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A Gimp In Photoshop's Clothing
comforteagle writes "Scott Moschella, from Attack of the Show!, set out to make The Gimp a little friendlier with a simple UI make-over, creating GimpShop. Despite an outcry from some developers, users have picked it up with passion. Howard Wen has interviewed Scott about why he did this. From the interview: 'I've always thought that GIMP was just as powerful as Photoshop. My way of proving it was to make GIMP work as close to Photoshop as I possibly could, given my limited programming experience.' As more Windows/Mac users discover powerful open source applications are they bound (slashdot disc.) to make more discoveries of this kind?" Update: 09/16 18:48 GMT by Z : Some users have pointed out this is basically an update to a previous discussion we've had. Link added for the sake of completeness.
My way of proving it was to make GIMP work as close to Photoshop as I possibly could, given my limited programming experience.
/passes out
With Photoshop weighing in at over a thousand dollars Canadian, let me just say that anything that resembles it moderately, without the strange behaviour of PaintShop, is welcomed. Free too?
It's funny because I can remember thinking about this the other day, and wondering when companies are going to start investing in the future of office systems, to help reduce their own long-term bottom line. If everyone donates $100 to the Gimp/Gimpshop project(s), just imagine the money saving that would come out of it! I would be willing to bet that if this happened, in less than five years open source would outpace Adobe in quality and reliability. The reason most people use Photoshop is for quality and reliability -- not necessarily features as you might expect. It does what I need better than anything else yet, but with some time, effort and financial backing, we'll see superior products come out of the open source community.
Open source needs a well of cash to draw from. I suggest a foundation be made to fund open source projects better than we've seen. Apply and they bankroll your project if you've got something hot. I'd like to see that work on a large scale and I often wonder why SourceForge doesn't take that approach, in favour of small donations to each project on a case-by-case level. I'd love to apply for financing for my crazy open source ideas! It's the money factor that slows me down. I don't have time to pursue it very well because I have to pay bills.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
To borrow a quote from elsewhere: "If you build it, they will come."
One of Adobe's Lawyers (from their Barrel O' Lawyers): Your Honor, in the defendent's own words:
Judge: I have no recourse other than to find for the plaintiff and wreak all sorts of havoc with Open Source Development.A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
On what you call friendly. I'm sure some people out there would prefer a graphics editor without a GUI.
I don't get it, why does it seem so many alt-os projects are forever trying to emulate the look and feel of a Windows environment?
Linspire, KDE, GIMP, and others, if you spent the time improving, not cloning, your application, perhaps you'd get more users.
I mean really, if your app is going to look, feel, and function, like a Windows one, why should I use yours??
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
For those not aware, you can change the shortcuts in gimp to whatever you want. Some people have already made the photoshop shortcuts for you. So all you have to do is download the gimp-photoshop shortcut file and you're set.
cl
Reply . . . let's get it over with.
IMO, the goal isn't to please people with a new interface, but rather to give something people are used to. I use an old version of Photoshop (5.5) fairly regularly, so I'm used to its interface. When I switched over to the Gimp recently to do some work with transparent PNG's, I had an extremely difficult time getting around. Had I known about this at the time, I would have probably used this instead.
Go, and never darken my towels again! -- Rufus
Calling it "GimpShop", though, is just begging for a (fully deserved) lawsuit. He might as well call it Microsoft Donald Duck Big Mac GIMP.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
When the GIMP has:
1) CMYK support;
2) Channel math;
3) Industry standard color engine and ICC profile support;
4) Channel mixer;
5) Equal control over color adjustment modes
and a bunch of other shit, then the GIMP will be as powerful as Photoshop. Until then, it's a silly statement to make. While 50% of the people who use Photoshop can very probably do the exact same things with the GIMP, for the 50% who really push Photoshop there is no substitute. And, as you climb higher on that curve to the people who are really stretching Photoshop on a daily basis (mainly very high level retouchers/digital artists) it is quite literally the only tool for the job.
This is one of those time I think open source cheerleading is not a good thing. Just because it's an open source digital image editing program doesn't mean it's the same thing as Adobe's flagship product.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
It's been a few months since I've seen this on Slashdot (please correct me if this isn't the same gimp-photoshop hack).
Despite an outcry from some developers, users have picked it up with passion.
As I recall, the developers were upset because of the way he went about makeing Gimp look like Photoshop. Rather than making changes to the data files that are used to create the menus, he changed to programing itself. This (going by memory) broke foreign language support. As I recall, Scott wrote the Gimp team and sent his suggestions. The Gimp team wrote back and invited him to join a discustion group. However, Scott decided to fork Gimp and make the changes himself. This of course leaves maintenance up to Scott. I hope he's up to it.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
Some of the reactions:
Why does someone always have to be an idiot (or even a novice) in the linux world to enjoy an easier interface? It's amazing that you guys wonder why most users won't touch Linux. Even in the world of computer nerds, it seems you can't escape the machismo mentality. All other things being equal, easier should be better even if you're a guru.
Even when I'm fully proficient with a program, I appreciate an easy, intuitive interface. It lets me get my work done quicker. It's less of a strain on my mind. I can spend those brain-hourse thinking about my next algorithm, learning more new programs, or whatever.
http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/
It's the best book out there to explain how Gimp works to a novice. It actually explain the image manipulation concepts and how to use them. For exemple, it will explain to you *why* a picture look bad.
It was made for version 1.2 of The Gimp but the interface still works the same way.
Except for bezier paths (check Gimp online help by pressing F1 when you get there) and the author tell you that intelligent scissors is broken but it works pretty well in 2.0+ versions.
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