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Hack turns GIMP into Photoshop Look-alike
Mr_Silver writes "One of the many complaints about the GIMP is that of its user interface and how it should be more like Photoshop. If you feel that this is true then Scott Moschella has hacked together GimpShop which turns GIMP's user interface into something more akin to Photoshop for OSX. However, if you're not running that operating system, fret not, because there is a version for Linux too."
...gimp have all the features of Photoshop though? Or atleast alot of them (I wouldn't even know how to use the complex features).
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
It might be a good idea to seed a torrent for this before the 40Mb downloads crush his server.
For those who don't follow gimp development, I think this has been one of the often requested "features" for many years. Gimp developers usually say if you want it - do it yourself. Finally someone did.
This is really fantastic. A windows port is an obvious need.
Actually totally copying photoshop is taking things pretty far! I'd have settled for a simple normal window model for each platform. Cool though.
This WILL reduce barriers to entry very dramatically. Always was curious that GIMP put together a nice package, but made it so awakward to use.
That sounds almost like experience talking..
... it would be even better if somebody would duplicate Painter's interface as well. The main thing that irks me about both The Gimp and Photoshop is the brush size. I like how Painter just always has a nice little bar where I can vary the brush's size and opacity -- I don't have to click my way into anything to change it, it can stay right there. Furthermore, it keeps track of my brush size/opacity for different tools. For example, I can be drawing with a really small and faint eraser, switch tools to airbrush, and suddenly go to a large, opaque brush without changing the settings on the eraser. In The Gimp, while I can control the opacity of each brush separately, I can't control the size that way, and there isn't just one pair of bars at the bottom of the screen to do it all.
calling someone a "gimp" is an insult, in a lot of countries it usually means "idiot"
I kind of miss the old gimp interface (the one without the menubar on the images). but I know most people don't agree. It felt very object oriented to me.
Yes, the G(NU)IMP is open source. However, some people, like me, actually like the default interface. I guess it would make sense to have a Photoshop-like interface as an option in preferences, but the default interface needs to stay.
Sometimes you've gotta roll the hard six.
It has a lot. If you're an amatuer photographer who wants to play around with images, it'll do.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Looking for a hack to make PhotoShop look like The GIMP. Tearoff menus would be a nice start.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Is it true that Gimp still lacks spot-color, RGBA, arbitrary-channel, raw and HDR support as well? I know that it did at one time, but it's been a good six years since I even thought about Gimp, so I don't know whether that's still true.
I never understood the point of a pure RGB program. Nobody uses just plain old RGB. Even Web designers are all using RGBA now.
and take it out to dinner, it's still a pig in a dress, not a girlfriend.
;)
Maybe, but if the pig won't charge you $500 for the privilege of taking it out to dinner...
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
It's really quite amazing how negative many people are.
User: "Wah! Gimp doesn't look like photoshop!"
Dev: "Here, we recreated the photoshop interface for Gimp. You may be more comfortable with it now"
User: "Wah! Gimp doesn't act like photoshop!"
Holy shit people. The Gimp rocks, be thankful for that. Yes it doesn't have some of photoshop's features, but most people don't need those features anyway. You can't tell me most people are professional graphic artists or work in a print shop. For those people, get Photoshop, for everyone else, get the Gimp. Would you rather spend 700 bucks, or an extra 5 minutes figuring soemthing out?
Unless of course, you have no ethical problem with illegaly copying software, in which case you might as well get Photoshop for your l33t h4x0r graphics.
It has? How?
It's been a long time since I've used an open-source tool wherein the interface didn't feel remarkably similar to a piece of commercial software that pre-dated the application I was using.
That's a problem to you? Most of us like the fact that we do not have to learn a new interface each programme we encounter.
It's really no wonder the majority of the world views OSS tools as "cheap knock-offs" of the real thing
You may (erroneously) think so -- I dispute that he "majority" of the world views it as such. Utter BS. Are you an MS astroturfer or something?
It's thievery, it's dishonest, and it should be illegal (in many cases, it already is).
I guess you want every model of car to drive significantly differently as some form of ?innovation?!?
Clutch on left in sedan, in middle on SUV, on the right on the coupé? Is that really what you want? Sounds like it, but somehow I don't think so...
I'm still waiting for a Photoshop hack that makes it look like the Gimp...
Adobe's interfaces tend to be pretty bad, actually, but they are an improvement on the GIMP's in some respects. I wonder if GimpShop really manages to incorporate the subtle things that give Photoshop an advantage, though...
Also, can we PLEASE get a name that doesn't contain the world "GIMP"? Pretty please? Pleeeease?
DNA just wants to be free...
"is cmyk. My boss is ready to buy 5 licenses for Adobe CS2, and I'd love to save him a few grand."
Just remember that his saving a few grand is going to cost YOU. The good news, though, is that what it costs you depends on what you do with the app. Me, personally, I create textures with Photoshop, and GIMP is sorely missing out on the transfer modes that I need. Hopefully with that example, you'll understand how my math works.
"Derp de derp."
Look for someone who would rather spend a couple of grand (AUD$2000) or more on a better lens or more Compact Flash than on software. Consider this:
Computer (AMD 2400, 1GB RAM, 200GB HDD): AUD$450
19" CRT monitor: AUD$300
Linux: AUD$0
The GIMP: AUD$0
OpenOffice.org: AUD$0
TOTAL: AUD$750 vs
Computer: AUD$450
Monitor: AUD$300
Windows XP Pro OEM: AUD$240 [PLE]
PhotoShop: AUD$1399 [Adobe.au]
MS Office Basic OEM: AUD$240 [PLE]
TOTAL: AUD$2629
DELTA: AUD$1879 or 250% extra.
Note that PS is more than half of the total system cost and cashing in either MS Win XP Pro or MS Office Basic would almost equal a second screen. Cashing in both would allow a second computer sans screen. Buying a virus scanner and a few other MS Windows necessaries would drive that past AUD$2000 easily.
The basic startup choice she was facing was: shall I buy software or a second camera? At each step along the way, the choice has been things like shall I buy software or a long-distance lens? or shall I buy software or backup my work?
The short story is, if she'd had to save an extra AUD$1879 before she got started, she wouldn't have got started.
Now she's so used to The GIMP that PS feels very awkward. There's a zillion little things which are easy to do in PS and hard in The GIMP, but there are another zillion little things which are easy in The GIMP and hard in PS.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Collision imminent! Collision imminent!
Methinks this is an April Fool's Day joke.
1. Don't you think Adobe would sue the pants off of anyone who did this?
2. For those of us used to GIMP, redoing the look and feel to be like Photoshop won't do much good.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Hi!
What it will actually do is make a lot of people realize that GIMP is a waste of time which should only be considered if budget or ideology is your number 1 criteria in selecting an image manipulation suite. Since professionals overwhelmingly use Photoshop it is obvious that those who need actual usability and results have already made their choice.
In this project we see the proof of several things:
- Nobody is even pretending that there is a real alternative to Photoshop any more
- Design is at least as important as execution
- Open source software could not exist without closed source to lead the way
Isn't it about time we dropped the pretence and simply supported those companies that actually innovate and deliver? If imitation is the greatest form of flattery why bother with a copy at all? The answer of course is, as I said, ideology or penny-pinching.
Cheers,
GNU/Wolfgang
This is seems pretty much like a button relabeling/shuffling. What really erks me with gimp is every tool having it's own window. I like having a parent window with everything else being a sub window with all tools staying 'above' the opened images. And tab was always handy to hide everything but the window of the image so you could just work on the image at hand with the current tool selected without being encumbered with all the clutter of the tool/layers windows etc.
I've tried to have a somewhat similar environment with having all the gimp tools in one workspace and the image in another but it's just not the same.
And I've seen this mentioned before with stating why an MDI interface is inferior. Well, it's hard to swallow something you know you don't like after multiple attempts at getting used to it, no matter who tells you 'no what you've liked all this time, no no, that way is no good, this is the way.'
But, from what I understand, this functionality is beyond most (all?) current window managers for X.
Well, considering that it was a Mac user who did this, and then a Linux user ported it, I think the question should be: why aren't Windows users bothering to port it themselves?
Don't just expect people to do this for you. Those who run Linux and OS X have no real need for Windows. It might be frustrating, but, well, tough.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Photoshop Elements is $63 after rebates on Amazon as we type.
For most of the crowd, Elements will be more than enough. For photography/graphic arts/etc students who need more, there's an educational version.
If you're one of the few image editing professionals that needs the full Photoshop, you're probably making enough to justify Photoshop as a business expense.
Photoshop is one of those apps that targets the professional class. Adobe doesn't care about that 90% of the pirates who warez the software and use it once a month to airbrush themselves into Natalie Portman's publicity shot. Adobe cares about the design shops who buy the legal version and use it eight hours a day, every day. There are enough of these folks paying full price to cover the development costs, and turn a nice profit besides. Everyone else can use Elements, or the GIMP.
Known quite a few artists. None of them wore berets, they were mostly a t-shirt and jeans crowd. Most couldn't afford to drink anything but Maxwell House. No kidding.
The people you see in front of the Starbucks dressed in fashionable black with the berets cocked on their brows are probably art dealers or self-styled critics, not artists.
Which patent are you referring to?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
What would be really nice is if they made an attempt to conform to every supported platform's human interface guidelines, like Firefox does.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Take any graphics designer who wears photoshop like a pair of well broken-in briefs, sit 'em down in front of GIMP, and tell 'em to do whatever it is they do. ... It's like giving a soldier in the Russian army a traditional Scottish tartan, telling them the tartan is their new pants, and expecting them to know exactly what to do with it.
Another experiment: take someone like me, who doesn't know the first god damn thing about graphic design. Tell that person to open the GIMP, and draw a fucking circle. Honestly, I'm not sure if Photoshop has this ability -- like I said, I know precisely jack shit about graphic design. However, I do know that I have flipped over to my Windows machine on several occasions, just to use Microsoft fucking Paint to draw a circle. Maybe it's not what the tool is designed for, but considering that it's bundled with so many distributions, it seems like a big omission.
Jokes aside, if you've invested years of effort into Photoshop at work, this is a nice way to carry that deeply-ingrained UI comfort into a tool that is free in both senses of the word. I use GIMP once and a while, but the UI differences between it and Photoshop (which I must use for work) are too jarring, so I end up booting my work laptop instead.
As a OS X user, I would also say anything that requires X11 is not a native OS X application. With no core OS X technology support (little things like colorsync, quicktime, etc), Gimp will really never take off on OS X. I personally will stick to using photoshop.
After playing with OSS a while you realize that more than one person usually wants what you want, provided its a reasonably common problem you're addressing.
GTK2 is being ported to OSX (without needing X11.
The Gimp does not support 16bpp
16bpp is nice, but for most of its life, Photoshop didn't support 16bpp either, and yet professionals were using it widely.
it doesn't support "Crop and Rotate" the way Photoshop does (very convenient trick to implement both in a single keystroke)
You can implement features like that in a couple of lines of scripting. Or you can just turn on "dynamic menu shortcuts" and pick more convenient shortcuts.
Isn't it about time we dropped the pretence and simply supported those companies that actually innovate and deliver?
Adobe did not invent photo editing, nor did they invent most of the features in Photoshop. They were simply the first company to ship this kind of software for popular PC platforms.
That is why it is particularly annoying that Adobe has such a lock on this market. If you think it is time that we dropped the "pretence" and we "supported those companies that actually innovate", then you should not support Adobe. Adobe did not invent most of what they are making big bucks with.
I generally have a more relaxed attitude than yours: let Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and all those other companies clone to their heart's content. But I draw the line when people like you claim that those companies invented it all; they did not--they mostly just package other people's technologies.
Nobody is even pretending that there is a real alternative to Photoshop any more
For 99% of people working with images professionally, the Gimp does everything they need. One reason to see that is that the Gimp has already more functionality than professional versions of Photoshop of only a few years ago already.
I'm the guy that said that gimp was limited to 8 bits per channel, in response to the other guy saying 24bpp. I was being funny, but I see I was moderated insightful, informative and all sorts of other stuff. Morons. And here I thought this was a site for nerds, where perhaps once upon a time someone knew something...
We don't have 4 channels in computers, we have 3. Our displays are RGB. Period. If you want to count CMYK output to special devices, that's fine, but it's a special scenario... And 99.9% of the time we take this into consideration, our source material isn't CMYK. It's RGB. It gets converted to CMYK in the printer driver, the printer itself, during a RIP process, or otherwise... This is, of course, not counting professional pre-press operations in photoshop or analogous programs, where it's actually useful to work in CMYK, but again, that's a special case that 0.001% of computer users ever face.
Maybe one day we'll move away from displays that act on addative RGB primaries (perhaps to an active ink--some sort of CMYK subtractive system), but that day is not now, and it's not in the forseeable future.... And even when that day comes, it would be far, FAR more simple to have whatever display controller convert RGB to CMYK on the fly, you know, instead of rewriting every program ever... But that's just me, what do I know?!
24bpp = 8 bits per channel on an RGB system. That's all folks.
Filters in layers will be awesome. It's so obviously awesome one wonders why it hasn't been available since the first layer implementation. But then, I haven't heard anyone asking for it either.
The Gimp still needs CMYK, let alone stuff like that.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
You are not an expert. Do you know anything about colour management? Those things certainly slow things down, but they are not the be all and end all of colour management. Depending on how you do things, you can just get a profile connection space, get an profile for your input device (scanner, camera, whatever), transform it into a wider colour space like CIE-LAB (etc), then on the screen apply a screen profile to see what you image looks like or if you want to print the image/document/whatever apply an output profile and spit out the data. None of these things are patented.
I suppose my original question was stupid, to be honest. Really, some type of colour management should be applied at a different level - like into GNOME or KDE in a similar way that Apple does their colour management via ColorSync. Still Adobe has their own colour management engine. They spend money on them and probably patented various things, but I see no reason why Gimp couldn't have SOMETHING. But then again, I'm not a developer. Oh, and this isn't a whinge - I'm VERY happy with Gimp and the developers should be congratulated on a mighty fine application.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The problem is that most people learned graphism on softwares like PSP or Photoshop, very centralized applications with a single monolithic window holding all the informations&options.
Gimp has a nice interface in itself, but when you switch from PSP/Pshop (or to them, as uncle), the softwares are so many worlds apart UI-wise that you're plain and simply lost.
And you therefore consider the new software (whichever it is) to be "a damn load of crap cause i can't find any of the tools/options/boxes of chocolate i'm looking for"
In a nutshell, the interface elements people don't like in The Gimp (when they have issues with the interface) are: all of them, because they're too different from Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro's
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Believe it or not, even by BSA's numbers, piracy in the western world isn't that high. No, seriously, look at their breakdown by states in the USA, for example. You'll notice that no state exceeds some 40% and some are in the single digit range.
And bear in mind that the BSA is basically a sock-puppet that exists only to whine about piracy, and how some chinese kid pirating 3DSMax to mod a $40 game actually represents a $6000 loss for a company. (Surely _everyone_ would pay $6000, even in countries where it means 6 years' salary, to mod a $40 game, if it wasn't for piracy. Not.)
BSA's only reason to exist is to cry wolf. So they do it lots. The'll even classify the neighbour's dog as a wolf because it sorta looks like it. Or as I usually say, there's a reason there's BS in BSA.
So if even their inflated numbers don't say 100%, sorry, I don't believe the fallacy that goes "they've all pirated <insert software title>".
The fact which some people fail to understand is that a helluva lot of us actually pay for software. Or, to open that can of worms too, for music.
Why would someone in their right mind pay for commercial software instead of (A) using some free crap, or (B) pirating it?
Well, point A is easy: because often we actually don't find the free one to do the same, or have the same usability. Sometimes it's cheaper to pay for something than to spend weeks making the free version work, or learning its quirks. Time is money, and mine is pretty expensive.
Point B actually boils down to personal ethics: either you're a thief or you aren't. If you are, I don't expect you to understand why someone would prefer buying stuff if shoplifting it was easy. If you aren't, then you can understand that most people wouldn't shoplift even if shops were completely non-supervised.
It also illustrates another point: true, not everyone can afford Photoshop. So some buy Paintshop Pro instead.
The world isn't made of only extremes. In the real world there are a lot of shades of grey in between owning a Ferrari and walking to work.
The same applies or rather should apply to software too: there are (and should be more) choices between the most expensive version (even by piracy) or something free (again, sometimes "free" via piracy, as in using a SN generator on a shareware version.) Paintshop is just one such example of an in-between piece of software. Others include, for example, using Milkshape instead of 3DSMax.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Theres not even icc profiling available, which is an absolute must have.
Sure there is ICC profiling, either outside the Gimp or as a plug-in. However, few people seem to use it or want it.
No adjustment layers makes it laughable as a professional editting tool.
Photoshop didn't use to have those either, yet plenty of professionals, even of your ilk, used to use it.
To say that 99% of professionals could use gimp and not lose anything compared to photoshop is just ridiculous. Why would you even suggest that.
You lose lots of functionality, it just happens to be functionality most people who work with images for a living don't actually need. (Note that most people who work with images for a living are neither photographers nor graphic designers nor prepress professionals.)
You obviously don't work with images professionally.
You obviously share the uninformed arrogance so common to many photographers and designers. I'm neither a photographer nor a designer, but I work with images professionally and almost certainly know a lot more about color than you do. I have never needed more color management than I get on Linux. If enough of the Gimp user community needs color management, it will be added, hopefully in a better way than in Photoshop.
GIMP does have an alpha channel. If you want to enable it you can add it in the channel view if you want to play with it directly, use the masks if you want to apply it indirectly, or save an image with translucent parts without a background to a PNG.