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
Are any of these features NOT copied from PhotoShop?
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
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?
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.
Wake when there are gigawumpus improvements.
(Did I use that properly? Should I be ashamed?)
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?
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?
Unfortunately, they couldn't figure out how to use the new selection tools.
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?
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
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.
Indeed, I've been using a 2.0 pre-release for awhile, and the improvement is cosmetic mostly. The dockable tool windows are great, but a functional MDI would be much more useful. Why? Window management is fine on linux with virtual desktops (one of mine is dedicated to gimp), but (a) it doesn't really work if you need GIMP on windows, which even with virtual desktops added has clumsy window management, and (b) more importantly, it is impossible to have windows automatically and intelligently resize themselves "around" the toolbars. MDI can do this easily and well, I and see no reason for this constant MDI-phobia (or is it SDI elitism?). Apps like Kdevelop have already proven that MDI can be done well, and the GIMP's SDI is the first complaint I get from people who might consider switching from Photoshop.
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
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?
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.
is the "Healing Brush".. That's my single favorite part of Photoshop; especially when touching up family photos from a digital camera.
Ctrl+D or image->duplicate
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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
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.