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GIMP Not Enough for Linux Users?
nursegirl writes "Novell has been running a survey about apps that people need in order to convert their data centers or desktops to Linux. The online survey has been running since Jan 13, and Adobe Photoshop was at the top of the list as of February 1. Desktoplinux.com has an interesting article about why the existence of the GIMP isn't enough for many professionals."
...when the author suggests that Linux using webdevelopers need Dreamweaver to create sites?
(dons flame resistant suit of anonymity)
Maybe this is because GIMP has one of the most god-awful GUIs known to man. I mean seriously, it seems to be designed to hide functions and impede work, not t'other way round.
People want real AAA products instead of crappy knock offs? Amazing!
Is that it's easy to use. PERIOD.
GIMP might come close to the level of features of Photoshop (note: close), but nowhere near the usability & speed of production.
If you want PROs to use your software it needs to be FAST, EASY & POWERFULL.
As it currently is, Photoshop is faster, easier & more powerfull. So what's there to wonder?
It's not like news that Photoshop is more wanted than GIMP, duh..
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
I agree. Gimp is pretty cool, but Photoshop is the "industry standard".
Being that there is a UNIX version of Photoshop (OS X) it should not be too difficult to wrap the inners with an X GUI outers.
Apps drive the OS. Linux/UNIX has all of the server stuff available, and that is where it is. OS X has tons of good apps. Linux on the desktop? Maybe when brand name apps are available (and usability increases, yada yada).
>99% of business desktops don't have Photoshop, let alone whatever a "datacenter" involves. If Photoshop is at the top of Novell's list, all it shows is that if you have an open web survey and ask Teh Community for responses, you get replies from 15-year-olds.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
From TFA: "After all, Adobe didn't even release Version 6 (acrobat) for Linux."
That's about as dissapointing as M$ not porting BOB to Linux.
ôó
So graphics professionals still aren't using GIMP because the interface blows and it doesn't support formats that have long been important in the professional world? Wow, I've never heard that before! Gee, next you'll be telling me that people don't use Blender because the UI is deplorably bad! Oh wait, I just realized that these topics have been getting regular coverage in the OSS communinity for years and it's not getting any better!
People not using OSS because the UI sucks or because it's crammed full of useless widgets and oddball features nobody but the original programmers needed isn't a new phenomenon. It certainly isn't one that deserves continued discussion. We all know that the GIMP isn't really useful for anything other than simple image manipulation for the web (or creating tacky web graphics circa 1999.), we all know that Blender is only good for crazy people with limitless free time to spend trying to make the interface not suck, and that OpenOffice is more bloated than Oprah Winfrey. Why not just stop covering these crappy old products and start giving some attention to newer, better alternatives?
I don't understand why people find this so impossible to understand -- the MacOS APIs (Carbon and Cocoa) do not exist on other platforms. You can can compile vanilla Unix applications on MacOS X, but you can't trivially recompile (or wrap) a Cocoa app on Linux.
Yes, there are some missing dead-tree output features. But honestly, you know why Photoshop gurus don't like the GIMP?
It's the same reason I'd be pissed if you took all my POSIX utilities away. Or replaced emacs with Visual Slickedit.
The user has spent a very large amount of time learning to use the incumbent software package very, very well. *Any* deviation in UI or featureset means that (a) he has to blow a lot of time relearning a tool and (b) he immediately notices missing features that he depends on, but it takes him a while to discover the things that the challenger can do, but the incumbent can't.
The article mentions the relearning time, but I'd say that 90% of the problem has to be right there.
User knowledge is the nicest of the forms of lock-in that I can think of (from a user standpoint). It's straightforward, it's comparatively easy to assess (the user knows how long it took him to learn a tool), you can't really hide it from a customer, and it never *can't* be overcome if absolutely necessary.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
He was suggesting that we use OpenOffice instead of MS-Office, but one of the biggest problems is that OOo-Writer simply isn't MS-Word, and OOo-Impress isn't PowerPoint. Even if they were feature-compatible (which they're not quite), they still wouldn't be identical, and a substantial percentage of users (faculty and students) can't deal with having Feature X on a different menu than it is in Word. Me... I can deal with WordPerfect and MS-Word and OOo-Writer each doing things differently from the others. And I can manage moving from the GIMP to Photoshop to Fireworks, much like I can move from OS X to Windows to Linux. But I gain that flexibility at the expense of efficiency and proficiency. For a professional for whom the latter two factors are of greater importance, the "just as good as" argument isn't going to be very persuasive.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I do. I'm a professional, not a hobbyist, and want to do my damn work, not fuck around with the interface.
If Adobe figured out some way to lock down Photoshop so that it couldn't be pirated as commonly as it is currently. I know tons of people who use Photoshop and praise it to the heavens, but not a single one of them actually put the money down on it. I work in a university environment, so there're lots of legal copies of Photoshop around, but a lot of people work with their own hardware, so many copies that get used for preparing images for publication aren't legitimate.
I use the GIMP for the same tasks, and get results that are just as good, though. I think that for most image processing, the GIMP does everything the average user needs it to do, and more. I'm not denying that it doesn't meet the needs of certain professionals. However, if people weren't able to get pirated copies of Photoshop readily, they'd find that the GIMP does the job they need it to do.
Today our lesson will be Chapter 1 of Elementary Necromancy: Proper Use of a Shovel.
The very fact that this question has to be asked says a lot about why Linux (and other OSS) has trouble making it in fields with established software. I presume that the people who wrote GIMP wrote it to meet their own needs, because they certainly haven't taken the time and effort to meet the needs of print graphics professionals. Even if you ignore the interface and a number of other shortcomings, the lack of CMYK support makes it IMPOSSIBLE for it to be used in a graphic arts environment for printed products.
The primary colors of light (and therefore monitors) are red, green and blue (RGB). The primary colors of printing are cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). A digital image starts out as an RGB and is edited that way, but it must be converted to CMYK before it can be sent to an imagesetter for four-color printing. This isn't a "good thing to have." This is a showstopper not to have. It's like having a car without wheels.
I keep hearing OSS people breezily dismiss criticisms of software such as GIMP or just insist that it IS good enough for professionals. The very fact that some people are arogant enough to try to shove tools onto people that WILL NOT DO THE JOB shows why it's hard to adopt Linux on the desktop. Linux has done well in areas where geeks have written software for other people like themselves. It has not done well in areas where the geeks don't "get" what professionals in other areas must have. A commercial company has a serious incentive to make software that fits the needs of those other people. The people who write OSS tend to just want to write things that are fun and useful to them -- and that severly limits adoption of Linux in non-technical areas. Of course, it also doesn't help that so many Linux people seem to take the attitude that the Linux desktop is fine, but artists and other non-technical types are just too stupid to use it.
David
This really is the key. GIMP will never have more than a marginal user base because they don't understand their users. Their users--nearly all of them--are Photoshop users (or potentially ex-Photoshop users).
Good user interface design means not just creating an inteface that "makes sense," it's also creating an interface that works the way the user expects it to work. If over 90% of your users are used to the way Photoshop does function X, then you sure as hell better implement function X the way Photoshop does. Not because that way is better or makes more sense, but because that's what the user expects you to do, and any deviation from those expections means your app is "broken" in their eyes.
Competing on features in this sort of market is futile. Your program may be able to give me the moon on a stick; but if I can't easily make it work, it might as well do nothing at all. The success stories--those projects that have managed to supplant a deeply-entrenched competitive offering--have always acknowledged this fact and have modified the behavior of their own product to compensate. The failures in this arena (GIMP being the most famous) always refuse to acknowledge the effect on their users' expectations caused by their competitor's dominance. For projects like the GIMP, it seems a matter of pride to not be influenced by such an unworthy competitor.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
Adobe offers these kits called Classroom in a Book and they are wonderful. Geeks might actually not like them, but they speak the language that artsy types understand. My mom had great success with a Photoshop class, and she says that is one of the biggest reasons. She's not a computer person, she finds them difficult to learn and needs precise instructions, with visuals preferably. These books provide that and using them, she's now gotten far better at Photoshop than I am.
This is extremely important, given that non-computer people are a major market for Photoshop and such. Sure geeks need to use photo editors, but let's be real here, we aren't the core market. The art people, be they prepress, photographers, designers, whatever, they are the ones that really make use of these products. However their computer skills are generally minimal, limited only to knowing what they need to work their tools. Thus having good training material is essential.
I am a normal user and not a graphic designer. Thus, I do not use complicated features in Photoshop or GIMP, just the low level features. One of these, however, is crop. And crop sucks on GIMP. With Photoshop it is simple, I put a box around what I want to crop to and I crop. With GIMP there are three crops, none of which are very good. The only one that I can use is "guillotine", which one uses by going to the ruler, dragging a line out to the middle, going back to the ruler, dragging a line to the middle, going to the other ruler, dragging a line to the middle, going to the other ruler, and dragging a line to the middle again. Then I go through the menu to guillotine crop, and 9 images pop up. I close the eight I don't want, so that I now have the original big one, which I don't want any more, and the cropped version. I can just imagine what the more complex features are like. Or what people who aren't like me think, who don't use Debian as their desktop.
IIRC, the GIMP is lacking a lot of things because of software patents.
http://outcampaign.org/
IMHO, Photoshop is made for and by graphic designer while GIMP is made for and by programmer.
Besides, if GIMP project had half of financial backing as Adobe Photoshop, it could be different picture. I think, it's helpful to take this as a constructive criticism and not as spreading salt on bleeding wound.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Photoshop, however, is Carbon based, so it doesn't even apply.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
There are just too many Linux people who feel that because you can accomplish this task or that with an application that it is somehow 'just as good' as another application. They refuse to accept the fact that the Human Interface Design, professional documentation, and seemingly 'minor' features the Linux application lacks are User interface, designed workflow control, and substantially deep and broad documentation options and third-party support are HUGE, not marginal, elements of an application like Photoshop. ITS NOT JUST A BUNCH OF FILTERS. Also, most if not all GIMP features *follow*, not *lead*, photoshop implementations. Like most Linux desktop applications, it seeks to duplicate the features and usability of the gold standard commercial app, not lead it. Someone else mentioned that you dont need Dreamweaver to develop webpages - entirely true - but if you are a professional website designer 90% of your workflow revolves around constant mockup revision negotiation between client and designer, following by a final code implementation. Using Photoshop and/or Dreamweaver to revise mockups moves MUCH faster than hand-coding, and as such saves time and money. Also, it is advantageous to design in PS and/or DW because you focus on what the final page needs to look like, and not worry about how it needs to be coded, which is huge.
I've used Photoshop for around 10 years now. My last two jobs were jobs were I used Photoshop full-time. Needless to say I use it a lot and feel like I'm qualified to express my opinion about it. You should also know I have never used Gimp. I'm running on OS X, and I know I could install it if I wanted, but I don't see a point. Photoshop is the industry standard in graphics, and no one will care if I'm fluent with the Gimp on a resume (that sounds odd in any case). I've also spent countless hours on figuring out how to do what I need in Photoshop, and I'm not going to throw that away by saving a few bucks ($150 for upgrade, or $500 for full version) by using Gimp instead of Photoshop. The time I would lose figuring out the "quirks" in Gimp wouldn't even justify me thinking about it. OSS is great, I use a lot of little utilities on my mac that come from those efforts. I don't make a profession by using any of them, but they enhance my experience and make my life easier. I really don't see OSS making inroads in the graphics industry though. It's a cycle because Photoshop is the standard, companies hire those that know how to use the standard, schools teach students how to use the standard so they can be hired, and Photoshop continues to be the standard because it is used and taught everywhere. How do you combat that? I applaud the efforts of the OSS community creating Gimp but I think it will always stay in a niche outside the limelight.
While I don't think GIMP is a complete Photoshop replacement, I gotta call bullshit on one of the article's reasons.
Saying that one of the reasons GIMP isn't a [Photoshop] replacement is because Photoshop is a single-document interface completely ignores the fact that the Mac OS X version of Photoshop is a multiple-document interface, just like GIMP.
Another hastily written article posted to Slashdot. Nothing to see here, move along.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
So perhaps someone should start a project similar to WINE, to add Carbon and Cocoa API compatibility.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Gimp for OSX requires X11. The average Mac user will not understand why they have to install this esoteric thing from their original OS install disks just to try out a graphics program. Then they will not understand why the main menu of the program (which by their reckoning is the one at the top of the screen -- the X11 menu) has absolutely nothing to do with the application that they are running.
The toolbox in a separate window thing, which I actually like on Linux, doesn't work on Mac because the first click on a window in OSX selects the window and does not activate any elements in that window. This means that selecting a new tool requires double-clicking in the toolbox window. Then using the tool requires double-clicking in the image window -- once to select the window and once to use the tool.
The entire GIMP user interface is alien on OSX. The application feels completely out of place. And this coming from someone who uses (and likes) the UI that everyone hates on his multi-head, multi-workspace Linux machine at work. In that environment, I like the separate toolbox and the separate image windows and the context menu. It works for me in that environment. But on OSX (which I'm running at home -- and have GIMP installed on) it just doesn't work.
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
Well, for Cocoa anyway, there's GNUstep, as, if I'm not mistaken, it's an implementation of the OpenStep specification that was created for NeXT and is still used today for MacOS X as Cocoa. Once GNUstep is reasonably completed, it would in theory be possible to have a certain amount of source-compatibility between any platform with GNUstep and Cocoa. Carbon, now that's a different story...
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Spot colors like PANTONE are a very small subset of the domain of color management.
While spot colours may be a small part of the technical side of colour management, the ability to shave several hundred dollars off the cost of a print run by using a two or three tone Pantone process rather than full CMYK is far from trivial if you want to stay in the print business. And that's before you even think about special finishes (like metallic), which can't be specified in CMYK or RGB at all.
Blank until
What spending 600 quid on Photoshop gave me was hours of my life back. Ignoring the technical issues like 16bit support, LAB, plugins, etc. I still would have spent this money on CS2.
Being able to modify exposure, black point, contrast and white balance in a second or two per image cut my workflow on a standard shoot from about 2 hours to 1 hour. Beign able to do that non-destructively so that I can go back and try something else later is even more valuable. Cutting my time down behind the machine means I can spend more time behind the lens, and that's where the money really is.
Being able to make a change once and then copy it to every other image in the shoot, or a selected subset of those images means that I don't make mistakes.
The other big issue is information available. Adobe Photoshop CS2 for Photographers is an awesome book. It presents 'recipes' that are easily understood, achieve a specific goal and can easily be turned into actions. The Real World Camera RAW book was also fantastic.
I tried GIMP. I spit four thousand times and I went back to Photoshop. Yes, interface is customizable and simply takes "getting used to" but I don't want to customize nor get used to it, all I wanted was to make a small animated toolbar (which I did in less than 10 minutes at home). Why can't there be a version that does things like Photoshop does?
I think GIMP is in the same UI trap as Lotus products that are trailing Microsoft Office popularity -- "We're different, and we don't care that more popular product has different interface, we'll force users to get used to ours". Yes, there will be perver strange people who will say they like Lotus UI because "it's different" but for most people Microsoft Office interface works, and Microsoft got where it is now not only because of the monopoly tie-in with OS products, but because they copy good things into their products, including UI. By being "different" Lotus office products limited themselves to situation where user is forced to use them. And for home they run for Word or for something that looks and behaves like Word.
Every time you encounter radically new interface it takes time and effort to get used to. People don't want and don't have to do it. Leave the radical and ugly dysfunctional interface to hobbyists, and copy Photoshop interface for the rest of users. If you want to make a point how easier/better GIMP interface is, add a little window that says "You could have easily done it in GIMP native interface by pressing blah blah blah". And, perhaps, allow pieces of interface being switch to native mode, so once user is completely accustomed to GIMP way of doing things whole interface would be reverted to radical mode.
Instead of that all I see is people argue with foam at their mouth on how much better GIMP interface is.
Hyperom.com
Ever heard of GNUstep?
And it is not replacement for Photoshop, either. But post scriptum: for PROFESIONALS. For other crowd who pirates Photoshop just for little tweaks (who are also just people who takes "first hit for free") GIMP could be good enough.
See, I said - could be. Yes, GIMP has it's own share of problems and it feels somehow stagnated, sure. It could be better. So it is just too little confusing in GUI and lacks good help mode. That's all.
For professionals it is completely other story.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
To an extent, I would agree that GIMP is not enough to make a business convert from Windows to Linux. Windows offers both Photoshop and Paintshop Pro, two extremely great imaging programs and in my strongest opinion, GIMP cannot even compare to those two. But on the other hand, GIMP should be considered a factor in changing operating systems. But let's not forget about the thousands of other exclusive programs found only for Linux... even though more and more are moving away as we speak. For me, I am just happy enough installing the newest version of Cedega and emulating anything I need from every other platform just to keep my Penguin happy.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
but in my humble opinion, I'd say that the GIMP is the best thing since sliced bread. I just can't imagine working on a machine without that amazing program installed – it's done everything I could ever need it to, whether I'm color-correcting a scanned photo, digitally coloring the likes of Erlkönig, or creating proof that J. K. Rowling's been hard at work on the eighth book that everyone knows is coming. In fact, believe it or not, I've never even used PhotoShop in my entire life; all the graphics on my homepage (except the ones taken from elsewhere, of course, like the background image) were created using the GIMP. And, of course, a bit of ImageMagick here and there; I doubt PhotoShop's going to have a handy command line any time soon!
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
Once again: Photoshop ported to GNU/Linux/BSD/etc=good thing. I'm all in favor of it. Then we can all get off the Gimp's back. I've been fighting ignorance about the Gimp for five years, and I'm sick of it. The reasons cited in this article amount to "We need something else for transportation, because cars do not come with steering wheels, tires, and motors." OK, whatever the reason for the insanity, y'all do what you have to.
What is it, exactly, that Photoshop does for you? Read your mind and draw the image on the screen while you sit back ten feet with your arms folded and meditate? So there's lots of little windows instead of one big one. So most of the functions are accessible with a right-click to the canvas. What's the big deal?
Does this help to at least clarify some of why it's that way?
They are mostly spending big bucks. 24 bpp + alpha is more than my eyes can discern and I'd be surprised if the other 24 bpp was not mostly white noise to the camera as well. It's hard for me to imagine light and voltage differences controlled so finely in the imaging or display devices. At 16 bits you are talking about 65,536 levels of difference on each pixel. At a generous 5 volts, you are looking at controlling your signal to 7.6E-5 volts. If either your fancy camera or monitor can control line ripple to 1E-4 V, I'll give you a nickel of your money back.
As a test, take a picture of an object that's supposed to be one color under the most uniform lighting you can make then tell me how consistent all 48 bits of your color space are. I'm really interested. Point me to specs if they exist.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There really is a need for a simple image manipulator for the masses with just the basic photo editing functions available in a single-click. I wish I knew how to code C++, I would program it myself.
Meh.
The essential problem is not a problem with the OSS community. Its a problem with the fact that the OSS community is so diverse that it is not possible to label it in a way that does not avoid contradictions. One such contradiction you pointed out is the simple one that many OSS projects are not friendly enough to pull in converts yet many in the OSS community want everyone to convert from closed source software. But this falls apart when you don't try to apply a label to THE ENTIRE OSS COMMUNITY as a whole and focus on what each faction within the OSS community wants. And that sucks, because human nature prefers simple labels for everything.
What do I mean by that? Simple- some factions of the OSS community care about certain things more than other factions do. For example, maybe those in the GIMP community couldn't give a damn about converting another single user from Photoshop. Who could blame them- for years they have been assaulted by those demanding that GIMP do "this thing" or "this feature" exactly like Photoshop does. So maybe they don't care about spreading OSS to the professional crowd. I can tell you after a year of using desktop Linux I no longer push it with others like I normally would because I am sick of hearing people gripe about not getting their games to play like they want. This can also apply to other parts of life- my father quit offering a cosmetic procedure in his private medical practice just because he was tired of hearing people gripe about the side effects he told people they would have before he did anything. Sometime you get sick of complaining.
Yet those in another OSS group the goals might be very different. Those people supporting Firefox for example probably DO want to switch over most of the world because the higher marketshare Firefox has the less chance web designers will make pages that work only with IE. They obviously care because that group has things like "Spread Firefox" combined with an emphasis on marketing (full page Firefox ad in NYT). So for these people the gripes of ex-IE users matters a lot more.
The biggest problem with OSS community is that you can't tie together the GIMP people and the Firefox people and the Ubuntu people with a common label. EACH OSS COMMUNITY has its own priorities...each has its own wants and needs. This is a very bad situation for those of us who DEMAND simple labels for everything, and who are used to a software industry that DOES have a common label and purpose (to please customers to make money). What is even worse is when some takes this traditional perspective on software development ("you are doing this for me the user and no other reason") to the OSS communities and finds that a particular community could not give a damn about its potential "customers."
Some look to the OSS community and do not see the factions and believe the community has many contradictions. It doesn't. Its more complicated than that. Yes that sucks for many people who demand simplicity, and it is part of the reason OSS fans backlash against the "morons" that do not understand them or their cause.
Open Source Sushi
If the GIMP people needed to make money off of the software, they would be required to listen to what the users wanted. However, they don't. So they can make a piece of software that pleases themselves, programmers who sometimes dabble in image manipulation.
My other first post is car post.