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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.
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.
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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
Yeah, definately one of the most annoying things about gimp for me, but they've made it so the brush becomes your cursor now if you want, it's a config option.
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I also hate that in the Gimp. I've been using 2.0 for some time now and you can basically use a single window. In 2.0 you can now add different tabs to the same window instead of opening separate windows (for the brushes, for example). You can still detach the tab if you are in a masochistic mood :). I really like 2.0 I have to say. It has some glitches (at least the build I installed) with the selection tool but other than that I was happy with all the improvements.
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
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yes, at least Gimp 1.3.21 does.
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.
The second thing you notice about the new version is the GIMP's "dockability." All dialogs (Brushes, Layers, Tool Options, etc.) can now be detached from the main window and shown in a separate window, added to an existing dialog window, or hidden from view. The software saves all changes you make to your view preferences, so that when you next go to work, your tools remain laid out as they were during your last session. This not only allows you to create a custom environment that suits your needs, but also helps reduce screen clutter.
Like that?
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Its a tweaked GNOME taskbar.
"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"
Create a new desktop. Launch GIMP in that desktop. Voila, 'one cohesive window'.
Switch back to the original desktop to see whatever you were working on before, free of any GIMP-induced overcrowding.
I hear that even Windows is going to support multiple desktops soon...
Personally I like to make them translucent at the bottom of the screen in a more traditional gnome layout. I would think a panel where he has it would either get windows over it a lot if he doesn't have it configured to stay on top or would get in the way a lot if he does have it configured to stay on top.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Have you tried inkscape? from what i can tell its sodipodi with abit more and they seem to have more frequent releases.
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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...
Actually, Gimp's layout is a lot better for multi-monitor (or multi-desktop) layouts (yes, for those who insist on using a single-window layout can use the new dockable feature, so Gimp can do both) so I'd say it's already somewhat better than Photoshop, especially in the usability department.
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.
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.
I believe your argument only holds water for the Windows version, at least as I remember it.
The Mac version of Photoshop has the menubar and floating toolbars, put them wherever you want.
I'll have to check out the new release on the Mac though, sounds better than it was.
At least Adobe's Photoshop has been offering this feature for many many releases already.
That leaves us with script-fu. Again, Photoshop has been scriptable for ages now. It's just a different language that is used in Gimp. The concept is not even the slightest new.
If you had ever used it, you would know that resizing the window rearranges the toolbox. So if you want a 2 column toolbox, make it skinnier and taller. If you want a 2 row toolbox, make it longer and shorter. It doesn't get any easier than that.
The GUI is in fact, "all new" in the very real sense that the code is wildly different. If you use it for a while, you'll see that while the new Gimp retains much of the initial impression that the old Gimp did, this is clearly a Wilbur of a different color.
Much of the UI was re-written and much of the internals were made into a library. Gimp 2.0 also boasts a much improved plugin mechanism and real support for many of the structural things that people had been asking for, and without which modern features of photo-editing software could never be added. Does this mean that Gimp 2.0 is the be-all, end-all? Not even close, but it does mean that Gimp 2.0 is on a much more viable development path than 1.anything was.
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.
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?
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ALL keyboard shortcuts are user-definable, and really easily. (Just mouse over the option/menu_item you want to redefine and press the keyboard shortcut you want to use for it) so making them all Photoshop-compatibile isn't a really hard work.
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You're right, Photoshop can't do multi-monitor support. Oh, wait, it can.
See, your problem is that you have a taskbar, which is a flawed utility that is useable with only a fixed number of windows before it runs out of screen space.
You should try out sawfish without gnome. Instead of a taskbar, you'll have a cascading menu when you right click on the root window that groups your application's windows by application. There's probably a taskbar out there somewhere that does something similar, but I've yet to see one, and you'd still be wasting all those pixels.
OP asked for features that were not copied from photoshop, not features that are not in photoshop. Gimp was scriptable well before Photoshop (at least on the PC). Multimonitor support I'm not sure about but I'm pretty sure the Gimp had that first too.
Actions would be the most basic way to do this, and it requires no additional purchase and not even any programming language skill. Batch process and you can polish off an entire folder with only a couple mouse clicks. Real easy.
People who bring up automation or multi-monitor capability as something GIMP does that Photoshop doesn't are simply talking out of their ass.
Ctrl+D or image->duplicate
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Elements users, correct me if I am wrong, but Elements doesn't support Layers (Adjustment or Mask) , Channels etc amongst other things, while PSP supports them.
If you want about 50% of PS functionality and can't use anything but PS UI, then go with Elements , otherwise if you want 90% of PS functionality and don't mind a slightly slower performance, go with PSP.
If you are into graphic design, I am not sure what to advice you , but if you are into photography, then I would recommend a very fast Harddisk and tons of RAM. PSP some times gets stuck writting undo/redo data to disk.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
I use the wonderful part of ImageMagick called 'convert' which will rotate, resize, etc. All from the convenience of the CLI (or scripts). Heck it will even make animated gifs out of your images!
Try it, it's free.
- Select a circle.
- Stroke selection.
Gee, how is it done in Photoshop?- Select a circle.
- Stroke selection.
Got news for ya bunky: the fact that you're a fucking moron says nothing about the quality of the programs you can or cannot use.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.
The original versions of GIMP used the Motif took kit. Since it was not Free, and Lesstif wasn't up to running the GIMP, the developers started work on a tool kit just for the GIMP. This was also about the time that KDE development started up with QT. Seeing how flexible the tool kit being created for the GIMP was, other developers started writing other programs using the same kit. Thus GNOME was born.
Seeing all the work the core GIMP developers put into GTK, I don't image they'll put the time into porting it to another widget set. That is not saying it can't be done. Just don't get your hopes up.
Ummm.... the right click menu and floating toolbars are still there. You can dock if you like, but it isn't required, and turning the menu off in image windows is quite simple (I did, I find it wastes space).
Besides, the new text tool isn't a vast change, functionality-wise, from 1.2's "dynamic text" plugin or whatever it was called (sorry, I haven't used 1.2 in awhile).
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.
Have you looked into cinepaint?
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
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You're wrong :^) I'm not an Elements user anymore, but it had most of the Photoshop functionality, including layers.
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.
It has the magnetic lasso, only it's called "intelligent scissors." Been there since at least 1.2.
Photoshop has supported multi-monitors for as long as I can remember. I used a dual head setup on a PowerPC 9500 back in the olden tymes. Dual head support in Photoshop has more to do with the underlying OS than the program itself.
If anyone is having issues with this on Windows, blame windows.
Using the display option, you can switch the active screen, and pull the dialogue boxes back.
HTH
The previous sig has been removed due to
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!
So, how do you feel Paint Shop Pro stands up against Photoshop Elements?
We did some comparisons at work about a year ago (local news organization) - we were (still are) looking for good, cost-effective, graphics tools for some of our photographer's tasks, for prepress work, workflow automation (image format conversions, meta-data creation, etc.), and so on.
I think I remember Photoshop (not sure if it applied to Elements too) has much stronger color handling, especially working with non-RGB colorspaces (i.e. handling CMYK, et al., making it more suitable for advanced printwork - which made e.g. GIMP a non-starter for many of our needs).
But, PSP Pwns PS in scriptability. PSP's scripting language is a more or less full implementation of Python (v. 9+ I think). Pretty cool stuff. I think every function/command/etc. in PSP is Python scriptable (I should check, but it's late...).
(That said, for quick image manipulation, I still reach for PS more often, because I've used it since v2.5.)
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Set the X resolution independent from the Y resolution and turn off Dot-for-Dot mode. This is one of the things that GIMP could do years before PS (just like multiple undo).
Well, there is a file called ps-menurc that is shipped with The GIMP. You take this file and copy it over your ~/.gimp-1.3/menurc and voila, PS keybindings.
Just looked in PS7, it has an option to save workspace, does that save the pallete locations as well? If yes, you can probably define two workspaces, one for single-monitor, and one for dual-monitor..
Otherwise, it's ugly but maybe you can just save and backup the settings from the settings directory? (in D:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop\7.0\Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Settings )
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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...
Photoshop's automation tools make that really easy. Hit 'record', give it a name, go through the process, then hit stop. It records the actions you've performed and makes a button out of them.
But that doesn't work when the process involves a step that says "Examine the size of the resulting image, calculate some new values for the compression parameters, then undo the compression and try it again with the new parameters. Repeat until the size is within x% of the target".
More generally, simple "record and playback" automation doesn't work for any situation where calculations need to be made, or decisions need to be made. I have a GIMP script, for example, that creates a copy of an image with the date and time the image was taken rendered on it in nice anti-aliased white text with a black border, appropriately sized and placed in the lower-right hand corner of the image. To do this, the script:
And, of course, I can run this script on every image in a directory with a couple of mouse clicks.
Taking advantage of the automation capabilities of the GIMP is more akin to programming than it is to macro recording and playback, but it's actually not that hard even for non-programmers, and it's very, very powerful.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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
I don't really use taskbar buttons at all these days. Virtual desktops are more efficient and easier to use by a long, long way.
I see no reason for having a taskbar.
In any case, if your system won't let you configure things like this, don't blame the GIMP people. Complain to whoever gave you that taskbar and ity's logic for what gets a button.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
That said (the bad stuff), Elements has some amazing tools in it that the programmers seem to have hidden from the accountants. Elements does NOT have paths, but you can use the magnetic lasso tool to create paths, then just save them as layers (Layer>New>Layer via Copy) or Selections. That's right: no channels to speak of but you CAN save selections. Not sure how they got that by the beancounters/QA but hooray for providing this power.
Adjustment Layers are available, but layer groups are not available. Also, there is no Curves in Elements so if you import an image from PS7 with a Curves adjustment layer, it's locked. You can turn it off/on but you can't double click and edit.
I haven't seen Photoshop 8 yet so cannot comment on its file browser, but Elements 2.0's file browser is just as good as Photoshop 7's. Which isn't saying a TON but you get my drift. Also, Elements file format is 100% compatible with PS7. Opening and editing in either is seamless.
If you edit images exclusively then the price point of Elements is totally amazing (compared to all the other inflated Adobe products). But I think Paint Shop Pro is a better deal, although I've never liked its trailer-park UI...