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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!
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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.
>> 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.)
Integrating The Gimp and Inkscape would be interesting.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Krita is already set to run them over, it's just a matter of time. The application has gone to a crash prone app with a barely useful featureset, to fairly stable with a modest featureset in a very short timespan. And it seems like it's just gaining more momentum as it goes on. For now development will probably slow as everyone works hard on porting to KDE4, but make no mistake that this app is the graphical interface many have been begging for on Linux. Many of us use the Gimp because there's no other option (or we don't feel like using photoshop in wine), but there will soon be a point where the gimp is going to end up a rather orphaned application as far as their userbase goes. With QT being cross platform, I might even be a bit conserned if I were Corel - the {now} owners of PaintShop Pro.
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.
A lot of the guys I work with use pro motion http://www.thegamecreators.com/?f=promotion which is basically DPaint. They push pixels for some very well known games and swear by it.
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.