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The GIMP UI Redesign
sekra writes "The GIMP UI Redesign Team has created a blog to collect ideas for a new design of the most popular image manipulation program. Everyone is free to submit suggestions to be published in the blog. Will a new GUI finally get more users to choose The GIMP as their program of choice?"
Nothing beats having a program use the same widgets you have on your operating system.
a name redesign.
I'd be risking more psycho mails in my inbox if I posted under any of my usual accounts, so I'm posting this anonymous, even at the risk of it being modded down as a troll.
GIMP people, the biggest, quickest thing you can do to get good people back in the project and working well together is to finally, please, finally get rid of Carol Spears. I know 80% of you agree with me and have demonstrated in private to me or in public that you want her out, but she's pushing more and more people out with her weird shit, her stalking behaviour, her willingness to criticize anyone contributing to the project for insane reasons like stealing her boyfriend or taking her life from her, or accuzing people of having sex with conference organisers to sway them and obtain cash. Whatever, too many good contributors are sick of it. Yes, she has mental health issues, but the project has suffered too much accomodating those. There is only so much you can do for her.
Taking this public because all the private talking has failed.
Every time I see The Gimp, I think about Pulp Fiction. How about a cooler name? I know it sounds like form over substance, but you'd be surprised how something so simple could slow adoption.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
How about making delete be Delete instead of ctrl+K
(1) a derrogatory term for someone that is disabled or has a medicial problem that results in physical impairment.
(2) An insult implying that someone is incompetent, stupid, etc. Can also be used to imply that the person is uncool or can't/won't do what everyone else is doing.
(3) A sex slave or submissive, usually male, as popularlized by the movie Pulp Fiction.
Look at that gimp in the wheelchair
Dude, quit being a gimp and take a hit!
Bring out the gimp!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gimp
so to the "street" (or younger population who you should be targetting) its an insult (has been my whole life and im 39), hardly surprising nobody wants to use it
I hate GUIs too, and you can be sure I'll be lobbying for a command-line-only interface for the Gimp. It might have a steep learning curve, but can you imagine how powerful and efficient that would be?
I love the way the GIMP has two completely different File menus with different contents. That cracks me up every time.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
You know, for years I've been listening to people complain that the Free Software and Open Source communities don't ever invent anything on their own. That they simply re-implement other peoples' ideas. I think it's kind of ironic that the number one suggestion for the future of the GIMP is that it be changed such that it simply re-implements other peoples' ideas.
The problem is that Gimp doesn't do everything Photoshop does, or even come close. There's no 16 or 32 bit channel support, no adjustment layers, no colorspaces aside from RGB and greyscale, no usable colour profile support. Those four things on their own eliminate Gimp as a usable high-end photography tool. The interface is not the problem. The underlying libraries are.
Krita from the Koffice suite is far more modern. It has all four of the above capabilities I mentioned. Some more polish and it'll be a very capable tool.
Anyone know what's really going on with GEGL?
Instead of opening up Photosho.. err, GIMP and cranking out a bunch of comps that are just mashups of existing UI concepts, why not talk to your users and design around their workflow and needs? Good UI is not born in a vacuum, good user experience doesn't happen without talking to users. For an app that seems to have the Rodney Dangerfield complaint, the team around it seems to do little to counter that. (You think Adobe doesn't test the hell out of its apps?)
So, I'll throw one out there, in the interest of PRACTICAL feedback:
Single window mode is a bad idea because it makes a photo retoucher's life much more difficult.
Here's an example why, an actual segment of a workflow and/or task, done in Photoshop to show the ease of this and why multi-window works well.
Grab a picture of a friend, ideally if they are drunk or have blotchy skin in the photo -- make it as unflattering as possible. Wedding pictures are ideal. Needs to be color.
Open it in Photoshop. Now, since I don't have another copy in front of me, this is the CS2 method:
Window>Arrange>Open New Window for [foo.jpg]
Window>Arrange>Tile Vertically
Now center both windows on the same area, ideally, said blotchy skin.
On ONE window, go to the layers/channels/paths palette. Switch to the Channels palette. Turn off all channels except green. Odds are, it looks pretty much like the color photo, just in B&W.
Now take the Clone tool and massage out some of the blotchiness in the green channel ("B&W") version. Ta-da, fixed in both. And you can see its effect immediately.
This is one way that your favorite babes are airbrushed to laughable non-human perfection for magazines. It's quick, it's got incredible feedback, and it's not possible in a tabbed or single window method.
Talking to your users, as opposed to a comp-off (or the cardinal sin, the designer assuming he knows everything), gives you all kinds of useful information like that.
Aimless brainstorming, bad. Brainstorming with a direction, productive.
I am not Herbert.
I manage a small but successful wedding photography company. We use almost exclusively open source software including DigiKam, ShowFoto and of course, the Gimp.
I wanted people to switch to Krita for the deeper color support and integration with DigiKam and ShowFoto, but the thing is unusable! There (currently) aren't nearly as many editing tools while and the UI may look more like Photoshop, it's sure doesn't behave like it.
After about 2 weeks of trying to use it, I had to go back to Gimp and put Krita off for futher evaluation in a year or two.
Some things Gimp has going for it:
1) It works pretty well (not great, not all the features that Photoshop has, but good enough for many uses)
2) The new 2.4 version is a huge improvement in usability (All color items in their own menu? Yes!, All special effects scripts in one place? , Yes!)
3) The extensive set of plugins http://registry.gimp.org/ which allow for added (and usually tested) functionality
4) Enough people use it that most major bugs are squashed before a release is made
Er, Krita has a grid, and has layer groups...
Boudewijn Rempt, Krita maintainer
it's funny because even a year or two ago when a GIMP article would come up, people would ask why it hasn't replaced Photoshop and I'd say that the primitive (well, it would have been state of the art in 1993) color support just kills it out of the box for anyone doing anything more advanced than web graphics. Of course, everyone would reply and say I was just a luser artist who was obviously just too stupid to possibly learn anything other than the Photoshop UI and that's why I secretly hated the GIMP, and no regular user will ever need to use anything other than 8-bit untagged RGB.
And of course now consumer-level cameras -- point and shoot $500 models -- are shooting in RAW and saving 12-bit tagged images that the GIMP has no hope of dealing with in any usable way.
If the GIMP developers had listened to the professionals back in say, 1999, when we told them their fundamental assumptions about color were hopelessly naive, they might have been able to do something about it. As it is, I don't imagine anything short of a Mozilla-style "throw out all the code and start over" will keep the GIMP from eventually fading away as more modern open-source apps port the GIMP's features onto a better foundation.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.