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GIMP's Next-generation Imaging Core Demonstrated
brendan0powers writes "GIMP developer Øvind Kolås gave a public demonstration of the Generic Graphical Library (GEGL) on Friday at the Piksel 06 festival in Bergen, Norway. GEGL has long been slated to replace the core image processing framework of the GIMP, bringing with it entirely new data models and operations — but development had languished to the point where many critics had written the project off entirely." Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.
It's rather amazing that after years GIMP hasn't been improved to a point where it is a serious contender for graphic designers and photo editors. I love using open source products where I can, but GIMP has always seemed subpar. Maybe I'm underestimating the difficulty of creating such tools, or am just too used to Photoshop. I can't wait to check it out!
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
They need to get this integrated before http://www.koffice.org/krita/ runs them over :)
- barkholt
Maybe now he can give The Gimp a decent UI instead of the trash it's had for the last 10 years
Sounds like Core Image and Quartz Composer Quartz Composer.
Ever tried to do basic drawing in The Gimp? Like, say, drawing a circle? Ask any Gimp developer why this is such a bitch and they'll tell you something like: The Gimp is an image manipulation program, not a drawing program, go use Inkscape or something if you want to draw circles. What's this got to do with Excel? Well, Excel is a spreadsheet program. It's ment for making reports or doing accounting or playing "what if" games with money. About 10 years ago the developers of Excel went and did a survey of what their customers were using Excel for. Turns out the vast majority of people were using Excel to make lists. Shopping lists. Laundry lists. People to Kill. That sort of thing. Did the Excel developers say "hey, Microsoft Word has better support for making lists, go use that!" .. no, obviously. What they did was study the way people use the software and make it better for what they are doing. They made it so you could hide the cell lines when you print and so you can print the numbers of the cells if you want. They made it so when you enter something really long into a cell it automatically overlaps the cells next to it, and so it would print that way. That's how software should be made, with a focus on what the user wants out of the software.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I see this as a confirmation of the stagnant GIMP developer pool, led by a few who are not interested in growing that community at all.
If the GIMP team would foster new blood, help new hackers learn the large and intimidatingly complex codebase, give any other reply besides a gruff "you want it, you code it" response to any artist who dreams of a good core feature, give specific progress feedback about modern image demands like 32bits-per-channel, CMYK, or fully functional ICC, then maybe we'd see a real alternative to Photoshop in the OSS world, not a Photoshop 1993 clone.
The only other path is "fork it," but with any complex project, it's very tough to fork away from the few experts.
It's clear the GIMP captains still see GIMP as a pet project, just as some major tech news sites see themselves as a pet blog, and refuse to take on the responsibility of being a leader or even trying to become a leader.
[
Yes I RTFA nice feature, but where the feature everyone realy need.
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
With the merger of Adobe and Macromedia there is basically a one company monopoly on Graphic / Photo Manipulation software. I personally love using Fireworks and I feel that this only got to it's level of goodness due to the fact that it had to compete with Photoshop. It did this by focusing on the Web Graphics niche and it did it well. Adobe didn't even give a shit, and they give less of a shit now - Open Souce Gimp is below their notice and I am suprised anyone uses it due to the fact that you can easily get your greasy little mits on a pirated / cracked version of PhotoShop or Fireworks...
... but development had languished to the point where many critics had written the project off entirely.
So GIMP been limping all these years?
Over the past six years I've been playing with gimp, people have written off the project as totally bass-ackwards enough times. But no matter what, the project seems to come back with a few surprises once in a while to prove those critics wrong (though it is debatable whether that would happen sans critics).
I'm not a graphics artist and in the rare occasions when I do have to draw something, these days I prefer Inkscape - there are days when I want the Macromedia Fireworks modes of bitmap-vector middle land, but not too many. But, I've been using gimp to post-process most of my photos and I've found that it is actually a really really powerful tool . So the part that really made sense for me in the GEGL docs is the following paragraph.
And the concept really scores some points because it stores transformation pipelines instead of the result bitmaps, from the looks of it. That should really revolutionize Undo for graphics.
I've heard enough photoshop graphics gurus say that Gimp is very accurately named. And probably for print media it still is - but for a hobbyist, it has started to really really kick ass.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
What's the point? I don't mean this as a flame, but what does this give you that the current architecure doesn't? I mean if you're going to through the porevious archicture out, you better be getting something significantly better.
Ahem:
Gimpshop. It's a great attempt at making The Gimp more comprehensible to people with a Windows/Photoshop background. And like The Gimp, it too is free.
Yes, good point. Forking isn't always the best way, but it does demonstrate the power of determined people to turn open source products into exactly what they want or think other people want--for whatever that's worth. I mean, next thing you know, we'll be forking Firefox because of its logo. Hmm bad example...
Maybe they'll leverage such advanced technology to offer CMYK....
given the previous version's reputation Gimp is pretty much doomed so I do not expect this will make much a difference
Seems likely. Even aside from reputation, people who've used PS to make their living for years know it inside and out and would be much less effective with anything else, unless it was vastly better than PS, which the GIMP won't be. The price of PS doesn't matter if you've already bought it and it's just another business expense anyway.
And secondly, being it open source, one may expect some exploits and worms in it so why bother.
Oh, yes, because OSS has so much trouble with that. </sarcasm> WTF are you smoking?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
QuantumG has obviously not used the GIMP in many years--drawing a circle in it is at least as easy as drawing a circle in PhotoShop, as multiple posters have pointed out.
Also, Excel is hardly a paragon of design.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I think as various parts of gimp are better modularized and seperated, which is the direction things are moving, you'll see more progress. This is similar to the path that mozilla took. They abstracted out the rendering engine and then other projects are able to make clean fast native ui's on top of it.
Then which Free program do you recommend for allowing a single document to have both vector layers and bitmap layers?
It made it easy to point/click your way through creating three dimentional wire frames, applying textures, opacity and colors to those frames then rendering those from whatever angle you liked in conjunction with various light sources into static or animated objects. Of course I never worked it to its true potential but I could do some visually compelling stuff. That is kind of the point though isn't it? I mean, with a charcol set, oil paints or chisel anybody could be an artist, but most people aren't. It's the making it simple that is the domain of software and in my mind, Gimp doesn't make it very simple.
There is a possiblity that I'm just looking in the wrong place I suppose. I tried Blender and gave up in horror after a couple of hours of frustration. I use Dia all the time and like it, but it's just not made for image manipulation. (Makes a dandy map in no time though.) Most of the time, if I have to make an image for the web or whatever, I use Gimp or MS Paint. I feel about the same enthusiam for them both.
What I want is a program that is as intuitive as MS Paint and lets me create in 3-D.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Sorry GIMP, but I already bought my Adobe CS2 Suite package. Being able to edit rotated and scaled text is worth something to me (superior text/font support in general). Save for Web image optimization. Slices. Integration with other tools.
Maybe if I didn't learn the PS interface so long ago, but I am quicker in PS then I ever am in GIMP. So sorry, there is a place for the GIMP, but not in my toolbox.
This
GTK+ is the main problem. Put simply, it's too low-level for a useful GUI toolkit. This is made particularly clear by it being written completely in C.
Yes, there are many higher-level language bindings to GTK+. But most of them retain the C pseduo-OO model, even when a mapping to more abstract language features would be appropriate. This is often done due to time constraints. For those few bindings that do manage to make use of such features, as in the case of gtkmm, we end up with poor runtime performance and excessive memory consumption.
GIMP badly needs to be reimplemented in a much higher-level language. But languages like Perl, Python, Ruby, C# and Java won't suffice. It's likely that they would have to resort to a high-performance, compiled, functional language such as Standard ML or OCaml in order to produce a product capable of competing with the best commercial offerings. A functional language should be used to allow for conceptual clarity and automated memory management, while native-code compilers are employed to make effective use of the CPU.
The whole of GTK+ would also need to be reimplemented directly in a language like OCaml or Standard ML. But it would be done in a way that most effectively uses the features of the chosen language. OCaml makes for a good choice, as it offers object-oriented capabilities and true inheritance, features which are currently emulated (poorly) in the C implementation of GTK+.
The second best option would likely be to use Objective-C. As Apple has shown, it proves to be a high-performance language suitable for building extremely complex and powerful GUIs. A reimplementation of GTK+ in Objective-C, taking full advantage of Objective-C's features, may help them get past the current stumbling block of insufficient abstraction.
CMYK with one set of inks isn't the same color space as CMYK with another set of inks, just as RGB with one set of phosphors isn't the same as RGB with another set of phosphors. So isn't it the printer driver's responsibility to translate images from sRGB to whatever color model your printer uses?
Corel Painter on Windows for me because Linux doesn't do mixed media brushes and other effects.
More powerful than people think.
Even aside from reputation, people who've used PS to make their living for years know it inside and out and would be much less effective with anything else, unless it was vastly better than PS, which the GIMP won't be. The price of PS doesn't matter if you've already bought it and it's just another business expense anyway.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there also a lot of highly used commercial extensions for Photoshop? Given the amount of money and developer time involved, it's unlikely that Gimp will ever match the feature set of photoshop + extensions. Luckily it doesn't have to. It can still undercut photoshop, and eventually become the product which up and coming design students use (instead of a pirated copy of Photoshop). That would get around this problem of people cutting their teeth on a different tool, and would be very good for the community, even if these students later migrated to Photoshop.
Pardon my American sensibilities, but I like Øvind Kolås based solely on the difficulty of typing and pronouncing his name. Woo woo alien character set!
Photoshop is far more efficient for manipulating photographs for the simple reason that you can preview your adjustments on all of the filters and all of the dialogs. Photoshop's band-aid tool is also a huge time saver which does not exist in gimp. GIMP's anti-aliasing is not the best, which is also exacerbated by the fact that text layers are rasterized immediately, so they are matted to the current background. You can't scale them without pixelation in the GIMP. The feathered copy/paste in Photoshop is also very helpful.
It's not a bad tool for doing the most basic cropping, scaling, and format conversion of images. But beyond that it's not nearly as fast for most things you want to do to your images.
.. If only i had 6 months to try to figure out how the fuck to use it.
God Be Gone
Well using a name such a IslandWind CoalHill would make it all too easy. (oh and it seems like you even managed to mistype it)
>> You're too used to Photoshop.
Maybe the parent was too used to it. But I'm not, I've never used Photoshop in my life.
Yet, despite being "untainted" by that package, I find the GIMP utterly unusable in its interface, a total nightmare of illogicality and randomly placed functions within a forest of mile deep menus.
It's just completely impossible to know where a particular function might be located in that ludicrous menu system. Is it a layer operation, or is it a tool, or a dialogue, or a filter? (Why the hell should it matter to the user how a tool is implemented?) And how far down do we drill in any of those categories before giving up our search in disgust, only to find that what we wanted was in the color subtree, for some mysterious reason.
It just doesn't work, it's utterly insane. And I'm a devout FOSS supporter, no Windows boxes here. Yet, the GIMP is just madness.
The solution is simple: provide the GIMP with a large, auto-hiding toolbar broken down into functional subsections, and color-coded to indicate the types of objects on which each tool can operate. I'd allow right-clicking on a toolbar icon if it represents several very similar functions, but no deeper than that.
And in addition to auto-hiding the large functionally-organized toolbar along one edge of the screen, provide also a caching toolbar auto-hiding behind a different screen edge, in which the tools you've clicked on recently auto-dock. And that's it, highly logical and visibly obvious selection from one toolbar (and the eye is great at scanning many objects at once), and highly optimized selection from the other.
No more idiotic 10-hour menu navigation!
(And no, pinning up the menus doesn't help either, as you still have to navigate to find them in the first place, and you generally have to do it repeatedly.)
I'm not sure it's the goal of every open source developer to turn a project into a feature-rich, widely adopted juggernaut. Feature requests might have been brushed aside out of deference to project goals, which can sometimes be as unambitious as "We needed a free tool that did X, Y, and Z and now we have that."
While it would be great if the GIMP could burst onto the graphics scene going "I'm the widely adopted Juggernaut, bitch" we may have to just face the fact that it's already topped out in terms of features and development milestones. If the GIMP remains a pet project, then so be it. There are plenty of other projects that are turning a corner, such as Inkscape and Krita. Heck, Photoshop fans might even be pleasantly surprised by how well their favorite graphics program runs under WINE.
In any case, we need not be concerned that all of our eggs do not fit in this one basket.
Integrating The Gimp and Inkscape would be interesting.
How we know is more important than what we know.
A Møøse once bit my sister...
Does anyone have a link to a video of the demo in question?
PHP. It was created by web developers for web developers, and it's a horrible language if you care about writing robust code.
http://outcampaign.org/
the mozilla browser, as was the original netscape navigator as opposed to netscape communicator, has always been available pretty much stand alone, without all the suite accessories, if you so chose(albeit composer was there I'll admit, to make web pages for your browser). I have no idea how that rumor spread that you had to download and install the whole thing, but it needs to be corrected whenever anyone brings it up. You can do it now, go look, go to the moz suite or seamonkey pages,you will find a stand-alone browser for download. Just a browser, nothing else. or the suite. or just the browser and email, but no chatzilla, etc
All FF did was reinvent the same wheel and waste a few years dev time.
It's almost like..makes ya go h-m-m-m-m. like someone..wanted to set back the moz project on purpose for _some reason_.
cop 101 - who stands to gain from something that looks like a crime?
I have only ever used gimp ... and found no need to use anything else. The onsite documentation is pretty awesome as well, and easy to follow. I think anyone reading that is in doubt of its quality should take a walk thru the different tutorials on the gimp www site. The only bottle neck I found is understanding "layers" ... and the different filters (lotts of info online fo these though). I don't see why anyone would complain about this tool.
Hmm?
Ctrl-Shift-B (or Dialigs->Brushes)
Choose a brush, click the Edit button
Or just create a new one from scratch
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
The big issue with DAGs is the execution model and how that effects storage. Although there are very simple algorithms to linearize a DAG, i.e topological sorting, these are blind to storage size. To say it in another way, the order that you execute the DAG has a major impact on how much memory you use. It's simple if the DAG is simple and images are small, but when the images are large and there a lot of them performance can go to hell. I think that this problem is actually NP complete, and is the same as the register allocation problem in compilers when mapping expressions to registers.
Just because you have a DAG doesn't mean you've solved the execution order problem. It seems easy, but it's really very difficult.
I haven't used it myself, but it's certainly for real (as in, contributed code back to the gtk trunk)
http://developer.imendio.com/projects/gtk-macosx
Cheers... -Geoff
And this affects GIMP how? From the page I linked:
I think that just making them even more consistent will go a long way.
Interesting background from the news wire:
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I think GIMP is a fantastic cross-platform photo manipulation tool. I had been using and advocating it for awhile now. In fact, all the logos on my sites were done with the GIMP Script-Fu routines.
HOWEVER - I am still sick of the horrendous UI that is presented to me. No matter how many times I argue with the developers and the "holier than thou" Gnome community, I cannot see their reasoning for a trashy un-comforting UI. Make a MDI interface and they will come. I see no reason why they couldn't have a two-option interface. SDI for the really geeky people and MDI for us normal users.
GIMPShop was a nice step in the right direction. Now, fix the bloody UI and the File Open/Save dialog (talk about garbage!) and you'd have a decent app.
Oh, wait - Krita is out. Oh - it doesn't work on Windows, and I still use Windows once in a while. Bummer.
Okay, guys, mark me down as a troll. I've said what I feel. GIMP could be a great tool, if only the developers would get off their respective high horses and listen to us normal users.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
In particular, GIMP is missing the CMYK color space, which is the backbone of the printing industry. (CMYK=Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK, each in percentages of 0-100).
Additionally, Pantone Colors are also missing (probably due to needing to license said color codes?).
If GIMP had CMYK colors, many coulw use it in the printing industry.
But look at the attitude of a GIMP user:
As long as the GIMP people think like that, GIMP will never be anywhere near as good as Photoshop!
Well, for one thing, if I were a GIMP developer I wouldn't want to add anything that might encourage people to add even more offset shadows or halos into images.
It's the lens-flare mania of the 21st century.
In any case I'll bet they're going to work on a generic realtime filter application framework first, and implement the parameterized shadows as an implementation in that. GEGL is a key to making that happen.
And for the record, you really shouldn't shadow or matte until you're positive about how you want things laid out (typically you're going to need to go in and hand modify or gradient your layer mask in a shadow layer anyway).
It'd be nice for doing previews though.
I think extending layer grouping so that you can applying transformations to them is probably a more important thing to have first.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
... no one is going to implement a GUI toolkit that is designed for both embedded and desktop use with a garbage collecting language runtime.
If you knew anything about writing cross-platform code (that works on platforms with varying memory spaces, models, with or without MMUs) you'd
know that it's not really in the cards.
Never mind that all the APIs that it'd bind to are written in C or Objective C. (XLib, Win32/DirectX, xGL, Quartz).
Let me guess, you're in a degree program, or have just recently graduated, or you work at Ericsson. Am I right?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Or xfig.
Or xv.
I like multi-windowed applications. I have two monitors and a proper desktop manager.
When I'm doing graphics, I need to be able to make things big, small, float this, drag this tab into here, get rid of that space-consuming menu (I'd rather context-right click).
What is with you people?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I have a degree in graphic design. I currently work at a photography studio doing Photoshop work full-time. I've used Photoshop for around 10 years now. That is my background.
Let's assume for all purposes that GIMP can do everything that Photoshop can do (yes, I know it can't). For me to learn the GIMP UI and become as proficient as I am now in Photoshop would take some time. If it took me more than 8 hours (which is pretty much assured) then it makes no sense for me to use GIMP. I could buy a Photoshop upgrade for less then the productivity time I lost learning GIMP. Even if I had to buy a full new version the time lost learning the new program would be more and would actually cost me quite a bit. Although GIMP may appear to be be free, it really is not to anyone who uses a image editing program such as Photoshop to make a living. It may be great for the hobbyist, but not for the professional.
Inkscape and Gimp don't step on each other's toes.
:-)
Inkscape doesn't have airbrush tools or a blur filter.
Gimp doesn't have a mini-copy of Illustrator bundled into it either (remember PS 6.0?)
Let's consider the cases where you might want to draw a circle in the GIMP.
Oh wait, there isn't a real good reason. Why the hell would you want a special purpose tool that only serves to rasterize (and trash) the layer below unless it was a drawing tool like a pen or eraser?
IT'S CALLED A PATH. It's in Photoshop too, you know. You got your polylines, circles, rounded rectangles, beziers, arcs, etc. You create them, manipulate them, attach them to guides, and when you want to turn them into pixels, THEN YOU STROKE OR FILL THEM.
The more you know.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I use Paint Shop Pro 9 and I sometimes have to use both things, shape drawing tools and photo manipulation tools in the same file.
The shape drawing tools adds what... One button to the toolbar? And are easy and intuitive to use.
Having said that, I like the way you describe Gimp doing the same task, as long as I can edit the circle properties at any time afterwards, like stroke width and color.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Why the hell do you need a circle tool anyway? I want you to think real hard before you answer.
If you start with a blank canvas in Photoshop and build up a picture by starting with a circle tool, I'm not really sure what to say other than you're using the tool wrong.
Line tool is an understandable complaint. It's a common enough op that you shouldn't have to round trip through a Path/Stroke to do it.
But circle?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I never use the fucking circle tool. Ever. In Photoshop. I use the path tool there, and I learned PS before the GIMP.
So I, for one, am GLAD they refuse to add a button for it. Learn to use paths, and then I don't have to look at your shitty, rasterized attempts at shoehorning PS as a diagramming tool.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
You need a workflow. (No one does that in design or desktop publishing anyway).
Step 1) Work on rasters (GIMP, PS, scanners, whatever)
Step 2) Lay out vector layers, integrate rasters for backdrops, matted textures, etc. (Inkscape, KDraw, etc.)
Step 3) Take groups of vector layers rasterized at a high resolution, reimport them into (GIMP, Krita), final composite.
This process may be more complicated and have more flows in and out depending on the size and scope of your end product.
Also keep in mind GIMP has rudimentary support for vectors in terms of manipulatable paths (which can be rasterized on demand).
An integrated product would be interesting, but I think it'd also be limiting (too many options and tools to expose simultaneously,
confusing "raster or vector" layer context questions...)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I don't think the developers really want to know, else they would have responded long before since I've already told it several times. While the graphic drawing power of Gimp isn't disputed, Gimp sports the most uncommon GUI an application could have. This (and only this) GUI leaves a bad taste in the users mind so they start looking for other minor annoyances one finds in any application if looked for. Yet since most users a pre justice because of the bad taste they won't forgive any other annoyance.
This is all known in the Gimp community yet they don't want to acknowledge this simple fact but prefer to discard this as a flame bait. So it's now wonder Gimp gets flamed at all the time, rightfully or not. On the other side it's incredible easy for Gimp to drop off this flaming, they simply should change their GUI to the one outlined in wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/). All it needs is some willingness on the Gimp side and a little work. It might be that wyoGuide isn't the best but it certainly is good enough for Xara (http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/projectlist.php) and many other fine applications.
O. Wyss
PS. You are free to rate this as flame bait but that won't help Gimp.
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
Not for nothing but, typically you let the printer convert from RGB colorspace to CYMK, since it tends to have the best feeling for that. You should make sure your monitor is calibrated for a profile your printer understands though, so the RGB sent to it is the RGB you saw on your screen.
Unless you're one of those people who really like to take control of their black levels. Or you have an offset printer.
Oh, I didn't think so.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
unless GIMP could also support spot color. Not everyone can afford full four-color printing, but some of us might be interested in something simpler that could leverage the colorspace work. But no one wanted to tackle that "for fun" since there are certain legal issues involved there (*cough* PANTONE *cough*).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The file dialog is stock. You want Gnome to fix the file dialog. Fine. A lot of people want that.
MDI vs. SDI... deal with it. SDI can work if you make it work. Try playing with your palettes a little.
I also recommend picking up a second monitor (you can get them for next to nothing on ebay). It makes it
much easier to work with and you'll see why SDI can be better than MDI depending on the task.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Let me tell you a little story, a story about the little school kid who used Gimp (which was functionally equivalent to Photoshop) while all his buddies used Photoshop. When they all become professionals, the Gimp user still has free software, updated regularly for free, which is very powerful and useful. The other kids all use Photoshop, which is expensive, updates cost a lot, and it's not as easily scriptable, nor are the developers as approachable for feature requests. Who is wasting more money keeping their technology up to date now?
What you're bitching about is that you're basically too lazy to learn something new, because different is bad. Still using an abacus to calculate your finances, because them newfangled calculators use numbers, and they aren't what you're used to and it'd take you more time to learn how to use 'em?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Thats why 99% from our designers use Macs. Hmm, must be because Mac is not so dominant. Don't let yourself be fooled by the "home" designers who buy Photoshop and run it at home. Office work is mostly done on Macs.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
If you don't like the Gimp, go to hell and get out of this discussion. We know you're paid by Adobe to astroturf these forums anyway. If it weren't for you leigion of assholes taking over every public conversation about Gimp, we could have innovated like this seven years ago!
Nice story, but expense is relative. Time = money, so any extra time the little kid spends dealing with bugs in GIMP or configuring it to use in whatever system he has could and will often be equivalent to the price of a Photoshop upgrade if not more so. If the little kid wants to work in a design studio or publishing house he will have to learn Photoshop whereas no one will ever have to learn GIMP. Sure he could freelance it on his own, but there is a reason why Photoshop (and much of the Creative Suite) is a standard in the industry.
Your generalization of me being "lazy to learn" is ignorant. I said GIMP has it's place, but it is not to be a replacement for Photoshop. Your analogy is bad also. While a calculator would speed up calculating my finances compared to an abacus, GIMP will never be able to do the same for my Photoshop work. Now maybe if GIMP were counting on my fingers and Photoshop were an abacus I would agree. Not everyone needs to count above 10, and not everyone needs to work with hundreds of layers in an image file either.
For you to have GIMP become an industry standard you will have to have all of the features companies need. There will have to be people who know how to use those features. There will have to be schools that teach those features. And there will need to be someone to provide technical support when those features don't work as expected. Photoshop has this and this cycle continually becomes stronger. There is no major reason for anyone to use GIMP over Photoshop so I'm not sure why you think an insignificant cost would break the cycle.
And just because I choose not to do something a different way compared to what is normal for me doesn't imply that I'm lazy. I choose to walk on my feet since walking on my hands is inconvenient. I also choose to paint by holding a brush with my hand rather than my foot because I don't feel the need to train my foot how to paint. I'd rather create then take the time to learn a new way to make something unless that new way is substantially more beneficial. Of course maybe you walk on your hands and paint with your feet. If you do, then good for you, I'm glad you found the way you prefer.
Another promising app for amateur photographers that I use for all my pictures:d igikam
http://www.digikam.org/
Version 0.9 beta includes 16 bits color depth.
Debian packages: http://packages.debian.org/experimental/graphics/
Better than screenshots: four movies showing whet you can do with Digikam. Movie number 1: http://www.digikam.org/?q=node/124
Until it comes to the day when the little gimp-kid wants to go into printing and gimp does not support any industry standard. bo-ho. Free is not always free.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Funny indeed!
You may however want to note that the Qt-based Krita painting program does actually implement a good number of those things that GIMP has been missing for years: CMYK, layer groups, displacement layers. AND an interface that all fits in one window (although you can also make it work like GIMP if you want, your choice). Even though Krita has a LOT less developpers than the GIMP.
I know the history of GTK+ full well, and I like its newest themes and widget styles a hell of a lot, but if at this point it has become a programming liability... History be damned: DITCH IT. Seriously.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Have you also heard the end of the story where the kids that use photoshop get jobs in design studios, magazines, photo libraries etc etc and the kid that learned GIMP can't get a job because they can't use the industry standard tool.
The industry standard tool that is paid for by their employer.
It might be just me, but I *like* the GIMP gui. Especially after 2.0, when it got a lot better. Sure, it might take some getting used to, but so will any learning.
I think comparing to PhotoShop is not really that useful at all. People who did actually pay for it will certainly continue to use it. People who stole it seem to be fond of it as well, maybe because of the price tag. People who use Windows will like something that fits their mindset. It's apples and oranges on all levels - price, UI, technology.
Meanwhile, Gimp does a really good job for linux freaks who actually like and trust free software with quirks. It's also great for folks who don't want to pay for PhotoShop but don't like to steal either.
Your argument is not specifically against the GIMP, but holds for anything where the alternative behaves differently to your current tool:
"If the new tool is different to my current tool, the time it takes for me to learn to use the new tool is worth more than the cost of the current tool, therefore I will not switch."
And that's fine. But it's not very helpful in support for the subject:
"The GIMP will not replace Photoshop because the GIMP is not identical to Photoshop."
Even if true, that means the only tool that will replace Photoshop is something that behaves exactly the same. Which means should something better come along, it still won't replace Photoshop, because it will almost by definition be different.
Well, I don't want the GIMP to be the same as Photoshop. There are plenty of things about PS that bug me even more than the GIMP's quirks. I'm certainly not saying the GIMP is ideal either, but I quite like the way it does a number of things as compared to PS. Here's just a few:
I fully accept GIMP has its shortcomings, but even taking that into account, I am more productive with GIMP's toolset than in Photoshop. It mostly comes down to familiarity (though I could argue some of GIMP's features better lend themselves to workflow efficiency), but by your terms, Photoshop isn't likely to replace the GIMP for me :)
I really don't understand all the indignation at Gimp's interface. It seems to me that the main complaint is "it is not Photoshop". Gimp is the only image manipulation program I have ever seriously used and I am happy with it. And when I stumble upon Photoshop I can't stand it because it is not the UI I am used to.
So the real question is : how much do the Gimp developpers want to grow the number of Gimp users ? Existing Gimp users are mostly happy as they are - it is the conquest of new users and particularily of former Photoshop users that is the problem. So it is not a technical question but rather a strategic one.
That analogy with calculators does not apply because the GIMP is no 'better' than Photoshop/PaintShop Pro (whereas a calculator is better than an abacus IMO)....
Actually, I do use the GIMP, but only for resizing things (I used to use Macromedia Fireworks for this, but Fireworks does some odd things with .PNG file sizes unless you choose use Export).
As a web designer, there's a few different things I might want to create. Outside of logos, there is also buttons, which are generally a shape with text on them. How would I go about doing that in several different editors?
MS Paint:
1. Draw shape using appropriate shape tool.
2. Write text using text tool and style it appropriately.
3. Adjust colors... can't change the transparency (afaik).
Photoshop:
1. Draw shape using appropriate shape tool.
2. Write text using text tool and style it appropriately.
3. Adjust colors / transparency.
Paint Shop Pro:
1. Draw shape using appropriate shape tool.
2. Write text using text tool and style it appropriately.
3. Adjust colors / transparency.
The GIMP:
1. Use one of the selection tools to select an area.
2. Use the fill tool to fill the area.
3. Shrink the selection.
4. Delete the contents of the selection box.
5. Write text using text tool and style it appropriately.
6. Adjust colors / transparency.
Oops, The GIMP doesn't have shape tools, so you have to abuse the selection tool to draw them.
Another common web design thing is styling text. One such popular text type is chrome.
MS Paint:
1. Can't do it, don't bother trying.
Photoshop
1. Choose black background and white text.
2. Choose a wide font.
3. Type in the text you want to chrome.
4. Rasterize the text layer, then duplicate it.
5. Apply Gaussian blurs to one of the layers.
6. Apply lighting effects to the top layer.
7. Add a small blur to the top layer to soften the edges.
8. Add curves using the curve tool.
Paint Shop Pro:
1. Choose white background and white text. Yes, both are the same color.
2. Choose a wide font.
3. Type in the text you want to chrome.
4. Feather the selection a bit (makes the selection wider than the text).
5. Apply the Hot Wax special effect until it looks like you want it.
The GIMP:
Part 1. Create an environment map.
1. Create an initial environment map using the Render Solid Noise filter.
2. Adjust the contrast. It is recommended that you use the Auto-stretch Contrast filter.
3. Blur the environment map to soften it.
4. Select the gradient you want to use in the gradient editor.
Part 2: Create the text
1. Choose black background and white text. The image MUST be a greyscale image.
2. Choose a wide font.
3. Type in the text you want to chrome.
Part 3: Create the final image
1. Create a new image with the same size as the text image.
2. Open the Lighting plugin.
3. Select the files you created in the previous two steps as the environment-map and bumpmap files.
4. Choose a maximum height.
5. Apply.
Of those choices, I prefer Paint Shop Pro's. It's the least amount of work for me for the exact same effect. However, this also limits you, so the best comprimise is the way Photoshop does it.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
What a totally stupid and condescending reply to a perfectly reasonable observation about time being a cost in a professional setting. Your pathetic invented anecdote and subsequent observations display the mental acumen of a potto's rectum and the social graces of parrot phlegm, so I really hope for your sake that you are nine years old, and spend the rest of your time arguing with other kids about who has the best dad.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
I too like the GIMP interface in many places, and use it exclusively for retouching my photographs (professionally published, as for instance in the Spaish edition of Rolling Stone). I export my results to a Photoshop .psd file, including a layer with the untouched photo for the editors to have a reference of what came out of the camera, and I send it to the photo editors. I don't miss CMYK or colour matching because, you know, they have that at the magazine.
;)
However, it would be good to have a completely tweakable interface. I have already commented somewhere that right now many 3D modeling apps are configurable to work like other apps, and that you have a vi mode for Emacs and Emacs bindings for vi, and nobody finds it strange that people like it that way. Problem is, vi and Emacs are used by coders, and coders can build their damn interface themselves. Most users of GIMP (and certainly most advanced graphics manipulators) can't. But they are right in saying they work better the way they do. Users are not idiots, and they know how they work better. What we need is not really "reskinning the Gimp, and more", but just the ability to tweak what really matters to you.
Not all features are equally important, or used equally frequently. Right now one can reassign shortcuts and move menus around, but modificator keys (keys that act as a "shift" to active tools) are still hard-coded, or were last time I looked. (Caveat: I haven't tried to configure it in a Photoshop way in a long time, as I am already used to the GIMP's UI, so I don't miss Photoshop's that much).
The thing I would love to have in GIMP is the space-alt-ctrl trio of modificators to invoke the hand tool and the zoom-in and zoom-out tools while in any mode. This is so powerful a way of working that I am almost religious about it, despite having retrained my muscular memory not to hit the spacebar with my thumb every time I want to readjust the working area. Also, later versions of Photoshop has evolved really nifty docked option palletes for tools (like the search feature in Firefox) that I haven't really used (as I am now a GIMP user), but they look fantastic.
Finally, some of us liked the MDI interface behaviour: sometimes, when you are editing photos, it is all you are doing (see below for single-app computing), and the focus behaviour of Photoshop is much saner than the Gimp's in many places. I know this is not the Gimp but the X11/WindowManager combo that provides window management; maybe what some users need is a PhotoGimpWM.
Contrary to popular Slashdot opinion, some of us who ask for certain Photoshoppy-features in Gimp don't want a clone of Photoshop. What want is the ability to really customise the way we work in a Photoshop-like app (and, like it or not, Gimp is Photoshop-like, see below) in the features that matter to us. Other people would like a Gimp preference option that adds a complete "behaviour" of the most-used and learned photo editor in the world. Think PhotoGimp on steroids, and if I were a coder working on the Gimp (sadly I am only a punter), this would be my first feature to add for propietary-software refugees' sake. Free Software being coded by volunteers, we can't make them do what we want... but that doesn't make our needs and wishes irrelevant or wrong. Just unenforceable
I have worked in TV with people using the Quantel series of graphical pallettes (concretely the superb HAL), and their gestural interface had nothing to do with Photoshop and Gimp's WIMP paradigm. However I would love the Gimp to have support for its dedicated clicker [note] for my left hand while I work with the pen in my right hand. I wouldn't mind to try the HAL's gestural interface either: it seems like a right timesaver, although I don't know how it would fare in a multi-purpose computer running other programs at the same time. In non-windowed environments where the only thing running is the graphics editor, however, gestural interfaces to be the right thing for bringing up pallett
http://barrapunto.com/ - News for nerds, en español
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
In Excel, right click on any toolbar and enable the "Drawing" toolbar. Click the Circle. Drag over a bit of your document.
Why is is even possible to draw circles in a spreadsheet app!?
You want to change the name to something "non-lame" anyway... This tells you to change it and you bitch about that!
I find it interesting that pjludlow's original comment generated several "It must be your fault, not the tools" response. You know? The kind of response that's guarenteed to get people to drop everything and use your tool. Like I've said in the past. F/OSS is fine, it's some of it's advocates that suck.
Wow, what are you smoking? Think back; what program did the last worm you heard of exploit? That's right, Microsoft Outlook(TM)(C) or Microsoft Internet Explorer(TM)(C) or Microsoft MSN Messenger(TM)(C). Now, think reeeeally hard and tell me which worm has ever spread using an OSS program. Now think even harder and tell me what worm has *ever* spread using an IMAGE EDITOR. I certainly haven't heard of any such thing.
Getting back from your trip to la-la-land, the Gimp is an awesome editor and I prefer it to Photoshop, having used both in a professional setting. If I ever need CMYK or 48bit colour, I may need to use a different tool. But I certainly won't waste my time complaining about how the hammer is "doomed" because I've got a screwdriver.
> AFAIK the interface is already abstracted away from the engine in preperation for GEGL, ... ;)
>
> I remember seeing some generalized device settings in the 2.3.12 preferences dialog, wonder if I can set up a gamepad...
All of this is great news. Last time I asked, modifier keys were not abstracted at all. I will update to Etch in a couple of months, so maybe their Gimp will come with that feature. A Spanish writer said that "God punishes us giving us what we ask for", so it might turn out that now I am so used to the Gimp that I don't like the compromises required in order to get the modifier keys in a more photoshoppy way.
> GIMP developers well writen bug reports/feature sugesitons should be best route outside of doing it yourself
You are right that I should write a decent bug report/feature suggestion on the abstraction of modifier keys; that would be enough to make Gimp more customisable for each user. I have a draft somewhere, which I started after meeting some Gimp devels at CCC last year... but life intervened, and I stopped.
As to setting up a gamepad, I have been thinking along the same lines, and I would probably have started if I could set modifier keys to it (shortcuts just aren't enough). I even got an adapter for my GC pad that turned out not to work well, and got sidetracked again (yes, I know).
My ideas for using a gamepad with the Gimp include gestures for the analog joystick (twiddle it clockwise or counterclockwise for slider value adjustments, draw glyphs for selecting rarely-used tools, etc). Also, the design of the Hal's joystick was completely sweet, and perfectly matched for the software features. The Hal is pretty minimalistic, and the left-hand joystick was not an option or an alternative: it was *the* interface, and the software had been designed with it in mind. I don't know if a Gimp/gamepad would work as well, mostly because the Gimp is designed with a keyboard in mind, and would require more gamepad switches than you can use with one hand.
http://barrapunto.com/ - News for nerds, en español
GIMP explicitely allows non-free plug-ins and the main reason for doing that is to allow such technologies to be added. Someone just needs to do it.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Yes, you can use a gamepad with GIMP, assuming that a driver exists that makes it available as a Linux Input device. Otherwise you could also write your own GIMP input module. That's a pretty small well-defined interface and there's example code that you can base your module on.
e l=url2html-27183http://gimp.org/unix/howtos/gimp-m idi.html> for a HOWTO on controlling GIMP with MIDI devices.
On a related note, see ahref=http://gimp.org/unix/howtos/gimp-midi.htmlr
Gestures might be a nice idea for the future. Perhaps you want to try to come up with a more detailed proposal on how this would work?
I have a problem with the GIMP logo. He's watching me man. I can see his eyes move as I move around my cube. Lookin at me with one eye bulging out and that evil smile. He's freakin me out man. Make him stop!!!
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
Not the best association to have for a program that's supposed to kill Photoshop. Not that it even comes close to doing that anyway.
Slashdot Classic
I come from the opposite end of the spectrum than you do - I have been using the Gimp for about 7 years, and I find that the interface is much more intuiative to me than Photoshop. I have done a number of large artistic prints in the Gimp, and I love the UI. Yes, there are some things I would like different, but overall, it's pretty good.
Of course, YMMV.
http://gimpshop.net/
Slashdot Classic
Long ago, there was a very nice program out for OS/2 that I loved to use, but have not found anything like it since (and I can't remember its name!!!). It basically combined vector based and pixel based tools. The most powerful feature was that you could create effects layers (ie blur, pixelate, whatever) and of course that layer could be a shape selected as you would with pixels. The effects could be stacked to provide combinations, and since it was vector-based, you could move things around (including the effects layers) easily to get exactly what you wanted.
I miss that. I don't think GIMP is capable of this, but would love if there was a way to make it happen.
is GEGL. When i say it out loud I can't help droolig...
I like your apopleptic alliteration.
I was simply putting the story in terms of "functional equivalence" like he first laid out. It was a silly thing for him to say in the first place, because he had nothing to add to the conversation. We all know that the Gimp isn't suited for professional print work for the most part. My point was that he was essentially bragging that he made too much money to even look at something like the Gimp, so he's "1337" and that F/OSS is somehow second class in all things because it doesn't work in his specific application of software.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
> Gestures might be a nice idea for the future. Perhaps you want to try to come up with a more detailed proposal on how this would work?
Actually, the gesture idea was about imitating the Hal interface completely, doing away with the WIMP metaphor. But some of its ideas could be used in the Gimp. The HAL has two modes, one for frame editing and another one for editing video clips. You toggle between modes by flicking the pen out either the side of the tablet. When in either mode, the tool pallette is invoked by flicking the pen out the top or the bottom edges of the tablet (which edge you use determines the placement of the pallete).
Maybe these flicks of the wrist/pen could be used for cycling between fullscreen and windowed modes, and for toggling visibility/invisibility of the tools pallette. This would make for a nice Hal-ified work setup when paired with a sane/useful config for the gamepad in the non-pen hand. Thankfully, Playstation pads and their PC clones are bilaterally symmetrical, so left-handers will have in this case the same pivileges as right-handers.
In my present design, a gamepad-to-midi interface needs three things above all, in order of priority.
- copy/cut/paste/undo
- modifier keys
- selected shortcut keys
Plus possible gestures for the thumb-joystick, I am still thinking abot what to put there.
Incidentally, I might be able to write a good proposal if I knew whether something can work or not. This is one of the reasons why I am thinking about learning to code: the more I see software developers at work, the more I realise that prototyping is like sketching. You don't do mockups of previous ideas, but rather you find your idea by building it.
So I not only don't have a clear idea of what gestures to put in the thumb-joystick of the gamepad; I also fear it might turn out not to be such a good idea after all.
http://barrapunto.com/ - News for nerds, en español
And its easy to export to PNG (shift+ctrl+e).
Actually, I've always found the mouse panning/zooming rather useful. Use the scroll wheel, and I believe will pan up and down normally, and left+right with CTRL.
Use shift, and you can zoon in and out with the scroll wheel.
(I may have the CTRL/shift functions reversed, but I haven't enabled the scroll wheel on my work-laptop touchpad so I can't test this atm).
This is one thing I've never understood. Some people love GIMP's UI, some hate it. Why has nobody released a fork or update that lets you choose both? After all the massive bitchfests about the UI and the lack of container forms, why not just allow the bloody option to have a choice of enabling some of the the options that people bitch are missing.
There is an easy keyboard shortcut for multiple undo in Photoshop: ctrl-Z will toggle Undo/Redo like you said, however if you press ctrl-alt-z then you will continue to go back sequential steps in the history palette. Hopefully this will help you.
"Ever tried to do basic drawing in The Gimp? Like, say, drawing a circle? Ask any Gimp developer why this is such a bitch and they'll tell you something like: The Gimp is an image manipulation program, not a drawing program, go use Inkscape or something if you want to draw circles."
I've never found drawing circles in Gimp to be `a bitch'--I do it the same way I do it in real life: I make a mask, and stroke along the edge of the mask with my pencil/pen/airbrush. It's possible to make more complex masks easily as intersections and/or unions of base shapes and splines (in the real world, some of those spline-masks would be French curves). So, quite the opposite from being `a bitch', it's `my bitch'--it does what I want without my having to deal with `computerisms' that don't scale.
Sometimes I do the double-mask thing (recommended at the URL that you gave), but that's something different--not what I thought of when you said "drawing circles". But, if you'd said "make a filled annulus", I'd do something similar to that, then I'd do something similar to that in real life; I'd do something similar in Gimp, but not for solid-colour fills.
When I've worked in Photoshop, I did things the same way.
Maybe you're not speaking from a graphic artist's point of view?
-rozzin.
"My point was that he was essentially bragging that he made too much money to even look at something like the Gimp"
What he actually said was that eight hours of his time spent learning GIMP would pay for a Photoshop upgrade, so for him it wasn't a productive option even if it had functional equivalence. A Photoshop upgrade has a street price of around $150, so he's only claiming to earn $20 an hour, which is not a lot of money nowadays -- my programming contract rates are over double that, and I'm not rich.
NB: for companies, GIMP becomes even less economic because they have a whole bunch of cumulative expenses per employee that can end up with the $20/hour graphic designer's work being charged to customers at $100/hour or more without making excessive profits. The $699 RRP for Photoshop (and few pay that much, especially when buying licenses in volume) is therefore a trivial price to pay for a more capable and much faster program which has become such a standard in the graphic design business that its UI is second-nature to most employees and potential employees.
"and that F/OSS is somehow second class in all things because it doesn't work in his specific application of software."
He said nothing whatsoever about FOSS in general.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
I wanted to make it seem like I had a more important criticism to make to seem more credible!
Now my reputation is in tatters. *tear*
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
It's going to be SDI or MDI. There's no point mixing the too (it gets confusing, look at Excel).
I like it MDI. If you want SDI, use a different tool. Try Krita.
It's not like making a change YOU WANT has no effect on other people.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
There are no CMYK monitors, are there?
And this conversion loss happens sixty times a second, whenever the program translates a CMYK image into RGB for display. Granted, I am unfamiliar with offset printing workflows, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about.
Does Photoshop have an equivalent to Gimp's Lisp/Python interpreters? People don't need commercial extensions when they can knock up their own stuff to do the job in 10 minutes.
So what you are saying is that photo manipulation / graphic design is always a job for you, never a hobby. If you would consider it a hobby some of the time, you wouldn't mind some lost productivity.
I don't think most of the extensions that people pay money for can be knocked up so quickly or easily, although I'm sure that workflow stuff is made a lot easier by having simple scripting available. I guess the real problem is, how many pro graphics people can also do this sort of scripting? Some, but not most. I also don't think they'd react well to the "knock it up yourself" suggestion if there's something missing. They would be willing to pay well for it though. Maybe if there was some sort of responsive bounty system where they were able to put money towards a feature, and know that someone who did have the expertise could put it together in a given time frame.
Really? How does the program account for the characteristics of different CMYK printers and processes? How can free software use color calibration profiles to efficiently convert CMYK to RGB 60 times a second without infringing any patents in jurisdictions that allow patents on algorithms?
They convert using a generic algorithm such as the following: Invert R into C, G into M, and B into Y. Take the minimum of C, M, and Y, and call it K. Finally, subtract K from C, M, and Y. However, this algorithm does not correct its output for each output device's color response profile. That's where the patent minefield is perceived to lie.
Why are we talking about giving GIMP to an art department?
GIMP wasn't designed to waltz in and make everyone stop using Corel or Photoshop, abandon all ye KPT filters and so forth.
It's a productivity tool for people who don't already have a set of favorite tools and expectations, or for power users and developers.
Besides, Photoshop users whine about everything. Have you seen a PS forum? (shudder) Even if GIMP did change the UI to be more consistent with every other piece of crap out there, they'd still bitch about it and development would stall under the weight of a thousands lamentations.
Adoption doesn't really _drive_ GIMP or anything. It needs to cater to its own users needs. Dropping the powerful MDI interface for an "intuitive" SDI interface is not a step in the right direction.
Calling SDI intuitive is subjective. However, I do know that the MDI model makes me more productive, mainly by reducing the amount of mouse movement I need to do, and increased flexibility in how I arrange my tools and windows in a multimonitor environment.
This is why I bitch about it. People say, "but but it's not like everything else and my mom got confused when she tried to use it" and I say: "well, then they can go buy PS Elements, leave my tool alone".
How can you call MDI a shortcoming? GTK lends itself easily to SDI applications. Most GTK apps are SDI, or tabbed. Yet GIMP (and inkscape) CHOOSE to be MDI. There are reasons. I listed them. Changing it would raise many a user's ire.
Fuck windows and it's shitty windowing system. Who needs them?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON