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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."
and take it out to dinner, it's still a pig in a dress, not a girlfriend.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Now if only someone would hack it into a photoshop do-alike.
from Adobe lawyers in three, two, one....
What post? The one you're carrying inside your rusty innards!
...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
Gimp: New and improved. I love the photoshop look and feel. Now I can enjoy the look of photoshop with the functionality of Gimp.
Linux blog http://nsajeff.com/blog
I am happy for this, but for sure, his site is gonna get the [slashdot] effect. The native GIMP interface was no good in my opinion. I pay no penny for the previledge to use it so I do not complain. I hope he's got enough bandwidth and backed up by a nicely configured Linux System.
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.
The MacGIMP web site has the download link for the MacOSX disk image here.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Yeah, but too bad that The Gimp does not support 16bpp (no, CinePaint does not do what I want) and it doesn't support "Crop and Rotate" the way Photoshop does (very convenient trick to implement both in a single keystroke). These two features are what keeping me back from using Gimp for my photography.
Until that day comes, Photoshop it is.
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.
is cmyk. My boss is ready to buy 5 licenses for Adobe CS2, and I'd love to save him a few grand.
Certainly a step in the right direction, only in the sense from what the page says, it's a vast improvement in the interface over gimp. That being said, it does fall into the same trap as other OSS project like to be in, mimicking. If a developer wants his/her project to be noticed not only does it have to do what the competition does, it has to have some added value over the competition. Price isn't necessarily a good way to standout, people are more than willing to pay for something they perceive as better. It would be nice if there were more publicly done research into interface design, OSS projects would benefit greatly from it.
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.
Burn Hollywood Burn
If it (the PS-lookalike code) was contributed back upstream (which it doesn't have to be, but the code itself must still be available to those who download the binary in order to comply with the GPL) I do not think the GIMP developers would accept it since it then would no longer conform as it does to GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines.
... 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.
Yes, GIMP is open source (GPL)
The project has to accept the changes, my guess is they didn't want to have a photoshop clone interface. But that doesn't mean you cannot release a patch yourself, which is what happened here.
This should help the GIMP gain greater acceptance. Rather than getting a Photoshop-oriented book, and then translating the lessons into Gimpese, users can go directly. Hopefully this will encourage more people to try, use, and promote The GIMP, while producing better photos in the process.
Ob. Disclaimer: I've used the GIMP since 0.54 on SGI, and think it hit a peak of usability somewhere around 1.1. The newer features are nice, but I'm glad someone took a stand and wrote an alternative. With this interface, it's a great alternative to Elements, and will hopefully cause Free Software to be used in more environments than before.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
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
What about us poor Windows users? There are quite a lot of us, and I'm sure you would want to educate us heathens to the benifits of open source software. Somebody please port it!
Here
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
There's a Fedora Core 2 RPM here:
:-/).
Code Mills
Good luck with anything else (the site with the source is slashdotted now
at today's date in three, two , one......
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
Feel free to snag the files from me (can handle a few hundred GBs)
GIMPshop.dmg.tbz
GIMPshop-source-2.2.4.tbz
May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.
They don't have to accept any changes. The only thing they have to do is allow this guy to use the source within the bounds of the liscense.
If he's willing to keep releasing patches, and keep distributing the binaries, all the more power to him.
Go ahead and mod me down...I'm still stuck in another era ;)
....
In A.D. 2005
War was beginning.
Adobe: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the GIMP.
Operator: We get signal.
Adobe: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Adobe: It's You !!
GIMP: How are you gentlemen !!
GIMP: All your GUI are belong to us.
GIMP: You are on the way to destruction.
Adobe: What you say !!
GIMP: You have no chance to survive make your time.
GIMP: HA HA HA HA
Adobe: Take off every 'GimpShop' !!
Adobe: You know what you doing.
Adobe: Kill 'GimpShop'.
Adobe: For great justice.
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.
8 bits per channel
3 channels per pixel
= 24 bits per pixel
Wikipedia article on GTK
"Initially created for the graphics program the GIMP, the GIMP Toolkit."
A pig in a dress is an excellent substitute.
I beg to differ.
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...
This is generally not correct. Not only is it faster to recognize a distinctive icon, but placing the icons in the menubar also reinforces the meaning of the toolbar button that shares the same icon.
.... I WANT A GODDAMNED FOSS PHOTOSHOP CLONE. >:|
:P
It's the only piece of pay software I use, and it's been UNuseable for my needs since v.6 came out- and it keeps getting more bloated, slower, and less useable as time goes by. It really burns my ass that they changed a lot of the key bindings (FOR NO REASON) with v.6 and give the user NO way to actually edit a key config for themselves. Games have been doing this for years and MS Office is extensively customizeable... you'd think Adobe would get on board but NOOOOOO.
I absolutely hate Adobe The Company, and I absolutely cannot use anything that doesn't open at least ps5.5 documents- GIMP'll do it, but kill your blending modes, masks, and fonts goodbye. Guess what I use a lot of.
So I'm stuck getting humped in the ass by Adobe's PCP-laced view of What Photoshop Should Be. Programmers- picture your text editor changing keybinds and workflow with every revision, and you CAN'T CHANGE IT. You either wouldn't upgrade or you'd switch, wouldn't you?
Anyway. I want a drop-in replacement for Photoshop. I don't care if it's slightly different so long as the interface remains the same- six years of using Photoshop 5.x has given me the ability to weild the program without even thinking about it, and one of the things that frustrates artists (aside from being forced to use shitty software) is having to learn NEW software. We just want to make art. You can't expect us to learn perl or ruby or whateverthefuck GIMP script-fu uses instead of making actions, document compatability is a must (if I'm to get rid of photoshop, GIMP needs to be able to handle a few thousand photoshop files with all kinds of funky blending modes and layer effects and so forth and it needs to be able to handle it all perfectly (especially text).... and it's a long way from doing so.).
There's also the meta key thing. Using control as a meta for a longtime mac user is like trying to answer the phone with your foot- it Does Not Work. That's gotta be my biggest complaint about these so-called X windows "ports" to MacOS X - it ain't a port if it ain't localized as much as you can make it.... and OS X (and MacOS) apps use the apple key as the meta key, dammit. It's right next to the space bar- makes it real easy to hit both with the thumb, etc, etc.
I could keep going, but I just came off an Enemy Terrirory server that got swarmed by a dorm full of teamkilling assholes, so now's a good time to stop.
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
But having said that, The Gimp is great if you need only the features of Photoshop 4 or 5. Photoshop has come a long way since then. Anyone who compares the two as "comparable" has not spent more than a few hours with the latest releases of Photoshop. There are definitely some cool things about process and detailed editing that The Gimp doesn't even come close for.
And I suspect this will continue to be the case. I'm willing to pay $800 to get today's tools, even though tools from five years ago are available for free.
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.
Sven Neumann AKA neo is working on real Colour Management as one of the many, many plates he has in the air. Expect to see it surface before GIMP 2.4.
Arbitrary colour channel depths is something of an elephant in the room at the moment. It was supposed to be inherent in a particular supporting library, but development on that library seems ot have petered out.
The people who are actually doing stuff do have this in mind, though, and regularly get asked about it, so it will happen, even if only to stop the whining.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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.
Doesn't have proper colour management. One of the best things about Photoship is the CM, and softproofing is pretty cool really. Being able to use a proper colour management workflow with ICC profiles in Photoshop gives it a BIG advantage over the Gimp.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
No I'm working on several other Opensource projects
What's with the hostility?
My point is that if you're going to go through all the work of a skin/redesign, why make a look-alike with a high legal risk-factor?
No one was bitching.
Settle down. Have a mint.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
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.
And yet they still complain. Figures.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Middle mouse button.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I made some "drop-in replacement" gimp packages for debian sid (i386 and amd64). I just built this modified source using the package rules from the "real" debian gimp. Because I didn't change the name, if you install these and then apt-get upgrade in the future, they will be replaced by the stock debian packages. You can get them here:
http://cmb.phys.cwru.edu/kisner/gimpshop/
Anyway, at least it is an easy way to install and check it out.
-Ted
Who's running the "How long until Adobe sues Scott?" pool? I have $10 on a week.
GIMPshop torrent at:
http://pipe.cs.dartmouth.edu/torrents/
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
I like the GIMP. I use it for cropping, touching up, and compressing-for-email photos, and for general doodling, and while (several) years ago I used to use Photoshop for some low-grade graphic design work, I'm now much more used to the GIMP; that Photoshop is both expensive and unavailable (barring workarounds like Codeweavers' Wine) unavailable on my platform of choice probably has a lot to do with this. Playing with the GIMP is more fun than most of the built-in timewasters that Linux distros have so cruelly includeed (even kbounce).
:)
Further, I like the GIMP's interface, at least in general. I like using the right button to reach nearly any option quickly, and being able to do that from anywhere. I don't know about the Windows version of Photoshop, or any recent Mac ones, but the last version I used with OS X sill had all menu items only at the top, which (to my GIMP-adjusted self) suddenly seems archaic and inefficient.
I do have some complaints about the GIMP's interface, too -- there are lots of tasks that I don't know how to do with it, and I'm not a serious enough user to chase them down too hard; if I needed to do them badly enough, I guess I would
Bearing all of the above in mind, I really like this project -- answers lots of objectors' main objection (though no good deed goes unpunished).
However, what I'd like to see more than this fully reworked version of the GIMP is for the GIMP itself to be able to accept "personalities" (themes / styles / whatever you want to call them), so that people could say "This set of keybindings and menu orders works well for me / my style of working / my company's workflow [etc]" -- and then let people download and try them out.
A sane set of default settings (and Yes, I think the current defaults are fine and sane; YMMV) is important, but beyond that, it would be nice to be able to quickly try out other set-ups as easily as it is to switch themes in a window manager.
Just an idea --
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
this hack, that turns Gimp into money.
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
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.
I was more responding to the original poster who seemed to think it was his God given right to have a port done for Windows. My response is that people who run Windows should do the port, not people who don't even run that operating system!
C'mon already. If a Linux user said that to a person who solely compiles an OSS app in Visual C++, what sort of answer do you think they would give them? Personally, I think it's pretty good that they have stuff already.
I can't understand the argument that people who write free software (free as in beer and free as in speech) should HAVE to do a port to Windows! They don't get paid for it, they don't have a responsibility to any of you! It's a priviledge, not a right to have this stuff.
Hence my sheesh.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I agree. I find the irony of Windows users screaming for ports of Linux software quite amusing, considering that it was only a few years ago that the situation was quite different (Linux users were screaming for Windows ports of software).
Payback sucks, huh?
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.
Unfortunately the "author" doesn't provide a diff of the changes.
Hey Sven, I found a diff of the changes -- hope it helps. I would love to see a cleaned up version of this rolled into the GIMP as an option to help Photoshop users migrate.
Keep up the good work : )
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling