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The Gimp from the Eyes of a Photoshop User
Eugenia writes "Many in the F/OSS community are raving about the Gimp, however pros who have actually used Photoshop think differently: This Mac professional designer goes through the steps of getting Gimp 2.0 up and running on his Mac, only to get baffled by the chaotic interface in general and its non-standard UI compared to other Mac apps, its slowness to open large files and to apply filters, the unintuitive tools that accompany it and its very visible bad quality of text and lines/shapes. That designer even bought a 'supported' version of MacGimp by an OSS-Mac company, Archei, but he never heard back for his support requests (free Gimp for Macs here). I think that's one of the best-written articles I've ever read about the reality of most open-source geek-driven projects vs their equivelant professional/proprietary ones. Personally, before I get persuaded to use Gimp again for my photography projects, I would need --in addition to the author's peeves -- full 16-bit per channel support, high-quality scanning/printing drivers with integrated GUI (a'la SilverFast), and a 'crop and rotate' feature (as seen in PS/PSE). Besides, both Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop Elements cost bellow $100 (with PS Elements getting bundled with most scanners/printers/digital cameras, albeit without the much needed 16bit support either)."
Alot of people have animosity towards Adobe, myself included over various issues, but there is one thing that Adobe has that nobody else can hold a candle to:
Photoshop.
This one software package is single-handedly keeping me from migrating to Linux. For those who say "But what about Gimp? It's just as good..."
Those people have also never done professional graphics for print, video or even the web. The toolset within Photoshop is unrivaled, it's color acuity precise, and it's workflow caters to multiple mind sets. For every one way to do something there is a handfull of other, equally successful methods to achieve exactly the same result. It is an artist's tool.
Mature? Nope. There are dozens of features that the community has been begging to have integrated for years, and slowly but surely Adobe has listened. I can understand not implementing every little widget and gizmo that has been suggested by crackpot users over the years into their flagship product line, and each new upgrade offers something useful that can either save me time or opens up a new realm of creative flexibility. Photoshop has many years to grow, become better and more refined. Most people just don't see it because a histogram is this wierd spikey deal that screws up an image, filters are normally reserved for creating 'L3nZ FL4r3s', and the layer effects were the perfect time saving device for all those bubbly drop shadowed graphics with glowy mouse-overs your client is begging for.
There is no alternative, and by glancing at the top 10 new features, it seems that Adobe has not forgot that Photoshop is not a toy program. I didn't see any "Improved Applesque Button Creation" feature.
(yet)
There is no god
We use photoshop here at work (digital-based photography business) all day long, and a few of us have tried using GIMP for image editing. We all found it fairly awkward. I've tried using it more than everyone else and I just find the whole "right-click to do everything" approach fairly disorienting.
(donning asbestos underwear)
FYI, I am a programmer and web app designer, not a graphics artist. That being said, I feel that any GUI application with a well-designed interface should be fairly intuitive and I should be able to get up to speed in a few minutes (I learn quickly).
I tried The Gimp on Linux. I tried The Gimp in Windows (the new native version). I still cannot get it. I try Photoshop and I can be halfway productive instantly. The result suck, remember I am not a graphics designer and I cannot even write legibly let alone draw with a pencil or a mouse, but I can get around the filters, tools, etc.
My experiences with other peoples' work proves that The Gimp is capable and powerful. My experiences with my own work proves that The Gimp has a steep learning curve mostly due to its odd interface.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
I had the EXACT same experience with Gimp on all my OSes: Windows, Mac and Linux. Gimp is simply NOT as good as Photoshop, not even as good as Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop Elements.
More work is needed.
On the matter of Text, use FreeType for the GIMP. It produces beautiful scaled, rotated, and angled text output.
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
From dictionary.com: 8 entries found for gimp. gimp2 ( P ) Pronunciation Key (gmp) Slang n. A limp or a limping gait. A person who limps.
inquiring minds want to know
Unfortunately, I have to agree with the author here. Most applications in the OS world are obvious in the sense that they are written by Developers (apps that I work on included). That is probably one of the biggest things missing in the OS world - UI people. People who understand how to ogranize all the options / bells&whisttles / etc into something meaningful and intuitive to the average 'joe' user. While there are definitely great strides towards creating more UI friendly apps, it is still one of the gravest detriments to our community as a whole.
Carl P. Corliss
I do my image stuff with Paint Shop Pro - but I was wondering about a post effect software (like Adobe's package - like Photoshop for film). I'm pretty sure I remember reading about a film version of gimp - anyone had experience with it and know if it's any good?
In the price comparison I think she's missing one of the major points of the gimp - it's open source. I don't think many of the developers are working on it so I don't have to shell out some money for paint shop pro, they're more likley developing it because there's a gimp shaped hole in the open source comunity that needed filling.
Everything will be taken away from you.
I am Photoshop certified and use the app every day in my work. I have also enthusiastically installed and am a sometime user of GIMP (on Mac) and I've gotta say this guy is right on target.
Enthusiasm for the GIMP reminds me of Samuel Johnson's famous comments on women preaching.
Historical sexism aside, his point was that when we see something hard being done by someone unexpected, we sometimes fail to notice how poorly it's actually being done.
In the OS community, everyone gets so excited about having a "free" (as in beer) app which potentially replaces an expensive commercial app, that we get a bit carried away in our enthusiasm.
Its like the do-it-yourself TiVo's that aren't really anywhere near as convenient or feature rich as the real deal.
GIMP gives us a glimpse of the tremendous potential of Open Source software, but anyone who thinks its "as good as PS," isn't a serious Photoshop user.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
One of the really cool things you can do with adjustment layers is work with an image you're turning into black and white and make it look like an honest-to-God black and white image (as opposed to merely a desaturated color image). In some ways, it's almost like taking an internal picture of your subject and adjusting the tones and hue on the fly, which can turn out some very nifty results. In GIMP, you just don't have that flexibility.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
A lot of people who think photoshop is great forget that they didn't pay for their copy BECAUSE IT IS EXPENSIVE.
You get what you pay for. It's that simple. And considering The Gimp is free it's a GREAT DEAL!
If they would be honest A LOT of home users SHOULD use the GIMP instead of using an illegal version of Photoshop.
And I almost forgot. The Obligatory link for the google impaired. :) Hinted, Kerned, and Anti-Aliased to your hearts content.. fully buzzword compliant!
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
This article re-illustrates something that serious graphic designers have been pulling their hair out in trying to tell the GIMP community for years: the GIMP - though a nice project - is completely and totally off in a little world of its own.
There are some major beefs that graphic designers and Photoshoppers have with the GIMP:
(1) The interface sucks. Nobody likes working with 16 different open windows
(2) The interface sucks. Nobody likes menus in different windows and toolbars
(3) No 16-bit/channel color support
(4) No [good] CMYK support = will never be used in prepress[1]
(5) Repeat (1) and (2)
(6) [Lack of] Speed
(7) Dependencies (GTK+, etc.)
Most importantly, I think, the GIMP community needs once again to have its teeth kicked in for its idiocy in choosing the name 'GIMP.' Yes, we here on Slashdot all know that it stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and we've all heard how it's "just an acronym" and not supposed to mean anything. But for reasons of political correctness, common decency, etc. the program's name will continue to be a major reason that it never sees any serious adoption.
So, GIMP developers, clean up the interface and change the product name, and your program has a decent chance of seeing the light of day in the real world.
[1] In the GIMP developer's defense, most/all of the CMYK process is patent protected.
[..] UNIX has this wonderful habit of trying to protect users from their own stupidity without recognising its own. [...]
... now it sounds rite ... Unix doesn't hide anything, and thats where the power is (and the great ability to screw up the entire system).
s/UNIX/OS-X
Yeah
Sunny Dubey
gimp
n : disability of walking due to crippling of the legs or feet
I suggest they rename it to Firehercules or Spartacus.
I agree, the Gimp's interface is inconsistent and painful. Then again, Photoshop doesn't even run (although it can be made to run badly on x86 only using Wine). So I guess it's Gimp for me.
Complain about usability all you want, I'd rather have an app that functions.
Honestly, I have not read the gimp site since version 2 became available, but approx. 6 months ago I recall reading on the gimp webpage that gimp was by no means the Adobe Photoshop killer. I don't know if this applies to version 2, but if it does it would be the user fault for not doing a little better research.
Sorry, Big difference between professional photoshop users and the general "I wanna edit my digital photo" public.. Surely no one in the world would argue that any current version of FREE software would compare favorably in the eyes of a photoshop professional. But there IS an arguement to be made that the GIMP is more than sufficient for the majority of everyone else's needs. One day the cost of photoshop will drive a savvy UI person to paste a PS emulator on the front of the GIMP and s/he will be endlessly praised by the rest of the OSS community... I can wait :)
Gimp 1 had a terrible interface. No bones about it. Gimp 2 however, has a decent UI. It's not super amazing, but its good enough, above average.
The problem is that these Photoshop users are used to photoshop. Any other UI no matter how slick and perfect will be worse for them. They are trained on photoshop so well that using anything else kills their efficiency. Like driving stick for the first time after driving automatic your whole life.
I'm no graphic wizard, just a programmer. And I recently got gimp 2 for windows and linux. I couldn't do fancy things right away, but its not because I couldn't find the buttons or they were in bad or hidden places. It's because I don't know anything about making graphics. If graphics people start out on the gimp instead of photoshop they will be just as good on that.
So don't try to convert people to gimp. Just get new people who are about to pirate photoshop for the first time to use gimp instead.
That's about it...
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
And I quote.."I think that's one of the best-written articles I've ever read about the reality of most open-source geek-driven projects vs their equivelant professional/proprietary ones." ... Not biased.. REALLY.
It's always humorous to me when trollers go after an opensource project that offers an excellent (albeit different) solution than a commercial closed source project. Do they ever compare apples for apples? How many free plugins/styles/scripting languages do you get with photoshop? what is the price tag again? I've used both, photoshop is better.. but Gimp is excellent and more than "good enough" for most projects (without being closed source or having a high price).
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
God how I wish the Gimp had the same professional and intuitive feel as Photoshop. You hear all the time "yeah, but Gimp can do the same things PS can and it's free!"
Point taken, but I think of it this way. You are taking a road trip from LA to Vegas. A Porsche and Saturn will both get you there. One is going to take you in style and cost alot more, the other is practical, no frills, and is a hell of lot cheaper.
Quick! Which would you rather take if given a no cost option to you?
I loathe The Gimp. Why? The interface is one of the worst I have ever seen. Ever. Including MS Word for DOS!
That being said, I find the interface for Photoshop to be a complete pain in the ass as well. If it wasn't for the fact that there isn't a Mac version of PaintShopPro, I wouldn't be using Photoshop (okay, Photoshop Elements, but it's still the same interface) at all.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I'm sorry, but I can't resist.
Isn't that sort of reaction kinda par for the "Mac user tries anything else" course? In fact, I think the text quoted by the submitter is a MacOS-level autotext macro.
We call 'em "MacSnobs" for a reason, eh?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Personally those that are complaining should put their money where their mouth is.
Gimp is done by people who love to give back to the community. If you look at what has been done, it is an awesome project. If you don't like that it's not a Photoshop Killer, then pitch in and pay the salary of a couple of the GIMP programmers so they can dedicate their undivided attention to the project and I guarantee you that you'll get what you ask for.
For where this product comes from, it is great. It shouldn't be looked at as a Photoshop replacement for professionals, but as a Photoshop replacement for those of us who can't afford Photoshop.
Stop looking a gift horse in the mouth. If you don't like the product and don't want to contribute to make it better. Go buy Photoshop.
Otherwise, get your hands dirty.
... about the state of Desktop OSS comes out. Mod me out as a troll if you like, but it won't change the independent truth revealed by this article. True, but sad. :-(
From the review, "UNIX has this wonderful habit of trying to protect users from their own stupidity without recognising its own."
*sigh* too true.
The Gimp is good for what it is: a small app for doing simple graphics work, like cropping photos, simple website graphics etc. Who in their right mind claims that Gimp can compete on any level with Photoshop?
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Open Source simply historically speaking does not produce quality end-user or GUI applications. Open source is written by programmers, for programmers. If it isn't something a programmer or sysadmin would be interested in, it doesn't get much attention paid to detail or quality.
So many people moan.
Seriously, I think one solution would be to fork it altogther, call it something non-offensive like "Accuro-paint-o-tron" (except more snappy) and write those missing features.
Then offer to backport them back to the GIMP. Keep it friendly, see what happens.
The name is fucking weird though...
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
I've used all four in comic artwork, and here's my option:
[b]PHOTOSHOP:[/b] A bit overkill, but it's the best for most any application. It's better on a Mac, though, than on a PC, due to interface issues.
[b]GIMP:[/b] Next best thing, I can do almost 100% of the stuff I can do in Photoshop. Speeding stuff up (like employing multiple CPU's or servers) will help, and 16-bit/channel may help photo artists.
[b]Paint Shop Pro:[/b] If it's what you got and you can't get the others, it'll do. Most of the stuff above you can do.
[b]Photoshop Elements:[/b] DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT GETTING THIS!!! BAD! BAD!! The interface is confusing for even old Photoshop users, and to think I used Photoshop *BEFORE* going with Gimp!!! EEEEEEEEEEEEEVVVVVVVVVVIIIIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!
Most of the time, you (the common user) don't need something heavy-handed as Photoshop. You just need to tweak Gimp/PSP to use more memory. I have it using half of 1.5 gigs here, may push it back up to a full gig. That speeds filters up fast (when you don't have to swap!)
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
When I was primarily a Linux user, I used GIMP for many hours out of each day, tinkering with my photos, working on images for web sites, etc. It is a good tool, and it has a lot going for it. The new interface is nice, but... in so many regards, GIMP is no Photoshop. I quickly realized this after I got a Power Mac and Photoshop 7.
Even though I do not use Photoshop in any professional context, it is a phenomenal product even for my personal use. Here are the major things that keep me from using GIMP on the Mac beyond occasionally playing with it:
Don't get me wrong - GIMP is a nice program, and for the price it absolutely kicks ass. But just that handful of problems listed above will be enough to turn off serious photo/graphics folks. Hell, I'm a geek that has used Linuxy and UNIXy stuff for years, and I am seriously bothered by those issues I listed, among other nit-picky ones.
Adobe doesn't have much to worry about at the moment. But if an Aqua native version of GIMP came out and could offer similar performance on high-powered Macs, then they might have reason to start sweating.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
One other thing I noticed about GIMP, it doesn't appear to have "Actions", at least with functionality similar to that of Photoshop. Maybe I just don't know the app well enough but I haven't found any decent automation feature. We use Actions a lot in photoshop, we've got a folder with around 100 of them for our daily work... Am I just missing some hugely obvious feature or something?
A lot of people fire back about GIMP's interface with, "But think of how friendly to multiple monitors it is!"
Never mind that Photoshop works just fine with multiple monitors! It has as far back as I can remember. I've seen five-monitor Mac setups arranged in order of the artist's graphics processes, moving from one monitor to another, going from area to dialog to area and so forth.
I get WHY people justify GIMP's interface. I just don't agree whatsoever.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
As someone new to GFX editing, and having used photoshop, and gimp, for about 5 hours each, I can say that The Gimp interface isn't as bad as all these long time photoshop users always whine about. I can do the same tasks in each app, with about the same difficulty and time taken. The Gimp is all I need, not being a pro. I'll probably get flamed for this by all the people who can't except that an experience contrary to thiers is possible, and the people who have been using photoshop so long, that they don't realize how much time it's taken them to gain thier profficiency and intuitive feel for it's UI.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
Where does the expectation that OSS should work for everyone come from? It's entirely unjustified.
I would probably be thinking that too, but I've used the Gimp under Linux, and it sucked. Perhaps it's worse on the Mac, maybe it's better, but you can't hide the fact that it isn't exactly Free Software's poster child.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
I'm actually pretty good with El Gimpo (though I'm a programmer like you), but the interface still boils my bum. No matter what you do, you have 700 windows open by the time you're done. If you're doing other stuff with the computer at the same time or working on a few images, you end up with a useless soup. And, if you're like me, you'll end up spending way too much time hunting through the endless right-click menus (often for the same 4 or 5 options).
Speaking of which, useless novelty crap has the same rank in the right-click hierarchy as bread and butter functions (there's probably hotkeys or some configuration crap I can do to fix this - but I'm ranting here). Beginning users are helplessly confused by the selection/anchoring setup. The Channels/Paths thing is just messed up, and I bet most users just steer clear of the whole thing and just implement what they can with layers and fudging. Lots of the subtools lack the features that would be required to make them useful, and are far too customizable in only the ways I couldn't care less about. Or are just pretty much useless novelty doodads.
Still, I use it because it's a free way to do some common picture operations (like fudging color) on my work computer.
You can't really complain too much about a free product - but you can certainly wish it had had a usable (and here I mean more than "it's possible to use") interface.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I don't see anything wrong with it at all. Adobe manages cross-platform compatibility (albeit without Linux support), and still has an excellent inferface for the Mac version. The rest of his complaint is perfectly valid as well, unless you're actually defending slowness, unintuitive tools, and bad quality of text/shapes.
Sheesh. The exact same complaints could have been written by a Windows or Linux user.
I've noticed one annoyence on the OSX version, maybe its a config issue, but clicking on a window (and gimp has many) only focuses it, you have to click again to actually draw/click a button.
But the real real killer feature thats lacking from gimp (and i cant for the life of me understand why its not there) is photoshops ability to apply an effect - ie drop shadow, and then go back later and adjust its settings or remove it, and the same with applying a filter - such as brightness/contrast adjust and then go back at any time and adjust that without loosing image quality because its a non-destructive filter. Yes i know you can have the effect on another layer, its totally not the same though. Audio applications have direct-x plugins and such and now days non-destructive filtering is just a cannot-do-without feature. Gimp could even go further than photoshop and allow any arbitrary filter to have re-editable settings so you can go back and tweek it later, this wouldnt even mean re-writing the filters, just make the effects non-destructive and stackable and you will have photoshop users drooling. As it stands, destructive filters are just not an option for modern designerss, when you want to tweek, you need the power to tweek lots of different settings at ease and see the results almost instantly, and when you apply something like level correction or brightness and contrast it is destructive to the image if you want to adjust it later. The idea of digital graphics is a total abstraction from the problems of the physical world and having to worry about generation loss etc.
Other issues such as 16 bit colour, CMYK, easy macro recording etc are going to get there in the end, but all in all its a great program!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
And write "The only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned." 100 times.
I swear, I feel like forming the AAAAI (American Association Against Abusing "Intuitive"). Our slogan: "Come join Aiyeeee!!!"
</RANT>
That said, I hate the multiple window thing too. It's ugly and cluttered. (yeah,I understand that GTK doesn't do MDI... it should.)
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Picture Window Pro from Digital Light and Color is worth a look for digital photographers looking for an alternative to Photoshop. It's much cheaper, but stacks up very well on the features (including 48-bit color and a very complete color management system).
4. Don't use it, buy an ACTUAL graphics manipulation software package, and laugh at the Gimp from afar.
If something can't be used, it doesn't matter if it is free.
He lost credibility in his first paragraph:
'Open source' means that the source code is available at no cost to anybody that wants to download it, use it, modify it, use it to fill empty hard drives - whatever.
I think we now know what kind of knowledge this guy has, and how easy it will be to disregard his opinions. Troll.
Thank goodness I have a mac. :)
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Yeah, but the MacOS GUI is logical...
Take some people who've never used computers before, and let *them* decide which is more usable between MacOS' GUI and GIMP's...
gimp is slow and not wery userfrindly.
photoshop for windows have always been slow and its only userfrindly for people used to a mac.
psp is getting bigger, slower and less userfrindly with each release.
so is there any other good alternatives out there ?
its an ok product, but inferior to available commercial apps. The only exception I can think of is the Firefox browser.
Can you provide any evidence? Or is this just on your say so?
I agree that there are problems with the GIMP. The 'endless window' interfaces of dia, sodipodi, and the gimp will probably never catch on, for good reasons. Plus there are the other problems elaborated on above. However, as I read the review I kept thinking how weird the results were. I can only attribute it to running the Mac version. I run gentoo so maybe I'm optimized more than some but I regularily work with 100MB files with no real problems (on a PIII 450). Files that photoshop for windows takes ages to handle. Furthermore, there are preview windows all over the place... I don't know if the mac version is missing them or what but I was surprised to see that mentioned. So, I think the review is fine and it wouldn't hurt the GIMP creators to read it with an open mind probably but it seems like the article is also saying that the Mac version is slow and may be missing features... though I'm not sure why that would be.
Submit a patch.
You've been listening to Marketing droids too long.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Which interface is more complex: Photoshop or AutoCAD? Are there other programs (not OSs) that are more complicated to operate than graphics-oriented ones? Girlfriend 2.0 doesn't count.
The arguments here seem to me to be outstandingly one sided. I wonder how many of these people have even used the latest version of the Gimp? I worked professionally for a year and a half training people in the use of Photoshop, and I can say with confidence that its user interface is not that easy for novices. I don't think it would really be possible for any application, the Gimp included, with that many powerful and technical features. IMHO most people who complain about the UI probably only do so because it is not an exact Photoshop clone.
Most of the comments posted have also ignored some of the Gimp's strengths, such as its scripting language and plugins, which give Gimp many features that Photoshop does not offer. I can understand how a professional would have gripes with it, but I believe it to be an excellent software package, even if its UI is vastly different than Photoshop.
And write "Photoshop is immediately intuitive to the vast majority of computer users who sit down at it. The GIMP is NOT." 100 times.
The "subjective intuitivity" argument is a very valid response against people complaining "but it's not what I'm used to". But this is not what is happening here. The "subjective intuitivity" argument cannot be used as a shield to protect applications that-- rather than unfamiliar-- are simply poorly designed.
No, there is technically no such thing as a naturally intuitive interface. However, there is such a thing as a naturally unituitive interface. The Gimp is one. Just because some amount of learning is requisite in using an application like Photoshop (in that it requires a basic familiarity with the graphical computer interfaces popularized in the last 20 years) does not change the fact that the GIMP's UI blows goats.
Photoshop does wonders, but the UI is nothing to brag about.
Paint Shop Pro has an arguably cleaner, quicker interface. It does much of what PSCS does, minus a few critical features.
So as obtuse as Gimp's UI may be, PS is no model to compare by.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I've said this so many times and I think this is what linux developers need to do. After all, this is what microsoft has done, fight fire with fire I say.
;) ).
I don't know what the current legalities are concerning taking someone's ui and making it your own. But if that isn't an issue I saw copy it.
But then people will complain about innovation, instead of being a follower. Well, that's where the expand part comes in (not in the way microsoft does with trying to contaminate standards, but with actual new features.)
Heck, if the gimp team doesn't want to do this, I wish someone would fork it and do this (call it PSgimp
A little off topic, but dealing with ui's. I favour gtk2 apps for my uses. But I like to use hotkeys. Call it the windows way if you want but I've been conditioned that alt will highlight the file menu and get you going in the menus. (I use alt up arrow enter to close apps all the time.)
This doesn't work in gtk2. You need to actually hit alt-f. But ok no biggie, I'll continue. Once in the menu by pressing alt-f, other alt combinations have no effect. For example a common gtk2 editor like gedit, If I press alt-f, and then say alt-e for edit, it has no effect. Also normally to get out of the menu's and back in the work area, one would press alt to collapse the menu's, but since alt alone does nothing, I tried alt-f to get in the menu, and another alt-f to get out, but this does nothing. I actually have to click with the mouse on the work area to get out of the menus. I'm using gtk2.2 so forgive me if this has been fixed in 2.4 which isn't in deb sid yet.
Also going way off topic now, but gtk apps, while being fairly sippy once launched, take a bit to first launch. Using gedit as an example again, it literally takes about 3-4 seconds to first launch (on my p4 1.6). I'm in a icewm environment so maybe being in a gtk2 environement like gnome would help, but I'm wondering are there some gtk libs I can have that launch when I log in to help speed things up.
I think it would be really awesome if the Gimp someday became as good as Photoshop and then surpassed it. But what's probably more likely is Adobe making a Linux native version of Photoshop, and that's not very likely either.
In order for projects like the Gimp to do the less likely of the above two (that is, exceeding Photoshop in usability and quality), it would basically need to be re-engineered to do everything Photoshop can do and more, with much more flexibility. This will only happen if a lot of people and companies start contributing money to the project, so that top talent can be hired full time to carry this out. The same way that billions are being applied to Linux.
Free with scanners and cameras
$69 on sale
$99 MSRP
80% of Photoshop, 500% of GIMP, and only 20% of Photoshop's price.
Sure, it costs $99 more than GIMP, but if it takes you 3 minutes in Photoshop Elements vs 1 hour in GIMP, who is really being silly?
GPL Deconstructed
Isn't that sort of reaction kinda par for the "Mac user tries anything else" course?
You're a troll, but I'll bite. The author of the article is not just some Mac user, he's Joe Gillespie, an established pro in graphic design and typography. By "established", I mean for the past 20 years or so he's been doing this kind of thing. Link 1, link 2. Nothing a little trip to google won't clear up if you're looking for credentials.
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
That is true--I use the Windows version with two monitors and only toolbars can be moved. I'm told, however, that Photoshop 7 and later can be configured for true multiple-monitor support--whether that is true or not, I don't know.
..Who actually *pays* for Photoshop. In that sense it's just as free.
I'm glad that this subject is being discussed more and more in open source forums. This last year of exploring the Linux world has shown me that many creators in the open source world, with all their contempt for Microsoft and Windows-based products, don't understand its attraction for the general populace. They simply can't understand why people would pay for software when there's "free" stuff out that could do the same thing.
The "other Story" I mentioned is about the safari necessary to successfully configure CUPS. It's a great cautionary tale for all those who would create a software package they want to be well-liked and easily used.
A metaphor to help understand the frustration of neophytes just trying to get something done with their computer: "I'm sorry, but you don't get to drive your car to the store until you demonstrate that you can rebuild the transmission - with no manual."
To a politician, one email equals one voter.
I am not surprised to hear Archei has not provided any support for MacGimp. I think they are rather slimy company who takes advantage of open source software like OpenOSX. I happened to know the brother of the guy who runs Archei, and let me tell you, and based upon his business model, I can believe Archei's business model being as bad as his brother's.
I just got my latest eWeek mag and it had an enterprise case study for upgrading from MS Office 97/2000 to OpenOffice.org vs. upgrading to MS Office 2003. OOo held its own with most users.
OSS isn't always harder to use than commercial software. The Gimp has ALWAYS had its UI as a major complaint. KDE isn't harder to use than Explorer. Kopete isn't harder to use than ICQ. VNC isn't harder to use than PCAnywhere.
The Gimp is damn hard to learn and use.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
I am not familiar with MSWindows, but can't you have single windows span multiple monitors? I.E., what is to stop you from taking Photoshop's single big MDI window and expanding it to the right until it more or less fills both monitors? That would be clumsy, but hey, I consider MDI inherently clumsy anyway.
Did anyone catch the part where the reviewer said it's not worth the money to get the Gimp at $30 or $50? I doubt he/she would think it's worth the price at free, either.
The bar chart at the end should be a wake-up call to developers; the reviewer rates the 'features' at 80%, yet the 'value' is 10% and the 'must-have factor' at 1%. It doesn't matter how many features you've crammed in, if you hide it in a confusing interface and the overall product takes up more time than saves, it's just not worth bothering with.
My impression of *NIX type OS's has been that if you ask it to point a gun at you and pull the trigger, it'll do so without a second thought (cough)rm -r *(cough). He seems to have confused the "imaginary" file system that is his OS X folders, with the actual file system underneath. Funny how people see the system they're accustomed to as being "real" even after it has had reality abstracted away to another system underneath it.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Some anecdotal evidence. I persuaded my g/f, a graphic artist to try out the gimp on her projects for one week and I'd buy her an expensive dinner. 2 days into it I caught her using Photoshop and she confessed the Gimp UI was "just awful" and complained the gimp was "twice as slow on some things" In the end I got yelled at for putting some "crappy" program on her computer. She likes open office and firefox though so it's a start.
This P.I.G. will walk on the water, This P.I.G. will walk on the sea, This P.I.G. will walk whereever he wants.
for graphics.
If you don't mind me asking, what exactly was the point that the parent post made that he is being moderated up for? I honestly don't see what he's trying to say. It looks like someone said something less than flattering about UNIX so he responded with the slashdot equivilent of "oh, no, YOUR mother sucks". I assume I'm just missing something though.
Best disillusionment ever.
No, that is not the point. You know what I do if I want to install gimp?
apt-get install gimp
That's it. That covers installation and download. I don't need to start some nonstandard installer program or reboot my machine like on Windows (I guess on MacOS I would have to drag and drop something, as that seems to be the way Apple likes to do everything). If that's not "ready to roll" I don't know what that is.
Open source developers primarily support the platforms they work with -- mainly Linux and FreeBSD. If you use a proprietary platform like MacOS then don't whine that there are no ready-made binaries for whatever you want to do.
The point of open source (or free software) is freedom - even if you never touch the source code, you know that no single company has control over what you can or cannot do, can decide to suddenly remove certain features or add certain requirements -- if that happens, and the majority of the community doesn't agree, then the program will be forked, i.e. someone will create THE BLIMP, the truly free alternative to THE GIMP. This is what just happened with X-Window, and it could never happen if a single company had control over the source code. If you don't care about freedom, don't use open source software.
Opening MacGimp for the first time was like stepping out onto the surface of an alien planet
That's because that is exactly what you are doing. MacOS is not Linux, it has its own proprietary desktop. If you take software that was developed under completely different conditions - one key condition being that the programmer doesn't know and doesn't need to know what underlying desktop the user works with (there's that pesky freedom again) - and you thrust this software into a proprietary environment where these choices do not exist, then yes, that's like stepping on an alien planet.
Most of the complaints of the author are the result of two things:
The few complaints that are valid (chaotic menu structure, lack of previews) can only be addressed through contributing money, code, or detailed ideas. Whining about open source software is like complaining about the quality of a Wikipedia article.
So: Mac user rambles about obscure GIMP port to MacOS not being like other MacOS applications. Nothing to see here - move along.
"From the review, "UNIX has this wonderful habit of trying to protect users from their own stupidity without recognising its own."" SECURITY! SECURITY! HELLO!! Simply stated: you are not used to an OS with some level of internal security. This does not constitute a valid reason to bash that OS. Please do not criticize things you do not even pretend to understand.
In the long run, there is no question, what will prevail. Photoshop is 14 years old, the gimp 7 years. Photoshop 2 was already a good project and I preferred photoshop 3 for many years since it was much faster then the photoshop 4/5 hogs under the old Mac OS. Having seen Adobe pulling Premiere from the Mac platform, I would not even bet on whether Photoshop will exist on the Mac in 10 years. The sudden death of closed source projects makes me nervous. The sudden disappearance of applications like Adobe dimension or Canoma is something which should make you think. I have more faith in open source projects. The gimp steadily improves while photoshop essentially stagnated.
Yes, the Gimp has a different user interface, but this is a minor issue. What is important for me is that the application is stable, also with memory intensive tasks, that it starts up fast and I'm done quickly also with working on hundreds of files at once "gimp *.jpg" My experience is that the gimp on linux starts a multiple times faster then photoshop or the macromedia fireworks on a mac with a similar CPU. The slower Gimp OSX performance might be related to the fact that X applications still run way too slow on the Mac. But this is steadily improving.
First of all, the main problem is that you are running on a mac. Seriously, macs rock, I'm on one now, but they only run "big" X11 apps so well. First of all, running under X11 makes it slower than running natively under linux. Run it under linux and see what you think. The toolbars issue... well, that's a Linux/Windows thing, Mac users just aren't used to having menus show up in application windows. That's a reflection of what you're used to, not the fault of the app.
Having to click on buttons several times to active is also a symptom of running under X11. I have GIMP2 on my powerbook and it's *horrible* to work with because of the way that focus works in a mac so each time you click from window to window in the gimp you have to click once to give the window focus, and then again to activate the menu/tool/etc.
Tools probably aren't grouped in the best way, but they are grouped with reasonably. The selection tools, manipulation tools (rotate, scale, etc), fill tools, and drawing tools. Again, they aren't perfect, but they are definately not "thrown down".
The open dialoge is standard GTK and if you were running in GNOME under linux, would look the same as the rest of your desktop. It doesn't look like your standard open dialoge because it's GTK, not aqua!
Some of the performance issues again are no doubt due to the emulation, again, same with the font handling. Try it on a real linux computer.
Also, GIMP isn't trying to be photoshop, I don't think, it's the poor man's photoshop. Hopefully now that 2.0 is out the devs will be able to concentrate on polishing the UI, adding in some of the niceness that is in elements, etc.
If you don't like it, don't use it. Why do we have to have endless whiny posts about how much the Gimp sucks day after day after day? For me, the GIMP does everything I want well enough that I don't bother with photoshop. A few Unix-head OS X users I know have also started using the GIMP rather than shelling out for PS. If it works for you, great, if not, STFU already, we get it.
Here's a thought - I've heard complaints for a long time about the GIMP's interface. What about creating two operational modes for the Gimp - one where it does what it does now and one where it mimics the behavior of the Photoshop interface, down to tool locations and such?
Would this be legal? If so, perhaps it would help Photoshop users getting used to the Gimp. E.g. one of the benefits of OpenOffice is that it in many ways behavies similarly to MSOffice, and allows a shorter learning curve for switchers. It wouldn't address a lot of other valid points (lack of preview for most things, for example) but it would be a start. Sort of an XPDE for photo editors.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
I've never heard of this before.
PS. I did follow the link. I still don't understand.
testing out my trending skills
>s/he will be endlessly praised by the rest of the OSS community...
No, s/he will be eternally flamed for copying the interface! "Can't these F/OSS project do anything but copy commercial solutions?" is how it will go.
And oh, if the copy isn't perfect, a similar set of people will complain about the differences.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
"Moron" you're responding to:
'Open source' means that the source code is available at no cost to anybody that wants to download it, use it, modify it, use it to fill empty hard drives - whatever.
Eric S. Raymond's Jargon File:
"Open Source"... describe[s] software distributed in source under licenses guaranteeing anybody rights to freely use, modify, and redistribute, the code.
Can you please explain to me the difference between these two definitions?
Would you say Mr. Raymond is a "moron"? Okay, maybe you would, what about all those people who mirror the jargon file? Are they morons as well?
I thought it was just me. My friends use the GIMP and sing its praises. I used it, and I was horrified by the user interface. So much so, it survived approximately an hour on my machine.
Of course, I didn't feed this back, because I assumed it was just me being corrupted by the Evil UI Conventions from Redmond.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
All we ever hear from the fucking communist open source users is how much better open source is. Well fuck that bullshiat. The GIMP is just yet another massive failure by an overhyped, over cocksucking "community" that obviously is jealous of the success of companies like Adobe, Apple and Microsoft who employ professional programmers to do professional work. In summary, Linux sucks compared to all modern closed source OS's, OpenOffice sucks compared to all modern closed source office suites, and the "GIMP" is an astute name because it REALLY sucks in comparison to photoshop.
Gimp sucks. Sure, you can make good looking graphics, but it takes twice as long to do, and the learning curve is far longer than even for photoshop. Thanks to crossover office, I can use both Photoshop and Paintshop Pro on Linux. I don't even know why I haven't uninstalled GIMP.
but that article author is entirely correct.
... well, with a fuck load of effort I got separate windows to dock into the main toolbar. In other ways it was an improvement over Gimp 1 though, with brush preview and all that. Shame that this is all stuff that DPaint had in the 80's.
I used to use Gimp an awful lot before I found Photoshop. Photoshop was bliss compared to the Gimp's UI. I then heard that Gimp 2 would fix a lot of the UI issues. However I was very disappointed when I tried Gimp 2.
I had been led to believe that this version would fix all the UI issues with the previous one.
The new text tool was so deficient that I was longing for the old text tool back. The UI was meant to be dockable
The Gimp can't be fixed. It needs a whole new front-end designed in collaboration with the users. A few prettier icons doesn't fix it.
One of the problems of Photoshop being a de facto standard is that most graphics professionals think that Photoshop way is the only/best way of doing somthing. For instance, the Layers paradigm is one solution to the problem of adjustment, composition and manipulation of images but it's not the only solution. Picture Windows Pro (PWP) (www.dl-c.com) uses a different paradigm (different images/windows for different layers/masks and then powerful blending and adjustment tools to combine these images) but is just as effective, and for most, a much more intuitive method of achieving results.
For photographers, Photoshop CS is simply too expensive/complex/overkill for the application. It's a great app for graphic artists, but how most people don't need the extra bells and whistles (in fact, they are a detriment to learning to use it).
One things that really irks me in GIMP is lack of 16bit/channel editing (even Photoshop does not have total support for this). FilmGimp (CinePaint I think it is called now) was a step in the right direction but crashed my machine on a regular basis (much more than is usual on a Windoze machine).
It doesn't look like the author was out to bash an open-source program just for kicks. :-)
Why not take such reviews as constructive criticism? It's actually good for programs like gimp that professionals or people who can influence the professionals have started to pay attention to free software.
So don't take it personally, guys. It's a good sign
One of the things apparently not made clear by this article is that OS X lacks a "native" GIMP port. It just happens that UNIX software runs natively on OS X, so Apple made an X11 server that uses the normal OS X GUI display to display things. It's kind of a lot like the X11 included with Cygwin, if you've ever used that.
However, it's just the normal linux/UNIX GIMP. It doesn't really have any conception of the fact that it's existing on a macintosh. This gets problematic becuase it goes ahead and acts like, well, it's in UNIX. This is a problem becuase some things, like the way the filesystem is laid out or the interface conventions, are different in OS X than vanilla UNIX. Many of the author's complaints stem from this problem.
There's essentially two factors deciding how good an OSS project will be:
1. The total users for that tool
2. The fraction of users developing that tool.
Everybody needs a basic kernel, word processor, spreadsheet, drawing program etc. Many users, low percentage develops but still many developers.
Geeky stuff like a regex parser may have few users, but relatively many developers.
A professional class graphics tool? Few people need it, the "professional class" at least. Few geeks are really great artists, and so relatively few developers. A low-low score = bad.
The only reason Photoshop comes up more often than other software is that users need the basic features, and well - if they're first going to pirate something, they go for the top product.
Yes, if I was doing graphics professionally, I would most likely get a professional tool, just as if I was doing movie editing, audio editing, 3d modeling or just about any other job.
If that is what you do for a living, simply do the math. How much time would it save you, or how much would it increase the quality and value of your work. If it's above sales price, buy.
I don't expect a bunch of programmers to sit down and make something for me that they don't need themselves - or well if they did, it would be because I'm paying them, which is indirectly what I do when I buy software. Obvious, isn't it?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Even if the GIMP were a 100% duplicate of Photoshop, we would still see all the idiotic bitching and moaning about it. The reality is, there are just as many photoshop "fanboys" on slashdot as there are OS X "fanboys". To them, nothing can match their chosen product unless it IS their chosen product.
Have you ever tried to create a drawing from scratch in the gimp? It's nearly impossible. And that's exactly what MSPaint is used for.
The gimp is NOT competing with mspaint, they're two completely different programs.
The gimp is a photo editor. Photoshop is a photo editor. Because both of these applications are used for the same (or at least very similar) tasks, they are competing with each other.
Whether or not the gimp can do what photoshop can do as well as it does it is what people are arguing. I've never used PS so I don't know if the gimp is nearly as good as it.
Corel Draw has something like 5-10 less features, half the price and similar interface. Then there's [the even cheaper] PaintShop Pro...
All Adobe has is the mindshare - to the point PhotoShop is a verb - so you just keep following the sheeple..
The main issue raised by the article is one that went to court ~3 years back - Macromedia and Adobe were suing each other over the interface. Great, so GIMP is different - which is exactly why it's counterproductive to anyone looking to make a transition, nevermind blatant disregard for usability standards.
Spare the "I'm not a UI designer/programmer" - hilarious/incredibly stupid coming from the development team of a graphic manipulation software. CUPS wizard and RMS, I could understand - this is pathetic.
No, I've used PS7 and PSCS on Windows machines using ATI, Matrox, and nVidia video cards, and on each I'm able to float the tool pallets out to the second monitor, independently of the main image window. I can't speak for versions of Photoshop before PS 7, but I wouldn't imagine them being that much different.
I'd say it is bashing, but don't give bashing a bad name. It's not just for kicks. The Gimp has too many followers who will swear it's better than photoshop. It _DESERVES_ a good, well-written and (for the most part) accurate bashing-the-fuck out of it.
The gimp is a great tool, but I'd certainly never use it for anything I use photoshop for.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
What? It's displaying menus inside of other windows just like every other operating system? That's just weird!
In all seriousness, Gimp does have issues with look and feel being inconsistent with whatever target OS it's built for. However, that's no excuse for not cleaning up the UI and making it consistent with the target OS, NOT whatever the windowing toolset requires.
Ironically, I remember an old version of Quicktime for windows where the opposite menu problem occured. Quicktime had a main window and then a weird little floating menu bar. Same kind of issue where cross platform UI's just don't look right.
Thats so messedup. Its like gates complaining that linux isn't secure. This reminds me of ye olde Word perfect users right around the time Word started to get popular. Yes, its not as good but for most people its good enough. So what if they have to use a goofy UI instead of another goofy UI. It has been gaining momentum, especially on platforms that aren't supported by Adobe.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Blech.
"Free" should NOT mean "this piece of shit sucks so badly that nobody in his right mind would pay for it". Is that what non-programmers who want to go Open Source on the desktop are supposed to be eagerly waiting for?
The GIMP project needs to get some actual graphics specialists involved with the project, by which I mean people who do this for a living.
It sucks that there is nothing in Open Source or even that will run on Linux that is comparable with Photoshop, PaintShop Pro, or Corel Draw for vector graphics.
Tech Public Policy stuff
"My experiences with my own work proves that The Gimp has a steep learning curve mostly due to its odd interface."
The "Gimp". Helloooo. The name should be a clue.
it's made by open source programers for open source users.
:) We want to be able to use ourcomputer quickly and efficiently. IE: I Hit record in photoshop, do some coomands hit stop and I can now use that macro for anything.
Honestly Graphic Designers are NOT programers. There visual people who like pretty things and easy to use GUI's - thats why Apple is a great platform for us
Theres no need for me to write a script or make sure I have some other dependency programs/file sinstalled. The Program works exactly like the other programs I use in the print industry Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign - they all use a similar UI.
Theres no reason for a graphic designer to touch linux ever. Maybe a windows machine, always an apple, but never linux.
The makers of GIMP are open source programmers who know nothing about graphic design in the professional world. Look at the prettines of their site compared to adobe's. The GIMP could have millions of dollars of money put into it and never be as good as phhotoshop, because they don't know or understand that CODERS ARE NOT GRAPHIC DESIGNERS and vice versa.
Ave Molech Setting
How about GnuArt?
Open Source software is brillliant... it's wonderful, and the beauty of collaborative invention is somethign profoundly important today in a world that seems to be committed to singular interest and personal competition as a natural form of self expression.
That said... OS projects involving the arts, need to get more artists to participate. More right brained thinking folks involved who will ultimately be using the applications. The kind of people who write code, typically want tools who's UI is consistent with the environments they use. These prople have tremendous mental muscles in those linear skills usually associated with coding and designing software. In applications whose ultimate user base will be artists, those considerations are second to having a tool which elegantly allows them to visualize, create, give birth to artistic expression. Powerful file handling features are great for somebody intending to perform batch operations on a slew of graphics files... however more photographers are looking for ways to get a clear sense of their work, and how to improve it. Most don't care what algorythms the programmer chose to operate on the graphic... they just want to see the operation quickly so they can compare this or that.
WIRED did a great article on OS last November... at OS as it's beginning to influence law and science. We need to have a fair representation of all human endeavors involved in this movement, so they can cross pollinate and create the kind of tools, resources, and infrastructure needed to grow a distinctly different kind of culture. One that is more interested in the common good, the general benefit to all, than the need to control or own one another. A shift from the an 18th century mentality to a truly third millinium mindset. I look forward to the evolution of OS... I see it as an underlying force for expressing what's best in being human.
Genda
So by your logic. Why are you EVEN LOOKING at the Gimp? Or for that matter, why aren't you using something else that's cheaper than PS, and better?
considering The Gimp is free it's a GREAT DEAL!
Read that again. Once more. Think about what you are saying.
Consider the degree of difficulty necessary to achieve making something that is free a "great deal."
If we in the open source community are to satifsfy ourselves with having given value by creating something that doesn't have negative utlility, then its time for us to stop the madness entirely.
We must do great work with our energies, or spend the time doing something else. Imagine that Steve Jobs or the corporate slavedriver of your choice were constantly riding you to make "art rather than crap." Imagine that your livelihood depended on making it great, and that you were worthless if it weren't. Otherwise, don't bother.
Anything less, and you are a poser wannabe.
Sorry, I don't buy it. Nothing we do is a "great deal" because its free. It should be a great deal at any reasonable price, and an astonishing piece of wonder because it is free (both in terms of price and liberty).
And for the record, that reviewer paid for the software, and found it wanting at any price. It had negative utility for her, and frankly, that sucks -- notwithstanding the wonder and excellence of the effort.
Its ok to say, "hey, that's not for you, sorry it didn't work out for you." But to say, "hey, its free, what did you expect?" Sorry, it just ain't the hacker ethic.
Yeah, the mac version does that but on the PC, it is an MDI inteface which does not work well on multiple monitors since you can only move the toolbars to a different monitor.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't UltraMon enable MDI applications to use multiple monitors? IIRC, it can spread one application across two monitors, which can almost be done manually. The only bad part is that it costs money, and I believe such functionality should be built in to the OS.
is the lack of 16-bit per channel support. Everything else is incidental. It's meant to be an image manipulation program. Text and vector stuff isn't really within its core remit; albeit it makes some effort in that direction there are far better tools for working with text/graphics combinations or with vector graphics.
But to be able to cope adequately with scanned images it really really needs 16-bit depth support. I know filmgimp supports it but the interface on that is really clunky (yes, even by GIMP standards!) and I've never managed to get xsane working happily with it. I don't care about ELQ's proposed spiffy scanner interfaces - xsane does everything I'll ever need, though I wish some of the ranges would revert to +/-400% rather than +/-100%. lcms colour management would be nice, but for home users (ie most users) it's not a can't-live-without feature. 16 bits-per-channel support is; I know there are plans to support it in future releases via libGEGL, but progress on this seems achingly slow. There seem to be plans to polish gimp-2.0 and release a 2.2 later in the year; I'd far rather that was shelved and the developers worked on libGEGL as the basis of a new GIMP core.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
ISTM that Gimp and Photoshop *aren't* really the same product.
(Caveat: I don't own a copy of Photoshop, and I'm not a graphics pro. As such, my opinions on Photoshop are unqualified; and likely to remain that way, as I don't have the money to spend on Photoshop or the time to make such an expenditure worthwhile.)
Gimp *is* currently limited on colourspaces; but, AFAIAA, that's a combination of a) a volunteer project that hasn't had the time to do it yet and b) the need to tread very carefully around heavily-protected IP. Remember Dmitry Sklyarov?
(f'rex; Pantone; proprietory; and probably owns a fair number of patents on similar ways of doing things.)
As such, I'm guessing that the Gimp isn't going to take the world of print media by storm any time soon.
Where I think Gimp does score is scripting. ICBW here, and the last Photoshop I touched was v4, but does Photoshop yet have anything as powerful as script-fu - that is open to the average end user? Does it plug into real, powerful, flexible, general-purpose scripting languages?
For example; cooltext.com has been running now for over five years. What it does isn't exactly in-depth; but think about it - a web-site that automates one of the commonest noddy-tasks that novice users want - for free.
If you have a graphics pro, they will probably go for Photoshop. They've got the money to burn.
If you don't have the money, you have the choice of Gimp, something like PSP - or sitting around whining that you don't have Photoshop.
For 95% of RGB-space photo-manipulation and general pixel-wrangling, the Gimp will serve you just as well as Photoshop.
To talk of the Gimp as a 'Photoshop-killer' is half-cocked; not least because half the 'battle' lies not in features, but in overcoming peoples' conditioned responses; the automatic 'use Photoshop for manipulation' reaction.
If you want to try building that killer feature, then fine. If not; well, it's not as if you can *only* be creative with Photoshop; art managed perfectly well without it!
IME, I didn't find the Gimp interface any more counter-intuitive than any other. I didn't start out assuming it was going to be Photoshop, and my first instinct was to RTFM. I'm no great shakes with Gimp, but I can do the things I need to do quickly, effectively, and with a minimal amount of fuss.
I simply don't need Photoshop, any more than a street busker needs a genuine Stradavarius.
Gideon.
Unfortunately, a lot of that software doesn't run under Linux, making Linux less useful to me.
Another interesting point, though: many of the programs I prefer to GIMP are shareware programs that were written by individuals or by very small development teams, and those programs don't seem to have some of the UI usability issues that I see in GIMP.
Maybe GIMP needs to fork into specialized versions with smaller development teams? As it is, it's a huge monolithic program which seems very awkward to use compared to some of its competitors...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
That depends on your graphics card. I have a Matrox Parhelia with two monitors and I can use Photoshop on both. I can expand a window to one monitor of both of them. I use Photoshop on both windows and it works well for me. Same thing with Premiere, it looks great on two monitors with my tools and timeline on one and my edit windows on the other.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
I use GIMP 2 a lot, and only have 3 windows open! Why do people seem to think that you need to have many windows? I use one dock with a series of tabs - works great.
My Photoshop experience is limited, and I found that when I went to use it in work I was very lost - I couldn't do half the things I could in GIMP. What I'm trying to say is that the UI is something you get used to, and I know GIMP.
Gimp 1 was a no-go for me, it wasn't easy to look at not to mention use, however GIMP 2 has provided a very useful and powerful tool for the OSS community.
GIMP does all I need it to do, and I enjoy using it, I do however use it in it's native setting of GNOME.
It may not be photoshop (Though I can get more out of it that PS) but for me the UI is great and the features are just fine.
Surely if it does all I need it to do and I like using it why pay a shit load for something else.
...my 2p worth.
You don't get it. "If you don't like it, don't use it" is such a horrible defense, and yet it is spouted often enough to be sickening.
For the most part, we aren't using it. This doesnt change that it is horrible.
We would love for it not to suck. That would be great.
The Gimp's UI shows a blatant disregard for all input from those who have been complaining for years. What incentive is there to help out by donating to a project which obviously doesnt consider making a project which is the least bit usable a high priority?
At least you didnt say "If you dont like it, change it yourself!" which I hear far too much.
Nobody expects you to get off your ass and do something about it, but if I sit down to eat and you serve me crap on a plate, expect some type of complaint before I leave. Especially when you say "This is free dinner 2.0! I know you hated it before but this is better!"
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Unless I misunderstood you comment, that's also true of PS and virtually all Mac apps going back to at least System 7 (and probably before). In fact that behaviour was long ago codified in Apple's published Human Interface Guidelines (haven't read the OSX HIG, but I did read the HIG volume of Inside Macintosh). Just the same, after working with Gimp on linux for about 6 months (just for a photography hobby and a few non-profit flyers), I ended up buying a used Mac and PS 7 about a year and a half ago - money well spent IMO.
I've always said that GIMP is still somewhere near Photoshop 4.0 in terms of capability (and holding steady). Of course, I'm probably saying that because it's hard to dig out the new features. Its interface is just out there. I've been using it for years, so I'm somewhat used to it. What the GIMP needs is a redesign so that non-GIMP developers can rearrange the UI.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Hey look everybody, the RIAA found Slashdot and decided to post anonymously! YAY!
If only because they say that Photoshop Elements has a different interface than Photoshop. Other than missing a few features (16-bit channel support, CMYK output, Healing Brush), the thing is IDENTICAL.
Troll/FlameBait, whatever - I don't have any mod points today (or ever, it seems).
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
I'm not really up on the Gimps' licensing status, but assuming it's OSS, why is it that one of the complainers doesn't just build the Gimp a new GUI?
If the source is all OSS, wouldn't it just be a matter of someone just putting their skills to work, and creating a new GUI in which to house the Gimps functionality?
I'm not a Gimp user myself (I've used it, but my opinion of the GUI is the same as a lot of others: Too many open windows and right click menus), but I don't see any reason that the existing functionality of the Gimp couldn't be tied a new interface rather easily (be it a Photoshop clone, or some new and unique look).
Obviously I'm over-simplifying this a bit, but the average GUI is simply a bunch of controls which tell the backend functions what to do. How hard could something like this be if someone put their mind to it?
The Gimp is free in terms of money. It is most certainly not free in terms of things like time spent configuring and downloading it, or wasted time spent trying to get used to its interface before realizing it just can't be done. The article we are responding to notes the Gimp to be monetarily free and then gives it a "value for money" score of 10%. I would be inclined to agree.
I made a concerted effort to start using the Gimp, beginning with the assumption that anything about the interface that didn't feel right to me was merely becuase I wasn't used to it and that once I got used to its idiom I would be as efficient with it as I would be with Photoshop. This turned out not to be the case.
What I would consider an acceptably designed tool is that once you are familiar with it, it just melts away into a comfortable sort of overlay where what you find yourself thinking of is what you're doing, not thinking about how to make the tool do what you want. It turns out that the Gimp interface, with its tools which do not work in logical or naturally synergistic ways and its interface consisting entirely of totally unrelated features scattered over a huge mess of heirarchal menus that seem to have the features sorted into them in random order, was just something I cannot get into a comfortable state with, no matter how much time I spent fighting with it. In fact, it was bad enough I couldn't actually manage to complete a single attempt at an image, no matter how small, to my satisfaction. The interface just got in the way too much. I would posit that this is the Gimp's fault, not mine.
Now, given, this was Gimp 1. The new Gimp that came out a couple weeks ago, I haven't used. But to be firmly honest I see no reason why I should. These people have given me no reason to believe they can design a useable interface. Installing this software would be a mere matter of typing "sudo emerge gimp" into my Gentoo box at home before I go to bed and letting it grind for the next day and a half. However, it would require a large investment of time in terms of learning, testing and playing with the Gimp2 interface, and I simply lack any reason to believe that there will be any sort of worthwhile payoff for this cost of time. I would prefer to continue with my current situation of using imagemagick to convert formats and only being able to edit images while in a computer lab on campus. To be honest, while I am somewhat embarrased to be saying this, if I DO eventually try out Gimp2, it will be for the sole reason that once I do so I will be able to respond to Slashdot discussions about it like this one in an informed manner. The software program itself simply does not offer anything I am interested in using.
If they would be honest A LOT of home users SHOULD use the GIMP instead of using an illegal version of Photoshop.
I disagree. There are other free and inexpensive alternatives to the Gimp that perform their jobs far better. One that comes to mind is GraphicConverter, a very cheap shareware graphics app for OS X that I used for years (though I haven't used it much since the OS X switch) that while by no means professional is totally acceptable for a large variety of applications. It doesn't have as many OH SUPER LEET TEXT EFFECTS as the Gimp does but I or anyone else could sit down, immediately understand how to do what they want, and perform tasks of relative complexity without being stymied by the interface. The same is not true of the GIMP. I am not familiar with windows freeware but I would imagine a similar situation exists there.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I have the full up Photoshop 7 and Photoshop Elements II so have not tried book, but friends who have swear by it.
"The Hidden Power of Photoshop Elements 2"
by Richard Lynch
Tells you how to add plug-ins to Photoshop Elements II that bring it nearly to the capability of Photoshop 7.
There are aslo a sh*t load of Photoshop plug ins online for free that are supposed to be useable in Elements II
The big backers of Linux (IBM, Red Hat, Novell) should fork over a bit of money to either pay Adobe for a Linux port or license the code and port it themselves.
Or someone just has negociate with Adobe the amount of money it'd take to port Photoshop to linux and then set up a www.Donate4PS-Linux.org website where people can make donations.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
I mean, as professionnal users are getting more and more savvy about things like HDR, 16 bit unsigned int is ridiculous. And if the poster meant 16 bit half floats, no processor handles these natively and they're way too slow. Since we're only dealing here with single frames and not video, why not do 32 bit floats all the way. Sure you end up using more memory, but this way you can deal with High Dynamic Range images. Also, filters become a lot simpler to write and you don't have to worry about funky int arithmetics on pixels. It may not be as fast as a purely integer solution, but properly written code that uses SSE2 or whatever SIMD instruction set your processor handles will get you as much speed as you need. Anyway, profesionnals are expecting more and more quality from their filters, and are willing to make compromises on speed.
Come on.
Most open source apps?
I agree with the assertion that GIMP has got absolutely squat on Photoshop. Honestly. That's why I see no problem in dropping the big bucks on PS. But MOST open source apps being the same? Highly doubtful.
OpenOffice handles legacy Word documents better than the "latest and greatest" from Microsoft. Heck, I've had compatibility problems between the equivalent versions of Word for Windows and Word for Mac that have been resolved just by opening the document up in OO.
Bash rocks cmd's socks off. If geeks do one thing exceptionally well, it's command-line tools.
Ogle vs. Any DVD player for Windows: Killer. Just learn your bloody keyboard mappings already (not that hard to find) and it's exactly the same as any given DVD player except no lock-outs, so you can skip all the bullshit previews the companies decide to force feed you with (also, you've read the FBI Warnings before, and if you haven't, you're not about to start now. Suffice it to say you saw the FBI warning, can you please skip it already?)
Like I said, GIMP definately has serious disadvantages over Photoshop. But a lot of the other tools that are out there are not as lacking. 99% of the stuff I use that's open-source is in most cases as good as and in many cases better than its proprietary counterpart. The one thing people seem to forget is that in the geek world aesthetics take a back seat to functionality. I don't mind learning curves myself so I find myself able to do a lot more with a fully open source system over a system loaded with its proprietary counterparts.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Its not like the GIMP Developers *don't want* to make a usable app, its that nobody who is bitterly complaining about how unusable the GIMP is seems to have the ability to produce a useful specification for how it *should* work.
By that I don't mean 'Rip off everything about Photoshop's UI and make the GIMP a lawsuit target', but rather start a project which provides a detailed set of interface conventions, specifications and mockups that will provide an easy way for the existing GIMP team, or a new team to put an artist-friendly face on the GIMP, and to serve as a guideline and UI spec for other atrist-friendly Open Source tools to conform to.
If the name should be changed, then suggest a new name as part of the project , instead of just saying 'The GIMP's name sucks, you should use something else'
Personally, I find GIMP 2.x quite usable, but Open Source is not about providing you a product, its about you participating in making a product.
If you don't realise that, or can't understand that, then i feel sorry for you, but you're whining is worthlesss if you can't even frame your complaints in a way that might get noticed by the GIMP developers (e.g. on the gimp-users mailing list)
Please shut up and go use photoshop.
If you don't want to help, then you really are better off paying for, or stealing a commercial product.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
For most users, Gimp 2.0 is good enough. 1.2 was horrid. If you're doing professional work, it depends. Simple web graphics, you can use Gimp. Complex 400 layer images with glass effects and all kinds of gamma corrections and transparencies? Hey, I've seen some people do it, but you might want to go invest the (was it $300 or $600?) cash in photoshop.
Once you learn to use gimp, it's powerful. It's damn good. It's not like it's got all the big, flashy features of PS though. Hey, here's an idea: stop whining about what gimp doesn't have, and hit the gnome bugzilla at http://bugs.gnome.org/ and ask for these things. 24 bit color per channel, 24 bit alpha channels (opacity), better image editing structure (tree based image editing instead of layer based), vector layers, take a look around and ask for what's not bugged on the list. If something DOES have a bug for it, reply to the bug to show that it's a popularly desired feature.
Don't go slamming OSS because it doesn't have everything you want, or doesn't blast the $500 alternatives. You have to make it better. Not by coding, as some of these big-headed programmers would like to force you to believe; but by demanding the features you need. Someone will code it if they actually care about the project.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
OK, probably a dumb question. I'm no developer. But why hasn't anyone taken the source code for Gimp, and made something with a really smooth, intuitive UI? Or taken the code over and made it a standard Cocoa app?
I'm sure the author intended it as a compliment (12 year olds get "kinda funny" when it comes to older women), but what a depressing observation of the status quo of geek girls.
If Eugenia's the pinnacle of what geekdom has to offer it's males, I'm really surprised that I don't run into more gay IT guys.
Her looks SO don't make up for her personality...
What I use my [pirated] copy of Photoshop for is nothing more than very, very simple cropping, correcting the rotation of, and resizing images. I usually then save in a different format. Occationally I will do some simple color correction, and very occationally I will need to take some simple graphic or text and resize and position it on top of some other image.
These seem like very simple needs to me. They do not seem like it would be possible to create a free software program which screws up being suitible for these simple tasks. Yet somehow, the Gimp manages it.
UltraMon only automates what you can do manually -- drag the window corners across both monitors.
As much as people rant and rave about Photoshop, I've never been able to get to grips with it. For me it is one of the most unintuitive programs ever.
You can complain about non-compliance regarding interface standards (which interface standards do we judge a multiplatform program by anyway?) and speed, but I'll say this:
If I had to get a job done that I hadn't tried before, I'm pretty damn sure I'd have the job done in the GiMP or another package before I'd even be off the ground in Photoshop.
Go ahead and mod me down if you will, but it's the plain and honest truth.
Actually I prefer the good ol' TV Paint and Photogenics any day (the latter is available for a multitude of platforms too by the way).
Nobody has to "justify" the gimp's interface. All you ever do is bash OSS and linux, get a life, what idiot would spend so much time, writing hundreds of posts on slashdot just to do such a thing?
"Optical kerning is, as I understand it, a new auto-kerning algorithm in InDesign 3. "
How much do you want to bet that it's got patents out the wazzoo? That's partially why CMYK was a long time coming. Anyone else that can't get Adobe to license it to them, or has the money to "clean room" will be "not good enough", and the subject of "critical reviews" on "/.". Welcome to the Brave New World.
That they do NOT change the name until such time as it is no longer a perfectly apt description of the product.
I don't know anything about graphic work/photo editing, but a friend of mine works for a graphic company that has produced many images (for packaging) for Kraft. According to him THE GIMP is being used by approx. 10% of their shop. Considering KRAFT is the #2 food retailer, I find it hard to beLIEve that THE GIMP is as bad as people say!
Let me repeat that. The GIMP's goal is not to be a Photoshop killer. The GIMP is an affordable (free) image manipulation program, with which someone who is interested in graphic art can do some pretty nice stuff without shelling out $100+ for a decent art program.
This is like saying "Oooh look! My Ford Mustang beat your '85 Toyota Corolla! Wow! Your car sucks!!"
Sure, a toyota carolla sucks when you are racing. But if you are trying to get somewhere, it works perfectly fine.
>Right off the bat, this isn't an entirely fair comparison, because he's using a PORT. Ports are always a little wonky, aren't they?
Not always. Photoshop is also a port. It has ports on Windows, and even the OSX version is a port over the very old 68k API. So, what's your point now?
Also, the version of Gimp that guy used was COMMERCIAL, and IF that port was "bad", then it shouldn't have being sold in the first place.
> Who's going to buy it? Photography and graphic design types. Why? Because they ALWAYS throw huge amounts of money at stuff.
Wrong. They buy it because it DOES stuff they need, not because they want to "throw" money. The Gimp simply CAN'T do some stuff they need.
>Is it worth blowing a thousand bucks and locking yourself into Mac just to have prettier buttons and menus?
Haha! You really don't get it, do you? When we are talking about the "UI" we don't talk about nice buttons and colors, we talk about FREAKING USABILITY. Something that Gimp LACKS.
>why the hell does everyone get so hell-bent for leather about comparing every single open source project with an expensive proprietary alternative
Because people use software in order to do their jobs. The fact that something is open source or not, is IRRELEVANT for 99.9% of the people. What matters is how each tool can help the user to do his/her job. The rest political philologies don't matter.
See subject,
I have both Photoshop 8 or as it is called now CS and I also run the latest binary version of The Gimp under X11 on MacOS X 10.3.3.
Setting up Photoshop is a piece of cake but then getting the Gimp going was not brain surgery either. In either case, if you are going to be making money or doing a lot of work with digital images then Photoshop is the only way to go.
Photoshop has been around longer than any other graphic app of its kind so the tool set cannot be beat. While the Gimps tool set is very workable it is not even close to Photoshop in the Human Interface department. The other reason Photoshop is the hands down winner is the support of third party plug-ins making the program very extensible. The Gimp being open source should have Photoshop beat in this department but I know of no third party Gimp plug-ins. Even many shareware photo editors support Photoshop plug-ins. Until Gimp supports its own and someone starts writing them Gimp will be an also ran.
If you don't have a lot of cash and your needs are modest then the Gimp is a great program with a lot of power under the hood. If you are a power user then Photoshop is the only choice. I hope someone takes the Gimp to the next level, better tools, a better UI and plug-in support and people writing those plug-ins could make the Gimp a real contender. As it stands now compared to Photoshop the Gimp is aptly named.
I find it very interesting to read all these people explaining how the Gimp sucks and is counter-intuitive. I'll agree that the Gimp is not a direct competitor to Photoshop, which is a much more advanced package. I personally find it very good at what it does do, however. I used to work in tech support for non-technical people. After a reform in the way web publishing was done in that organisation, many of these needed to be able to do image editing. I divided these people into two groups: basic users and not-quite basic users. The basic users I fitted with Macromedia Fireworks which is great for semi-automated web optimization.
For the not-quite basic users I tried Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro (these were the two packages previously in use within the organization). Paint Shop Pro didn't cut it for various reasons, which left me with Photoshop.
It soon became apparent that people had some trouble learning the Photoshop interface, and of course they only used a tiny fraction of the available functions. Also, with large images (high resolution scans in the 100-200 MB range) Photoshop hogged memory, and with WinXP's crappy memory management (and with most machines having 256-512 MB of RAM) it was inhibitingly slow (Note that the only thing done to these images was cropping and massive down-scaling for web use).
I tried Gimp on a couple of users with very positive results. Around half of the users preferrred the Gimp interface, and it ran much better with large images (contrary to the experience depicted in the article).
Personally, I find the Gimp and Photoshop about equivalent for the types of things I do, but I am getting much more familiar with the Gimp (because freedom matters to me), so I prefer it.
I use the Gimp on Linux, where it runs perfectly, but I did notice some stability problems in Windows. It seems from the article that the Mac port is poorly adapted to the Mac environment and has serious performance issues. Does everyone here complaining about the Gimp run MacOS? If not, what exactly is it everyone finds so troublesome with the Gimp interface?
(Note: My professional Gimp usage was about a year ago, so we were using Gimp 1.2, which I still use, as the detachable menus in 1.3/2.0 don't play well with OpenBox)
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Mod PArent Up, it's this type of no nonsense talk that slashdot needs more of, instead of the useless Karma whoring most of the people in this story are doing.
Thanks for posting this -- I was about to try, but was having problems pinpointing everything I wanted to say. You seem to have nailed it almost exactly.
I was looking forward to seeing Gimp 2.0, which so many people were boasting about how the user interface had had a complete overhaul and now looked much better. When I finally saw it though, I hardly noticed anything. It was just the widgets that had changed, making things look a little shinier but with the exact same menu hierarchies and the exact same difficulties in finding the right ways to do what you actually wanted to do. The UI "overhaul" was a completely developer centric overhaul, changing the code and the surface look, but not changing the usability structure at all.
I don't do any serious photo editing, though I use Gimp mostly because it's the only serious option in open source that's free. It's nice to have something that's free, but one of the things that really irks me is that the interface is so feature-based rather than task based.
If you don't want to do anything too tricky, Gimp will probably let you do it. The problem is that it's so difficult to figure out how to do it, because all of it's features seem to've been just thrown into a relatively uncategorised pile that you have to dig through every time you want to do anything.
When there is categorisation, it's often related to the way that a feature has been coded rather zthan what it does. Otherwise, why on earth does the menu strcuture distinguish between the filters, script-fu and python-fu??? Personally I rarely even touch script-fu and python-fu because my first impression some time ago resulted in Gimp locking up.
I can't ask anything more from the existing developers because they're already doing what they want to do at no charge, and for that I appreciate. But it certainly wouldn't hurt Gimp if some UI-proficient people were called in to seriously look at the interface from a task-based perspective. It still won't compete with Photoshop, but it might actually be usable. Gimp needs it.
it is a mac "graphics" person who has an obvious disdain for "compiling" something, or even know why you might want to compile something instead of using a pre-built binary.
I run X, use gimp, albeit not for the same purposes, I am not sure who they are talking to, but I would not recommend gimp to anyone who had massive serious work to do with graphics.
One, linux guys mostly don't care much about graphics. (mostly.. there are a few).
Two, gimp is mostly for quick deals and unless you are a script-fu hacker and feel like writing your own plugins it is not for production house style graphics. You need to work with the tools others are using.
As a side note, photoshop is for "Print" and still is not fully set for "web". For web, fireworks is what basically all the pros are using and for good reason.
Using crossover you can run either fireworks or photoshop in X with no problems so you don't have to bother booting into windows.
If you feel like making a quick button, gimp is fine.
Take it for what it is, don't try to rate a program against something that it is not really in the same area as.. It would be like comparing netscape mail to outlook, they are just different animals.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Apparantly...YOU don't get it. That is a perfectly good defense.
I'll repeat it here. If you don't like it, don't use it.
You don't like it, you think it's horrible. But yet, it's obvious that others out there do like it. Are you saying they're all wrong that they shouldn't like it?
Who is forcing you to use this program? There are a TON of programs out there that I can't stand...but you know what, I don't complain about them BECAUSE I DON'T USE THEM! Sitting around sniping at something from the comfort of my home that I don't even use nor have any intention of using helps no one other than my ego.
People that crap on others for the sake of making themselves feel better are a sad lot.
Please, don't use it and STFU.
But this elitist drivel is just the type of crap I've come to expect from certain quarters after 5 years of avid browsing. The reason the article drives me nuts really comes down to cost. (FYI) The submission here pretty much sums up the article except to leave out all the sarcasm and jibing.
Sure, commercial users who are able to purchase $3,000 worth of hardware without bumping up the mortgage probably 'can't understand why anyone would want to go to so much effort for so little reward'. They probably do honestly think that at $99 Photoshop Elements is 'cheap, painless and produces high quality results'.
So who cares about the unwashed personal use throng?
The cost of obtaining a great quality Digital Camera has made all the difference over the last couple of years. It's one of those cases (like digital music) of people getting a chance to take a part of their real life and combine it with their interest in computers or email or the internet or even just a penchant for electronic wizardry, at a price and personal cost that really is cheap and effortless. My point here is that personal users do matter - more each day in fact.
Whilst I know I am not a GIMP zealot I have used the WIN32 off shoot (The GIMP windows version incidentally, doesn't have to be compiled in an end user sense it comes as an installer executable). As an end user however I am relatively motivated by the general ideas and beliefs of the open source commnuity and in that domain the GIMP is the anti-candle.
Then there is the issue of breaching the User License. For all you folks who don't taint your pure selves with the concerns of warez and all that - Adobe (for as long as I can remember) has always produced software that seems to be notoriously easy to crack. So I guess, sadly, that gives users such as myself another option, that no-one ever seems to acknowledge.
Hmm.. I guess no image editor war is ever going to start here (for the time being), right? Let's be honest - it's like comparing a foot massage with a ho down in the holiest of holies. Everyone knows that.
The article mentions the problem with the help system. (I vaguely remember discovering a fix at some point.. can anyone help?) In any case look no further than here for what I consider to be a remarkable effort, all things considered. It really sums up to me why I (but more importantly GIMP developers) go to all the effort for 'so little reward'. The author of the article says in respect of the MacGIMP that he thought he'd have a look. I guess then he thought he'd wipe his MacNIKEs on the hard and thankless labour of others. Have some respect fulla...
The answer is the same one that we see in the "Linux needs this to beat Microsoft (MONO?)" threads, except replace "Microsoft" with "Adobe". People who either can not, or will not do what's required, but will insist that others take the time to do so (Explain to me how this whole Open Source thing works. I put my money were?). Welcome to the world that popularity built. Are you certain you don't want to cut while the cuttings good? I hear that the Hurd, or even Darwin might be less crowded. And of course the new Amiga's dying so that means it's not going to be popular with the "Linux must win at all costs" crowd. Anyway if the interface is done using Glade files, then it's a bit easier. Or if it was just an API, that would make KDE intergration easier, and we know how the "Beat M...oops, Adobe, anyway we can" crowd loves KDE.
Thats easy. Get rid of the window clutter.
I whole-heartedly agree with people who complain about the pains of the gimp UI. Lately, I have been spending of the order of an hour a day with it while writing up my thesis, the topic of which incidentally is fairly close to image processing algorithms. In terms of the UI, photoshop is *far* better. I keep using gimp because I'm too lazy to boot my machine just for photoshop or to walk over to the winblows machine in the other room at the department. Regarding the functionality and algorithms supplied, gimp is fairly cutting-edge, but so is photoshop. In fact, it is acceptable in the image processing literature to compare improved algorithms with stock photoshop algorithms (the improvements are sometimes implemented as gimp plugins (: )
Swearing about a free software being better than is definitely risky, most likely dishonest barring a few notable exceptions like the mozilla project and so forth, and in the case of gimp, wrong.
Because the vast majority of computer users prefer to run their mouths instead of helping to fix problems, and because nobody develops for the Mac.
Well, obviously some people develop for the Mac, but because Cocoa is unsupported on any other platform, that most of the professional Mac developers' core skills are in Carbon (an API with no future) and that the open source philosophy has attracted most of those who are left (i.e. those who are passionate enough to work for free) to Linux-focussed development, means that Mac-using developers who are actually working on Mac-oriented projects are few and far between, and generally not interested in porting software that doesn't already use (the admittedly very nice) Objective-C language, Cocoa API and tools, and nobody who doesnt already have a Mac is able to develop native applications for the Mac, even if they wanted to.
There are of course a few other options (Mac-native Qt for example, GNUStep) but neither of these is a good solution, and the general problem is that mac users are just that - users, and even the geeks who think MacOS X is great (like me) tend to develop for Linux, because of the vibrant community, which Apple actually used to have but has long since lost.
Apple thus far has been doing a really good job at providing the tools, the technology and the open attitude to bring that community back, but I don't see it today.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
So let me get this straight:
Some guy whos used to using one piece of software to do graphics stuff tries out another one and is astounded that it isn't *exactly* the same?
Perhaps if I had to work exclusively in CMYK I might consider using PS once in a while but I just have no need for it. And text renders just fine if you install it properly.
As a long-time GIMP user (after giving up on Photoshop), I'm tempted to find a windows box somewhere and write a "Photoshop from the eyes of a GIMP user" article. Let's see how 'intuitive' PS really is.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Easier still, send out a public call for suggestions. A UI bugzilla..
But I do use finale and I've spent a lot on it over the years, but I'm a composer and I need the program, not an open source notation program.
I guess my point is, shut up and use what works. the GIMP will come along eventually, so will open source music notation programs, so will my website :-)
before I get persuaded to use Gimp again for my photography projects, I would need --in addition to the author's peeves -- full 16-bit per channel support, high-quality scanning/printing drivers with integrated GUI (a'la SilverFast), and a 'crop and rotate' feature (as seen in PS/PSE)
Sounds like you want to check out CinePaint (the project formerly known as film gimp).
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
You mean I'm not the only person in the world who thinks The GIMP has a horrible UI?
I am a programmer and not a graphics guy, with that being said, there is nothing that Photoshop has for non-professional graphics work that is not in the gimp. Oh, and the gimp is considerably less money. Some people like Photoshops UI and some like gimps. I personally like the gimp's with one window and multiple tabs for all the dialogs vs. Photoshops UI. Some people will feel the opposite.
A quick summary of this whole thread:
The gimp sucks, photoshop is better
Photoshop sucks gimp is better
Photoshop has feature X and the gimp does not
Photoship cost X hundreds of dollars, gimp is free
and so on and so on
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
original comment: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=80387&cid=7086 133
I never realized before, the GIMP slashdot icon is animated. Is it the only animated category icon, or are there more?
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
This was not about just doing some graphics stuff. It was from an artist point of view. Sure you can make some bevel button in GIMP without a problem, but as an artist tool it doesn't cut it.
If you don't like the way Gimp is, but you don't want to pay for Photoshop; help out the gimp project. Simply say "the UI sucks", "it's slow", etc does absolutely nothing to help the situation. If it bothers you so much, write a patch, make a plan for a new UI layout, talk with the developers, submit a bug report, make a feature request, do something productive!
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
We know about Cinepaint, thank you very much.
Thing is, Cinepaint is a VERY specialized application for movies, it is NOT an image editor that photographers/image artists need.
when people say they don't want to switch to Linux, or it does not get preinstalled on machines?
Your attitude that everyone must be a programmer is what will continue to doom OSS to second class status for end users.
Consumers consume. That is what they do. Almost no users of computers care about the things you care about.
Someone mod this up, please. That is the whole point (and strength) of Open Source. Anyone who thinks they can do better is welcome to modify it any way they like. You don't need permission from whomever is currently directing development.
Look at the output quality. The lack of "Professional" quality drawing and text tools is the reason I always go back to Aura, Photoshop, etc.
A UI can be learned if the results are worth it.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
I know that in enlightenment there are window "groups", so you can add the image you are working on to a an existing group of other image windows, and other window managers also have ways of keeping windows that are open grouped together. Combine that with, for instance, in enlightenment - alt-shift held down plus an arrow key (up,down,left,right) and you have keyboard access to up to 8x8 virtual desktops, ctrl-alt held down plus right arrow or left arrow gives you access to up to 32 "multiple desktops", within each of which there are, as I previously mentioned, up to 8x8 (64) virtual desktops. That's a total of 2048 desktop areas the size of your monitor, all accessible "out of the box" from your keyboard, as if that weren't enough space. Windows and Apple are decidedly claustrophobic.
That being said, I believe that in order to really be productive with your graphics work, you need to be able to be proficient at BOTH. There are things that Photoshop can do that Gimp can not, there are things that Gimp can do that Photoshop can not.
And I thought that there was a way that you could fire up Linux on your Mac and then fire up OS X within Linux, so you could have a full Linux install with Linux Gimp, which is the best version, and then fire up OS X and use the multitude of art-and-graphics related programs on OS X, which are one of the things that OS X is known for.
I don't think that you can get the most out of your graphics abilities and skills without having access to both the OS X tools (perhaps SGI as well), and Linux tools like the Gimp and the productivity improvements of having a good window manager.
There is no doubt that OS X is an important thing to have if you do graphics. Gimp can help fill out your skills, but you really need Linux or some type of BSD and a good window manager to really use it effectively. If that means two computers and a KVM or something...
In Other News: Photoshop from the Eyes of a Gimp User
"Many in the Windows community are raving about Photoshop, however pros who have actually used Gimp think differently: This Linux professional designer goes through the steps of getting Photoshop up and running on his Linux box, only to get baffled by the chaotic interface in general and its non-standard UI compared to other Linux apps, its slowness to open large files and to apply filters, the unintuitive tools that accompany it and its very visible bad quality of text and lines/shapes. That designer even bought a 'supported' version of Linux Photoshop by an Adobe company but he never heard back for his support requests. I think that's one of the best-written articles I've ever read about the reality of most proprietary software profit-driven projects vs their equivelant professional/free software ones..."
Coming Up Next: Linux from the Eyes of a Windows User: "I got baffled by the chaotic interface in general and its non-standard UI," said Windows user asked about Linux. Film at 11.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
It seems that, while we're extolling the virtues of open source, we're missing one of its main virtues: open code. If we don't like the GIMP interface why are we relying solely on the GIMP team to change it? Why don't we form a team and fork a project specifically to redesign the UI to a more professional standard? I mean, why gripe about it like there is just no solution outside of the main GIMP team?
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
A group of Free Software/OSS advocates have choosen to put together a CD of free software for Windows. One of the things that took me by surprise was that they currently prefer GIMP 1.x over GIMP 2.0 for Windows.
Some of the things CinePaint has that the GIMP lacks:
Also, CMYK support is coming soon. BTW, I'm not a pro user of Photoshop, the GIMP, or CinePaint. I learned about CinePaint from these Slashdot stories:
All this article tells us is that the author is too inflexible to make an informed or useful comment. If this were to be taken seriously, all the people who have been coming up with great ideas for desktop usabilility should just hang up their keyboards and let Redmond dictate what we are supposed to like.
I'm somewhat bored of hearing about users complaining about an application's interface not being like a competitor's. Really, can't you guys accept that there are differences and that from the moment you accept them, you will actually be able to enjoy the application? Also, if you don't like the interface, why don't you contribute and improve it? If the antialiasing isn't perfect, why don't you try to fix it? Free software is not all about free beer, and I think that's a serious problem it's facing toward users (especially artistic ones). At some point, you need to understand that there is no money-hungry company behind the application and it's most likely written by programmers for their own needs. If you have specific needs, just make them clear and stop complaining. You might need to work a bit to get it, but it's a very small price to pay. Really, if you don't like an open source application and you are not ready to contribute some efforts to improve it, just buy your software, I don't want to hear anything you have to say.
Qui ne va pas à la chasse n'a pas de gibier
PHP Queb
In the early 1990's, Mac's ruled my university's computer labs. Though I used vector programs for my engineering studies, my roommate was Industrial Design major so he was always talking about the paint apps.
The hot "paint" program back then was something called "PixelPaint" and it seriously grabbed the Architecture and Industrial Design students of the day. Everyone wanted it because of it's large pallete size, gradiant fills, and razor-like precision.
One day, a program called PhotoShop showed up in the labs (legally installed by a student who forgot to delete it before s/he left). It was cool, but PixelPaint still out classed it. Every line you drew was "fuzzy". The pallete size was so big, that it was hard to select a particular color. And overall, things just seemed blurry even when printing or copy/pasting to another app.
The designer's names were in the about box and I actually saw the lead developer post to the comp.sys.mac.* usenet newsgroups so I wrote him some email to complain about this horrible little app in both it's interface and ability.
He actually responded to my critiques and spent some time explaining just how programs like "PixelPaint" could really only make good-looking "on-screen" graphics due to low colors and resolutions. His app "PhotoShop" was aiming at photographic images where razor-sharp lines looked fake. He even replied about my suggested interface improvements and told me what they had planned for the next version which was even better than what I suggested.
This really impressed me. I know that this type of interaction between commercial programmer and user doesn't exist anymore, but it was amazing the patience that he used to point out my misunderstandings (and I wasn't even a real customer at the time).
The interaction I've had with the GIMP community hasn't impressed me. I'm a little more technically savvy than some of the Mac users out there, but getting the GIMP installed and usable is a pain. The GIMP is capable of a lot of things, but its defaults really don't impress me. I feel like I really have to work to get it out of PixelPaint mode into Photoshop mode (and I'm not really knowledgeable enough to say that I get those changes right). The online communities just aren't as open or friendly to answer the questions that I've asked even if I've tried reading TFM and FAQ.
If I were tight for money, I think I'd pay my bucks for GraphicConverter (a Mac shareware app that has a similar PixelPaint feel) rather than waste the time on the GIMP.
I'm a big supporter of Open Source software, but I've thought for a while that a group of people really need to decouple the engine from the interface and produce a "better" photo manipulation software in the way that Camino (and later Firefox) successfully rebuilt alternative user experiences on the Mozilla web-browsing engine.
I've used the gimp off and on, but I always come back to the color calibration bug. PS and most of the other commercial packages offer this features, but Gimp is still out in the cold. I understand that the ICC profile system may not be "free" to implement, but it's a critical part of the commerical world of photography. I still have hope, but until that day, I need to use PS.
CLASSIFIED
Err...I just read the article, and it's not all that cutting, really. It's just saying that "the GIMP doesn't yet have the interface of a MacOS X applications", "the display is slow" (dunno about that, but I'd be curious as to how X11 performs on OS X), and there aren't previews.
I ran into the same irritation with a lack of standardized preview code, and already started poking at producing a standard preview interface -- but stopped because of the 2.0 freeze. When I get time, if other folks haven't started again, I'll be back at it again.
As for a Mac OS X interface -- the GIMP looks like a regular ol' app on Linux. If a Mac OS X guy wants to step forward and add an interface on GIMP that conforms to Mac OS X conventions, that's certainly reasonable. My guess is that's it's just a lack of open source developers on Mac OS X showing up.
I haven't used the GIMP on OS X, and I'm not sure why he considered it sluggish, though I suppose it could be.
May we never see th
Biology is Not Sexist - It's just evolution...
And men have nipples too...
Everybody starts as a girl, until the testosterone kicks it up a notch on the ole' Y chromosome... and ta-da - you get boy parts!
Kerning is typically defined in the kerning table of a font file (truetype, opentype) by the author as being the most visually pleasing.
I can't think of many applications that kern based on metrics except where you want them to.
That said - the 'Optical Kerning' method may take a while, but I'd have to ask this : does it store the resultant kerning data for re-use ?
Does it cache at all ?
If not.. no wonder it's slow.
It should be entirely feasible, after all, to build a kerning table for all possible letter/glyph/etc. combinations in a single run, and re-use that when needed. It's not like the font morphs over time.
just my 2cts
This die-hard Harley-Davidson fan decides to install the 1.8 litre engine from junked a Honda Civic (hey, it was free!) in his Dyna Glide, only to be confused by it's chaotic array of wires and hoses, non-standard bolt pattern, difficulty matching it to his original Harley transmission, and the general slowness of his new behemoth bike.
Seriously, if you post something like this on a gearhead site, you'll get laughed off the internet. Why is the same sort of stuff can be passed off as constructive criticism when it's about open-source software? The Gimp was never meant to be a Mac app. If it works, that's a nice bonus, but please don't expect it to be neatly integrated with a platform that it only runs on because of a third-party porting effort.
0 1 - just my two bits
I would like to say that Paint Shop Pro is way better (for my webish needs) than either.
And, if the point it to make me puke, PSP8's new UI is extremely intuitive and effective.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Uhm, I think that is a sucking reflex...
that's why the little tikes will take a binkie...
No lunch provided, but it's something to nibble on...
And it's Not a sexist comment - the female areola darkens for lactation so the kid can see his target better.
I've used Gimp for years but had a pretty hard time getting it to run on the Mac. (On Linux it was easy, of course.) As a result of having moved to a Mac for my day-to-day use I was actively looking around for a Mac-native alternative. Photoshop was obvious but at $600 there was little chance of me buying it.
When I bought a new camera it came with Elements which, for many operations, was a lot easier to use than Gimp and generally did what I needed. What Elements lacked -- 16-bit support, support for RAW format images, support for macros -- seemed more a matter of convenience than anything else. Gimp didn't have these things either and I survived. After using Elements I had a hard time believing that Photoshop CS was worth a $500 price premium, much less the $600 premium over Gimp.
But I'm here to tell you that it is, and it's not just for those features. Gimp is good, but CS is great, probably the single best software package I've ever used. It's not always intuitive but then again what it's trying to do is really complicated.
I bought CS through a local photography school at a significant discount ("only" $260) or I might never have taken the plunge. But, having done so, I can see how Adobe gets away with charging that much: The product really is that good, that much better than anything else like it. They'll get their full license fee if or when I go professional and I will smile when I write the check.
I'm a great fan of paying for good software; being a software jockey myself I know how hard it is to write and how valuable it is once written. Unfortunately of late I've been paying a lot of money for what I consider pretty mediocre software. Moreover an increasing amount of that goes to Microsoft despite my ever-shrinking numbers of Microsoft systems and significant reduction in purchase of Microsoft tools from when NT was my primary development system. As their competition evaporated their software got substantially more expensive, way out of line with actual improvements. That bugs me and that has a lot to do with why I run a lot of OSS software. In large part I'd forgotten that commercial software can be very good.
MacOS X, for instance, is not only the best version of MacOS I've ever used, but perhaps the best general-use operating system I've ever used. They've done an astounding job of taking the power of UNIX and grafting a good UI to it without breaking it. From 1997 to 2002 I had slowly replaced most of my NT systems with Linux, which worked better for many things I wanted to do. But over the course of the last couple of years my household went from not having had a Mac since 1994 (when I started using NT) to having three.
That happened despite Apple's price premium, and despite the fact that every new release of Linux improves its strength and usability. It happened not because Linux fell out of my favor, but because MacOS X was that much better. I certainly wouldn't have said that of MacOS 9.
Apple, like Adobe, charges a price premium. But like Adobe the premium is worth it, especially for laptops.
In contrast it's hard to stomach paying Microsoft hundreds of dollars for XP, which is really only marginally better than the NT they've been selling for more than a decade. It's a little fancier looking and they finally put disk defragmenting software in the box, but really it's not that much better and it sure does use a lot of memory doing what it's doing. XP is a very nice version of Windows but they're dragging you over a barrel at the prices they charge for the quality you get. I might not even mind that much, given that it's a pretty robust system in general, but this wh
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
I've only played with Gimp and Photoshop Elements briefly so far, but I get the feeling the Gimp is designed to do a whole lot more than touch up digital photos (crop, rotate, red-eye elimination, etc.), which is all I want to do.
Are there any open source alternatives (preferably cross-platform) that do this job just as well as the Gimp but are simpler to use?
He's a troll and gets off on this sort of thing. Understand now?
I sure hope the whinner that started this post, the one who stated demands of the Gimp developers is funding his demands! You can bitch after your payment has made NO differences about the OSS project. Get the hint eh!
The immature mind measures.
Do you even know what 'literally' means?
Since this whole paragraph has no bearing on the article or post I will ignore it - it's just typical preteen-slashdot-grammar-nazi-elitism.
Yes you can schedule Tivo to record via a web interface
Again, not without separate add on software that likely voids your warranty. If I am going to be paying 2x as much for a commercial product, I damn well don't expect to have to crack it open / hack the software to get it to do what I want - nevermind the fact that this is totally diametrically opposite to what the point of "just get a TiVo" is, that it is easier than rolling your own. Adding your own software / hardware totally tears that argument down, especially when you consider that with MythTV you don't have to do anything to get the functionality, it is already done for you.
yes you can transcode to DivX
Not without separate add on software that likely voids your warranty
but who the hell would want to watch TV on their computer screen, I don't know
Obviously did not even read my post; one MythTV encoder can serve as many computers and other televisons as you want. I can have one encoding box in my closet and four thin client PCs that take 1/4 the size and cost of a TiVo to play the content.
No, it can't do the 2 other really retarded and nerdy things you mentioned
Playing MP3s and video games is nerdy and retarded now? Wow, better let Apple, Sony, and Nintendo know before they all start going bankrupt... oh wait.. you're just totally wrong since the video game industry makes more money than the movie industry, and nearly everyone and his dog has an MP3 player.
In short, your reply is just completely bogus. Thanks for the fun though, it's nice to unwind with some laughs at the end of the day.
it is an image manipulation programme and not a photoshop clone/ rip off/ whatever.
i can't stand the attitude that free software has to mimmick closed software to be considered good. ever worked with maya? for a long time? ok, switch to 3ds. uh, it has a screwed up interface from your point of view, so 3ds must be crap.
see? i took the other way round, i never bought ps and did my design issues with gimp. at work, i often need to "design" some prototype websites to test the web frontend, and they got photoshop there, but i can't use it, 'cos of the screwed up interface, so i'll stick to the gimp.
and yes, the cymk seperation was an issue, but i reworked my pictures with 2.0 and i got two perfectly looking poster prints processed with gimp at the wall.
gimp2 is good, i do not care about interfaces as long as there is a possibility i can learn them. you know, learning, to some minds it is fun. i had a several discussion over and over again regarding blender and 3ds. not to mention that blender implements all the cutting edge (funny, in 3d modeling this means 2 things...) features. if you wanna know what a cutting edge modelling app has to have, have a look at the modelling forum run by bay raitt (he did gollums face animation system, maybe the best 3d modeller alive). i'm not posting a link here, cos if i did and i ever meet bay, i think he may kill me.
nothing against the mac fanatics, but there are a lot of ways out there to organize a UI, not only your way.
beer as in "free beer"
I am not even Photoshop or Gimp but the whole articles resolves to:
-I was stupid enough to pay bucks for free software and not smart enough to use google.
-I invested 5min to learn the program after using Photoshop for five years every day and didn't totally understood every detail. Basically The Gimp isn't photoshop and therefore sucks
-There are other computers out being used in other ways than my mac using different handling and that is plain evil and oppressing for the community of mac-users
But to be honest ignorance is one of the thing I always expect from "certain" users and I am seldom wrong.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
I don't care how powerful it is, if the interface is confusing then it is not written correctly.
Burn my Karma, but frankly its attitudes like this which leave a lot of OS projects forever in the "also ran" category.
I don't care if its free.
I don't care if its open-source.
I don't care it is not Microsoft/insert-evil-of-week
I care that it is intuitive
I care that it follows standard conventions
I care that they look forward to implementing things better
I care that they look forward to adding that feature that makes product-X so great
I care that what I need to make it work is easy to find, as in linked from one place.
These professional packages did not become the dominant players by just passing themselves off as "assuming a competent user". They did their time of ass kissing to the consumer for many years to earn their reputation as the best or most used packages.
Tell people that they need to put forth more effort to get something to work like they are used to the competition working is the same as saying, don't bother, we don't care.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Unix folks just dont get it. Give em credit they are trying hard these days, but theres more to UI than eyecandy and placing widgets in non standardized locations just to be different.
OK, at the risk of being redundant here, I want to point out some pretty obvious things here.
;-)
/. fun...
- the Gimp may be free, but since it's being compared to PS so much (by users) it deserves this kind of reviews.
- there are only two useful viewpoints here: either you don't care, Gimp/PS does it for you and there's no incentive to change or you do care and then there are quite a few actions worth taking. Bitching about your choice isn't constructive.
1) GUI gripes: Since theming is such fun in Linux, I don't see why FOSS programmers and some good Linux or OS X gui designers can't work together to make Gimp acceptable on various platforms and have those themes as defaults depending on the platform.
A theme doesn't equal a good GUI but it goes a long way. This would charm many amateur users on various platforms, not only mac users are gui-anal, they however are very vocal
After all, this is hardly a new gripe. Now that there's an excellent OS X package available that installs like a charm on Panther, you'll hear more gripes than before, maybe, but still...
2) Professional gripes: IF, and that's a big if, the Gimp has professional ambitions, start working with professional designers already and find out exactly a) what results and kinds of output they desire and b) how to offer this gui-wise. Someone here remarked that indeed if the result is good enough, any gui can be learned, but it would help to make things easy from the start.
All the rest is just typical
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I'm guessing the GIMP developers would like to keep with the GNU/acronym theme, so let's see...
... the GNU Raster Image Manipulator, "GRIM", hmmm...
... the GNU Natural Universal Display Enhancer, "GNUDE", uhhh...
... the GNU Raster Image Transformer, "GRIT"...
This may be tougher than I thought...
The ultimate plays for Madden 2006
Now, if you haven't, you really should. The interface has been GREATLY improved (especially the dialogues are now much more conservatively designed and are stackable into one window pane (for example: channels, tool options and brush types, font types etc.. all in one window in tabbed menus or one above the other))
See, for example, the screenshot I provide. Please, if you have the possibility, mirror it!
http://webplaza.pt.lu/bartek/gimp2.jpeg
Hell yeah! Let's rally against the developers until they cry. Maybe they'll give up this silly OSS dream, about competing against us. Hmmm...I wonder if that'll work against Linux? Hey Linus! Your OS isn't as good as Windows, and it has a funny name.
A mac user,confused with an interface that has choices.theres a shocker!
A photoshop user who spent long hours figuring out adobes kludge shrivels like testes in the artic at the thought of learning another kludge.who can blame them.
if it dont look like photoshop and act like photoshop its gonna stand out like a pooh in a punchbowl and cause similar neurotic responses.
you arent gonna get the mac-ies to switch to linux and the photoshop users to do much more than play with gimp.
some people dig extensibility and customization.
some got so much on their minds you cant give them more than one mousebutton.
what really is the news here but one mans opinion?
what is that opinion but one more to the black end of the scale than the white?
ask some demographic that likes choice,free software and art to do a review or a book or something.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
While GIMP's interface is truly awful, that's not what kills it, and that's not the most important reason why he ultimately finds it to be a failure.
What sucks the most about GIMP is the quality of its output. The anti-aliasing sucks, the text rendering is abysmal, it can't deal with real-world output requirements, Microsoft Paint puts its color handling to shame.
I've tried the GIMP. I've tried it lots of times. I run Linux on servers and desktops and it works great for me. But when I have to do graphics work, there's no substitute for the Mac, in large part because the applications just aren't there on Linux.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Ah yes, but there are certain style-guides which have been established for years by all major operating systems. They're what users are used to, and wanting to be different because the GIMP authors think they've made a better choice just isn't a good enough reason. There has to be an overwhelmingly good reason to force people to learn a new interface, and so far, nobody has come-up with that reason in a satisfactory way.
As an example, have a look at Lotus Notes.
An email/database/whateveryouwanttocallit software package that intentionally or not breaks almost every windows style-guide because the authors thought "they knew better" and programmed it "their way". And because of that, the program is widely recognised by nearly everyone who has used it as an unusable piece of crap, regardless about how anything under the hood might work.
I havn't tried GIMP, so I don't know if it falls into that category or not, but if the UI was designed to function in the same method as common Windows or Mac graphics applications (read Photoshop or PSP), I doubt people would complain. Like it or not, that's GIMP's competition and they need to recognise that they need to make it easier for people to move to their product, not harder. If that means replicating a recogniseable interface, then by all means, do it!
Before anyone flames away on me, you might want to take a moment and stop and consider what I said.
Infact, I don't at all think that Linux and Linux applications themselves are what's holding back public acceptance, I think it's programmers and designers who havn't decided on a single "everyone needs to stick to it!" GUI style guide for the operating system as a whole.
Heck, I'm to blame myself, I HATE writing GUIs with a passion, but I love coding the guts where you can have fun optimizing code. GUIs are a chore that nobody likes. Unfortunately, they're also what the user utilizes and what they evaluate your program based-on.
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
$120,= for a MandrakeClub Silver Bullet account
:))
$0,= for the Mandrake 10.0 official iso downloads
$0,= for the contrib Cooker RPMS of the Gimp 2.0
$175,= for a USB2.0 Epson Perfection 2400 Photo
The posterized scanner result? Priceless
You mean to tell me that I just spent the last four days DLing The Gimp on my 28k modem for nothing? Fucxxing Linux, Fuxxing WinModems and Fux The Gimp!
Ciao.
Oh, and speaking of patents...from the article:
Menus were attached to windows instead of being in the menu bar.
That's because Apple has a patent on having a single menu bar at the top of the screen.
Now as for the furry overtones of the Firefox name, that's another story, but at least they aren't named after another word for "crippled"!
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
what, complaining about the suckiness of any piece of software not specifically designed for his Mackintoy?
he may be a very good graphical artist, i'll give you that. but griping about a non-mac program having (shock! horror!) its menu bar attached to its window - that makes him not qualified to review software outside his own little mac-elitist clique of snobs.
Granted, while I painlessly learn new GIMP tricks every time I use it, I'm still nowhere close to utilizing its potential. But it does everything I want and more, the package install was very quick and easy, it works with my scanner, and it seems fast considering some of the operations I've done on large images. No EULA or copy protection hassles either.
Disclaimers: I am not a graphics pro. I use the GIMP for pretty simple stuff. And I'm comparing recent versions of the GIMP with older versions of PS and PSP.
However, the recent versions of the GIMP are 1.x and 2.x and I'm comparing them against much higher version numbers of PS and PSP, so maybe it isn't such an unfair comparison after all. At the rate the GIMP is advancing, when it reaches version 7.0, it'll not only do all your graphic stuff automatically and before you even know you wanted it, but it'll also serve you free pizza and Jolt cola. OSS may start by satisfying a programmer's itch, but it eventually ends up listening to users and making them very happy.
Despite the /. detractors who don't like it because they learned PS or PSP first, the GIMP is a very useful tool now, and is destined for greatness a version or two down the road.
Besides, any software with such a cute little weasel rat bastard mascot must be good.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
Here's an article for you if you don't care about licensing. Honestly, do you agree to Adobe's license? If you don't -- or if you don't care and manage to violate the agreement out of igornace -- you are committing a felony under US criminal law (not to mention the civil penalty as well). Adobe wants to make you into an unemployable, scum-of-the-earth, dirty, lying criminal for violating their unreasonably restrictive license.
Everyone who doesn't care about licensing should be required to face the wrath of the BSA. Mayve then you'll see the beauty of Free Software despite its flaws?
-JemAhh yes, the eternal GIMP vs Photoshop debates.
I find these kinds of "reviews" really not so interesting. As a professional DTP IT consultant, I use most all of these tools daily: Photoshop et al..
Where I find these reviews lacking is:
Running apps in less than ideal conditions. Fink is a nice and very useful bridge to enable lots of excellent FLOSS to run, but it is not really fair to compare GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape or any other comparable Linux app when it is not run on its native platform. It would be the same having an experienced Unix/Linux tester, familiar with apps like development tools and then switching to a Mac. There are things I find incredibly frustrating when switching to a Mac too.
The reviewers overlook or miss things which show a lack of knowledge about other OS's. To me this review shows someone who has used nothing but a Mac and is clueless about other paradigms in computers.
The reviewer, in his or her ignorance completely overlooked some of the less obviously superior features of GIMP: Scripting in Python, Perl or Scheme come instantly to mind. The GIMP also has PNG support which is far better than Photoshop.
*Sigh* - It gets tiring hearing from both FLOSS bigots and Adobe fanboys who are so blind to their own zealotry.
That said, I use both and both have their strengths. Which one is better ? Neither. Both have their place and I confidently install GIMP right besides thousands of dollars of high end DTP apps including Photoshop.
GIMP 2.0 is a dramatic improvement which shows, IMO just the start of GIMP reaching a new level in image editing. The release of 2.0 will be followed by 2.2 sometime we hope, this summer. The hard under the hood work has been done, from which the GIMP team can build more functionality and refinements like substantial color management support.
The UI has been dramtically improved. There is a "small" theme for those who work on smaller monitors. Yes, there is a help system and other add-ins which extend GIMP like the freetype tool and GAP (GIMP Animation Package).
The GIMP authors and programmers are part time volunteers who do this for the joy of programming and probably a hundred other reasons... They should simply ignore this nonsense and keep on coding. Photoshop is one of the prize jewels of Adobe and is a wonderful program - but it is far from perfect.
If you really know both programs, you will learn NEITHER is better - they are different.
Optical kerning is, as I understand it, a new auto-kerning algorithm in InDesign 3. Rather than kerning based on metrics, it kerns based on actual letter-forms, producing much more pleasing results.
Optical kerning was around at least as of InDesign 2.0. In theory it is a very nice method for kerning; in practice it doesn't seem to make as big of a difference as you might think, at least with fairly typical serif and sans-serif fonts. In the print environment in which I worked, we used optical kerning for our newsprint, with our two dominant fonts being Calisto MT (serif) and Gill Sans (sans-serif); neither of those fonts suffer serious colisions with normal metric kerning, so optical kerning didn't make a night-and-day difference.
Also, optical kerning does add a modicum of additional spacing over the flow of a story or document, as in a 100 line story might end up 102-105 lines after being optically kerned (again, as of InDesign 2).
If the antialiasing isn't perfect, why don't you try to fix it?
This is the standard excuse for F/OSS software sucking. "If you don't like it, do better." How about because not all of us are computer geeks or programmers. The world is also made up of writers and artists and businessmen and firefighters and other real people. These are the people that Linux was supposed to reach as it strives to be "ready for the desktop." It's a benchmark that so much OSS doesn't meet, and so many OSS zealots can't understand. Grandma wants to type a letter on her Wal-Mart PC, she doesn't want to write a word processor. That's why she's going with Windows or Mac or whatever actually works.
The F/OSS community complains about not being accepted widely, and then thumbs their nose at the rest of the world for not being geeks like them.
World's tallest building rises in the desert
Didn't you hear the story about exploiting the goose that lays golden eggs? Here's a refresher.
Let things develop on their own time, or be prepared to help nuture its growth in some fashion.
====---====
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
MacGIMP approach is to minimize comparisons with Photoshop because the two pieces of software are just very different animals. As far as interface goes, once you get used to the GIMP way of doing things, Photoshop feels awkward, and since most Americans have prior experience with Photoshop, the accusation that the GIMP feels awkward seems to dominate the discussion. Outcomes of interface quality comparisons have a lot to do with what you first learned, and what you've gotten used to. So any balanced interface comparison should keep the inherent bias of familiarity in mind. Windows versus Linux-based desktops will face a similar challenge.
It wasn't mentioned which version the Web Page Design for Designers review used. Recent builds are now making use of GIMP Freetype plugin which has excellent support for anti-aliasing. For the record, Archei LLC does provide support (by a toll free number too) for anyone who purchases the MacGIMP product. Not sure how that support request slipped through the cracks, but the offer to help still stands: support@archei.com While we're on the topic, the MacGIMP forum is another alternative to getting questions answered.
Finally, even though a certain amount of disagreement will likely occur, discussions about open graphics software, especially when open and patent unencumbered file formats are promoted, are always to be encouraged. Hopefully this Slashdot article will have the net positive effect of making more people aware of the GIMP who had never heard of it before.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Could someone explain what is the 'crop and rotate' feature that Eugenia is pining for?
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
The only truely intuitive interface known to man or beast is the nipple!
/. UI barometer.
Yeah, go ahead and argue with that logic. Is Gimp that intuitive? Uh, no, but neither is PS. Let's make the teat the official
Any votes?
Oh, as a side note, most everyone that I know that prefers PS to Gimp got it for free (Not free as in beer, but free as in theft).
Just a humble observation from the UI guy,
Robert
Please don't consider what I have to say here as an attempt to start a flame war, instead take it as a complement. I decided to take a look at the comments here, expecting to find everyone out for the authors blood, instead I found most people discusing it quite rationally.
I find Gimp interesting, however, despite using Linux back in '92 before I ever touched a Mac (or Photoshop), I'd used Photoshop before Gimp came on the scene. Having first used Photoshop, Gimp is very confusing, and I'm a person that can normally sit down at anything except most 3D software and simply use it. I have tinkered with it a couple times and I do like one or two of its features, but the learning curve is just to step for me, and it is missing features that Photoshop has.
While I'm not particularly happy with the way Adobe does business, I do like their products. A Lot! I own legal copies of Photoshop 7.0, PageMill 3.0, PageMaker 6.5, InDesign 2.0, and Acrobat 5.0 for the Mac. In the next couple of months I hope to upgrade my copy of Photoshop to Adobe Creative Suite Pro (at $750, ouch!). That will upgrade all the apps I use (GoLive is the only upgrade path for PageMill, and I've already moved from PageMaker to InDesign), and more importantly it will give me an app that I really need, Illustrator. Now for the scarry part, I don't make any money using any of these apps. I'm simply using them as a hobbyist! I'm also looking to buy a professional masking plugin for Photoshop in the near future (I already own the Intellihance plugin).
Since I don't make any money using these applications, I'd love freeware alternatives. Sadly, none of them seem to offer the quality of output I demand from my own work (though I really want to give 'nvu' a try for web development, as I don't think GoLive is where I really want/need to go).
Z.
Crossover Office isn't really software -- it's a support package for Wine. Now, there's nothing wrong with CodeWeavers offering this package for people unable to face Wine unassisted. But if you have the expertise and patience, you should really try to make Photoshop work under Wine without shelling out your money. It is possible.
The author is right on every point. And every point, it seems, is Mac-specific.
For example, the cost is Mac-specific. The fact that the menu is in different places is Mac-specific (fits right in in my GNOME desktop...). Having to install X to use this one program is Mac-specific. That horrible font rendering is Mac-specific (c'mon, if you see awful text like that, you don't actually think the developers meant for it to look that way, do you?).
On the other hand, I simply cannot see how somebody who uses Photoshop has trouble getting used to a grand total of 25 icons. Yes, having 25 icons in your toolbox sucks. But Photoshop sucks much more in that respect.
Of course, I'm not a graphic designer, so what would I know. But people go to school to learn Photoshop... and then bash the GIMP about its UI? Admit it: Photoshop is very difficult to use (the Windows version, anyway). For example: I had a .png and wanted to convert its white background to transparent. I had to spend more than half an hour to figure out this simple task using Photoshop; it took about one minute on the GIMP.
Obviously if you have used a program every day of your life you'll find it easier than something foreign -- especially if you're a Mac user; apparently this GIMP port is very bad.
The reviewer did try to give the GIMP its chance; however, he does not understand the slightest thing about Free Software. For example, he went and bought it (mistake number one). And he didn't even consider asking the developers why its font rendering is godawful on his system (mistake number two). He simply took what he found and gave his opinion. Sure, this is what most people end up doing, and this is exactly how things are done with proprietary software, but that means he was missing out on... everything!
Never?
Linux already has a market share the size of Apples (OS wise). At some point, there will be enough graphic design folks who have migrated from the windows side that Adobe will make a linux native version of Photoshop.
I think it would be **foolish** to ask someone to wait for that day. Because it won't be soon. But that day is comming.
Linux is not going away. Windows holds 95% of the market. But only 10% of the world is using computers. China, North Korea, Brazil have all decided Linux is the way to go. If in the next 5 to 10 years, 2 out of every 3 new computer users outside of the developed western nations chose Microsoft, and the other 1 chooses Linux. We will soon be living in a world where Linux will hold 10-25% marketshare.
Unless Adobe is going out of business, I would not say "Never"
vi +
I've always tried to give GIMP an objective and open-minded whirl from time to time. For tho I don't mind paying for my legal copies of Photoshop (since it's my bread winning app) but I'd also like to do without the expense.
My workflow has changed over the years and I'll use the best tool for the job regardless of cost, maker or platform. From PC Paintbrush, Pixel Paint, Painter, PhotoPaint, Photoshop, NeoPaint, etc etc etc over the past 15 years in digital illustration.
First off, I feel that GIMP's interface is inefficent. True, if you get used to it, it's not such a big deal, shaving off seconds here and there not having to rely on the interface at all is what makes for an effective working enviroment. No windows in view, just full screen, just you and your cursor brush. Right+click contextuals should be all that is necessary.
Why? Window clutter distorts your perception of light/dark. Put a dark grey square in the middle of a very light grey flooded field and the smaller dark square looks darker than it really is and the same is true for the lighter grey field. Windows floating around give the same effect.
Being able to control everything you need via contextuals limits the time and visual distractions. It's a fickle complaint I realize, but it's these little nuances that impair the using experience. When this sort of application is pretty much all you ever use a computer for, it becomes a greater issue.
Interfaces can make or break an applications success in my opinion (however welcome it may be). PhotoPaint by Corel has had this issue, some versions of it had great interfaces, others had not. The few that were very comparable to Photoshop (tho not mimicing) and others were haphazzard and impaired my interest which sent me back to other versions or back to Photoshop.
Painter is another such example, from 7 to 8 were big improvements in terms of interface. Greatly increasing my desire to use the application and thus greater understanding of how to empower myself with the applicaiton.
I won't bother to rehash the technical limitations nor shall I embark on repeating the voices of others regarding the spirit/ethics/cost of GIMP vs *.
It all really depends on what you do with the application and how. Personally, given the choice of any appliation for photo restoration, I'd opt for Photoshop and it's healing brush. If I had to batch process a few thousand images, depending on what's ncessary I could use Photoshop or I could use GIMP. When it comes to natural illustration, it's either Painter or Photoshop.
Right tool for the job, sometimes you don't need a Cadillac to do a Chevy job. Sometimes you do...
I'm an artist who codes, and I hate it when people assume people like me don't exist. (Or that we're not "real coders" or "real artists.") It's extremely depressing, especially given the fact that back in the 60s and 70s, any artist working with technology (such as early computers and video systems) was practically assumed to be a hacker. In those days, if you wanted a unique image, you had to either break out the punch cards or the soldering iron.
Now we have software that fills most people's needs. But sadly, these days people don't realize how influenced and constrained they are by their tools. Just look at Flash, and how it coerces you into an aesthetic. And when people run into limitations, it just never occurs to them to create their own tools or plugins.
As a die-hard Mac user, I started writing After Effects plugins seven or eight years ago, and since then I've created fast-selling commercial tools, proprietary tools and several artware projects. As someone who went to one of the country's top art schools, I consider myself equal parts artist and coder.
And I'm not alone. Artists involved with the high-end of the computer graphics world (that is, people in visual effects) love OSX and Linux. Most of the big FX houses have switched to a pipeline that relies heavily on Linux, and the largest firms have tons of proprietary technology. On the other end of the spectrum, software-as-art (or "artware") is an exploding field, and tons of very visually-minded people are exploring software as an expressive venue. Here in Chicago we have the Version festival (Version04) which celebrates NewMedia and artware, and similar events, groups and artists exist worldwide.
As someone who runs primarily OSX (along with Linux and *ugg* XP for professional reasons), I find Gimp2 to be interesting but still too half-baked. On the other hand, Cinepaint, which began as a hacked version of the Gimp, is a good reason for an artist to dip into the X11 side of things. With support for 16bit integer, 16bit float and 32bit float, you can work with film, deep photos, HDR -- and navigate image sequences really easily.
Now, all of that said, there is NO excuse for a bad UI. But don't assume that all artists are good GUI designers -- user interface is more of a cognitive science problem than an artistic problem. And the Gimp could use some concentrated work in that area...
This article is silly for 2 reasons:
1. It's not Gimp's fault for not having a consistant UI with the rest of OS X. It's apple's.
Apple purposely keeps the UI and libraries completely closed off to open source developers. Probably to keep OSS out of the mac community.
Sure you can install X11 on OS X, but that's hardly ideal.
2. You don't put fonts in a photograph. That's what stuff like quark express is for. You make the images in Gimp and Photoshop, and then use another program to do the layout.
You use fonts sometimes when incorporating it into the actual image, like a stop sign or a floating text or whatever. In this case the ability to do anti-aliased text is overrated.
3. When I use gimp 2.0 I don't end up with dozens of windows floating around. I have the main toolset, the layer, masks and selection manipulation tools grouped in one window, the brushs, patterns, gradiants and colors in another window, and then the actual image I have in a 4th window.
Whoopie f-ing do.
95% of the guy's difficulty is from Apple's inability to play along with others rather then anything wrong with Gimp.
Sure I wouldn't use Gimp professionally, I would use Photoshop.
Just because it's better.
HOWEVER a article like this is unjustified and unfair. The Gimp is a great product, much better then photo studio pro or other freebees. It has everything you need to get anything done, and a skilled person with Gimp can create images of equal quality as a skilled person with Photoshop.
But when people argue "OSS developers should listen to articles like this", that is BS. There is nothing to learn from this and provides little usefull information.
The article makes one point that I think many posters here have missed.
The author is prepared to pay ~$250 for PhotoShop (or perhaps ~$100 for Elements) instead of paying nothing to use GIMP. To this user, payment is not a barrier to use (and, conversely, zero upfront dollar cost and access to the source code are not suitable motivators for use).
The two common counter-arguments I hear in this thread are (1) "you can't complain if it's free" and (2) "if you don't like it, why don't you fix it". These arguments can be mounted with any open source software product.
The cost of acquisition issue shuts down both of these arguments - the busy user doesn't have time to "fix it", and they won't bother complaining. They will simply go and spend the $250 it costs to acquire a program which meets their needs.
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
Catchy title. I'm a vim professional myself, why bother with all that pointy clicky stuff when you can edit hex :)
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Seems like nobody caught that part. Here is the deal with Gimp. It is like Linux in many ways - it is graphical manipulation at the lowest level, where you manipulate abstract concepts like chroma and luminancy, layers and channels, and do (often) unintuitive things to come up with a clever way to manipulate an image into something more desireable.
For $600, Photoshop will hide some of that for you, and give you 25% more features that are licensed technologies from other companies (meaning there is a reason they don't make it into the Gimp). It is also packaged behind a pretty interface, which was designed by an expensive committee which specializes in user interfaces.
Now, I don't mean to deride Photoshop at all - it IS a fantastic app. This comparison was probably fair, except that the reviewer is a typical Mac user. The Macintosh has this wonderful habit of trying to protect users from their own stupidity without recognising its own.
I am a programmer, and have been one for years now. I don't do any graphics at all, as my friend who is an excellent graphics artist does them for me.
However, out of sheer curiousity, I tried GIMP 2.0. I loved it. I've never taken a class in computer graphics, nor read any books or websites. I can work my way around GIMP, and quite well too. I've done some graphics work that has impressed by friend (taking into consideration I have more fingers than self-made graphics).
I've used Fireworks once, and totally hated it. It's just a matter of preference, not usability. I know people that would hate vi or emacs, but they're still extremely useful in the right hands.
Then again, ESR couldn't get CUPS to work and blamed the interface. He's got support and flamed.
And remember, if you don't like the interface, tell the developers. This is an open community after all. However, if you tell them you want a photoshop clone, don't be too happy if they turn your request down.
and I still have trouble figuring Gimp out..
1.2 is just flat out clumsy, 1.3 is a touch better and 2.0 is even more improved. But still, they are all tough to figure out. I don't use it every single day, maybe once or twice a week at most but it sure could be more user friendly.
I've seen some work that other people have created with Gimp so I know it's a powerful program that can do mind numbing stuff but I'll be damned if I can get the hang of it.
I used to use paintshop pro 6 back when I was using windows, because it was simple to understand, cheap, fast and it took care of my limited needs.
I wouldn't mind having Paintshop pro 6 run on Suse 9.x pro...
My wife is a graphic designer, and she uses Photoshop. I am a web designer, and I use GIMP on Linux. I have to say that I am as lost in Photoshop as she is in GIMP.
Really? You must be the first person I've met who naturally knew to select an area before modifying it, to make sure you were on the right layer when modifications didn't go the way you planned, and how to grab things with the stamp tool (or even what makes the stamp tool different from the eyedropper).
C'mon, be honest and admit that you had to learn the program, just like everybody else and every other program. Trial and error is an acceptable way to learn, as is reading a book, but don't feed us any b*llsh*t about learning it naturally because you're telepathically linked to Adobe's programmers.
Huh? In my experience GIMP doesn't have more windows than Photoshop. Unless, that is, you choose to tear off a menu (turning it into a window).
Standard for what platform? Maybe not the Mac, but the Mac is not the only platform out there.
Huh? Does that mean "each tool has its own job"? How is this different from Photoshop?
Really, what confuses you about looking in the same place for the same tools?
I'd guess the Adobe guys spend lots of time and money on UI research and user studies. Which they've improved and refined for what, 8 versions?They probably have entire departments of specialists who do this. This is a critical factor that is sorely missed in the GIMP. A few geeky coders who think "yeah this should just go there" doesn't quite compare.
Whenever I here complaints like this I think of an audiophile describing how faithfully the sound from Top Gun is reproduced on his home system. It doesn't matter, it's still a crap movie.
GIMP provides utilities that far exceed the abilities of most people to produce graphics.
A list of things I own that cost less than their professional counterparts but work for me:
Saturn vs Ferrari
$200 no name bike vs $6000 Trek
Some kind of camera vs $$$$$some other kind of camera
If all you want to do is type a letter, use notepad. I won't blast you about how bad notepad sucks compared to vim. I won't say that the proprietary model has utterly failed because you can't get all the features of emacs.
Let's check out a professional webisite like, uh, Slashdot. Could the graphics on here have been done in GIMP? I'm betting it could be done like that, and without too much lost productivity.
There are lot more small business out there where people just want to make a few images and GIMP works just fine.
GIMP isn't better than PhotoShop, it's just as good for what I need though and comes at a much better price.
t
But did I miss something, or is this nothing but a Mac user whining that an X11 program doesn't have a native OS X interface and doesn't work just like photoshop.
That aside, are we really supposed to be taking advice from a guy who puts up a website which indicates it gives website design advice and the first thing you see is a banner add and a giant purple page...
Sad enough that many assume that one way of doing things is the only way. I have noticed that there about 5 different ways of doing the same thing in The GIMP (Same true for PS) it comes down to the artist's preference.
I would take options anyday over conformity.
The menu you get from right-clicking is also avaliable by left-clicking the menu arrow located at the upper left corner of the image.
On a side note I have always ripped my hairs out trying to memorize the short cuts in PS. I then tried GIMP and found them to be intuitive and was able to guess about 90% of them easily. Of the ones I couldn't memorize I fell in love when I found you can customize and change them to your fancy so easy.
In fact The GIMP was so intuitive that all I did was hover my mouse over the menu item and press the shortcut I wanted and bingo it was done. No more hard to navigate preference panels.
P.S. BRING LAZY FOCUS FOLLOWS MOUSE TO AQUA!!!!!
> SELECT * FROM brain_cells WHERE synaptic_rate > 0
0 row returned
I think Gimp made huge strides with the UI in Gimp 2. It now can use a permanent menu, dockable windows, and Utility Window Type Hints. The Gimp developers have done tremendous work. With all of these improvements I think UI criticism should stop.
To let it fully replace Photoshop for me it still needs higher bit color, adjustment layers, healing brush, and proportional crop.
Eugenia is infamous for these subtle put down's of FOSS disguised as reviews.
Her so called news site routinely censors all anti Monopoly$oft comments & calls it 'moderation'.
I personally boycotted her monoply$oft shill site long ago.
So here wae are with people using (owning?) $1300(au) graphics software smugly congratulating themselves over their supiority to those using software which is the result of the hard labour of a bunch of volunteers.
Monopoly$oft shills continue to congratulate themselves whilst large parts of the world are moving to the new paradigm & loving it.
Eugenia did not write that article, she merely linked it. And she expressed important reasons why even she can't use Gimp, reasons that others also found prohibited if you read the comments (especially the 16bit support).
... that there's been a bunch of these ``Experienced [application-name] user tries Linux program and doesn't like it.'' articles? Could this be a little astroturf activity? I wonder how bad the criticism would have been if they discovered that, say, the GIMP's menus were exactly like Photoshop's. (``Well, these Linux programs aren't original. They just copy other software.'') And if the Linux program is different in some way from a Windows product or some other commercial software package, well that's a negative as well. There's just no pleasing some people, eh?
Any more, I see these articles and laugh. This one, for example, could have been titled: ``Long-time Photoshop user discovers that the GIMP isn't Photoshop!''. Might have been a more accurate headline, IMHO.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
then again, on linux there arent too many (if any) decent photo printers that work with it. Nonetheless, i dont see how anyone could take an image manipulating program seriously without even basic color management.
-
I've used Corel Photo paint, Photoshop, even Microsoft Photo Editor. GIMP is a big ole POS. Who designed that crappy unusable interface? Holy cow.
I've tried to use it a few times because I want to have an OS bitmap editor I can recommend to folks but it just SUCKS!
GIMP isn't better than PhotoShop, it's just as good for what I need though and comes at a much better price.
So you have no point. Great post!
What do you mean PS?
The only reason it is non-intuitive is because it doesn't act like photoshop!
Creative Demolition
Chinese: Chinput
Japanese: Kinput2 You should find links to Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean Input Methods from those links, too!
I do a lot of graphics work. I've also used a large number of the true graphics programs (3d, 2d, vector, etc... not MSPaint) out there at one point or another. In addition to this, I also do freelance development from time to time. It is the user interface alone that makes or breaks the program, in my opinion. Without a good interface, it doesn't matter what the rest of the code does.
Here are my remarks on a few of the ones I've used at one time or another:
Photoshop - Easy to use interface. Provides an easy introduction for those unfamiliar with the program and provides the power necessary for advanced users.
GraphicsConverter - Another easy to use interface. Though it lacks the power photoshop has, it makes up for it in the large number of image formats it can read and write.
Paint Shop Pro - I am not overly fond of this interface. For one, I think there are far too many icons used. Drowning out interface buttons and such with icons is very irritating for a novice user as they generally have to hover the mouse and wait for the tooltip to figure out what something is. Further, it has the "too much help" syndrome that seems a standard on windows. I much prefer that the help system be delegated to something else and not be built into the program.
Poser - This is definitely a unique interface, but it still provides simplicity for novice users and control for advanced users. The largest downside is that by not using default system-provided user interface widgets, some of the details you would expect are not there whereas they would be there if the system versions were used.
Bryce - Bryce is extremely easy to use. It was my first 3d program and is still one of my favorites due to its simplicity. I have yet to find another 3d program with an object placement system that I like more than bryce's.
Blender - Not a big fan. Though it is quite powerful, the learning curve is very steep. On Macs, the interface text is quite small in some places and hard to read. The interface is also a bit clunky. Sections are not as clearly divided as I would like.
Carrara - I have not used this one for some time (and as such, newer versions may be different than what I remember), but I found it quite user-friendly when I did. All tools were placed in a context-sensible place and it had the camera system that I liked from bryce.
The Gimp - I don't like it. The user interface is extremely clunky by my standards. Consolidating a number of the windows into one and reorganizing the tools would go a long way towards helping it. There is also the fact that I am used to my nice Aqua interface and it has the drab sharp bevels and general lack of detail that is natural to most x86 OS's under default configurations.
Illustrator - I do not use this program frequently, but being from adobe, it has a very similar interface to photoshop that makes it very easy to use.
Fireworks - I'm apathetic about this one. It provides no real functionality that I cannot get in a program whose interface I like better and has more stuff I can use.
Freehand - Pretty much the same as Fireworks. I've only mostly toyed with this one as I found Illustrator more appealing.
One other feature I like about photoshop is that it is extremely easy to do image versioning. When doing web designs, I will
Of course, it's not always easy, but the current tools do the job for 90% of the situations. I just wish there were better comments than 'the interface stinks, gimp stinks'. There are acceptable ways of proposing improvements, and at some point, you need to get involved. Even if you're not a programmer, you can report bugs, propose original solutions or help development in some other way. F/OSS leaves some reponsability to the user base. You can't just take from the community and give nothing back. What is it to take a few hours of your time to propose an improvement (in a constructive way)?
I don't like MS, but I hate people that steal software even more.
Qui ne va pas à la chasse n'a pas de gibier
PHP Queb
You bring in users and give them a few set tasks. For an image processing program, one task might be "read in the images from this CD, edit out all telephone poles and wires in the background, then print the images on the printer." Each user gets about an hour or two worth of tasks. You do this for five or so users.
Then you review the tapes. You look for every place where the user made a mistake, had to back up, became frustrated, encountered a bug, or could not make further progress. Any problem encountered by more than one tester must be fixed. Any problem that kept any tester from completing the task must be fixed.
After fixing the problem, you retest, using a mix of people from the previous round and new people.
It's worth editing the tapes down to a highlights reel of problems, and making the developers sit through it.
That's how it's done. It's not rocket science.
It's another World. I just can't understand why anyone would want to go to so much effort for so little reward. It's like scaling a craggy mountainside and getting to the top to find that there's no view!
I'd say he did not give the tool a fair chance. First, he used it on the wrong platform. Then he did not use it much before giving up. There are good reasons for making and using a free photo editor / paint program.
Gimp is free software and it works best on Linux and BSD, where the developers are and have better access to the works.
What exactly did the reviewer do? All he tells us is that he opened one image, drew one line and typed one bunch of text. I doubt he spent more than a day at it. Some mountain climb there.
The reason for making the GIMP is simple, it's free, won't go away and is flexible. Anyone with an itch can program it, as the makers of Scooby-Doo did. Hopefully, they will share that work back but they don't have to. Because the Gimp is free, I know that it will never die. I'll always be able to get a copy and it will always work as well as I remembered or better. Non-free software is rented at best and has a tendency to go away. The Gimp is a combination of other free software and bits and pieces can be pulled out to use in other places, like the Image Magic project.
The Gimp is a tool. Some people have made professional use of it and have gotten superb results. What you get out of a tool is a combination of your imagination and what you put into it. A person who's not used anything would be better off learning to do things with the Gimp. There are plenty of tools to take care of what the Gimp lacks and the Gimp does what it does way better than this reviewer saw in such a brief evaluation.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
For a normal Windows user, The Gimp is a step back of 15 years in terms of UI.
Translation: for a normal Mac user, the Gimp is a step back of 20 years in terms of UI
=)...and it does'nt involve making a convicted monopolist wealthyier.
Well, this is a valid argument. But it's also the thrust of the problem many people have with Linux and OSS in general.
You're cloning other people's programs. Somebody put a lot of time and effort in designing this thing, and you're just taking what they've carefully designed and making your program work like that. It's cloning. In some cases, it's damn near thievery -- Linspire's iPhoto rip off comes to mind. And we're to wonder why software patents are so desired by commercial vendors?
Now, everybody talks about how innovative F/OSS can be. But when a team REALLY innovates, really makes something new instead of borrowing incrementally from different sources, they're told that they should just COPY the photoshop interface?
I hate the GIMP because it's buggy and it crashes and script fu sucks. But I like their interface. I like what they're trying to do. I'd love to see them freeze new features, polish up the interface they've already got and put some damn exception handling in there.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
It's mostly just you making fun of the user for not being familiar with the Open Source crappola we all know and love here.
This one of those rare situations where I see proprietary software in a good light. Adobe has been investing in research into graphics and color for decades. These are not trivial subjects. There is alot to know about how to get color to look right on paper or on a monitor. Researchers made it their livelyhood to understand all there is to know about images are percieved and how to get the best results.
Hats off to them. I would glady give them some money to use their excelent software. Anyone who has taken a University level Computer Science Graphics course has got to appriciate what they do.
That all being said, I am not big into photo editting or graphic design, so I use gimp because thats what there is available on my BSD box. It's alright. But it's no photoshop. I've tried some of other free image/graphic editors that were in my ports directory. They weren't very good at all.
I used PSP 6.0 for years and loved it. It was great -- I bought plugins and everything -- but then I installed Linux. I also (dumbly) resized my Win2K partition. Now, Windows won't run, but I still have a bunch of old images I'd like to edit. Is it possible for me to convert PSP 6.0 files into Gimp-readable format, or do I need to reinstall Windows? Much as I know and love PSP, I'd rather stick to one OS if possible...
I appologize - it was rather bad form of me to use OS when I meant OSS. I guess I just felt the context left it rather obvious that I was usign OS == Open Source. Obviously I was wrong or you wouldn't have been so far off-base from what I was talking about. Next time I'll preface OS with something like Open Source (OS) or just use OSS to make it more clear. Maybe then, you'll have a clearer idea of what I'm talking about so you can particpate in the conversation. Who knows, maybe you'll feel less inclined to use the 'Anonymous Coward' feature next time too :-)
cheers,
Carl P. Corliss
You seem to have taken a mostly out-dated opinion on Lotus Notes and applied it to the Gimp, which you admit to never having used.
Lotus Notes has lost most of the usability problems that people disliked about it over the last couple of major revisions. Regardless of that, I would dispute that it is "widely recognised by nearly everyone who has used it as an unusable piece of crap." On the contrary, I think the majority of people who use it for more than a couple of weeks find its interface to be quite effective.
GUI style guides are great for helping people to use an unfamiliar program, but slavishly following any guidelines can quite easily make regular usage a pain in the neck. For example, all serious Notes users quickly decide to turn off the "welcome page" layer that gives Notes a more "standard" interface for mail. It only gets in the way for power users.
The Gimp diverges from standards to give icons on the system bar for its separate dialogs, which is actually exactly what you need when working on large images that cover the entire screen.Ever tried to switch to a diffent app and go back to a Windows File Properties Dialog?
Many of the UI problems being discussed about the Gimp are referring to the previous version. The latest version is looking much nicer, and is also closer to style guidelines.
The article complains about the fact that it doesn't use the Mac guidelines, which is hardly surprising, given that it hasn't been ported to the Mac! If he wants his X11 apps to look like Mac apps, he'd need to talk to the person writing the X11 interface for the Mac.
Politas
"A lot of the OSS community thinks it can compete with everything simply on price, ignoring the fact that people will quite willingly pay for something better if it's worth it."
Or download it off a P2P network, or "borrow" a friends copy. So why are we having this conversation, again?
That was one of the most horrible and ill informed reviews I've read in a long time. Note his attitude when he thinks that gimp's file open dialog is part of some unix smugness conspiracy to make life difficult (how hard is it to understand that it doesn't have access to the capabilities of the mac gui, that it's not native?) Also note how awful his review of netscape is below. The guy's a tool. Why does anyone care what he says?
...its non-standard UI compared to other Mac apps..
it's the mac apps that have the nonstandard UI, not gimp.
we discovered a new way to think.
99% of the stuff I use that's open-source is in most cases as good as and in many cases better than its proprietary counterpart
Agreed. The only reason to use proprietary software is when you have no free/open alternative. I'm longing for the day when I could drop Maple and Mathematica for an open, portable version that will run on all BSDs, Linux et. al...
As far as the Gimp is concerned, I'm happy with it. It's certainly not perfect, but it is just a matter of time before the developer community makes improvements. At least, we are not at the mercy of a commercial vendor. If we want something better, we can bitch about it on /. (and elsewhere), or we can get down to morph the existing code into something we prefer.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
So someone who works with Photoshop on a daily basis, finds Photoshop more powerfull and intuitive... How chocking! However i DO find it usefull, for gimp to get feedback form as many users as possible. Gimp as many other programs, will always need ekstra features. And some of the tools in it, could properly need a little work and polish. But until hell freezes, and Photoshop gets GPL'ed i sure couldn't give af fuck. I don't care if Paintshop Pro, and Photoshop Elements are cheaper. They er still under the wrong license. I have a nice and free (as in speech) operatingsystem, and i'm sure not going to install nonfree things again.
"Being honest and open about the capabilities, strenghts and weaknesses of the platform we love so much is more likely to win people over - after all, they get enough lies and deceit from the proprietary side of the fence, don't they?"
What? One of the things Slashdotters complain most about Linux is the lack of marketing. Yet marketing is for a large part based on lying.
So when people are honest about Linux and it's development, Slashdotters will complain about:
- Conflicts between groups. If you tell them that companies have internal conflicts too (it's just that they don't let anybody know), they'll tell you that Linux will fail on the desktop *because* conflicts are public.
- Lack of marketing.
- Security vulnerabilities. Linux doesn't hide it's vulnerabilities. Yet more and more people are constantly nitpicking on Linux, saying "Look! Linux is more insecure than Windows!", while not even looking at the fact that Microsoft hides a lot of bugs from the public. Linux developers release information about new vulnerabilities so admins are aware of it, yet Slashdotters abuse it to claim that Linux has "failed".
Obviously being honest about this has done Linux more harm than good. Yet if we're *not* honest about it, people like you complain about lack of honesty?! Damned if you do, damned if you don't?!
"I am sure this will be modded flamebait by some kneejerk reactionary moderator, just the other reply to the parent, but what the hey......"
No it won't, I'm sure it will get modded up, like all other similar posts. Slashdot is not a pro-Linux anti-MS place! Heck, I'd even argue criticism against Linux is often overrated - it's like people mod it up even when it's not true, like it's a divine thing or something.
Linux must be one of the most hated things in existance. People do nothing more than insulting it and claiming it's defeat. People are constantly belittleling Linux developers. I'm working hard to write software to make Linux better, yet all people do is insulting me and telling me how much everything sucks?! Even the Windows community is better than the Slashdot crowd!
Yet it's always the Slashdot crowd who's whining about "Don't imitate Microsoft! Come up with something original!"? Gimp's interface is original, yet Slashdotters complain about it *because* it's not a Microsoft imitation?!
This kind of Slashdot attitude is exactly what's wrong.
Why are all complains about Gimp on Slashdot about Gimp 1.x? Gimp 2.0 has been out for quite a while, with a much better UI. You can drag & drop docks together into a single tool window, and there's a top menu bar for every image window now. The GUI now looks much slicker with it's colored icons.
1. Time is on the Gimp's side. Graphics, just like text editing and operating systems, has a point where things are "good enough" -- OpenOffice.org, for example, has reached that point, which is why it is starting to slowly but surely eat into Microsoft Office. Once the Gimp reaches that point, and it will, Adobe will have a problem charging its insane prices
2.The Gimp is good enough for semi-professional use, and with this price tag, it is going to attract a lot of attention and get a lot of feedback. Feedback is the life-blood of Open Source. And there are always a lot more people who are semi-professionals than professionals.
3. Ease of use isn't everything. Mac users (for the record: I own an iBook, too) love to go on and on about how their interface is standardized, easy to use, etc. True, but if that were to translate into sales, the world would have been dominated by Macs even before OS X came along. People can and will cope -- heck, they piced MS DOS over the Mac. If Gimp can do 80 percent of what Photoshop can do for free with whatever interface, Adobe is toast.
We'll see where we are in five years.
As an audiophile, I have to protest. A movie has nothing to do with being an audiophile. We are about music. *lol*
Besides, I think music sounds better on GIMP than on Photoshop.
home
I assume you're not comparing the 'Gimp' (what's with that juvenile name/acronym?) with Photoshop on OS X?
Photoshop acts like every other app on OSX. The Gimp is a frankenstein child of linux and windows, and not just because it's under X11. I'd say the photoshop users are *exactly* the people the Gimp designers should be listening very hard to. There is a reason people are willing to pay good money for photoshop, and a lot of that reason is the interface, which tries hard to fit in and at the same time extend the host OS. Looking at the Gimp one on OS X, it has some serious problems:
There are two file menus, one in each document window too (If they're going to use the broken 'menu in the window' idea they could at least get it right).
There doesn't appear to be any consistent ordering for the buttons in windows, and why are their buttons to perform actions anyway? Are these dialogs or palettes? The palettes are all too large and the arrangement of tools is not at all intuitive. Why the huge patterns palette is shown by default I have no idea, because it was 'cool'?
The popup menus are enormous (sometimes for stuff like 'px' which should be in the prefs anyway) and some buttons are half-hidden by the bottom right corner of windows. The default for the layers palette appears to be not to follow the selected document, and there is a little 'auto' button for choosing this option (??!?!!?!?! Shouldn't auto be, you know, automatic?).
So, in general, the interface feels like a historical accident that no one wants to clean up, and unfortunately that history is on another platform, making it appear even uglier to someone used to native OS X programs. If it was the sort of program that you just set up a few options and leave to do its thing (rendering, batch image processing etc) that'd be acceptable, but in a graphics program where you spend all day choosing options and tools, it just can't work.
If it took over the screen and imposed its own paradigm so that you forget the rest of the system (like many 3D apps) that'd be another way round it I guess, but at the moment it looks like it's trying to fit in and failing miserably.
The default install also leaves several invisible files in your user folder, so you'll have to go through and try to delete them if you choose to remove it.
This is ignoring the fact that on a default install of X11 you have to click twice on windows to actually choose a tool - though not strictly a Gimp problem, most new users would get stuck right there. If it's going to see any adoption on OS X someone needs to do a port using carbon or cocoa and throw away the horrific front end. For now I'm happy paying for photoshop. I had a quick look at the code, and boy do they have their work cut-out if they want to separate the back end from the interface. Perhaps that's why they're loath to change it?
I haven't seen more cluttered menus in all my life! Why on earth are the color equalize, color normalize other colour tools in the _Layers_ menu? You would have to expect to find those in the Colour tool menus, or the Filter menus, _anywhere_ but the Layer menus.
This was far better with The Gimp 1.2.
But still, I love this thing. But for sanity's sake, please give all the menus a new better structure.
Leopard cub
Some people find the GIMP inadequate. I find the GIMP overkill. Simple xpaint does all the graphics I need to do at work. Even MS Windows Paint would suffice.
Moral of the story: use the tool that YOU need. Some people need more than the GIMP. Some need less. And for some, the GIMP is just right.
It is like the arguments over MySQL. It is adequate for some people, overkill for others, and just not SQL-compliant enough for the PostgreSQL, DB/2 or Oracle crowd (that includes me).
Pick the one that meets your need. Stop bitching about others that have different needs. And if the problem is that Photoshop or whatever doesn't run on Linux, complain to Adobe. Oracle and IBM moved their "professional" database packages to Linux ages ago. And even Adobe supplies Acrobat reader for Linux.
I am anarch of all I survey.
There is more than one person who posts to Slashdot. IT IS NOT A GESTALT ENTITY.
His website is running Apache on Linux. In his defense, he probably isn't aware of that.
XV is a gold mine. It has just the function set needed for most operations you'd like to do quickly. Crop, resize, a few color management options and different save and load formats.
It is small and quick to open. I think it has the exact features you need for digicam work (as you do) or pre-web-publishing work (creating cropped thumnails instead of resiezed ones).
Thanks for reminding me of it, it has been a couple of years since I used it daily.
The Speedy Viking
Must be about 15 years?
Is it no wonder that the GIMP is still catching up? It's only on about version 2, previous to that it was version 1.2. So go back to Photoshop 1 or 2 and compare that to the GIMP. I think they've done a lot of good work in such a short time. Cinepaint which is based on GIMP has been used in many Hollywood films, basically because they can alter it to suit their needs, no need to ask Adobe for features.
If we reskin GIMP to look EXACTLY like PS, would that make you happy?
Yes! More work would still be needed, but that would be a killer. In the FOSS-Unixy world we have vi modes for EMACS and even (for the truly lost) EMACS bindings for everything including vi. Well, the same happens in the graphical-editing world.
My 3D-designing friends have all learned to model in old apps and have since moved on to newer systems. All of them, to a man, have a heavily tweak their UI, with new key shortcuts and whatnot, so that it works like the old one they are used to (note it is a matter of habit, and not of intuitiveness).
Corel Draw did something like that with version 9, I believe, which could be turned into either Freehand or Illustrator at the touch of a button. And I don't mean a mere reskinnning, either. Fundamentals like bezier curve editing modes and graphical transforms were turned upside down, in some cases quite literally.
So bring it on! How difficult would it be to have a checkbox in the preferences that says: "think I am Photoshop"? I want to use space for panning, space-(alt-ctrl) for zooming, etc. *just as I am used to already*. That would helm me, and others like me, get into the Gimp vibe more easily.
It is not like we are not trying. Give us a hand.
A final note: EMACS has a vi mode and vice-versa because their users are programmers. The heavy-duty professional users who needed these feature most could add them themselves. This isn't the case with graphics apps. But the opposite is also true: the programmers are at most casual users, and they need the help from serious artists with professional needs. Some collaboration is in order.
http://barrapunto.com/ - News for nerds, en español
I think that the caring part is changing in the OSS community, and that is good to see. There are still plenty of developers who want to make software with good user interfaces, and mean well but just don't have the skills. Time to get serious, time to Educate thyself. User interface, interaction design or whatever you want to call it isn't "touchy feely", personal preference or "whatever you are used to". There are real design principals and concepts here that are every bit as rational and useful as any in the Software Engineering realm. It is not voodoo. These design principals and concepts can be learnt and successfully applied just like other areas of software development such as network programming, computer security or object oriented programming etc. And just like these areas/fields in software development if want to have a chance of doing them well you will need to do some study, read up on the subject. Hell, you might even find it interesting. :-)
--
Simon
Many people do things differently just for the sake of being different. Most of the time these people are taking a step backwards.
I've used Paint Shop for a long time, it's my paint program of choice by far. Sure, I've tried Photo Shop a few times here and there, and while I think many of the individual tools are better than Paint Shop's, I find the overall user experience in Paint Shop far superior.
That being said, my knowledge of Paint Shop does translate over to Photo Shop to a large extent. Although I might not know exactly where something is, I usually have a general idea of where to look for it and it doesn't take long to track down.
On the other hand, I tried the GIMP a few years back and had the opposite experience. I didn't know where anything was and had no clue where to even begin looking for it. No sweat, it was free to install and it was just as free to uninstall. Just like a lot of GIMP users have said, if you don't like it, don't use it.
Everyone's happy now right? I don't think so.
I think the foundation of Open Source is that if I make X then someone else will make Y. A lot of critics ask what an Open Source programmer gets out of working on a project for free. The answer is really simple if you think about it, they support and foster the idea of Open Source which in turns inspires others to create Open Source projects that will meet their needs.
Open Source could easily kick the crap out of proprietary software, if people could just get the hell over themselves that is.
If programmers would realize there is a lot more to a software application than lines of code. A carpenter can build a house from a set of blue prints, therefore a carpenter can draw a set blue prints, however, there is a reason there are architects.
If Open Source projects would strive to serve the community instead of their egos. This program does what I want it to do so if you don't like it, don't use it and STFU isn't an Open Source project, it's a personal utility.
If people would realize that less is often more. It's better to be a supporting member of a team that created an outstanding project than the leader of a team that created a crappy project.
If people would realize that people only need one application for a given purpose, one that works instead of 50 that don't.
If there actually was an Open Source Community.
...that you get what you pay for.
Photoshop is expensive because it's the best. If you feel like being a cheapass in the name of freedom, fine. Feel morally superior.
In the meantime, us smart people will be using Photoshop and owning the rest of you on Fark and Somethingawful.
GIMP is a prime example of what's wrong with Linux coding these days-- you have to think of how it'll work from the perspective of the end-user.
Sure, us Windows users may have trouble the first few times we use Photoshop, but we can hit F1... and what's this? Help files! Lots of help files! Well-organized help files, even!
You can trumpet the advantages of Linux all you want, but when it comes down to it, the vast majority of people (including me) won't switch until we can do everything we can on a Windows PC as well as a Windows PC can do it.
No doubt the usual smartasses will now chime in with the usual bad jokes about bugs and security holes.
GIMP, The command line does all my image editing for me. UI's are for wimps. Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913): Gimp \Gimp\, n. [OF. guimpe, guimple, a nun's wimple, F. guimpe, OHG. wimpal a veil G. wimpel pennon, pendant. See {Wimple}, n.] A narrow ornamental fabric of silk, woolen, or cotton, often with a metallic wire, or sometimes a coarse cord, running through it; -- used as trimming for dresses, furniture, etc. Gimp nail, an upholsterer's small nail. Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913): Gimp \Gimp\, v. t. To notch; to indent; to jag. Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913): Gimp \Gimp\, a. [W. gwymp fair, neat, comely.] Smart; spruce; trim; nice. [Obs. or Prov. Eng.] WordNet (r) 2.0: gimp n : disability of walking due to crippling of the legs or feet [syn: {lameness}, {limping}, {gimpiness}, {gameness}, {claudication}] Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms (Version 1.9, June 2002): GIMP General / GNU Image Manipulation Program (Linux, Graphik, GNU)
Who moved my sig?
I doubt the most /.ers even would grasp PS and what it's all about. The headline should give you an impression. You _can_ do some usefull stuff with Gimp, but only on a _very_ limited scale compared to PS.
This guy obviously is somebody who uses PS for a living. It's a shame he doesn't come to what makes PS really tick.
Gimp 2.0 has all the editing features and the most basic layers. And THATS IT. Imagine a guy used to emacs checking in on this Notepad thing everyones talking about. Mr. Emacs would spend like 2 minutes before getting the impression that he's wasting his time.
PS is the reference for all GFX programms. It has features that you use twice every minute once you know them, but are lightyears ahead of any other program out there. You can do things with PS you wouldn't even think of doing with other pixel editors. Very much like Notepad compared to Jedit. Gimp 2.0 actually can be used for usefull things but it is by no means in the same ballpark as PS.
Anybody saying that this guy probably didn't look properly doesn't know what he's talking about.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If he thinks Gimp has a bad UI (last time I checked I would've agreed), then apparently he's never seen Blender. Whoah!
...at least, has done for me for months now. See this proof-of-concept screenshot of 7.0 running under Mandrake Linux 9.2 with the January 2004 WINE SRPMs out of Cooker, rebuilt on the 9.2 system.
However, if you've used GIMP 2.0, there are very few reasons left for "I absolutely have to use PhotoShop". If you're doing 48-bit colour, maybe, but FilmGIMP does that already. Dunno what happened the fonts, maybe the OS X version of X11 doesn't render them very well. They seem to be fine under Mandrake Linux, but OTOH Mandrake do patch XFS for light hinting. It loads files very fast, but I think the dialog box from which you do this is very... dated. I'd bet most of Joe's problems stem from having to unlearn PhotoShopisms rather than them being missing from The GIMP.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It'll raise the odds of relatively new stuff like removable hard disks (USB and FireWire, at least) working flawlessly OOTB.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No one is seriously comparing The GIMP to PhotoShop are they? Um, CMYK? Yeah, I know they say that The GIMP 2.0 supports it, but, seriously now, kiddies, I'm a professional. The GIMP, like Linux is a toy.
If it were email, I'd ask them "you have a delete key, don't you?" Since it's a blog, scroll down. Boy, that was tough</sarcasm>. Move along, nothing to see here, folks... (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
So? Neither is "the open source community". Yet Slashdotters continue to flame down the open source community as a whole, just because of a vocal minority. Until Slashdotters have fixed this attitude problem, I will continue to treat Slashdotters like a single entity.
...you forgot one thing: WINE is backed by Linux, and all operating systems are not created equal. Lotus Notes may well be a slug under WINE, but not everything is. Recompile WINE without debugging and try again. Despite the translation layer and lots of stuff being done the hard way because a replacement DLL for the easy way hasn't been written yet, some things still run noticeably faster under WINE than natively.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...but it's still pretty limited. It's way more than most people will need, but still shy of PhotoShop's benchmark for the absolute experts. You also have to switch to FilmGIMP for 48-bit colour, which costs you a fair bit of functionality comapred to standard GIMP (unless, of course, you're editing commercial movies with it :-)
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Could have fooled me, it seems like everyone here sits around and whines about everything on Earth. :)
standard WINE (Jan2004 release), not CrossOver, under Mandrake Linux 9.2, no native DLLs.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I haven't read the article yet, but the comments by eye-of-the-beholder sound very familiar. Of course, every professional software user has his own very unique needs. Someone needs 16-bit per channel support, others need 24-bit per channel, yet others will never be happy without 32-bit or even 64-bit support. It is, however, impossible to write a program that would satisfy every potential user. Look at the previous version of Photoshop - it is clearly missing some necessary and trivial functionality - that was added in the last version. Does that sound like a reason to blame Adobe for not doing their job the last time? But it isn't.
The only realistic way to make a software used by everyone is either to utilise monopoly tactics or to spend years on incrementally improving it with every subsequent release. There are already thousands of people whose needs are perfectly met by Gimp. With time more features will be added, interface will be improved and more and more users will be converted (because their uniqie needs will be met).
Taking a stance like the critics often do is silly. It's like refusing to play Unreal Tournament until they add a clown player model. OK, they added that, but now I need a model of Kermit the frog.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The GIMP 2.0 doesn't do any of those things for me. I'm using it under Mandrake Linux 10.0 in several places.
The GIMP 2.0pre3 also doesn't do those things on my wife's machine (Mandrake 9.2).
And yes, you can use PhotoShop (at least v7.0) under WINE (that shot under the Jan2004 release pulled from Cooker and recompiled for 9.2).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I really know little about photoshop or the GIMP, but I found the GIMPs "intellegent scissors" feature much easier to use than the equiviliant in Photoshop. However, the GIMP doesn't seem to be able to copy and paste images between applications (at least on Linux). That's a big disadvantage from my point of view.
...and it rocks! (-:
It's not InDesign and won't swap native files with it, but it does work some modern miracles with PDFs and the like, including animation and transparency.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Damn right! Could you give us pointers to stuff you have developed? If you code as well as you argue, I want to try them.
http://barrapunto.com/ - News for nerds, en español
I couldn't figure either out. Too many damn windows and tools. I couldn't even tell you how to draw a box in either.
Give me Paint. Its not changed in what, 10 years? And all the tools are right there handy for ya.
I do, at present use Photoshop and Gimp.
I try at all opportunities to switch to OSS. Not because it might be better but because
it's predictable. I can rely on it. I don't have to trust a company to be honest with me - it's inherent.
If x86 dies it doesn't have to go abandonware.
This is the main reason I choose OSS these days. Too often in the past I bought software (or even hardware with firmware), only to find the company abandon it, treat me bad.
It least with OpenSource I can't expect no support.
My Windows install is always on the line:
- will be University XP license still be valid in 6 months time?
- will Windows 2000 be discontinued and unsupported next year?
- will there be a compulsory upgrade for Photoshop next year at an unbudgetable price?
So you see, I'm taking a risk getting used to Photoshop because I never know what the future has in store. I'm not in control. No freedom.
This is the problem will all propreitory software.
It doesn't matter how good or bad the alternatives are, it just can't compete... the quality of the software only takes the argument so far,
especially when I've spent 10 on my computer in the last year.
A blog I run for the wealth
I don't care if the GIMP is different. I care that every time I have tried to use it, it has literally driven me to apoplexy. I can't think of a program which has made me as angry as the GIMP. It is VERY BADLY designed.
No comparison to Photoshop is needed. I'm not a Photoshop user, so I don't get frustrated with the GIMP because I miss Photoshop's UI. It pisses me off all by itself, thank you very much.
Hopefully someone can come up with a compromise;
- OpenSource backend, ClosedSource frontend,
something like that.
Or:
- ClosedSourced with agreement to release source in event of company liquidation, discontinue line etc
Or:
- More software licenses like QT
and so forth.
or:
- invest in people, not software. Pay geeks to run operate GNU software.
It would be nice for OpenSource to do it all but I think there'll always be problems if it remains Community driven. I still haven't seen a OpenSource project with a GUI / interface that has really impressed me in terms of phycology.
A blog I run for the wealth
Th Gimp is the second worse UI design in an application that I have seen. It is non-intuitive to the max. The first application goes to one that I have to implement at work and it shall go anonymous.
No manual for the GIMP? WTF? I studied and used GIMP at least four or five years ago (and did some advanced scripting-based things then that even Photoshop couldn't come near!), and there was a large and extensive User's Manual even back then! I even printed it out. I would be quite surprised if the manual no longer exists now.
Gee, let's try some Google: GIMP User's Manual, there that wasn't so hard was it.
And you call this an "overall problem with OpenSource software"? You blatantly lie, then generalise the lie to all OSS? That's extreme FUD, and seriously makes me contemplate that Adobe has sponsored this "review".
We warned them that they would find the GIMP odd, and that the windows version was likely to crash on them, but to say to themselves "it's free, it's free." Some will use it, others will not.
Some observations:
-- Mein Systemadminstrator hat einen großen schwarzen Moustache.
I'm sorry, but this review was written by a whiny mac user who can't handle more than one button on a mouse without becoming confused. If he's going to make valid complaints against the quality of the program, then I'm all ears, but I wonder if when he was complaining about the non-antialising diagonal lines, if he wasn't just using the wrong tool. There is a line drawing tool that purposfully doesn't antialize lines, and one that does. My guess is that brainless couldn't figure that out. I have had issues with the program running slugishly on non-linux platforms, specifically the windows version, so this might be a valid complaint for people who use those platforms, however those problems evaporate when running the program on linux, which in truth is the platform the program was meant to run on anyway. I hate reading biased reviews, they're next to worthless for someone really interested in the program being reviewed.
Who knows whether the GIMP core is designed and separated from the UI well enough to actually fork resp. revive a KDE-variant on that?
(hopefully, without a thousand config options...)
"...Elements cost bellow $100 ..."
Those bellows sure are cheap these days!
So we have a guy that has been using Photoshop for 20 years, and then one days tries to use The Gimp, stares at the interface, and then says "it's different from Photoshop, so it sucks" ?
I might not have 20 years of experience in graphic design and typography, but I started by using The Gimp, and last time I was given a job the boss told me to use photoshop... I just couldn't understand how it worked. So I downloaded the Gimp, and made what he asked, and he saw no difference.
Of course, if I really took time, I'm sure that I could learn Photoshop, and see how impressive it is. But I have all the features I want with The Gimp and I won't change because it would make me loose too much time (and time is money). And it's basically what that guy says.
gimp is obviously better than uh-oh-photoshop.
and it has customizable keyboard shortcuts, which allows you to work on image without even moving your mouse off the image (to reach uh-oh-lame-icons)
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Seems to me the author doesen't understand OpenSource. If he doesen't like it, he shouldn't use it, rewrite it or pay someone to rewrite it. It's free after all. If all those Photoshop users that dislike gimp would pay someone to change it like they pay those who made photoshop they would certainly like it.
Just a small GIMP-tip: If you enable mouse-based window focus the GIMP will be 7000 times more efficient.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
I havn't tried GIMP, so I don't know if it falls into that category or not, but if the UI was designed to function in the same method as common Windows or Mac graphics applications (read Photoshop or PSP), I doubt people would complain.
So I'm going to complain.
The one thing that's pissed me off most about GIMP (and I've only started using it recently, under Windows) is that there's a File menu but it doesn't have a Save or Save As option. The image window has no menu at all. I'm supposed to figure out that right-clicking the image will give me a menu with File in it,and pick up Save from there. Why?
A close second is pissing me off right now. I started GIMP, opened the File menu to make sure I wasn't talking out of my ass, and then Alt-Tabbed back into Mozilla. The damned menu is sitting on top of Slashdot, as I type this comment. Why? Dear God, why?
I tolerate it because I can't afford Photoshop, and the GIMP lets me use the PanoTools filters. That doesn't mean I like it. Nor does it mean that I shouldn't expect the damned basics to work properly, or at least the same as everything else.
All this person seems to have done is banter about how much Gimp sucks because 1) It's not OSX and 2) It's not Photoshop.
You can tell that the user hasn't got a clue what he is talking about. The major points of his argument included that Gimp has menus in the windows, just like all Linux/Unix X11 and Windows programs; and that the Open dialog tried to 'protect' him, so Unix must have all these weird protections.
Obviously he is unfamiliar with the X11 and Windows style interfaces, so he is unqualified to comment on that. We can disregard this portion of his review. All of the "Alien Planet" comments are irrelavent.
He is also obviously unqualified to comment on the quality of the Open dialog. On Linux, it gives access to everything from / up, so there's no contest here.
We can also safely ignore his banter about "What does gimp mean," "It must be compiled," and "I had to pay for this crap." Also, as a review of Gimp, we don't care about the specific troubles of installing X11 on Mac, especially noting that this person is a mac zealot from his comment: "Running OS X soon knocks all notions of 'The computer for the rest of us' out of you!"
The tool pallet complaints are blatantly wrong. The first 6 tools are selection; the next is a path tool; Next the color picker; next is zoom control; then angle measurement; then move, crop, rotate, scale, shear, perspective, and flip, all Transformation Tools; then Text; then the Fill and Gradient, which are both fill-type tools; then Pencil, Paintbrush, eraser, airbrush, pen, and clone tool, all direct editing tools (they draw lines); then the convulver, smudge, and dodge/burn tool, all some form of touch-up utilities. We can disregard the toolbox complaint.
If your brain is too small to ignore the icons in the menu, you're just stupid; I'm sorry but there's no other way to put it. They're QUITE ignorable, and even HELP me to figure out what I'm doing. Looking for a picture is easier than looking for a word.
Live preview works on Linux, 'nuff said, disregard that.
Ignore the cost and support issues. Whoever sold him this thing is making money from someone's stupidity.
So the valid points that are left:
- Gimp is horrid with big images. No contest there.
- The FreeType library doesn't do such a great job until you enable anti-aliasing, which is illegal.
- Lines could possibly be better anti-aliased
- There's a lack of every-plugin-everyone-ever-needs or at least 1:1 with PS
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Large scale projects routinely produce something less than desirable; this is a part of any creative process. I'm sure nobody knows what major flaws exist better than GIMP hackers (similarly, I'm sure Photoshop's developers can point out big flaws with Photoshop). I don't mind repeating flaws or bringing them to wider public attention, but I get no impression that this reviewer is aware of the process by which free software is developed and how that process includes the users far more than proprietary alternatives.
Also, along the lines of "why would people [bother]?", people bother because not everyone wants to become dependant upon a corporation that treats us like crap (remember whose actions held Dmitry Sklyarov in US jail?). Some people want software freedom and are willing to work to get it.
That this person paid for support they're not getting is unfortunate but that is just one firm from whom they could have bought support. The nice thing about a free market is that you can have multiple vendors competing for your business. Monopolies don't make this possible, software freedom does. All proprietary software are monopolies.
The font rendering demonstration--is that the result of not being able to leverage Apple's patented font rendering technology or a bonafide GIMP flaw? If the former, we see the same lack of software freedom hobbling the ability to provide competition. If it's the latter, is this flaw seen on other platforms too? I'm not against addressing real flaws, I'm against not having enough information with which to assess the problem.
How much of the problems noted have to do with the artist and not the program? Jimmac produces impressive work using The GIMP. How long did Jimmac spend with The GIMP and what difficulties does a long-time user see? This input would be valuable to know as well.
The GIMP needs work, no doubt, but so many points in this review leave me with more questions that I am left with a bad impression overall. I look forward to further GIMP improvements and revised reviews that track the progress of the GIMP.
Digital Citizen
I'm not trying to start a flamewar, but [see my sig]:
....
I don't think I actually ever bothered to steal a copy of Photoshop, so for most of my uses when I was largely a Windows guy I would use Irfanview, which kicks ass if you don't have much to do, and crappy old MS-Paint.
When I finally needed to move out of kindergarten and get a "real" graphics program, I started playing with the Gimp - only because it came with a linux distro I was fooling with at the time.
Thus, the Gimp was my first exposure to "real" graphics programs.
On the Gimp, I learned how to use layers. I made my first gradient. I stopped downloading desktop pics from Spymac or wherever and started making my own. I eventually grew into a fairly solid artist. I'm considering making a huge piece and putting it in the local art show next year in the mixed media category. I think I could win.... The Gimp really has done everything I could ask of it.
When I tried my dad's Photoshop, I couldn't find my way around, because I was used to the Gimp. I thought PS was laid out badly, because I was used to the Gimp. I couldn't do much at all, I was stumbling around, spending most of my time searching for things like how to draw a straight line in PS, because I was used to the Gimp. A lot of my time was spent mumbling, "hmm... that's stupid!".
I find that the layout might matter the first little while you're using an app, but once you get used to it, all apps approach the same natural level. My friends who use WindowsMediaPlayer are as fast and efficient in it as I am in iTunes. I struggle with apps my dad zings around in, and he struggles with the ones I'm awesome in. But our effectiveness at getting our various jobs done is roughly the same.
It's like learning a language: I am *fluent* in the Gimp. I barely speak "tourist" Photoshop. And sitting at Photoshop thinking "this would be so damn simple if I was on my OWN computer using the Gimp" is frustrating. It takes me a lot longer to get things done.
The Gimp can do everything I ask of it, and when I think it can't and want to be surprised, I simply
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
Sure! I developed dvmatte pro, which is a comprehensive After Effects and Final Cut Pro plug-in for doing blue and greenscreen removals with DV (and other high-compression-ratio formats). We have a demo on the site -- although I've been doing bug-fixing the past few days, so the demo is not rock solid. We had sporadic reports of crashes that were impossible to repeat on my end, but after combing through the code line-by-line and inlining a few functions of questionable threadsafety, everything seems to be working for the testers...
Also, I'm also involved with a group called criticalartware, and we have a variety of interests -- among them, drawing parallels between the early video and computer art moment and the current moment in artware. People tend to think that since new media and artware is "new," we need all-new discussions and theories. In fact, these discussions were going on in the 60s and 70s, just with slightly different terminology.
Anyway, as part of our goal to facilitate connections, we designed (and I wrote) "liken," which is our discussion platform and site architecture. It autogenerates two-way "paths" between posts ('nodes') based on word frequency, and the text of a node is automagically linked to other nodes whose name appears in the text. Like a wiki, but you don't have to specify links -- they just appear. So if the word "liken" appears in your post, it'll link to the "liken" node. But more interesting, if the phrase "liken interface" appears, it turns into a popup menu, with the choices "liken, liken interface, interface," each leading you to a node. Also, the more popular these links are, the better they're ranked in an Everything2-like sidebar.
Also, we export an XML description of all the pathways and linkages in the site, so that people can create entirely alternate/critical interfaces and interpretations of liken. One such interpretation is the nodemap, which is a clickable "overhead" view of every node and path. But what we're really looking forward to is someone doing a 3D interface where you're riding a dolphin through the site.
Hopefully because this is an old thread, our poor EV1Servers.net SCO-approved Linux box won't get slashdotted... :)
- ben
You're only proving everyone's point that most of us are just a bunch of overzealous, mindless open source software advocates who think that M$ sux bcuz it r M$ n nt fr33. I get that kind of flak a lot, and it's annoying because I have valid reasons why I use open source software. These range from "Because it's BETTER than the other crap" with valid points as to WHY it's better; to "Because I don't need all that extra junk that the $500 alternative offers." In the latter case, I usually have an objective view of the applications, and can recommend whether you should get the OSS one or the proprietary one based on your needs.
Really, don't just stand there picking your nose acting like you know everything. Make a REAL argument or shut up.
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All of your points are important ones, but you omitted the most important one: user testing.
Early and often, developers should get their product into the hands of key *users* and performing formal and informal user testing. Thinking about UI alone won't solve or even uncover important usability issues. By following something like the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, or Microsoft's Interface guidelines you'll get close to where you need to be, but the last and most important parts still require active testing.
Any professional designer does usability testing, whether it's airplane cockpits, voice mail systems or web sites. Usability tests can be as simple as drawing wireframes and using sticky notes, with a designer as the "operating system" and the user pointing and telling the designer what they expect to hapen and when. Tests can be customized development versions of the program you're working on with click hotspot metering and video of the users using the program.
Maybe it's just grabbing a few people passing in the hallway outside your office and saying, "hey, come here, tell me what you think of this," when you're still in development. Whatever you do, you've got to test with a small audience before you release to the big one.
A graphic designer is going to earn the price of a new full version of Photoshop in 15-30 hours. Maybe even faster than that if she's good and been in the business a while.
The price is only a small hurdle. If the choice is between expensive software that works well vs. free software that drives you mad, the designer is going to consider the fleeting nature of youth, health, sanity, and life and drop the Franklins.
Rotate, then crop. Who names these things?
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If all that's true, then why is she looking for alternatives that everybody knows isn't the best? Why bother with alternatives because it costs time to learn and even review?
It's not like she knew how to use PS automatically by looking at it. Too many times the word un/intuitive have been abused to bash Open Source. If something is easy to learn, it's not intuitive, and it's just that learning ease. If programming is intuitive to you, then how come your average granny don't feel the same way?
- The tools are not grouped in a coherent manner
- The interface is littered with icons where none are necessary, making the application appear more complex than it is
Neither has anything to do with Photoshop--other than that Photoshop does things the better way. Both criticisms speak directly to why the GIMP puts off new users: the lack of coherent groupings makes it harder to learn and remember what each tool/function does and where to find it, and the cluttering of the interface puts off newbies by making them sort through more visual 'noise' to find whatever it is they're looking for.In both cases, the GIMP interface increases the learning curve with no corresponding benefit to power users--a lose-lose tradeoff and just plain bad design.
Beyond that, he also makes some pretty painful observations about the quality of the GIMP's output--or is he perhaps just being closed-minded about he intrinsinc beauty of misshapend letterforms?
All your post tell us is that you're either not willing to read criticsms of the GIMP or are not interested in considering them on their merits.
If learning an interface is so hard for you, maybe you shouldn't bother learning the software. Learning is not intuition, and it takes effort to learn, which is totally opposite with intuition.
Open Source software is Free, but also being free is no excuse for you to whine about how hard it is for you to put some effort learning it, because you're used to another interface.
By the average definition of intuitiveness, if the Open Source coders find it intuitive to create these softwares, then why isn't it intuitive for you to create your own that fits your intuitiveness?
Some whiner is going to cry this attitude of make your own is anti-adoption by the masses. Well, all I can say is until you contribute to these projects, you have no right to demand things to be done your way just because you don't want to learn.
Because I'm not a C++ programmer. Neither is Joe Gillespie. And while I can't speak for Joe, I don't have the mathematics chops to figure a better anti-aliasing algorithm--or a better one, for that matter.
Exactly what do you call that review, then? He asked for less clutter in the menus, logical groupings of tools and better rendering of lines and type. He even provided an example of why the type rendering in the GIMP is crap. How much clearer does he need to be?
Then get the rest of the OSS/FS movement to shut the hell up about moving to OSS/FS programs.
Having hordes of evangelists running about telling everyone 'there's a better way' only to greet the folks who listen with 'I don't want to hear anything you have to say' when they point out that the way isn't necessarily better is pretty stupid, no?
Besides, who's forcing you to read the reviews/comments/whatever? If you don't give a rat's ass what non-programmers think of OSS/FS, then just don't read their opinions. Pretty simple.
would make a great rock band name;-) but isn't this the intersection of the commercial art/technology interface, where u can substitute outsourcing the learning curve, ie: paying someone 2 teach u;-)
I cannot compare GIMP to Photoshop as I do not use Windows any more and have currently no access to a machine with Photoshop right now. But my impression with The GIMP is, that for screen-oriented stuff (WWW, icons, etc.) it is certainly good enough. Also, I have done some photo editing and had the pictures printed (as regular fotos) afterwards. The result was nice for my purposes, I don't know about publishing quality.
But even if GIMP is not (yet) as good as PS (i.e. for professional graphics), it can become this (as the FilmGIMP project (what's their new name, I forgot)) has already proven.
The very negative outcome of the article makes me wonder how well done the porting to MacOSX was done and how nicely that commercial distribution of MacGIMP was setup? The example of that Helvetica text set at 18 points, for example, is totally different to what I get in GIMP when I use the text tool: perfectly set, smooth text at least as nicely done as the PS example given in the article. Is it perhaps an old version, and not well ported, either? Does anyone know?
Kind regards
zapyon
I like my spaghetti with source.
Just like Office and OpenOffice, the problem with Gimp (even 2) is that it doesn't properly support the Photoshop's PSD format.
{{.sig}}
If you believe there is a difference between Mac OS X X11 and Linux X11 you do not know anything about Mac OS. There isnt a difference. Its the same libraries using the same display protocol with the same window managers. In the last year or so Apples X11 server has popped up with a propeitary window manager that uses normal OS X windows but up until that happened someone using X11 on OS X was probably using twm.
Maybe it works "better" somehow on the exact combination of OS, window manager and implementation of X11 you have? Well I dont know. But if you are expecting the gimp to be anything resembling a "photoshop replacement", or even a replacement for MSPaint, then you cant say "if you want it to be usable you have to have this very exact combination of versions of unix and window manager and all of these things!". A graphics program has no right to have the entire machine configuration reordered for its benefit. That's totally against the entire spirit of linux and its something people would not put up with from any other open source app.
Quite some crowd feeling concerned with this. Articles of this kind, obviously written from the perspective of a non-hardcore, non-geek or techie user who solely focuses on the job he's trying to do with a piece of software, really spoke my mind. I've been using gimp for quite some years now, and altough I've gotten pretty used to the UI I never seriously considered it a match for Photoshop. No way close. Even the lastest version lacks substantial features like good color management or serious pre-print functions. The performance is not just a little worse, it's downright poor when compared to PS. There is no coherent help system, the workflow is random. I don't demand anything from the GIMP guys. They've done a great job, and gimp certainly is the best you can get for free. Fair enough, none of the gimp crew ever claim world domination or make serious comparisons to PS. It's rather the geek fraction, advocating it mindlessly because it's open source, who annoys me.
Because I certainly don't have tabs. Hopefully the newer version will fix some other stuff too.
Thanks.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
This article is not a review of the GIMP from a photoshop perspective. Instead, it is a MacHat reacting to a different UI.
/is/ somewhat jarring, but also not important. A real review is not "This does not let me to jump in and use it precisely as I use another program, so it's no good!" a real review starts by LEARNING the program, and then reviewing whether or not it can get work done.
70% of the article is "Wah wah, it doesn't look like I expect, the menus are all in non-Mac places, it doesn't use native widgets, it doesn't use native dialogs, waaah!"
Admittedly some criticisms were constructive: perhaps there should be some kind of grouping to the tool icons in the tool selector. I, for one, have never liked the "icon only" approach and would welcome some labels.
The context menu in the canvas acting as your main menu thing
A review of Linux which stated "There wasn't a button labeled 'Start' anywhere!" or something would be laughed at, as this 'review' should be.
So the scripts were sub par. A valid criticism. When I've used the GIMP they've always seemed to be handy, useful things. Perhaps a mention of what scripts SHOULD have been included would help?
This person seems largely hung up on the GIMP being not-Mac and not-Photoshop. "Some features in different places" is called "disorienting". Well you know what? Different programs are different. This is not news.
The slowness criticism was good, the notes about line-jaggedness and antialiasing were good. I disagree, but that was some good reviewing.
The misrepresentation of the GIMP as an app which can either be built by hand from sources (which it is implied is too hard for an average person to do) or purchased for an outrageous amount is simply a lie. The GIMP can be had in a precompiled for for OSX from a couple of different sources.
I'll bet a GIMP pro who had never used Photoshop or OSX would be almost as annoyed and baffled if they were plunked in front of OSX, given an installer, and old "Tell us how you think this compares to the GIMP."
Real reviews concentrate on function.
I want my Cowboyneal
The attitude is "it's too hard for me to learn/adapt to this software," so it sucks.
Actually, the criticism the author in the article levied was, I think, substantially deeper. (For my part, I am an artist-naif, I work in Gimp primarily becuase my lack of skills on that front doesn't justify my dropping more than a dime on graphics software.)
But let's assume that this "attitude" was all she raised. Guess what, she's right! The user drives the utility of the code. If the code is too hard to leearn to use or (ugh) adapt to, it sucks, and it won't stop sucking until it improves.
However, the attitude expressed here more than ratifies some of the recent criticisms levied against OSS, adressed by ESR and others -- open sourcers certainly appear to care less about usability than depth and multiplicity of function, a design model that has long been discarded by the marketplace. Not because the market customers are dumb, mind you, because unusable software isn't used, unreachable, unreliable or undocumnted features aren't used -- they aren't accessible, so they don't exist.
Being free in Open Source means these people don't take learning the software seriously, since it didn't cost them anything, so it's safe to discard it.
I suppose reasonable people may differ with the conclusion you draw here. To me, it doesn't seem that these people -- THE SERIOUS USERS SUCH AS THE AUTHOR OF THE CAPTIONED ARTICLE -- didn't take LEARNING the software seriously, but came to the reasonable conclusion that she shouldn't take the software itself seriously.
If we as open source developers don't get with it, we will evolve into irrelevance. Trust me, free isn't enough. Much of our free software, as much of the for-profit software, isn't worth what we pay for it. And in view of thse comments, if WE don't take ourselves or our own software seriously, why should she?
We must undertake to improve that, or it is WE who suck.
Photoshop is powerful but IMO is a pain to use. I've been using Photoshop longer but I still can work faster in Gimp. Not that I never use Photoshop.. it's a good program and sometimes it can do things Gimp can't. I think anyone whining that it's interface isn't Mac-like enough is missing the point of how it's interface is designed. The way it is designed is very functional, if not beautiful. Gimp is my favorite photo editing app, then Paint Shop Pro, and finally Photoshop.
My only real complaint about Gimp is that it lacks basic tools for drawing that'd be pretty easy to add. It really does seem to be more of a image manipulation program than an image creation program. I'd like to see this isse addressed.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I'm a Photoshop user and a GIMP fan.
Apple's X11 is just not a good environment for an app to run in. I've noticed a big drop in quality of the sort the author talks about too - but not between Photoshop and GIMP, no: between GIMP for Linux and GIMP for Mac. These apps need to run natively.
That said, there is also more configuration to be performed on GIMP out of the box than with Photoshop. I don't know why the default for line drawing is "perfect but slow," which is what causes those line distortions he complained about (from the GIMP's File menu, choose Preferences, then click "Image Windows" under "Interface" and un-check "Perfect-but-Slow Pointer Tracking").
GIMP is available compiled natively for Windows, but it's unstable. The best version is the one for Linux - use it there and compare that with Photoshop on Mac or Windows. You will have to learn a new interface, yes (for a while, I used nothing but the GIMP, and Photoshop seemed awkward and frustrating when I used it again; but then the GIMP seemed awkward and frustrating when I went back to it - so I understand that feeling, but the author should account for the fact that he's not used to change).
...after trolling your websites, I've concluded that your graphics are weak. You could do better even in GIMP, which also leads me to belive that you're not much of an authority on graphics programs.
What exactly is that supposed to mean?
If you took the time to do your research, you'd notice that UIs in general look like Windows on Linux; that is, the control box is on the right side of the title bar and has similar symbols; the window menu is on the left side of the title bar, and is lain out similarly; menus are at the top of the window, just under the title bar; and dialogs are in general similar to Windows dialogs (with many exceptions).
The UI on mac is much different. The control box is now on the left side of the title bar, and is a color coded candy rack; the button on the other side evidently hides the toolbar (it's been a while since I used OSX, somebody told me that was its function); menus appear on the menu bar at the top of the screen, not in the window; and I don't recall any longer what the dialogs look like.
Take into account that the UI for mac is simply a Mac UI, and the UI for most Linux graphical environmets is somehow similar to Windows. Consider that Gimp was made for those environments, and Mac users weren't.
Now tell me, what is this attitude you're talking about? Because I just don't see it.
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Dunno if anyone is still reading this thread or bot but here it goes ...
I am a programmer, and a while ago I was asked to do some graphics at work. Since I am always looking for new and exciting challenges I said sure.
Now, not having a commercial software application at hand I turned to the GIMP 2 (windows 2000). After all the graphics were not that complex and my graphics editing experience went as far as resizing, croping and changing formats.
The interface sure was weird at first, but I got used to it. There was also an anoying DOS window poping out of nowhere with some debug messages. And lastly there were the crashes (GIMP only).
In the mean time I learned about layers and masks and filters and a few other goodies. And I was able to get some cool graphics done. My boss was happy.
I though, now that I know a bit more about the graphics stuff I want to give photoshop a try!
The interface sure looked nicer then GIMP's interface, and a quick browse through the menus it looked like this had much more functionality then the GIMP. Then I tried doing some graphics like the ones I did at work, and that's where the "fun" begins:
Couldn't find anything because the menus where so messy. When I found something I wondered why it was called whatever it was called. It didn't make any sense.
I also installed photoshop elements. Since it is a simpler version, maybe it was easier to use. Same crap but without the functionality of even the GIMP.
Tried both photoshop and elements for another couple of days thinking that it could only get better. Well, it got worse. Frustation settled in and the end result was uninstalling both.
My guess is because I got used to the clunky GIMP interface and intuitive menus in the first place, when it came to change to photoshop, I didn't like it. Not that I am doubting Photoshop almigthyness in terms of graphics editors, however, IMHO, when it comes to graphics for the web, GIMP 2 is rich in functionality and easy to use.
Therefore I fully undertsand the frustation of experienced and professional photoshop users when trying something else, including the GIMP.
Are you running gimp 2.0? Here is a screen shot of Gimp 2.0 running under MS Windows XP, the Linux version has the same UI.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
That page really opened my eyes about the HCI interaction. I have sent the link to the Y Windows Development mailing list in the hopes that maybe Y Windows will incorporate these principles. Who knows? Maybe Y Windows will eventually beat out Mac OS...
Every time you run "emerge", a Microsoft drone dies.
A major reason is that the Gimp doesn't have a decent preview feature for filters. If you're using the program's built-in tools (e.g. Levels, Curves, Color Balance, etc.), you can see the effect on the image window as you tweak the controls, scroll the image, zoom in and out, etc. With plugin filters, OTOH, if there's ANY preview it's the plugin that provides a little tiny thumbnail in its dialog. So, if I'm tweaking the balances in the channel mixer, I can't preview the results in detail at all before applying the filter. I need to apply filter, look at and make mental note of results, undo, open up the filter again, readjust, apply, compare to previous results from memory, etc. A decent preview mechanism would fix this.
But even with this improvement, Photoshop would still beat the Gimp, due to adjustment layers. The Gimp is not a bad program at all, but it's just not up to par with PS.
Are you adequate?
The Wikipedians keep bragging about how much better their site is than real encyclopedias. And their "arguments" for this are not based on any actual comparisons of article quality, but rather (a) number of articles (a.k.a. "we got more articles than any real encyclopedia, even if a huge number of them are stubs and/or on topics nobody cares about like anime"); (b) placement in search results (a.k.a. "if Google searches return our articles all the time, it must be because they're good, not because we're effectively spamming the web"); (c) "bazaar" contribution model ("we allow anybody to contribute, and that obviously makes our project superior! No need to compare article quality!"); (d) selective anecdotal evidence ("We looked *really* hard to find a handful errors in Britannica, that Wikipedia doesn't have!"-- pot, kettle, black).
In short, the Wikipedians really deserve to be made major fun of.
Are you adequate?
dvmatte looks interesting, criticalartware rocks, and liken is amazing. I am there as kandinski, I don't know how much time I will have to actually participate, but kudos on a great idea, a better execution and what seems like a tightly knit community.
http://barrapunto.com/ - News for nerds, en español
dont think the comparison is a fair gimp/photoshop comparison in general.
On a mac yes, mabe.
It looks like freetype wasnt compiled with propper hinting (for the font example)
And saying that MacGIMP is slow (probably true), but its only recently been ported.
If your looking for a general gimp/photoshop comparison then checkout gimp in linux compiled optimized for your processor- etc.
I have done some comparisons of loading 500meg+ files and photoshop didnt do any better.
'coherent' and 'increases the learning curve' are relative to Photoshop. In your own words - Neither has anything to do with Photoshop--other than that Photoshop does things the better way, which is to say 'has everything to do with Photoshop'. You don't just strip a Photoshop user's background off before trying GIMP. Thus you have a context - and in that context PS 'does it better'. But, at the same time, nothing will do it better than the original - at most, you can get a perfect UI clone. So this kind of criticism is wrong. Fair would be to compare learning curves for complete newbies, some starting with PS, some with GIMP.
There are valid points about GIMP's interface to be made, but placing them out of the proper context just defeats the purpose.
So yes, there are valid criticisms that can be brought to GIMP. Same for most any program - gee, nothing is perfect (PS has its share too). Unfortunately, you didn't make them.
Let's line up the cute catgirls and draw the tools on their nipples with magic markers, then photo 'em really close up and replace the toolbox icons with those. Then the GIMP will have the most intuitive interface ever! :)
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Nonsense. Coherent groupings help the user guess at--and remember--functionality of the different tools, and also improve a user's ability to guess at and remember where a given tool is located.
Whether I've used Photoshop or not, remembering where a group of functionally similar tools is located is easier than remembering the location of each tool seperately. More, having those tools grouped visually helps both in terms of guessing at what a tool does ('well, this widget here is grouped the fill and eyedropper tool, so it must have something to do with colors...').
This isn't a matter of 'it's good because it's the way Photoshop does it' as you insist. It's a matter of 'it's good because it gives the user more information to work from'.
The GIMP's tools palette does put similar tools next to one another, but there is no separation from dissimilar tools. That is, you might have the selection tools all on one row, or they might be split on a few rows depending on how wide the toolbox is. A better solution would be to add seperators to the toolbox to ensure that distinct groups stay distinct regardless of the width of the toolbox.
Forget the features. Really. CMYK and (maybe) 16-bit image handling can stay on the list, sure, but otherwise the rest can go on the back burner. I still remember how to do things in P'shop without all the layer effects and whatnot, and am perfectly happy to give up a bit of that in exchange for a free-as-in-speech app, at least for the time being. Just get the output up to snuff, dammit. And get the UI cleaned up. It's really a screen-hog--worse even than Macromedia's apps, which I'd not thought possible.
I'm running the GIMP on WinXP Pro here. The type is much better than what Joe got, but even with FreeType installed it's still nowhere near the standard set by Fireworks, Photoshop, etc.
Nor are the lines--and while I've read plenty about the FreeType issue, I've read nothing whatever that would indicate the poor rendering of lines Joe had was an aberration unique to OS X. My experience in futzing about with it on Windows (and as yet that's all I've done--futz about) idicates that the line quality is just sub-par in general, but further experimentation may change my opinion.
The OP and replies here are such a pack of whinges!
I used PS for a number of years both on Mac and PC. I used GIMP more recently and I struggled at first with its interface, but *as with PS* I read the manual and figured out how the damned thing works.
Now I much prefer the GIMP.
I really cannot believe how lame all these complaints about the GIMPs interface are - no, it doesn't look like a Mac app nor does it look like PS. But FFS! Different != bad.
These programs have very different layouts. PS has a few features that the GIMP doesn't. Other than that they both do the same job very well.
I've also concluded that Slashdot's glory days are long, long over...
"All hail prince of the obvious."
- Dominar Rygel XVI
How often do you do a defrag? Yes, even XP and beyond benefit from those. How often do you sweep for spyware? Did any spyware come with your computer too? How about viruses? Does a "black-box" update or hotfix ever crash your SSL server or undo other security updates? How about updates reinstalling software you removed because you don't want it? Has any update silently added DRM restrictions to everything you do?
"Only without hassles", my donkey! (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
BSD is dying! (-:
Seriously: yeah, fine, whatever. Any modern BSD (possibly except OpenBSD on SMP) should give you comparable performance gains. More so on SMP since X11 means display tasks are a separate thread.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
A lot is said that the F/OSS propeller heads don't get the Zen of GUI and that their attempts at GUIdom are as rough as a corncob. But while you would expect the propeller heads to be weak in the human-factors area, you would think they would be geniuses at algorithms and at coding.
OK, lets blow off the GUI tuning because that is the realm of people who talk in buzzwords. How about making lines straight and fonts accurate? OK, so GIMP is a little rough around the edges, give it time and all of that. OK, how about the slow algorithms?
I am thinking along the line of some sports cars -- Spartan appointments, hard seats, stiff ride, but boy can that thing corner! The F/OSS alternative has a rough GUI and a few quirks, but does it does it have the performance? Well, no.
Now BeOS was not F/OSS, but it was an alternative to Windows, MacOS, and everything else and there was some hobbyist interest in it. BeOS may have had its quirks, and it kind of melted away before I ever had a chance to look into it, and there was very little in the way of applications for it, but the story is that it could perform, although at the cost of figuring out how to write multi-threaded apps.
If the reviewer could have said, "the GUI is quirky, but boy is this thing fast!", I think that would have gotten a lot of people's attention because a lot of us would put up with novelty in exchange for speed, because not having to sit around waiting for something to happen is a big UI feature. But the reviewer said it was quirky, buggy, and slow, and people are slamming the reviewer for not giving the UI a chance. So to the extent that Photoshop is more geometrically accurate and faster, yeah, it is not like Photoshop.
The attitude I refer to, is the one which states that the user will take what they're given, and they'll like it, or they're a bunch of whiney little bastards who shouldn't be using computers in the first place.
The users want a standard Mac style UI? Then they'll go with the software that gives that to them. Saying that they should be happy with an X style UI, so that's what they get, means you don't get users.
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And my first complaint was speed. Sixty odd megs and it slowed down to a crawl, when I've got a nice shiny new work computer with oodles of memory.
Much slow shuffling later, I finally realise that there's a 'tile cache' I can set to a significantly larger value to make it all work as fast as I expected. Why did I need to find this and set it myself? Couldn't it have been set to a suitable value when first installed, or even left to runtime to allocate memory as needed? Speed wasn't a problem ONCE I KNEW TO LOOK FOR SOME OPTION. I'm off to try and find a suggestions box...
Christopher
I don't care if its free.
I don't care if its open-source.
But some of us do. Really. It's a feature that Photoshop probably will never have.
"Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand." - Homer Simpson