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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."
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
Let me tell you a story. My dad asks me if he should pirate photoshop. I told him no, said the reasons for why most ways of pirating are bad (possible trojeans, lawsuits, etc). So he asks me what should he do. So I told him about GIMP. His response was why would he use inferior tools. So I said what about paint shop pro. He responded inferior and costly. So I told him about the low cost version of photoshop (stripped down a bit). He looked at it and his response was that important features are missing from it. I told him he does not need those features, and his response was what if I do.
Basically Adobe runs into the problem where every person that wants to do image editing is now thinking "photoshop or bust". And all of those types will end up pirating it or not doing any image editing at all. I think my dad went the no editing at all route, because he wanted to only use photoshop for editing (not that he knows how).
badness 10000
You know, Mac OS X solves that problem -- all you need is visual feedback. In iTunes, there's a button that you click to make a playlist. If you option-click it, you make a smart playlist. How do people know they can do that? Simple: when you hold down the option key, the icon on the button changes from a "+" (with tooltip "create a playlist") to a gear (with tooltip "create a smart playlist"). Adding this kind of visual feedback to all of GIMP would go a long way towards making it more usable.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
Your dad's an idiot.
You're doing it wrong.
He is not the only one.
badness 10000
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.