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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?
As powerful as GIMP is, I find myself struggling to complete tasks that would be easier in Photoshop. More frustrating, however, is having to compile my own plugins. I still have not managed to compile one successfully (and I've been working with Linux since Red Hat 7.3).
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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.
Then...Photoshop is a SDI application on the Mac. SDI vs MDI is hardly the reason professionals will not switch to The GIMP.
Like the article mentions, it's all about colour management and plugins. The former could be solved with code, but the latter is very much chicken/egg; third-parties won't write GIMP plugins until companies start using it, and companies won't start using it until their plugins are available.
Not to mention all the licensing fun of releasing closed plugins for a GPL application. That'd be fun...
I want to work in my RAW photos in 16-bit as much as possible before converting to 8bpp at the final step. GIMP doesn't do that, so I am forced to use photoshop.
It's not there yet, but look out for Krita. It has great ICCM colour support, but it's kind of slow.
GIMP is cool, a bit unixy but for a novice it accomplishes much the same as more expensive programs. The thing I'm most missing on my desktop is Irfanview. How to move hundreds of pics from digicam to the computer, crop and rename? GIMP is very unsuitable for this task. Heard it's possible to get Irfanview to run on WINE, though, but a native solution would always be nicer.
I can easily say that the newer versions of Photoshop dwarf the competition. I specifically focus on restoration and cleanup of old photographs, and this is where Photoshop excels. Photoshop's layout seems much more straightforward, and its utilities more accessible and versatile than those in GIMP.
>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.
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People (like me!) complained for years that Photoshop only existed on the Mac and PC, and so, finally, Adobe ported version 3.0 (at apparently great expense) to the SGI. Unfortunately, it was a monumental failure -- Adobe sold perhaps hundreds of copies.
The sad thing about this is that now there is almost no way that Adobe would consider doing anything like that again, with Linux. They've been burned before.
It's a shame. I'm sure that they'd sell many more than a few hundred copies to the Linux market. Maybe even a thousand.
Hardware is so cheap these days, though, that you might as well have a Mac or Windows PC around to run Photoshop when you need it. After all, the software is going to cost you $1,000 or so, you can spring for another kilobuck on some hardware -- or you can dual-boot your Linux box under Windows.
As much as I'd like Photoshop to run under Linux for my visual effects company, in the end I would prefer that Adobe just make better versions that run under the toy operating systems. My painters will be happier that way, anyway.
Thad Beier
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I do. I'm a professional, not a hobbyist, and want to do my damn work, not fuck around with the interface.
The Gimp is good enough for most of us. It is different than Photoshop so people need to relearn how to do some basic things which can painful for the easily frustrated. A better GUI for Gimp wouldn't hurt and I think they addressing some of the issues in 2.4. Also others have mentioned GimpShop, I'm not sure how mature that is though. But yes Gimp as it stands is not good enough for photo professionals because it lacks color management and built in CMYK support, even though a plugin exists. But then again how many photo professionals use Linux in the first place?
On a side note I'm really impressed with how much work/research Novell is putting into the Linux desktop. Instead the gradual long-term effort Red Hat has invested, Novell seems to be thinking short-term. Novell desktop 10 looks really interesting and their sponsorship of XGL is also really great. I'm glad someone is stepping it up.
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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.
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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.
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One of the main reasons people don't care about GIMP, isn't just the questionably poor usability. It's still the features. Last time I check, things such as the ability to group layers, advanced typographical control, adjustable object effects, and color modes, were still far behind Photoshop.
Even in photography, I still find the GIMP lacking. The lack of LAB mode, which I often use, is one example.
The GIMP is a good project, and it sure has it's uses, but it's still far away from a Photoshop replacment for many people. It's like saying that MySQL is a suitable replacment for Oracles's top-of-the-line DB. For some; sure, for others; no F'n way.
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.
The annoying thing about the colour depth issues is that there IS a version of GIMP that supports large colour depths - there is an entire fork of the GIMP tree called 'FilmGIMP' - and then, later: 'CinePaint' that's been developed with really comprehensive deep colour support.
The problem is at the core of the GIMP developer team's culture. If you hang out on the GIMP mailing list for any amount of time, you'll find it's an unbelievably hostile list. The members of the team seem to hate each other with a passion! There is constant bickering and any questions that are even a shade off-topic (or even on-topic but in the mailing list archives) will be flamed mercilessly.
It is that innate hostility that drove a wedge between the GIMP team and the consortium of movie art teams that put together FilmGIMP/CinePaint. That the project had to be forked in order to get such a basic feature done is just criminal.
GIMP is great - yes - but it could have been so much greater. It's amazing that it's done as well as it has.
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For dealing with photos or even scanned images you will often want more than 8bpp, especially when you want to do things like shadow enhancement or highlight recovery. In this way it lets you choose what will be thrown away instead of having the camera throw information away when it converts to JPEG. There is a lot of detail that is often thrown away that can be brought out with the right software.
For example, one technique used when shooting photos in high contrast lighting conditions is to shoot the photos a bit underexposed then go back and adjust them after the fact, since otherwise the camera can screw up the highlights, often causing them to shift colors due to saturation. Having the extra bits gives a lot more room to change the photo later.
RAW images are becoming increasingly popular, and though there are several different formats, just supporting Canon and Nikon will probably make 90% of the people happy. For those not familiar with raw image formats, most high-end cameras support more than 8 bits per pixel, often 12 bits and preserve the original CCD/CMOS mosaic pattern. Code like dcraw has already been written which can read most of the formats out there. I myself as a Linux user have fallen in love with Bibble, which allows me to quickly go through hundreds or even thousands of photos and fix things like white balance, shadow recovery, lens distortion, sharpening, etc. all while supporting the higher color depth.
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As powerful as GIMP is, I find myself struggling to complete tasks that would be easier in Photoshop.
You mean stuff like resizing the brush with a keypress? After reading the manual, going to google, setting any arcanely named binding that might be it in the shortcuts preferences, the Gimp just sits there and stares stubbornly at me when I try it. Do these people never paint anything? OTOH, this is the same people that think that CTRL-K is much more logical for deleteing stuff than say, oh, I don't know... delete, maybe?
Apart from that, a lot of why the Gimp is such a struggle to use is those right click menus and image menus that the Gimp people are so proud of because they can do anything. Sure, they can do anything - but it also lists *everything*, always! It's called a context menu, and it could be incredibly powerful if it had any context. Oh, and things sorted in real categories.
I could very well live without a Photoshop interface, but I want a human interface.
Spine World
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.
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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.
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A simple example which bugged me this weekend. I needed extra space to draw in so I resized the canvas. But I can't actually paint there! Why? Because the canvas size changed but the layer size didn't. This is so stupid. I only had one layer, so why didn't it ask me if I wanted to resize the layer too, or even provide that as a persistent checkbox preference in the Canvas size dialog? GIMP is replete with stupid little things like this. Such as the foreground / background colour selector where it is entirely non obvious how it works with the same tooltip covering 4 distinct actions. Or the scale selection (as far as it works in Win32) does not support proportional scaling and the grabber behaviour is totally insane.
Rather than attempting to play the same complex notes as Photoshop (another lousy experience IMHO), perhaps they should be simplifying its day to day use first. Make the next version a usability & bug fixing release only. People wouldn't be pining so much for Photoshop or any other decent tool if the one which ships with Linux didn't make them want to gnaw their own arm off with frustration.
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Actually no. The main reasoon GIMP is lacking lots of things is lack of active developers. There's really nothing that keeps us from adding support for high color depths and/or other color spaces like CMYK except that GIMP is being developed by a small group of volunteers with limited free time. If you want to help out, there are plenty of tasks in our bug tracker over at bugzilla.gnome.org that are waiting to be implemented. The GIMP developers will be happy to hold your hand and answer your questions.
Sorry mate, I use UNIX every day, to run really big serious programs costing tens of thousands of dollars per year in licensing. I do it from the GUI. Sure, I occasionally type in real hard to understand commands like 'mdi', or 'dtfile' into the command line, but mostly it is just me and that big old boring HP UNIX GUI. The longest batch file I've ever written has 3 lines.
Elitism such as yours is both misplaced and counter productive. There is no really hard reason why a Knoppix type system, and a bit of fine tuning, would not make a consumer level OS. The problem is not the underlying OS, the problem is at the GUI level, and as such is solvable by scripting at the VB level.
Krita, the painting and image editing application for KOffice is probably a better alternative to Adobe Photoshop on the Linux desktop. It is nicely integrated in KDE and its codebase is cleaner than that of GIMP, so it is easier to add features at a fast rate. In fact, even GNOME devs have been amazed by how fast it's growing.
Incidentally, I just happened to have refuted the inaccuracies in the TFA here. Perhaps you can point some of these out to others in this forum? Or add to them over time? I, too, have experience with both (as well as with MGI-photosuite, Macintosh Draw, Windows Paintbrush, xfig, and Corel Draw, and more I've probably forgotten), and am absolutely baffled at how so much flat-out Bull gets spread about one little program. I'm getting to where I have a pet theory that Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is the source of all of it!
But anyway, you being a user of both, I would highly value any input you could provide in the comments sections of my blog's tutorials (scroll down the menu on the left, they're there). I'm fine with porting Photoshop. I'm *not* fine with the mythology going around.
Well, while you are technically correct, you shoot past the who point by miles.
The idea isn't to try to actually view at that color depth. Its already beyond the capabilities of many video output devices, and even possibly the human eye. But again, thats not the point nor in dispute.
The issue is the accumulated filter effects and tranformations applied to a digital image. Each such effect can create subtle artifacts and degradations. When you start with 8bit/color channel (traditional 24bpp) then these can build up fast to become noticably visible in the final image.
But if you apply those effects to a 16bit/color channel (48bpp) image, the artifacts don't become noticable as quickly, if at all, assuming you are using a good quality image manipulation program. Then when all is done, you can convert your final image to 8bit/channel (24bpp) such as jpeg and have a clean image.