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.
Mod parent up. It's not a troll.
The author is asking whether GIMP is doing things that we don't see in commercial tools. I'm interested in this, too.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
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.
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?
Script-fu -- incredibly useful for automating content generation. Very clean, easy, and powerful.
I'm not a pro, but I use GIMP because I find it simpler and less daunting than Photoshop, and still almost as powerful.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Blame adobe. They have the patents over much of the CMYK processing space.
It's not that gimp won't do it, it's that legally they can't until adobe release the patent, or allow the gimp authors to use it for a low price.
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.
You should stop looking and try to use it.
Feel of new Gimp GUI is completely different than the old one
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
One feature not included is the "Call the FBI when you scan in a $20" feature.
Don't "blame Adobe". These are useful, non-trivial, novel patents that took a lot of research to develop. Unless you think that specific pieces of directionally influenced [non-symmetric] 4D to 3D matrix math with interactive tuning are just so obvious to everybody that they're not worth protecting. This stuff isn't the one-click patent.
If the Gimp team wants real CMYK they can do it themselves with a team of volunteers, a few Gretag spectrophotometers and several years of fine-tuning but there's a reason that everyone licenses this stuff from Pantone, Screen, EFI, Adobe, etc. and it's because it's really, really, really hard to do.
Think about it for a minute ... a new interface is never as intuitive as the old one you are used to, let alone more intuitive. Maybe, once you get used to it, it will be better, or maybe not ... but it is going to take a fair investment in time and energy to figure out if moving ahead is good or bad, and a real pain to move back if you made a mistake.
Looking at the writeup, I saw only ONE improvement that I really, really want - the multi-line text tool. And the reviewer was careful to point out that other goodies (like a multi-COLOR text tool) were NOT implemented.
Personally, I'd be just as happy if someone would retrofit that new multi-line text tool into 1.2 and forget about the rest of it. I've taken the time to get used to right-click menus and floating toolbars and such, it wasn't that hard. So pardon me if I don't enthuse for changes that disrupt all the current users just to make things easier on a few newbies!
Teen Angel - a Ghost Story
Everyone likes Mozilla's tabbed browsing, right? Well, that's just another form of MDI. It's windows-within-windows, but done right.
What is evil is MS's old brain-dead MDI where you have a blank useless desktop with icons on top of it that can be hidden. Tabbed browsing just this trimmed of some extra features.
What Mozilla does also right is that the whole SDI/MDI model not an either-or choice anymore. Want all pages in different windows? Fine. Want all pages in one window? Fine. Wants some pages in some windows? Fine. I showed Mozilla to various family members who usually use computers, and they all immediately love tabbed browsing.
MS doesn't seems to understand which is better. They keep going back and forth between SDI and MDI when the answer is both!
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
The biggest issue with the GIMP that I see, is that the majority of people out there making money with photoshop have no desire to learn something new. I include myself in that...I have been using photoshop now since version 2, and can use the app practically in my sleep. There is no need to think about "now how will I do that? What menu/palette/option is that?"
I have played with the GIMP off and on, and while I think it is a great program. I see no reason to switch to it for my main app. Especially as 2 hours of billable work pays for an upgrade to photoshop.
If you are one in a million, then there are six thousand people who are just like you.
"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..."
Faded? A few days ago, a buddy of mine decided to venture into the wonderful world of Texturing as it related to 3D animation. He took a digital photo and wanted me to help him make a textur. He didn't have Photoshop, so he downloaded Gimp. I use Photoshop on a daily basis, I've gotten to know virtually all the features in it. I've learned quite a bit about how to do some of the things you need to do. I don't mean just what buttons to push, but what is being done to the image to get to the result. I sat down at his computer and started flipping through the features in Gimp and.. ouch. It felt like Photoshop lite. It was very limited in what transparency modes it had. There was almost none of the workflow shortcuts that PS has, like Layer sets etc. My experience trying to paint or smudge was... inconsistent. It's like they didn't tune it to what an artist would use it for.
That was about as far as I got. GIMP is not in a state right now where it'd save me $150 for the next PS upgrade. Not only that, but Adobe's chugging ahead with new stuff as well. (I can't believe what an upgrade 7 was from 6...)
I'm going to be honest with you: I think most of the peeps that are dependent on Photoshop are terribly interested in voicing in on this argument, thus the perception that it's "faded". No, it's not Photoshop. But that's not really the question, is it? It's "is it Photoshop enough for you?" Well that's a different deal. You can do your cropping, color balancing, contrasting, etc. That's fine. Just don't get too general about this. Photoshop is a $600 tool. Mastering it can earn you a living. Apps like that are very difficult to keep up with in the Open Source world.
"Derp de derp."
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.