new docking capability it's really flexible and elegant. You can have all dialogs on a single tabbed window if you want to. It doesn't get better than that.
Edwards is mega-rich, influenced by special interests, and voted for the DMCA. Why didn't we vote for Dean again?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
When will Gimp support the awesome "healing brush" that Photoshop has?
After discovering Photoshops new "healing brush" for touching up photographs I will never be able to go back to just the clone tool.
The healing brush clones, makes the clone match the color characteristics of the surrounding pixels, and blends the clone with the surrounding pixels.
A 20 minute job can be done in 3 or 4 minutes.
Ranting how crappy Gimp is compared to [fill in comercial product here] is just as unfitting as stating that Gimp is about as good as PS.
I'm a mulimediadesinger and have worked with a wide range of tool on a professional level.
Gimp 1.3 actually _is_ a usefull tool. It's not the tool of choice for most things, but in some scenarios it can actually deliver results were other grafics tools get in their own way with feature and algorithim bloat.
The habit of putting every thing in it's own window made pre-1.3 Gimp absolutely unbearable for production. Unless you had Fluxbox, maybe.
But the simple level Anti-Aliasig and some other nice features along with the one or other workaroud trick make Gimp a nice Pixeleditor to work with. Praise the Gimp team for getting the message and introducing tabs and other must-haves for GUI work.
On top of that, - and this is one of the most notable things of this OSS project imho - as long as I can remember, Gimp has allways been an absolute breeze to install. I wish all OSS would install that way. For instance, right now I'm debugging a default Postgres/ODBC Setup and it's taken up 30 workhours allready with no end in sight...
To me the undo stack in Gimp 2.0 looks promising, as it hints in the direction of the PS protokoll. Which, btw, proves that PS is still waaaaay ahead of any competition, be it comercial or OSS.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to Gimp 2. Cudos to the Gimp team for their good work.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Oops, sorry, Edwards didn't vote for the DMCA, he wasn't a Senator at that point. I think it's fair to assume that he would have, though.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Of course I let them make a total ass out of themselves before I reveal that not only do I use Linux, I've used it since before Linux was cool. Alright, I'm the same evil guy who always managed to have a relative who was [fill in subject of ethnic joke]. I get a perverse pleasure in watching people squirm.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Seriously. If you WANT an encompassing window around your environment, then do it the Unix way... with a tool that does JUST THAT.
Xnest your gaim sessions. Xnest your open office documents. etc.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Two major things are missing:
1) proper colour management for the workflow (X, Gimp, scanning and printing).
2) no 16bit per channel support. This indeed very important for higher end cameras, scanners and printers.
3) no LAB or CMYK support.
I use these daily and they are an absolute nessessity, unfortunately.
Well. we need 16bit per channel support before CMYK.... Also we need colour management for both Gimp and X and printing with proofing modes etc.
I may be woefully behind the times here, but last I had heard from the mailing list was that CMYK color-space management and color-matching could be done in nieve ways that were not encumbered, but if you wanted to, for example, match the same CMYK handling that print shops will use, you were SOL.
Feel free to correct me.
I enjoy the gradient that happens between
"GIMP isn't photoshop. Fix it." to
"GIMP is just a photoshop clone. Why don't
you innovate instead of copying??"
I'm glad that GIMP is now nearer to the latter side.
I, personally, can't wait until it makes it to the 'photoshop clone' part completely.
I'd also like to suggest that those people who
always insist that projects need to innovate instead
of copying take a moment, and think, "Hey, maybe
there is a best way of doing things. Maybe it's
already been done. Maybe to do things the right
way, we must travel down a path already made."
Personally, I prefer quality to novelty.
The parent emphasizes the political incorrectness of the name "GIMP" somewhat bluntly, but the point still stands. If GIMP wants to become mainstream it should conform to acceptable naming conventions. Why do all the most popular widespread applications have such tame (and admittedly bland) titles, or at least words that are far from any slang?
What I see as the flaw in Microsoft's MDI implementation is the potential for wasted screen space. With Mozilla, all screen space occupied by the Mozilla window is constantly used.
national election.
for giving me the right terms: linux wacom project ...
still another hope for that digitizer (Thinkpad 730TE); gave up when the binary output caused gpm to segfault.
thanks
I love Gimp and use it almost exclusively when on my Linux box (at home).
But lately I've not had as much time as I'd like to work on my puter at home.
So I use Gimp at work... when I can.
GTK for Windows has a bug in it when dealing with digital tablets and.. yep.. I draw with a tablet. Gasp.
Fix that single bug and Gimp will be absolutly perfict. Else I'll be using other software to draw my images and then the gimp for image editing after the fact.
But that kinda sucks.
I don't actually exist.
4) the ability to draw straight lines or polygons. That's the only friggin button that I'm missing.
I'm rather shocked to see all the complaints about the Gimp here. The comments seem to be divided into two categories:
1. I've never used it, but from the screenshots it looks scary! It sucks!
2. I've used it, and it didn't work exactly like Photoshop. It sucks!
As a person who has used Photoshop (and a bevy of other paint programs, all the way back to the days of DPaint) extensively, I feel the Gimp is by far the best program available for creating (pixel-based) graphics, especially in the realm of web imagery.
I have used it to create from-scratch graphics for countless websites, including: this, this, this, and this. I have also used it to do many print items, such as this flyer. (Amazingly enough, CMYK is not really that necessary if you don't mind slight variations in the color on the final product. If you are doing serious print work, you should really be using a vector illustration program for everything but photo retouching anyhow.)
I think perhaps the Gimp's strength is how a non-artist (ie, me) can create pretty nice looking art with it - as I believe the links above will attest. It has a number of features not found in any other paint program, such as highly configurable tablet sensitivity.
Unfortunately, the hardest thing about using it for someone who has switched from Photoshop is that it looks _very_ similar to Photoshop, but yet it is really not very similar at all. Much like an expencied Windows user switching to KDE, they will find themselves fooled into expecting the interface to behave exactly the same way - and it doesn't. It's a different program, with a different interface.
But those who either have the patience to un-learn their Photoshop habits, or are not burdened by them to begin with, will find the Gimp to be one of the most powerful graphics tools available today. It is also quite likely one of the most impressive and mature applications available in the realm of free software - on par with Mozilla, OpenOffice, and Evolution. I'm not sure why it doesn't get the same respect that these packages do.
Corbis: Aren't you glad that Microsoft owns your history?
FireWorks is the most henious personification of evil the web has ever seen. It takes an expanse of pixels, puts them through a paper shredder, mixes the bits in water, and then forces you to eat the unrecognizable paste. (What else would you call a bunch of tiny image-filled table cells with no semantics that are only aligned properly in IE?) I can only hope you're not being accurate when you say it has FireWorks-esq features...
Seriously, what's the OS and Window manager that the screenshots are taken from. I like the look of that.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
SodiPodi has an interface similar to the GIMP, but gives the user the option to show buttons in the task bar for every window or just one for the main app.
Anyhow, I was very impressed with it. Admittedly, there are some things that are still rough around the edges, but this is a significant improvement over previous releases. Things I especially liked:
- Relocation of the line stroke button that makes it easier to use Bezier curves and the like.
- Better resizing and resampling algorithms that produce that nice, anti-aliased effect.
- Quick, no frills approach to plugins and features.
Things that I still think need improvement:
- I think that rather than have a smattering of premade brushes with the option to make your own that Gimp should adopt a system like Paint Shop Pro where the menu for the paintbrush (and other relevant tools) lets you adjust the brush size, density, step, etc. in one convenient panel, rather than having to go through the effort of making an entirely new custom brush for the task. The current approach is functional, but unnecessarily clumsy.
- Have something akin to the Browse feature in Paint Shop Pro. This feature analyzes all graphics in a directory, produces thumbnails of all of them, and displays them in a window where you can pick and choose which ones to open. It's like a pictoral file selector.
- Implement more features that can be done with Layers, like adjusting gray channels for example and allow layers to modify layers beneath them (e.g. a Multiply layer or a Screen layer). If this ability exists, I haven't found it.
- I'm not still not a huge fan of the MDI approach. If you have related taskbar icons cluster in Windows or Linux, it's not too bad however, and there are pros and cons to both approaches.
But it's not at all bad. For free, it's a remarkable product. As an example, I selfishly submit this plug for my webcomic whose most current chapter was done with Gimp (true until this Sunday, unless I decide to use Gimp again): http://dragonangel.keenspace.com
It's just that with Paint Shop Pro already costing about $60 on sale (as low as $15 for previous users), and being more substantial and feature packed than Gimp, I don't have a reason to switch to Gimp (unless PSP 9 is a similar flop), but I would certainly recommend it for the graphic artist on the cheap.
Too bad there still isn't a solid Illustrator replacement as I suspect more casual graphic work is done (or at least: would be easier done) with vectors. Just look at the way Adobe names them: Photoshop is for photo manipulation, Illustrator is for image creation. How much time do most people spend touching up photos compared to making little webpage widgets and stuff?
"Photoshop was neither designed nor marketed towards any of the markets that do pallete based art/graphic design."
How is this imformative? Photoshop was designed for image manipulation. Illustrator was designed for actual creation.
An optional MDI interface is listed as an enhancement in GIMP's bugzilla, along with a discussion of what it would take to implement. The last update was posted in January 2004.
ID 7379
http://www.deforum.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19589
..or i can say Qt is not flexible enough to act like GIMP event loop.
:-)
Let as not talk of GTK as some generic tooklit. GTK is (at least at its basement) subset of GIMP.
I'd prefer to say, it is GIMP event loop, not one of GTK
I have used it to create from-scratch graphics for countless websites, including: this, this, this, and >this.
Sorry, but that last link looks like you just ripped off images from the web. The lightbulb and book are in completely different styles, for instance. One looks like it may have originally been created in Illustrator, the second is a cropped photo. If this is what you have to resort to when you use Gimp, I'll stick with my Adobe suite, thank you.
OK, I for one am still using my purchased copy of Paint Shop Pro 5 (in Windows). However, I am trying to get rid of ALL my paid for apps in favour of freeware alternatives, that I can give to others on CD to use on a fresh install of Windows. I consider this the first step to weaning myself and others off Windows completely - prove that free software can be as good as or better than paid for apps.
For the most part I have it all down - Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org - the three basic apps any user needs to be productive are all there AND are superior to their commercial equivalents. The missing piece of the puzzle is a graphics editor. I have tried GIMP on two occasions, and both times I found the lack of single interface and weird ways of doing things to be constraining, to the point where if I couldn't work it out, there wasn't much point trying to give it to my parents to work out! I held hope that on seeing the announcement of a new user interface, it would finally match (roughly) the UIs of Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. Alas, no such luck.
Well, now my question is this - what freeware applications do you know of that I can give to others as a graphics editing app. It doesn't need to do full CMYK etc, but I'd like it to have at least equivalent functionality to my old PSP5. Note that I'm not asking for open source necessarily. Free is good enough for now. I've tried Serif Software's "free" option but it isn't really free and I can't store it on CD because it wants a key that expires.
So Slashdotters - Free, Windows OS graphics app, single document interface, equivalent to PSP5 or similar - does it exist?
Visceral Psyche Films
You can stick the gimp just about anywhere without having to worry about it. You have to plan to use photoshop. Most people could just get by with xv or imagemagik (eg. convert filename.[weird.graphics.format.extension] filename.jpg can make life a lot easier), but most people like an interactive GUI.
Come on, here virtually all cars have manual transmission. I need the automatic transmission as much as i need the Ms Clippy!
Of course you could try using Photoshop under Wine.
I have been using gimp for more than 3 years now ... and I really miss some of the features I had in FireWorks or Flash (yes, people do use flash for images as well). But that said , I think the new gimp screens look ugly ... I liked the old thick buttons and B/W buttons.
:)
A Good tool is just that, it does not let you do what you want , but gives you what you need
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
A true 48 bit support would be a great plus for such an app: no concurrent, great market. And if you optimize it for 64 bit AMD processors, you could potentially create the first killer app for 64 bit processors (remember, you need 64 bit registers to handle 48 bit colors simply).
Non-Linux Penguins ?
What if we liked the old gimp? I don't like the new UI, and all the little icons in the menu.
The missing part is the thing to make the ICC profiles. Adobe have their own ->CMYK profile and tuning system which gives reasonable results on most presses. But this is rather old-fashioned now (IMO) and really pre-dates 1995 and the introduction of the ICC system in pre-press. There's no need to duplicate this functionality: just ask your pre-press house to give you a profile for their system.
Okay, y'all, I know I'm ringing in on this late, and it's 6:00am without any sleep for me, so I might come off as brusque. Everybody says "I'm not a graphic designer, but..." Well, I actually am a graphic designer.
The GIMP may, someday, be as good as Photoshop. Right now, it's not even close. Photoshop's interface is so polished and so wise, and its tools are so powerful but easily accessible, that all of these debates about the GIMP are frivolous. I've used both extensively, and for anything other than fucking around, there's no comparison.
I will pay $600 for a program as powerful as Photoshop. But, I'd really like to have Photoshop (without the use of CrossoverOffice) run on my Linux desktop machine. I can boot into Windows or I can walk to my Win98 box to run Photoshop, but it's frustrating not to have Photoshop accessible when I'm doing other sorts of serious work.
What I think graphic designers who want to use Linux should do is lobby Adobe to make PS available on Linux. I would pay, and I know others who would, too.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
We have here definitive proof that "The Gimp" is never used as a story topic.
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
I was wondering what had happened to film gimp. Thanks for the tip.
As for photoshop, we're trying to avoid it - the licensing structure is node locked, which is a pain for us since most of the fifty people who need it need it for about 3% of the time. We're also a linux-only shop for production artists, which means that the few people who really do need to use photoshop have to also run a windows emulation package.
It's actually fscking amazing when you think about it. Can't believe how great it's coming along!
Looking forward to checking out the OS X preview after work this evening. here's the install page for Panther. Not too much to build.
Developing software is more subtle than it seems. The notion that you can abstact a solution for a set of problems into general product is basically incorrect.
When you are trying to solve a serious problem, the most important thing to have is a good team of engineers, experienced in your domain. If they are responsible and professional, they will work on solving your problem instead of trying to generalize their work into a product. In most of the commercial development environments I worked in the engineers would refuse to attack problems unless they felt the solution could be generalized. That is -- they wanted to create a _product_ rather than a solution, and deploy the product, rather than taking the more tractable approach of babysitting the users through the entire lifecycle of the program use. For this reason many things do not get done in commercial industry.
I also worked for several years in a research and development environment in a government lab. The approach here was completely different; the development engineers were basically the users as well, and worked directly with the scientists in the use of the system. Engineering and use were the same thing, and the system could be adapted and tuned to solve the specific, intractable, problem at hand. Progress was made in this environment, much more rapidly than in the commercial environment.
The best thing about open source software is that it is possible to treat it as a library or framework for solving specific difficult problems. The disadvantage is that the code may not be that great, and the startup time at learning the code base can be high. But the code seems to improve as the product matures -- for instance the linux kernel has become very legible. I haven't looked at GDK and GTK recently, but when I first looked at them (1997) they seemed pretty amaturish. By now they are probably useable.
Have you ever tried this: http://mmmaybe.gimp.org/tutorials/Straight_Line/ ?
I've read that it detects this by a cluster of yellow circles on the bill. I can't find it anywhere. Can a more Where's-Waldo-adept slashdotter give me a clue?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Looks like it might be Enlightenment (the Eterms certainly suggest that). Probably running on Linux.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat