First Looks at The Gimp 2.5

desmondhaynes writes "The GIMP team announced today the first release from the 2.5 development series. It is true that this version is unstable, but a little bird told me to give it a try and see what's it capable of. First of all, let me tell you that its interface is quite redesigned and I think that some users will have problems adjusting with it, but that's just my two cents. On the other hand, version 2.5.0 of The GIMP includes some hot new features, like the integration of GEGL (Generic Graphics Library) which will finally get support for higher color depths, more colorspaces and eventually non-destructive editing."

Comments

Yay New Features

[CastrTroy]

With the rate of advancement in The GIMP, eventually, Photoshop enthusiasts will have nothing bad to really say about it. It was always about no cmyk, no 32 bit color support, no adjustment layers. It looks like some of these things may be coming in future.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot "no interface elements that aren't batshit insane."

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

With the rate of advancement in The GIMP, eventually, Photoshop enthusiasts will have nothing bad to really say about it.

You're right. It's only been 12+ years that people have been asking for those things. Now GIMP actually has an engine capable of doing them (note that it doesn't actually do them yet). It'll only be another few years until the basics are covered!

Re:Yay New Features

[Alan Shutko]

I'm hoping. The lack of 16bpp color support was the factor that was bugging me most.

Re:Yay New Features

[Coryoth]

You forgot "no interface elements that aren't batshit insane." I'm curious; can you tell me some interface elements that are batshit insane, and explain why they are insane? Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to admit that GIMP has some interface quirks and problems around and about. Personally, however, I've found most things to work reasonably well, and, more importantly, to be steadily improving (the dockable palettes that showed up in 2.0 or so, and the Image Window + Tools Window shown in TFA for 2.5, etc.). That leaves me honestly curious as to what leads one to the point of view that apparently all the interface elements are insane -- so please: can you explain some of the things that bug you so much about the interface?

Re:Yay New Features

[davolfman]

As those are features I use on pretty much every image I guess I won't be using it yet. Same with a pretty large portion of anybody else who scans film.

Re:Yay New Features

[CastrTroy]

Yes, it hasn't caught up yet, but I think that eventually, it will. And then what? Do you think that people will continue to pay for Photoshop once GIMP does everything Photoshop does? Sure, some will, but a lot won't. And also, have people been asking for 16 bit per channel color and adjustment layers for 12 years? I highly doubt it.

Re:Yay New Features

[Ford Prefect]

You forgot "no interface elements that aren't batshit insane."

Yeah, like changing a simple right-click on a layer, then 'Alpha to selection' to 'Select', 'Load Selection...', then selecting the appropriate document and channel from no-preview combo-boxes...

The GIMP's batshit insane, but Photoshop is as loopy as a teapot. Their particular modes of madness simply aren't entirely compatible - The GIMP is definitely pretty bad in places, but for the life of me I can't figure out how Photoshop is supposed to be infinitely superior from a user interface point of view.

I must admit that I still really like The GIMP's perspective correction tool - Photoshop's got better distortion tools, but they won't run backwards. Unlike the crop tool's perspective correction, which has no handy grid-lines visible. There's the lens correction filter, but that's really fiddly. But is brilliant at removing barrel distortion from texture references - something that's a real arse in The GIMP.

Drawing tools? I really like how the hold-shift-to-draw-a-straight-line works in The GIMP. Click somewhere, undo to remove that splodge, hold shift down and it'll preview a fine line from where you clicked to the current cursor position. Click somewhere, and it'll draw a line with the current drawing tool. Hold down control-shift, and it'll lock to particular angles.

Photoshop? Click, undo to remove that splodge, ARSE! it's forgotten where I clicked. Okay ... Leave that initial splodge, hold down shift, NO FINE PREVIEW LINE!, click somewhere, oops wrong place for that line, undo, ARSE AGAIN! it's forgotten where I wanted to draw the line from!

With Photoshop, it's really easy to set up guides for your simple, shadowy lines on yer textures - but I still like The GIMP's way of doing it.

Actually, The GIMP's handling of alpha channels is a bit more sensible - right up until the point it merrily decides to discard colour information from completely transparent pixels. As part of an 'optimisation', albeit one that only gets invoked with certain operations. So it's very easy to completely destroy your texture, unless you keep to a strict, undocumented set of operations.

Photoshop's alpha handling is plain weird in places, but it's a bit more predictable...

Re:Yay New Features

[krazytekn0]

But they aren't the same interface elements as Photshop! So they're terrible!!!

Re:Yay New Features

[Abcd1234]

So, all three of you, then? :)

Re:Yay New Features

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

As those are features I use on pretty much every image I guess I won't be using it yet. Same with a pretty large portion of anybody else who scans film.

You might want to try CinePaint (formerly called Film Gimp). It is a fork of Gimp aimed specifically at touching up frames of film. It supports 8, 16, and 32 bit color, CMYK, HDR, Onion skinning, etc.

It is mainly developed by film production, special effects companies and has been used on many major motion pictures (Harry Potter, Spider Man, etc.).

It may well be more what you're looking for if you're working with film images.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

I think people will continue to pirate Photoshop and businesses will continue to pay for it. Pretty much the same way it is now. The GIMP is never going to become mainstream unless they completely redo the user interface.

Re:Yay New Features

[stubear]

By the time GIMP catches up with Photoshop, Adobe will have added new improvements for GIMP to ape and the cycle will start all over. GIMP will NEVER be as good as Photoshop for professional use.

Re:Yay New Features

[Dekker3D]

i'm not him, so i don't know what he's talking about, but i know the separate-screen gui drove me away for years. i got fed up with downloading photoshop again and again though, so... i figured i'd just grin and bear with it. it hasn't crashed so far though, while photoshop does that sometimes, so i guess i should be grateful.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe's marketing department, a.k.a. Photoshop Enthusiasts, will never get done bashing the GIMP. As long as the GIMP is "not" Photoshop, it will be unsuitable for serious or professional use. End of story.

Re:Yay New Features

[teslatug]

At what rate? I don't see that the new release does much in that regard. There is still no CMYK or 32bit support as far as I can tell from the article.

Re:Yay New Features

[CastrTroy]

My understanding is that the multi window interface is actually very similar to Photoshop on the MAC. Photoshop only has a single window MDI in windows. I could be wrong, but that's the way I understand it.

Re:Yay New Features

[hostyle]

How about this menu: http://news.softpedia.com/images/extra/LINUX/large/gimp25preview-large_009.jpg ? Doesn't seem very sane to me.

Re:Yay New Features

[MobyDisk]

The problem with GIMP is that the interface is so far gone, so weird, so bizarre, so non-standard - that it is really tough for anybody to sanely explain what's wrong with it. It's just so darn self evident.

Having not used it in 2 years, I'll try:
1) The multiple windows thing
I think this is the most often cited issue so I will list it first. GIMP opens multiple top-level windows which means that normal shortcuts and window navigation doesn't work. (Alt-tab on Windows -- apple-tab on Macs, etc.) The only way to use GIMP is to have multiple virtual desktops, which not everyone likes. The barrage of windows clutters the interface, and windows move around a lot because when you select new tools they resize or change. You can see through to the desktop which is distracting. I know at least on the Windows version, the keys that hide windows so you can get to your image don't really work right. Maybe my experience is skewed though because of the Windows and Mac ports. But IIRC, this same stuff happened on Linux.

This problem has garnered enough hate that there are several open-source projects that are either modifications to Photoshop, or programs that re-parent the window so that it behaves more normally. Unfortauntely, all of them are hacks and don't work super-well.

2) Unusual use of menus
- The menus are just... oddd. To a new user, the app is useless because once you open something, you get a window with no menus. After much frustration, the user monkey-clicks the mouse and realizes the menus are on the right-click instead of at the top of the window. That might not actually be a bad idea, but it is definitely counter-intuitive. Especially for "file" operations where people are used to seeing File-New/Open/Save/Save As/Close and those just aren't there.

This is not an issue for an advanced user, but it is strikingly odd to someone new, and it might force a lot of people to give-up right away.

3) Things that are NOT problems
- I'm browsing the comments and I see comments about Photoshop having an odd user-interface. I see comments that one particular tool or another doesn't work the way someone expects. I think these people are missing the point. The problems with GIMP aren't that some particular tool is not as easy to use as a Photoshop tool, or vice-versa. The problem is that nobody can even find the tool in GIMP because the overarching user-interface is so strange. Once people can get to the tool in the first place, then think about how the tool behaves.

4) Other
If you really want to know, this comes-up on Slashdot every 6 months or so. Probably some searching will come-up with obvious things I've completely forgotten over time.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

You act as if Photoshop is a non-moving target. The features that you're talking about up there were available in Photoshop 3. We're up to what, version 9 now? And each version adds features that are actually useful if you use the program professionally.

Re:Yay New Features

[Coryoth]

How about this menu: http://news.softpedia.com/images/extra/LINUX/large/gimp25preview-large_009.jpg ? Doesn't seem very sane to me. Given that that is a menu attached to an as yet very loosely integrated feature (GEGL) in a first development release... not such a great complaint. Sure, it's a terrible menu, but then it's clearly something that was slapped in to provide testers with access to GEGL's functionality. There's no way that's going to survive to 2.6 (the stable release).

Re:Yay New Features

[CastrTroy]

I'm sure at one point, a lot of people said the same thing about Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sendmail, PHP, and all the other open source products that are used by professionals on a daily basis.

Re:Yay New Features

[Ford Prefect]

Having not used it in 2 years, I'll try:

Use a recent version. Point number two is definitely fixed (by default, image windows have a conventional menu bar at the top) - and point number one has been worked on. A lot.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you tell me more about the future, please? Like, will I strike it rich or something?

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why the GIMP will never be popular. Despite its lack of popularity and the overwhelming number of complaints about the user interface, the developers, and the few existing supporters, continuously rely on the excuse that users are merely familiar and conditioned to the Photoshop user interface.

Of course, it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that the GIMP's user interface was haphazardly thrown together by programmers with absolutely no concern for HCI. Photoshop's interface couldn't possibly be better despite the thousands of hours of research and user interface testing that Adobe has put into it. Nope, absolutely none of that matters!

Keep blaming people's familiarity with Photoshop and you'll be sure to continue the GIMPs long standing tradition of complete and utter failure.

Re:Yay New Features

[Dekker3D]

wow.. i didn't know that. still, i'd assume most people trying out the gimp would probably have a windows background. macs and the software commonly associated with them tend to be more expensive than regular pcs, so they won't pick the gimp just because it's cheaper.

Re:Yay New Features

[paulatz]

The facts that gimp opens up ~200 windows to do the simpler tasks is already insane. Add the lack of predefined shortcuts (you can customize them, but you will lost on everybody else computer, plus they are lost from time to time). Mix it with modifier keys wich interfer with each other (i.e. if I press CTRL to subtract a rectangular selection, I will have to subtract a *square* selection instead).

I can also recall the insane scripting language, even if it is not interface in the stricter sens. I can more or less program a dozen languages but I could never really understand that pita; furthermore most filters are badly designed and cannot be used in a script.

The printing interface sucks so much that I have to open the window before using it. It was probably designed to use the printer directly in order to make a better use of advanced features. Its support for printers from the nineties is still incomplete: you will have to manually select PPD files. even if you do it, gimp is not able to autoparse the available printing options and display them in a (not even sub-decent) interface.

Re:Yay New Features

[websitebroke]

1) The multiple windows thing I think this is the most often cited issue so I will list it first. GIMP opens multiple top-level windows which means that normal shortcuts and window navigation doesn't work. (Alt-tab on Windows -- apple-tab on Macs, etc.) The only way to use GIMP is to have multiple virtual desktops, which not everyone likes. The barrage of windows clutters the interface, and windows move around a lot because when you select new tools they resize or change. You can see through to the desktop which is distracting. I know at least on the Windows version, the keys that hide windows so you can get to your image don't really work right. Maybe my experience is skewed though because of the Windows and Mac ports. But IIRC, this same stuff happened on Linux.

Just checked on a Kubuntu Linux System. Alt+Tab cycles through each GIMP window and any other window on my desktop one at a time. Does that not work in the Windoze world, or is that your problem with the interface? I like it just fine.

Re:Yay New Features

[SharpFang]

Let's start with File>Print... which opens the same dialog you'd see with Notepad. The ability to set up a printout are nearly null (if you dig into it, you'll spot Image>Print Size which allows you to set DPI, but about nothing more than that. If your printer driver doesn't provide 'center', 'landscape', 'multi-page', 'position' etc, you're out in the cold. Print preview? Dream on! And interestingly, GIMP had a pretty rich (though batshit insane) print setup dialog somewhere in 1.x times.

There's no way to save a set of dialogs. I can't count the times where I was painstakingly rebuilding the second pane of layers/channels/paths, undo history, brushes/gradients after clicking 'close' and then 'OK' on wrong window.

Tools in the main window are laid out in a multi-line row, changes to the width of the window change the tool layout completely. And changing the width is useful, some tool properties are invisible/cut off in the narrow window. So I know I can expect selection tools in the first row in the beginning, but an airbrush? Fourth row, left? Third row, right? Fifth row, left? Never the same.

Confirm, set, change, etc dialogs pop up in such a way as to obscure most of your current area. You pick a "crop" tool, start cropping the pic in upper right and the dialog with the values pops up right where you'd finish it in lower left. If you pause to move it, you can't drag lower left corner to resize the selection any more, it moves the whole selection.

The translations are plain hopeless. People who translate tool and filter names are bound on translating every single word, have no trace of computer graphics background, and no trace of understanding how a given tool works, often picking the translation out of their ass, missing the point completely. Oh, and there's no prefs option to change the language. You need to edit obscure text files to change environmental variables to change to English.

Font preview. Aa, Aa, Aa, Aa, that's about as far as it goes to seeing what given font looks like.

Brush editor: if you want to create a brush that is a variant of an existing brush: -Click existing brush, click 'edit', write down the values on a sheet of paper (they can't be changed), click 'close', click 'new', set the values by hand. There are three base brushes, round, square and square. The other 'square' differs by the 'Angle' slider offset changed by 45 degrees.

If you want to paint with alpha/transparency: pick eraser tool, select brush and whatever the tool allows. Sometimes it won't have '100% opacity' no matter what, hard to guess why. If you want to paint 'erase' with a different tool, either play with Layer Mask (confusing and slow) or you're out of luck.

You want to apply the same filter effect to all 600 frames of GIF animation. Well, good luck, pick them one by one.

No, you can't zoom in a playback preview of a GIF animation.

Yes, you can't change playback speed of a GIF animation. Just rename each layer from "Frame #431 (14ms)" to "Frame #431 (13ms)" by hand.

If you place guides close enough, you won't be able to drag a selection between them. Guide 'snap' zone is zoom-dependent. You'll drag the guides. (sure you can hide guides. But if you want to move to a different set of guides, you need to switch them back on.

Part of my work for a living is using GIMP (only 'designers' are entitled to photoshop in the company, 'developers' need to use open-source apps, and if a designer sends in gfx with an error, you need to use GIMP to fix it or send it back and wait another day while deadlines fly over your head.) I use it more than I'd like to and I got used to most of its pains. And after some 4 years of getting used to its interface and learning it really well, I still say it's batshit insane.

Re:Yay New Features

[Coryoth]

Having not used it in 2 years, I'll try: That may be part of the problem -- as I said, they have been working on various issues...

The multiple windows thing This was slimmed down in 2.0 with dockable palettes so you could just have one tool window and then image windows. The docked windows also solve the issue of windows resizing (palettes don't when docked; they may, at worst, acquire scroll bars). This particular release sees the start of further UI overhauls the first of which is to provide a default main window with a single "tools window" which has the various palettes docked into it. Furthermore, the "tools window" is marked as a utility window, so windowing systems that understand such things will consider it as different (i.e. not a main window). This fixes (I presume, I haven't tried it) your window navigation keybinding issue.

I guess the long answer is: GIMP was initially designed for systems that didn't have taskbars, and did have multiple desktops; the result was the interface you seem familiar with, which, I agree, had serious shortcomings when ported to Windows. Over the years various efforts have been made to clean this up, and are still ongoing. Windows, of course, is still not the best platform, though there are plugins like Portable Background Window which provide a single background window which contains all the GIMP windows, providing an MDI style interface for Windows.

Unusual use of menus...To a new user, the app is useless because once you open something, you get a window with no menus. This was fixed in, I believe, 2.0 (or possibly 2.2). All image windows have menu bars with a menu that replicates the right click menu. This means users can simply use the menu at the top of the window as they might expect, or use the right click menu if they prefer. The latest version from TFA goes so far as to remove the menu from the tool window and provide a default empty image window (with menubar) upon start up. While the last problem is still potentially somewhat irksome depending on taste (though with plugins it can be "fixed") I think this one has been safely dealt with since the last time you used the GIMP... indeed, it was dealt with some time ago.

Re:Yay New Features

[nmg196]

Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but the rate of advancement of the GIMP is very slow - which is probably why the vast majority of people still use Photoshop. It's currently nowhere near Photoshop in functionality or reliability and I doubt that will change any time soon. It's OK for editing your holiday pics and retouching photos, but it's got a long way to go before professional designers can adopt it company-wide to produce professional artwork for print.

Re:Yay New Features

[Beetle B.]

I think this is the most often cited issue so I will list it first. GIMP opens multiple top-level windows which means that normal shortcuts and window navigation doesn't work. (Alt-tab on Windows -- apple-tab on Macs, etc.) OTOH, I like this. It allows me to move images to different virtual desktops - sometimes I like having my images contained in 2 or 3 of them. A single parent window won't allow me to do that.

The only way to use GIMP is to have multiple virtual desktops, which not everyone likes. Not at all. If you're on Linux, use a window manager that allows you to group multiple windows and treat them as one (i.e. minimize all with one click, switch to other apps with one keystroke, etc).

2) Unusual use of menus
- The menus are just... oddd. To a new user, the app is useless because once you open something, you get a window with no menus. After much frustration, the user monkey-clicks the mouse and realizes the menus are on the right-click instead of at the top of the window. That might not actually be a bad idea, but it is definitely counter-intuitive. Especially for "file" operations where people are used to seeing File-New/Open/Save/Save As/Close and those just aren't there. This has long been fixed. Whenever you open an image, the image window has the usual menu.

I strongly recommend you try it again. I used to hate the Gimp interface and didn't use it for a while. After a number of years, I tried it and there were a number of interface enhancements (like the one you complain about).

Re:Yay New Features

[Ford Prefect]

My understanding is that the multi window interface is actually very similar to Photoshop on the MAC.

Screenshots or it didn't happen!

Oh wait. The GIMP, Photoshop CS3. Behold some passing similarities!

Re:Yay New Features

[MidnightBrewer]

And by 32-bit color support you meant 16, right?

For a professional product, these things are necessary. Having them finally incorporated will be a wonderful thing indeed. I only hope they're addressing the Gimp's performance issues as well.

Re:Yay New Features

[Coryoth]

i know the separate-screen gui drove me away for years. It's not so weird. As someone else pointed out, Photoshop for the Mac works the same way as GIMP, and UNIX and X11 historically have favoured multi-window interfaces to things -- in large part because virtual desktops were mat least as prevalent as taskbars in many early window managers. If you're on Windows then I can see how it may still annoy you -- although as TFA points out, while not going with a Windows style MDI they are smoothing things out a little (relegating the tool palettes to utility windows that window managers should handle differently, as well as having a default main image window at startup). If you are on Windows and are still bugged by it all then This plugin for GIMP is the way to go: it makes GIMP a Windows style MDI interface with a single background window.

Re:Yay New Features

[Kartoffel]

Photoshop's UI is just a different flavor of batshit insane. I don't mind that the menus and graphical doodads are different, but it would freakin awesome if Adobe and GIMP could standardize a bit more on the keyboard shortcuts. Ask any serious user. It's all about muscle memory and keyboard shortcuts.

Re:Yay New Features

[Toby_Tyke]

My understanding is that the multi window interface is actually very similar to Photoshop on the MAC. Photoshop only has a single window MDI in windows. I could be wrong, but that's the way I understand it.

I think you are wrong.

I HATE the Gimp's GUI. Absolutely, completely despise it, and here's why. Say I have a bunch of apps open, browser, music player, my home folder, and Gimp. Now, the Gimp actually has three windows, The document window, the tool browser and the layers palate (actually it can have more than that, but that's the default). Now, let's suppose that I've finished reading slashdot, and I want to carry on editing my image, so I click on the taskbar button named "image.xcf". The image I was working on is maximized, but where are my editing tools? oh, they're still minimised. Back down to the taskbar, click on the GIMP button. OK, so I select the tool I want, but wait, I'm on the wrong layer. OK, back down to the taskbar, click on the Layers,Channels button, up pops the layer selector.

OK, so so far I've had to maximize three separate windows, just to be able to edit the image. But it gets even more annoying, because you can end up with the image over the top of the tool palates, so every time you want to go back and change a tool, you have to go back down to the taskbar and select the palate window again (or alt tab).

Now the reason I think you're wrong is because last time I posted a rant like this, two Mac users pointed out that Photoshop on the Mac does not work like this. Apperently, clicking on any image open in photoshop also brings the tools into focus as well. Of course I could be wrong as well, since I have no direct experience with Photoshop on Macs.

And before anyone points out that I could just set the palates to "Always on top", yes I could, and as a matter of fact I do, but it grates on me to have to work around a programs stupid defaults. Besides, I then have to manually minimize them if I want to use another program, and then manually bring them back up after clicking on an image window. Still annoying. Clicking an image in Gimp should bring the image up along with a full set of editing tools.

Re:Yay New Features

[BBandCMKRNL]

1) The multiple windows thing
I think this is the most often cited issue so I will list it first. GIMP opens multiple top-level windows Interesting. One of my main complaints with PAN, and my Windows-only newsreader - Gravity, is that it ISN'T multi-windowed. Different strokes for different folks.

Re:Yay New Features

[Shade of Pyrrhus]

If I could mod you up, I would.

I love the GIMP, and I've never actually had Photoshop. However, I will say that I frequently get lost in trying to figure out where things are. If, instead of saying, "Oh, it's not Photoshop, your complaint isn't legit!", they all said "Let's see what we can do to fix this," things would probably get better more quickly.

I understand they've been working on things, hence this release, but these complaints are very old.

Re:Yay New Features

[Coryoth]

Okay, some of these are valid, if exaggerated, but others are just a little odd.

The facts that gimp opens up ~200 windows to do the simpler tasks is already insane. Okay, that's a wild exaggeration, but yes, the many windows is a complaint that has some weight behind it. It is a problem that has been and is being worked on. In particular dockable palettes, and the recent (2.5) approach of defaulting to docking all the palettes in one utility window (hinted as such for the window manager), helps to alleviate this.

Add the lack of predefined shortcuts (you can customize them, but you will lost on everybody else computer, plus they are lost from time to time). I'm not sure what to make of this; a lot of shortcuts are pre-defined; particularly the all tools and most common operations. Mostly the operations lacking shortcuts are the various colour and filter operations, which are sufficiently numerous that keybindings would quickly get out of hand. Are there particular operations that you want keybindings for that are currently lacking them by default?

Mix it with modifier keys wich interfer with each other (i.e. if I press CTRL to subtract a rectangular selection, I will have to subtract a *square* selection instead). Well you could hold CTRL to start and get subtraction, then let it go to allow you to draw a rectangle. The last stable version fixed this by actually separating the options: if you hold CTRL before starting a selection you get a subtraction of the selection with rectangle selection. To get centered selection (what CTRL does -- use shift tio get a fixed ratio) you must press CTRL after you've started your selection. Add in the ability to modify selelction shapes (including modifying subtraction) provided in 2.4 and I think we can call this problem largely solved.

I can also recall the insane scripting language, even if it is not interface in the stricter sens. Script-fu is lisp based if I recall. Of course there are bindings for Python, Perl, Ruby, and probably a dozen other scripting languages. You can script GIMP in whatever you're comfortable with. I have to admit I don't see quite how this is a major problem.

The printing interface sucks This one I have to grant. I understand it is being worked on, but yes, currently the printing interface is on the clunky side. Of course you could save your image and print from something else with a simpler print interface, but that's a little clunky too. Better printing would be nice, but I'm not sure the slightly complicated interface for printing makes the whole software package "batshit insane" -- lots of programs have clunky printing interfaces that could be much improved (I'm looking at you Adobe Reader for Linux!).

Re:Yay New Features

[A Jew]

Why not use dockable panels that can be turned into separate windows, with the GIMP remembering your setup? That way everyone would be satisfied.

Re:Yay New Features

[RiotingPacifist]

Isn't that what gimpshop is for?
Given that both tools require a significant amount of effort to learn, I think that while standardising keyboard shortcuts would be nice, it could actually be counter productive as the two programs do the same thing in different ways.

Re:Yay New Features

[stubear]

"GIMP is going to be as good as Photoshop one day" is the same as "Is this the year of desktop Linux"? Geeks keep asking these questions but pan the answers they get from professionals, thinking they know more abut what the industry needs.

Re:Yay New Features

[Machtyn]

[start snide remark]
Get yourself a blinkin' dual monitor setup!!
[end snide remark]

Wouldn't it be possible to setup The GIMP to allow users who want everything in one window to have that, and those of us who appreciate break-out menus and secondary windows to have it this way?

The reason I don't like Photoshop's UI is for this reason: I have a dual monitor setup and I want my picture to fill all of monitor 1 while my tools sit on monitor 2.

It would be nice, though, if The GIMP would make the Main and Tools windows "Always on Top" when the user clicks on the image being edited.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know where you get the software associated with macs is more expensive, I find that I generally pay less for higher quality software on the mac

Re:Yay New Features

[NWprobe]

I've heard many people proclaim that photoshop is superior to the Gimp because Gimp only supports 8-bits colors. The same people often have their digital camera set to store their pictures in jpeg, which is 8 bit. Nobody I know with a compact digital camera has their camera set to save the photos in anything else than jpeg. Many people I know with digital SLRs still has their cameras set to store in jpeg. The point here is that jpeg is 8-bit per channel. Unless your shooting in tiff or raw, there is no need for 16-bit channels.

Currently I rarely use 12/16bit channel photo editing. The reason is that it's to slow (ok I admit, my computer is 3 years old, but hey! I use linux, haven't had the need to upgrade for three years, and I'll probably use my computers for 2-3 years more untill next upgrade). I convert my RAW files to 8 bit channels with Ufraw. In the raw conversion I adjust colors, white balance and exposure, then I only use Gimp to do minor changes, cropping and the like.

What I really would like, is adjustment layers. That I miss. CMYK is really a non issue unless one need real color proofing and do proffesional work.

Re:Yay New Features

[tezbobobo]

Yeah, really wicked. Now all GIMP needs is support for the various colour matching systems such as ANPA,DIC, Fokoltone, HKS, PAntone, Trumatch and TOYO. Sure they cost a lot to license and so are almost guaranteed to NEVER be in Photoshop locking out a huge swathe of the publishing industry.

And really, who cares that it doesn't fit in with CS3 the way photoshop does - it doesn't fit with Krita or Scribus either.

Hey, give it only another decade and it may have some lossless processing gear.

Reality check buddy - Photoshop users aren't out to get Gimp. It doesn't bother them and if it's ever better. Photoshop users only hate clueless Gimp USERS who wouldn't know a proper colour management workflow, from Raw to print to online, if it smashed them in the face with a fully formed colour profile.

How about you continue using GIMP for your happy snaps, and I'll continue using it for aiding in the publication of the newspaper, at which I'm the operations manager, with a distribution of 127,000 copies weekly.

In return for us never crossing into each others territories again, ie you don't pretend you deal with real printing in real quantities and I'll not tell you how to remove auntie's red eyes, we'll stop spreading mis-information such as 'Photoshop users only need CMYK and when GIMP has that they'll be on par.'

I', gonna give you the benefit of the doubt after all that and assume you meant to get modded funny, not half-wit Linuxoverzealot.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

You've pointed out exactly why I hate the Gimp's interface. I don't compare it to Photoshop, because I don't use it and I don't know anything about it. Gimp's interface is bad all on its own.

Re:Yay New Features

[Enselic]

This problem doesn't exist in GIMP 2.5 if you use a window manager with descent support for window hints.

The default setup in GIMP 2.5 is to have the toolbox and dialogs/docks with a Utility window-hint and this causes for example Metacity to not show them in the task bar (i.e. the taskbar is not cluttered by GIMP windows). If you bring up an image the toolbox and dialogs/docks will be brought up as well.

GIMP has since long offered the Utility window-hint but it was not useful until now when there is a window that hosts the menu while no images are opened.

Re:Yay New Features

[xtracto]

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to admit that GIMP has some interface quirks and problems around and about.

The issue is that, what for you are "some interface quirks", for real world designers are completely craptacular design decisions. I am not a designer (I am faaaaar from that) but I have worked with real designers and everyone of them who tested the Gimp agreed that the interface was so clumsy and unnatural...

The question is, are YOU a real designer? if not, then your opinion is just another open source advocate/zealot apologist.

Re:Yay New Features

[LunarCrisis]

In GIMP 2.4.5: File->Preferences->Window Management: Set "Hint for the toolbox/other docks" to "Utility Window". This also takes them out of the taskbar.

Re:Yay New Features

[Coryoth]

Thank you, you're one of the first people with some interesting complaints that aren't largely fixed in recent releases. Some of your complaints are a little odd to me though:

Let's start with File>Print... which opens the same dialog you'd see with Notepad. The ability to set up a printout are nearly null I'm not sure what to make of this. I have GIMP 2.4 here and the Gutenpring dialog, while clunky, is far from lacking in options, previews, and so on. If anything it is rather overstuffed with options.

There's no way to save a set of dialogs. You can save a window layout in the preferences, or revert to a default layout. Not sure if that's quite what you want.

The other points are largely reasonable. The toolbox layout changign can be quirky (though also makes sense in some way. Some manner of logical grouping might be a good start though. The translations -- I can't comment, but that's a problem with many packages, not just GIMP. The font and text tools do suck somewhat, but apparently that's a focus in the current version, so you should see that much improved soon. The brush editor; yes well, I'll happily admit that's a nasty quirk. I've never run into the eraser problems you describe, but they may well exist. While I've never done it, it sounds like GIF animation certainly sucks.

So thank you, these are actually a bunch of quirks and complaints that make good sense, and I agree should be fixed (though some of them are already being worked on). I still wouldn't go so far as to say the whole interface is batshit insane though -- it seems more like GIMP sucks at a few tasks (GIF related) and has a few annoying quirks; lots of applications have annoying UI quirks though. Can we go with "some specific areas that could definitely use significant improvment"?

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

And you don't use multiple desktops for what reason? Don't bitch because you don't properly utilize your desktop environment.

Re:Yay New Features

[Coryoth]

In GIMP 2.4.5: File->Preferences->Window Management: Set "Hint for the toolbox/other docks" to "Utility Window". This also takes them out of the taskbar. And, it should be noted, is apparently the default in 2.5.0.

Re:Yay New Features

[i_liek_turtles]

I don't know if it's just me, but I tend to have problems using a Wacom tablet with the GIMP; whenever I want pressure sensitivity to affect the size of the brush, it will eventually stop registering. If I use light sensitivity, it will also often not register. I have not had problems with this with other programs in Wine. While there are other problems, to be sure, this became my major pet peeve with the GIMP when I tried it.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

PS on the Mac appears to be multi-window but operates as if it were a single window like in windows.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point, and it would be easy to get the same behaviour as on the mac in X11, by making the palettes children of the image window. Then the window manager should take care of keeping the palettes in front. The problem is that this only works with one "parent" window, so gimp would have to re-parent the palettes whenever the focus changes. I'd actually love to see this implemented properly, because that keeps annoying me whenever I use gimp for more than a quick crop, resize or so. Some people may want to be able to actually bring the image in front of the palettes, so there may have to be an option to turn back to the old bahaviour.

Re:Yay New Features

[SanityInAnarchy]

Alt-tab on Windows -- apple-tab on Macs, etc.

Last I checked, apple-tab on a mac would cycle through apps, not windows. It would thus raise all Gimp windows when you find the Gimp, as a single item. Maybe I had to tweak something to turn that behavior on, but that's pretty much how I work when I'm on OS X -- on Gimp or anything else.

The menus are just... oddd. To a new user, the app is useless because once you open something, you get a window with no menus. After much frustration, the user monkey-clicks the mouse and realizes the menus are on the right-click instead of at the top of the window.

Apparently, you haven't used it in 2 years. The image windows now have their own menu bar, which pretty much replaces right-click.

Re:Yay New Features

[Wiseman1024]

You haven't used a serious image editing program to its full potential, have you?

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it hasn't caught up yet, but I think that eventually, it will. And then what? And then the GIMP will still be behind, because Photoshop will have had another upgrade or two, with more refinements.

Recent upgrades of Photoshop have focused as much on streamlining the UI as on simply adding features. The GIMP needs progress in both areas, at a faster rate than Photoshop, if it is to ever "catch" Photoshop.

Re:Yay New Features

[Coryoth]

The issue is that, what for you are "some interface quirks", for real world designers are completely craptacular design decisions. Well that really depends on what they are doesn't it? If you could actually explain what the problems are that might go a long way toward fixing them. It's also worth noting that, ultimately, GIMP isn't really targetting the professional design community. I mean, I'm sure the GIMP developers are aspiring to get there, but professionals are a relatively small group with very high powered and exacting needs*. On the other hand there are a lot of semi-professionals, quasi-professionals, and amateurs, who don't have anywhere near such high powered and exacting needs; for them GIMP may well be more than sufficient -- and ultimately that's currently GIMP's target market: the great swathes of people below hard core professionals who still have some need for powerful graphics and photo manipulation tools. As long as the interface quirks don't bother that market I don't see that they are yet that much of a problem.

* Let's be honest, if you're doing serioius photo-retouching in print work in a professional capacity it is GIMPs features, rather than it's UI, that are going to be your biggest hurdles: 16-bit colour and CMYK not the least of them.

Re:Yay New Features

[DittoBox]

Does it have strong OpenType and other typographical features? 'Smart' filters? Smart Objects that let you place art from Illustrator (or in the open source case, Inkscape) that you can then fully edit in the other program? Really good camera RAW? Smart sharpen?

Re:Yay New Features

[bothwell]

To be honest, that is actually one of the difficulties with GIMP. Nice, neat program and it's powerful and tweakable which is great, but interface-wise it's not really like other image-editing tools so there's going to be a learning curve there. I moved from Paintshop 6 or something to Fireworks 4 through Adobe Photoshop, and the interfaces of all of those tools are so similar that once you've used one, it's just a case of getting used to the minor differences of another. Even MSPaint looks pretty much the same. The GIMP, though, can be utterly incomprehensible, especially if you're used to just starting up a tool and, like, going ahead and using it. I realise that the idea of just switching something on and having it work is antithesis to the nature of many /.ers, but to normal humans it's sort of standard expectation.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason I don't like Photoshop's UI is for this reason: I have a dual monitor setup and I want my picture to fill all of monitor 1 while my tools sit on monitor 2.

Have you actually tried doing this with Photoshop? It works with no problems.

Re:Yay New Features

[not flu]

It is painfully obvious that you nor the grandparent have ever used The GIMP and Photoshop on OS X.

Re:Yay New Features

[jcupitt65]

The current gimp 2.4 behaves a little differently:

Now, the Gimp actually has three windows, The document window, the tool browser and the layers palate (actually it can have more than that, but that's the default). Now, let's suppose that I've finished reading slashdot, and I want to carry on editing my image, so I click on the taskbar button named "image.xcf". The image I was working on is maximized, but where are my editing tools? oh, they're still minimised. Back down to the taskbar, click on the GIMP button. OK, so I select the tool I want, but wait, I'm on the wrong layer. OK, back down to the taskbar, click on the Layers,Channels button, up pops the layer selector.

gimp2.4 just has two windows: the main tool window and the document window. You can break the tool window out info a set of separate windows if you like, or you can make a couple of tool windows each showing a different set of tools. Each open document gets a window too.

There's a preference for always-on-top which you can set for the image and/or the tool window if you like. It doesn't link iconise/uniconise of the image and toolbox windows though.

The development GIMP has some prototype stuff in for no-image-windows:

http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/No_image_open_specification

(Things have changed quite a bit since that page was written, I understand the current code is rather different)

This will make the tool window into a true floating window and should enable the linked iconise/uninconise effect.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

They still say it about MySQL and PHP.

Re:Yay New Features

[MaXMC]

Besides, I then have to manually minimize them if I want to use another program, and then manually bring them back up after clicking on an image window. Still annoying. Clicking an image in Gimp should bring the image up along with a full set of editing tools. Why would you want to minimize all of Gimps windows just to use another program?
Just click up the other program and it will cover the Gimp windows. Then when you are done with it minimize that.

But I agree that Gimp should open all it's windows if anyone of the windows are raised.

Re:Yay New Features

[blincoln]

By the time GIMP catches up with Photoshop, Adobe will have added new improvements for GIMP to ape and the cycle will start all over. GIMP will NEVER be as good as Photoshop for professional use.

I used to think the same thing, but I've really not noticed a lot of new features starting with the CS series. Even the kludgey HDR wizard has basically remained the same throughout.

The GIMP has a *long* way to go, but IMO Adobe isn't going out of their way to keep in the lead. They also keep jacking up their prices.

Re:Yay New Features

[Schlage]

So, your solution to a software problem is... go buy some hardware to solve it? Really?

All fake shock aside, your points about liking The GIMP for its dual monitor setup lovin' seem off to me as well, because I have a dual monitor setup at work and I use Photoshop there every day, and I've never had a problem in being able to put all of my tools on one monitor while the image resides on the second monitor. In fact, I've found it far more friendly than The GIMP in this usage scenario as well, largely still due to the complaints raised in GP's post.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with GIMP because it's not Photoshop, I have a problem with it because it feels like it's not a single, cohesive application. I feel like I'm managing several discrete applications that all happen to semi-relate to each other, and because the way it's used is, in my opinion, is still somewhat unrefined. Still, with every generation of The GIMP I check back in with it, kick the tires, and hope that it's finally at the point where I feel it's a viable option for me vs. Photoshop--not because I feel caged by Photoshop, but because I like having options and I firmly believe that competition is good for the consumer.

Now, I admit that even when The GIMP has solved the usability problems that I perceive that there will still be pains in converting over to different shortcuts, different workflows, and just differences in general. But so long as those differences are surrounded by equivalencies and I'm not giving up things that I need, then this I could deal with.

For me, the capabilities of Photoshop and the speed with which I can get things done is the key, because as high as the entry price is for Photoshop, the time price for completing operations and projects is lower than with anything else I've found. This is simply the way it works for a lot of people. It makes more sense to shell out a few hundred dollars for something that's going to save me hours worth of work, and therefore increase my earning potential, even if I feel the software might be overpriced or if I love the idea of open source, democrative efforts.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeebus. Get a virtual desktop manager already. What is this, 1978?

Re:Yay New Features

[Larryish]

mod parent insightful - the unconnected panels are annoying as hell

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite example:

In Photoshop, when I want to delete the selected pixels, I press "delete."

In GIMP, when I want to delete the selected pixels, I press "control-k."

Re:Yay New Features

[matthewcaudle]

i find lens correction to work pretty well. actually, i had never used it until about five minutes ago after reading this. took a pretty gnarly fish-eyed picture of a skyline (with a lot of would-be right angles to gauge the filters effectiveness) and it did fine. it was a low res image so the results got a little blurry, but with a proper size image i think that would be less of an issue.

Re:Yay New Features

[MoxFulder]

This is why the GIMP will never be popular. Despite its lack of popularity and the overwhelming number of complaints about the user interface, the developers, and the few existing supporters, continuously rely on the excuse that users are merely familiar and conditioned to the Photoshop user interface. I must respectfully disagree. I am not an expert with either program, but I use GIMP much more and generally prefer it. I agree that the interface had some rough edges prior to the 2.0 releases, but they've improved a ton since... I find the GIMP's interface more intuitive. If I use Photoshop, I get confused :-P

If you want the Photoshop interface, check out GIMPshop. It doesn't seem to be very popular though, I guess not EVERYONE is hankering for a Photoshop interface.

Of course, it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that the GIMP's user interface was haphazardly thrown together by programmers with absolutely no concern for HCI. Photoshop's interface couldn't possibly be better despite the thousands of hours of research and user interface testing that Adobe has put into it. Nope, absolutely none of that matters! Actually, I think the GIMP has put a *lot* of effort into adopting the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. GNOME applications in general have improved immensely in usability as a result of these, in my opinion!

Keep blaming people's familiarity with Photoshop and you'll be sure to continue the GIMPs long standing tradition of complete and utter failure. Failure? Why?

I use it a lot and like it a lot. So do many other people. It keeps getting better and gaining more features.

No one's getting paid to write the GIMP... they don't *have to* judge their success based on commercial competition. That's the beauty of open source/free software: if it's useful to *someone*, it will continue to be developed.

Re:Yay New Features

[yankpop]

I understand where you're coming from. But I think the UI design does actually make a lot of sense in a Linux context. Some of the problems you describe may be a consequence of a flawed port to windows. But when you're working with virtual desktops those problems completely disappear.

In my case, I'm reading slashdot in my 'firefox' desktop. When I want to get back to editing a picture I hotkey over to the 'gimp' desktop where all the windows are laid out how I want them. When I need to check mail, I hop over to my mail desktop and so on. Nothing is ever minimized, and I never find myself alt-tabbing through a dozen unrelated windows, as would happen when all my apps are on the same desktop.

Given that 99% of my computer use is confined to 3 apps (browser, editor, mail), a six desktop layout is more than enough room for all, without becoming too complex to navigate. Now that MS supports multiple desktops as well, at least in Vista, people may start discovering that there are saner ways to arrange multiple windows than squeezing them all onto the toolbar of a single desktop.

yp.

Re:Yay New Features

[The-Bus]

I guess "bat shit insane" is a more direct way of saying counter-intuitive. If GIMP ever wants to "convert" a lot of people who are used to Photoshop, it will need to mimic what these users are familiar with: the Windows and Mac environment. That doesn't mean that you have to port over the good stuff and the bad stuff, but out of any number of graphic applications I've used over the years on Windows and Mac, GIMP was by far the hardest one to hit the ground running on.

This is not to say that Photoshop doesn't have some problems, of course.

Re:Yay New Features

[Blakey Rat]

Except that OS X and Windows are both better than Linux distributions in a lot of fundamental and important ways. And don't even get me started on MySQL-- what exactly is it better than? It's not even close to as good as PostgreSQL, and both of those products are years behind commercial database vendors, even Microsoft's MSSQL. And Apache, Sendmail and PHP all had first-mover advantage, so they're only ahead of the competition (arguably not, for PHP) only because they're in Adobe's position.

Your argument does not compel.

Re:Yay New Features

[Blakey Rat]

The reason I don't like Photoshop's UI is for this reason: I have a dual monitor setup and I want my picture to fill all of monitor 1 while my tools sit on monitor 2.

What's the last version of Photoshop you've used? Adobe fixed that in Windows years and years ago.

And it was never an issue in the first place on Macintosh, which has an OS-level concept of tool palette windows which can be dragged to another monitor, but appear/disappear with the main document window. Remember, Photoshop was a Macintosh application first.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the biggest problems with CinePaint is that it is a fork of GIMP. That means it hasn't kept up with improvements in GIMP, while they've added a lot of useful features for the film industry by going their own direction.

CinePaint isn't really a high bit depth GIMP at this point, as much as a completely different package that does a single specific thing well. It might still be exactly what the GP wants, of course, but GIMP getting high bit depth support is long, long overdue. (A delay which can probably be mostly blamed on GEGL, but it finally seems like GEGL isn't vaporware anymore.)

Re:Yay New Features

[xtracto]

One of the reason why I have not used The GIMP is because it is kind of a beast to startup and also because I find it "difficult" to find out how to do things with it.

Because of that, since some time I downloaded and used Paint.NET program (free as in beer) which may not be as feature rich as Photoshop but it can do everything I need. *If* you are on Windows you might find it useful. OTOH, it is one app that I really would like to see ported to Linux via the MONO framework.

Re:Yay New Features

[xtracto]

I have a dual monitor setup and I want my picture to fill all of monitor 1 while my tools sit on monitor 2.

Wow, you must have a kick ass table and right arm with a lot of space for moving your mouse right and forth each time you edit an image!

Re:Yay New Features

[darkwhite]

That's exactly the reason I despise Gimp as well. The fact that the Gimp developers refuse to fix this (a simple enough fix) in the face of numerous user complaints is indicative of their hubris.

Re:Yay New Features

[Z34107]

I use only the Windows port of GIMP - I don't do much photo editing, but before the not much that I didn't do was not done in Photoshop. </Englishgrammar>

The Photoshop interface was clunky, but I blame that on the "We have 5 million features that you will probably never used, all cleverly hidden under buttons!

The GIMP interface, however, fails at basic Windows GUI principles. This is to be expected, of course, but come on - the interface is generally split up into 3 modeless dialog boxes. The one that has your tools on it is hidden if you maximize your editing window. Ditto for the layers box. They kinda got it right with some features like "transform" - the relevant dialog box pops up, in view, in the editing window, as you're editing.

The whole 3-separate-windows thing (editing, tools, layers) looks like a lazy hack, something I did when a project was due and I was too lazy (read: procrastinated on the deadline and was too time constrained) to write a proper interface.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

One way I deal with this in gimp is to set the gimp tools above everything. In metacity I believe if you right click in the top right corner you can set the tools above. I have a little button set on my emerald theme to set above.

This only helps if you're working on several images at once, not if you're switching between apps all over the place. It helps you maintain focus on your tools if you are manipulating several images. It really improves my productivity when I'm actually working.

Re:Yay New Features

[Ticklemonster]

Consider that the Gimp was written for linux, and that in linux, there's (as stated previously) multiple desktops, therefore just put the Gimp in it's own desktop, and voila, your desktop serves basically the same purpose as photoshop's overall gui. What need is there, in a multiple desktop environment for a gui to hold everything in? Photoshop has unconnected panels, but they are just sitting in a wrapper, ever notice that? What's the difference?

Also, if I'm using gimp, and I have just opened firefox to come get my daily dose of liber'l libel, all I have to do is think, and click on the firefox quick launch, which minimizes firefox, bringing me back to all of my Gimp interfaces. Of course it takes knowing how to use a computer to know to do this, and I really wonder about people some times... (works in windows or linux, btw) I'll post back from the house later with instructions on how to get Gimp to just two windows instead of three for the majority of tasks. It's really simple.

Re:Yay New Features

[NoisySplatter]

Keyboard shortcuts!

Re:Yay New Features

[Machtyn]

I will agree with most everything you say. Having used Photoshop well over 8 years ago, then realizing that my illegally acquired copy was, ahem, illegally acquired, I moved onto The GIMP. I didn't have $200+ to spend on Photoshop.

With any software that compete: Linux, Windows XP, Windows Vista, MacOSX for example, the UI takes some getting use to when switching. Of course, in the above example, some Linux distros are having to modify their shortcuts to match what Microsoft has done with Windows. This is not a bad thing.

I'm sure that if I tried Photoshop again, I'd see a lot of improvements from 8 years ago. I doubt I would be much faster. Certainly, I will find things I like and things I prefer with The GIMP.

As for adding hardware, in a professional situation, I would hope that developers and graphics artists have all the tools they need to do the job. To me, that means a dual monitor setup.

Once I had a taste of dual monitor setup I have not gone back. Even if all I had was a 15" secondary monitor. (It kills me that my work computer (software QA) only has one monitor... then again, I'm surrounded by a desktop, laptop, several custom embedded devices and two extra monitors to attach to those embedded devices, so I'm getting my daily dose of radiation!

Re:Yay New Features

[Machtyn]

Increase the acceleration of your mouse pointer.

Re:Yay New Features

[Coryoth]

Apparently 2.5 does exactly this: it instantiates an empty image window on startup and has the palette/toolbox windows set as "Utility Windows". That means that they don't appear on the taskbar and raise/lower along with the image window. Better yet you can hit TAB to have utility windows toggle their visibility, so if you want them out of the way just hit TAB and they'll vanish.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you ever try setting the palettes to be 'Utility windows'? With any decent window manager, this should give you the functionality you desire. Say you have all your other apps open, and you want to go back to an open image in the Gimp. What's this? You discover that the palette windows aren't in the taskbar; only your image windows are. Hesitantly, you click on the button corresponding to your desired image window. Voila! Your window manager, knowing that the Gimp palette windows are transient to the image window, automatically raises them as well.

Fancy that... You're beloved image editing tool could have provided the user experience you desire, but you configured it to behave in a manner that you find annoying.

Re:Yay New Features

[MobyDisk]

Weird. This definitely shows a difference in mind set. :) What you just described is exactly the bug. But you seemed to think it is a feature.

So, let me explain why many people consider this a bug. Suppose you open GIMP and have 10 tool windows open. To alt-tab back to some other application you must now hit alt-tab 10 times. So GIMP has changed the expected behavior of alt-tab on a system-wide level. Most applicatiosn create a single top-level window and place their tool windows s children of that. So alt-tab switches "applications" or "open documents" not "all open tool windows/dialogs/child windows." Generally ctrl-tab, or ctrl-left/right (on Macs it is ctrl-brackets or alt-apostrophe, depending).

This is why I find most people who use GIMP also use virtual-desktops. I'm curious - do you?

Re:Yay New Features

[Keith_Beef]

In Photoshop, when I want to delete the selected pixels, I press "delete." In GIMP, when I want to delete the selected pixels, I press "control-k."

I don't know what you do in Photoshop, but in Gimp you would press CTRL-x. This is perfectly logical, since what you are doing is cutting the pixels from the layer.

Now you can go ahead and try to argue that deleting is not the same as cutting, that you just want to DELETE, and that if you wanted to cut the pixels to the clipboard then this is a different operation...

Since you just came here for an argument, go ahead: knock yourself out.

Re:Yay New Features

[CastrTroy]

Wait, MS has multiple desktops in Vista? How do you enable this feature? Is it as braindead as it is with the Windows XP powertoys? I was sure this feature still wasn't standard on Vista.

Re:Yay New Features

[strabes]

This is not a problem when used in conjunction with virtual desktops.

Re:Yay New Features

[MobyDisk]

I don't think you understand what I mean by multiple top-level windows.

Good use of multiple windows:
I open 3 documents, and I get 3 windows. Each window has a series of toolbars. I hit alt-tab once to switch to the next open document window.

Bad use of multiple windows:
I open 3 documents, and I get 13 windows. 9 toolbar windows, 1 app window, and 3 document windows. I hit alt-tab 12 times to switch to the next document window.

I think this is why this subject is so hard to discuss. You just have to see what GIMP does to understand why it is so strange. It's just not at all what normal apps do. Single-window, or multiple-window.

Re:Yay New Features

[Sir_Lewk]

Or maybe, it has something to do with end users never being able to say exactly what should be changed to make it better but just bitching about how it's bad because it was "designed by programmers". Come up with a more concrete compliant and maybe it will be addressed.

Re:Yay New Features

[falconwolf]

With the rate of advancement in The GIMP, eventually, Photoshop enthusiasts will have nothing bad to really say about it. It was always about no cmyk, no 32 bit color support, no adjustment layers. It looks like some of these things may be coming in future.

CinePaint aka Film Gimp has had 32 bit colour depths for a while. While it doesn't have cmyk support it's being worked on. From what I could find though it doesn't have adjustment layers either.

Oh, I wanted to share these graphics of Gimp and Photoshop being depicted as Swiss Arm Knives

. Falcon

Re:Yay New Features

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

One of the biggest problems with CinePaint is that it is a fork of GIMP. That means it hasn't kept up with improvements in GIMP, while they've added a lot of useful features for the film industry by going their own direction.

That's true, but since the previous poster was claiming their use case was working with frames of film, it is likely more suited to his or her needs than GIMP. Especially in that it did have all the features he had complained were missing from GIMP.

I certainly would not recommend CinePaint to the average person looking to work on/touch up photographs and the like.

Personally I use GIMP for automated batch jobs that GraphicConverter can't handle. For the rest I use Photoshop, although I've been playing with Pixelmator a lot as well and it seems to be a contender for some use cases, especially at the much lower price point than PS (although not GIMP or course).

Re:Yay New Features

[Atzanteol]

I think you are wrong

Wishing doesn't make it true: http://www.hylobatidae.org/misc/photoshop.jpg.

The deal with Macs is that ALL windows associated with an application come to focus if you select one of them. This can piss me off as I only wanted *one* terminal window, not *all* of them to come to the front. But this behavior is not specific to Photoshop but rather to MacOS.

Re:Yay New Features

[falconwolf]

macs and the software commonly associated with them tend to be more expensive than regular pcs

Have you priced Macs in the last few years? The price of them hold their own against Windows PCs now. Last year I switched from Windows to OSX, I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro. Before I got my Mac I compared it's price with the prices of OEM PCs with the same specs. I don't recall all of them but an HP configured close to my MBP was about the same price whereas the Dell was about $200 more. As for software prices, those companies that release both Mac and Windows versions sale them for the same price. Heck some even come in the same box. A few days ago I was in a big box store looking over graphics and photo editing software, and looking at the hardware requirements some of them listed both Windows and OSX requirements.

Falcon

Re:Yay New Features

[Sentry21]

If you want the Photoshop interface, check out GIMPshop [wikipedia.org]. It doesn't seem to be very popular though, I guess not EVERYONE is hankering for a Photoshop interface. More likely the professional users that want Photoshop just go out and spend the money to get actual Photoshop - including some pretty badass integrations with the rest of the Creative Suite apps, not to mention running natively on Windows and OS X.

GIMPshop is for people who want to use Photoshop, but are on Linux, or who are trying to migrate casual Photoshop users (such as pirate hobbyists) off Windows to Linux.

Re:Yay New Features

[Sentry21]

Except that the GIMP uses full-fledged windows for tool palettes, meaning that they could end up above (or behind) applications, despite the main document application being in front; Photoshop, in contrast, uses toolbars, which are 'always on top' when Photoshop is the active application, meaning you'll never lose your toolbars.

Also, this means that toolbars never show up in Expose or spaces, or in advanced task-switchers like Witch; GIMP's toolbars also, last I dealt with it, showed up in the GNOME panel, resulting in a half-dozen entries just to edit one image.

Toolbars are not windows. Seriously. I hope this is one of the fixes, or it's going to keep being treated like a half-baked toy.

Re:Yay New Features

[Sentry21]

Now the reason I think you're wrong is because last time I posted a rant like this, two Mac users pointed out that Photoshop on the Mac does not work like this. Apperently, clicking on any image open in photoshop also brings the tools into focus as well. Of course I could be wrong as well, since I have no direct experience with Photoshop on Macs. Photoshop on Mac or Windows (or any decent editing software) will in fact do exactly as you describe. This happens in Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, Powerpoint, iWork, and any other well-designed software I've used (and yes, Word is better designed than GIMP is).

In fact, Photoshop has an even cooler feature - the tab key toggles display of the tool palettes. The huge benefit that this provides is that you can fullscreen your editor to avoid any other distractions (or just to maximize viewing space), or even have it take over the entire monitor (so Photoshop's canvas uses every pixel of the monitor). You pick a tool, hit tab, and the palettes disappear. Do your editing, hit tab again, they come back, change your layer, tab again.

I've yet to see GIMP offer even this (relatively simple) feature for image editing. Oh, wait, I know why - it's "not Photoshop". Great.

Re:Yay New Features

[the_rev_matt]

That's actually a common interface on non-Windows systems. Given that GIMP was originally created on and for UNIX-y systems it's pretty logical.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Plenty of real complaints have been repeatedly dismissed on both the GIMP mailing lists, IRC and the bug tracker. At this point, there's simply no way for anyone who's been around throughout the GIMPs development to credibly make the argument you're making.

Re:Yay New Features

[Translation Error]

Well, you could always dock your various dialogs to the bottom of the tool box, and hitting tab when you have an image window active will hide/restore the toolbox window, even if it's been minimized.

Re:Yay New Features

[PitaBred]

It does just work, though.

Or are you one of those people that say that Linux is a failure because it's not just a free copy of Windows, with everything exactly the same?

Re:Yay New Features

[PitaBred]

Learn to use Virtual Desktops. The Gimp is not designed for Windows or OSX, even though it works on them. Use a virtual desktop for it like a proper *nix OS does, and you'll see how powerful it can be.

Re:Yay New Features

[Sir_Lewk]

Having not used it in 2 years, I'll try: Well there's the problem...

Re:Yay New Features

[Haeleth]

My understanding is that the multi window interface is actually very similar to Photoshop on the MAC.

Except that Photoshop on the Mac actually works well, whereas GIMP's multi-window interface is a royal PITA, with the windows constantly getting hidden behind one another and all jumbled up with other applications. If you comment on this you either get told that it's your window manager's fault (huh? how come every single other program I use works fine, then?), or that it's your fault for not devoting an entire separate virtual desktop to GIMP. (Thanks, but I kind of like to set up my work environment to suit me, not to work round UI deficiencies in the programs I use...)

Re:Yay New Features

[SharpFang]

the Gutenpring dialog, while clunky ...no such thing under Windows. Bare system "print" dialog with just as many options as the printer driver provides. Unfortunately due to certain custom software requirements here I can't switch to Linux, so I'm stuck with the Windows port.

You can save a window layout in the preferences
Not quite where I'd look for this kind of option. And I can save only one (I'd prefer some different, say, for B&W editing, for editing for web, for animation etc).
Your window setup will reset to default values the next time you start GIMP. Oh, and remember to uncheck "save window positions on exit" or you'll have to rebuild from defaults again...
Interesting adventure, to try to add Undo History -between- layers and brushes.

lots of applications have annoying UI quirks though. Can we go with "some specific areas that could definitely use significant improvment"?

Actually, no. Beyond the traditional (CMYK etc) that's just 'UI Quirks'. Thing is I didn't exhaust the list here, by far. I just threw a couple off top of my head. If you really wanted all my gripes I could go on for hours and hours.

Sure there are apps that have interface quirks. This is normal. There are apps that have many or weird interface quirks. That's annoying. There are apps that have many and weird interface quirks. That's very unusable. GIMP's interface is ALL quirks, and many of them very weird.

Want a run off the mill on just HOW quirky the interface is? Start-to-end, upper left to lower right.
Click the icon. Startup window appears but no cancel/close button. If I doubleclick it by a chance, I have to wait till both mill through the fonts and extensions dirs, only when loading is finished I can kill one. No idea why anyone would want two instances but oh well.

Now I have the two default windows. Upper left is the gadget on the title bar. 'Restore' and 'Move' are non-quirky, size and maximize work as intended except maximize is utterly useless, the window fills the screen but you can't really make it horizontal because some elements are fixed at "below the rest". 'Minimize' minimizes current GIMP window. If you have 10 pics open, you have to click 12 different minimizes to hide all GIMP windows. 'Close' works as expected, the other buttons on the title bar repeat the function.

Next row: File. Starting with the top, the ------------------ bar which is a quirk I actually like but it took me some time to find it, because it's entirely non-intuitive. Besides, dialogs created with it can only be closed, not minimized, so they tend to get lost. Also if you pick the same entry the second time, it closes the window even if you picked it in context of a different window (so you can't have two 'colors-info' dialogs open for two images to check histograms periodically. Another quirk. And yet another, these are missing from the image top bar menu. No '-----------' there. *shrug*. Quirk.

New. Somewhat too simplistic... Templates - oh, too deep subject to get into their quirks... there are some and heavy, next image size, with chain icon missing (if you want to get twice as much as 1024x768, calculate in your head how much is 768*2).

Next portrait/landscape. Nothing in common with print orientation which might seem non-quirky but MS Word's quirk here seems to be the defacto standard.

Advanced options... they change (per Template) but remain invisible if you pick one. Template quirk.

X, Y resolution. The 'more' option opens a dialog that might just be the same as 'units' from the menu, but isn't. It displays just 6 more units to pick from.

Colorspace - distinctly without Indexed.

Fill with: Picking 'transparent' will add alpha channel and anything else won't. Maybe logical, but a quirk.

Comment: Needs to be set to empty in defaults, otherwise it will haunt you forever.

Help, none found. Reset, to 420x300, what kind of default is that? OK and Cancel not quirky.
Next, Open. Interestingl

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

The Gimp is pretty flexible.. what you probably want, is to run it on its own virtual desktop (or "Space" in OS X Leopard). The biggest immediate problem is that Microsoft Windows has lacked this functionality, and users are undereducated and/or misinformed. MacOS has supported virtual desktops only since the release of Leopard, though it was not as much an issue, as that platform has a default behavior of raising all application windows on focus.

I understand that a lot of people can point the finger and say, "but users don't like this". Well, perhaps *some* users don't like this, but you also can't expect them to completely rewrite the GUI in QT/KDE, or to rewrite/extend the GTK MDI module -- which is what would would be necessary.

Photoshop originates from a Windows 3.1 era when embedded MDI windows was common, and the Mac's 'one application one screen' cooperative mode were the standard. Today, it is rare to see a new application built this way. On the other hand, the Gimp originates from X11 where at the time, its functionality was standard -- tying the window management operations to the Window manager rather than handling it inside of the application.

Its one thing to say it should be changed, but another to at least understand both why it *is* and why it is so difficult to change.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Now the reason I think you're wrong is because last time I posted a rant like this, two Mac users pointed out that Photoshop on the Mac does not work like this. Apperently, clicking on any image open in photoshop also brings the tools into focus as well. Of course I could be wrong as well, since I have no direct experience with Photoshop on Macs. Yes, that's exactly what happens.

And before anyone points out that I could just set the palates to "Always on top", yes I could, and as a matter of fact I do, but it grates on me to have to work around a programs stupid defaults. Besides, I then have to manually minimize them if I want to use another program, and then manually bring them back up after clicking on an image window. Still annoying. Clicking an image in Gimp should bring the image up along with a full set of editing tools. Yup. The standard behavior for Macintosh art and design programs is for tool palettes to be 'floating' -- while you're working in an editing window, the tool palettes float on top, are visible no matter how large you make the editing window, and have permanent focus for collecting mouse clicks. They aren't ordinary windows and aren't treated as such; instead they're treated as a layer associated with the application which created them. They don't appear in lists of windows used for task switching (for example you cannot command-tab to a tool palette window) and they automatically hide when you switch to another application.

Other conventions include easy docking of palettes to each other, and minimal UI chrome around the border to save space (last time I tried to use the GIMP, its tool windows used full size window border elements because they were just ordinary windows).

The GIMP copies the superficial elements of this interface design (having tools in little utility windows) without copying the tweaks to window behavior which make it useful.

(P.S. I believe Photoshop was the first program to introduce floating tool palettes to the Macintosh, but the convention was adopted by numerous art and design programs on the Mac and has not been unique to Photoshop for a decade or more.)

Re:Yay New Features

[Haeleth]

In Photoshop, when I want to delete the selected pixels, I press "delete."

In GIMP, when I want to delete the selected pixels, I press "control-k."

That's odd. In GIMP, when I want to delete the selected pixels, I press "delete".

(I'm no GIMP fan. It's extremely frustrating to use in many ways. But that doesn't mean that every criticism of it is valid...)

Re:Yay New Features

[Haeleth]

The point here is that jpeg is 8-bit per channel. Unless your shooting in tiff or raw, there is no need for 16-bit channels.

Unless you're doing any postprocessing, of course; in that case you want to use 16-bit channels even if the original was only 8-bit, or you'll be losing information every time you apply a filter.

Re:Yay New Features

[paeanblack]

i got fed up with downloading photoshop again and again though, so...

For a small fee, you can get Photoshop on a disc. Apparently, Adobe has been offering this for years. They even throw in a valid license for free.

Your software dealer of choice may have more information on this spectacular offer.

Re:Yay New Features

[maxwell demon]

Now, let's suppose that I've finished reading slashdot, and I want to carry on editing my image,

then you just switch from the virtual desktop with your browser to the virtual desktop with GIMP and can carry on editing your image. At least that's what I do.

Re:Yay New Features

[maxwell demon]

GIMP was not really created as a gfx program. It was created as an excuse to conduct the huge experiment in user interface called GTK, and image processing abilities are just an afterthought after that mad scientist experiment.

That's definitively wrong. Originally Gimp used Motif.

Re:Yay New Features

[tehBoris]

Yeah, but MS Windows doesn't have those, or a decent window manager for that matter.

Let's face it: the GIMP does a crappy work at respecting Windows' conventions and limitations. That makes it a crappy app. in Windows IMO.

The GIMP folks could make a better effort at porting the program into Windows. If Chuck Norris could, and he is no programmer, why couldn't they do that? :)

Re:Yay New Features

[debatem1]

right click->always on top

Re:Yay New Features

[Evil Pete]

OK. I rarely manipulate images, but when I do I get really confused by both apps. And the worst experience I had was when I had an image and I wanted to add a line to it with some arrows to show a path etc. I could not for the life of me work out how to do it in the Gimp or Photoshop. You ask for help and people say "it's an image manipulation tool not a drawing tool", well what the hell am I drawing on then. The point of this random rant is that this issue has become a litmus test for me about the friendliness of the UI: does it allow me to do simple things simply? From your comments I am already getting warm fuzzies over GIMP.

Re:Yay New Features

[MishgoDog]

My number 1 complaint with GIMP is very very simple.

In Photoshop, I can very easily (read: right click and it pops up) change the size and softness of a brush with a few sliders.

In gimp, I can change brushes to a few pre-set ones, but I cannot (I've sunk a couple of hours into this over the last two years) change the settings, without defining a new brush (when I'm changing the size and softness of a brush in context with the size of the image I'm working on - I'm not going to go define a new brush every time I want to do it).

Oh, and the windowed issue REALLY gets to me. Keep the dialogue boxes ONTOP of the image, unless I hide them, dammit! How else can I access the tools?

Re:Yay New Features

[strabes]

All legitimate points. One must remember, however, that the GIMP wasn't designed to be run on windows, which is why its windows version (and the whole GTK port) are awful.

Re:Yay New Features

[dbcad7]

Now, the Gimp actually has three windows, The document window, the tool browser and the layers palate

Mine does not.. When I open gimp (2.4.5) from the main menu .. I get one window, the toolbar.. When I open an image file with gimp I get two windows.(the image and the toolbar)

The layers window I have to open seperately, if I want to use it.. for say making an animated gif... And really, if it defaults for you as opening on startup, what's the big deal to close it, if your not using it ? ... when a program opens with a "tip for the day" do you just leave it open ?

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

At least you got the damn thing working. Gimp on Windows doesn't work for me if I try to do anything 'cept cropping/resizing. Dunno why, but I can't even use the plain old paint tools. (Which is why I didn't even bother throwing GIMP on my laptop-plus I'd heard of paint.net by then.)

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Touche. I keep on trying it because everyone blows the GIMP trumpet. I love it especially when Photoshop is used as a comparison.

GIMP needs a LOT of usability work.

Even with two windows there is no damned chance I'll download it!

Re:Yay New Features

[despisethesun]

While I'm no fan of the GIMP's interface, you would only get 4-5 windows open with GIMP opening 3 images, unless you open multiple instances of the GIMP. The tools (and layers window, if that's enabled -- it's not by default any more) are shared across all documents. I just tested this to confirm it, opening 3 images and having 4 windows (3 images plus the tools.) Like I said, I'm no fan of the GIMP's UI, but hyperbole doesn't help your case.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

the GIMP's user interface was haphazardly thrown together by programmers with absolutely no concern for HCI. To be fair, programmers generally aren't informed about the dangers of hydrochloric acid.

(What? That's not--? Oh...)

Re:Yay New Features

[deathguppie]

tab.. that is all you needed to do was hit.. tab..and the tools will pop up. Personally I prefer the fact that in gimp I can use the whole screen for image editing. I can put the tools on a second monitor if I wish, or I can use one and hide and reveal the tools with the tab button. In photoshop I'm forced to use whatever area of my monitor is left after the tools get their area. So I still don't get your point. You didn't know about the tab button, and you don't care about how much of your screen you get for image editing. This is your preference. It has nothing to do with the layout of gimp.

Re:Yay New Features

[rabiddeity]

I think the main point here is that the UI should behave consistently with whatever OS/environment it's running under. While on vacation two weeks ago I tried to download and install a copy of GIMP onto my friend's Vista machine (yeah, bitch about it but it's what I had to work with). I wound up installing the newest GIMPshop based on some old 2.2 revision. I expected it to be similar enough to Photoshop that I could figure it out. It was anything but.

If it's running under Windows, I expect that the program open up with something resembling a standard File/Edit/Help bar at the top. Instead I got a standard container window (which in Windows symbolizes the actual program) with a single File menu. That File menu had a single option: Exit. This tells the user that this program can do exactly one thing, and that is to self-terminate. It took a few long moments to figure out the regular File->Open menu was actually on the toolbar?! I tried to open a file and got some hacked-together GTK dialog instead of the standard file browsing dialog box. While manipulating the image all the drop-down menus were buggy AND look like crap, because instead of using the native window manipulation functions it uses the GTK ones. All of the interface issues were a matter of consistency with other Windows programs.

If it's running on a Mac, I expect those menus for File, Edit, and so on to be up at the top just like every other Mac program. If it's running on Linux, I expect the same sort of consistency with other Linux apps. This consistency makes it easy to figure out the program. Every Windows program has a similar menu structure. Every program uses the same dialog boxes for opening files, and has the same X in the upper right corner, and every window looks and acts exactly the same. It means I don't have to think about how to perform the most basic operations and figure it out for each and every program. On top of that it looks professional; Windows users would say it looks like a "real program" instead of something hacked together in a basement. Like it or not, aesthetics and UI need to be taken seriously.

I understand the historical reasons, I know that GTK was developed in tandem with GIMP to make its window manipulation possible under X fifteen years ago or whatever. I know GTK works great under Linux, cures cancer, makes time travel possible, etc etc. But if the GIMP team wants their program to be taken seriously as multiplatform, they need to stuff their pride in a locker and use native window and menu functions when they are available. If that means rewriting GTK, then do it. If it means not using GTK for window management in Windows ports then they need to suck it down and do that. Moving things to GEGL might be a step in the right direction (assuming the engine and UI are finally separated), but at this rate it's going to be 2010 before a working UI is viable.

Re:Yay New Features

[jhol13]

The problem with MDI is that if you have two pictures open you are screwed.

BTW, if your desktop background is distracting maybe you should change it.

Re:Yay New Features

[Coryoth]

I think the answer is that they aren't all that serious about multiplatform. There are Windows and Mac ports but they are very much secondary. The Windows port, especially, tends to be exactly that: a port of a Linux application, with little beyond enough to get it working in Windows. I'm sorry GIMP on Windows doesn't work for you; that doesn't make GIMP a bad application, just a poor Windows port.

Re:Yay New Features

[mstahl]

To sort of elaborate on another earlier reply, the Mac interface for Photoshop is different because the window manager in OS X supports a lot of funky stuff that the Windows and Linux window managers really don't. This allows floating menus full of stuff that can be snapped to each other and moved around and still remain on top of the editing window. Things like full-screen editing are a lot easier to program, too.

Regarding your other point, not all of us mac users buy them because we're flaunting our vast riches ;). They're actually about the same price if not cheaper than PCs that have similar specs. I still haven't seen any company in the PC world produce a laptop as powerful as a macbookpro that's as light as one. Whatever. The point is that I find gimp's UI abhorrent because it's so unlike the mac interface of Photoshop. It lacks the same polish. It's not just that the icons are in different places; it's also that the interface doesn't behave the same way.

Re:Yay New Features

[mstahl]

The reason I don't like Photoshop's UI is for this reason: I have a dual monitor setup and I want my picture to fill all of monitor 1 while my tools sit on monitor 2.

That's how I have it set up in Photoshop on my mac. Tools on one monitor, image editing window full-screened on the other one.

Re:Yay New Features

[XNine]

I agree. So often I hear Gimp fans say "photoshop is bloatware." Right. Despite the MILLIONS of people who use it on a daily basis for LOTS of different design platforms, it has bloat.
give me a fucking break. Photoshop owns anything else out there, and always will until someone pools hundreds of millions of dollars into an app that will kill it. Most likely, Microsoft will try, and of course fail. But at least they'll try.

Re:Yay New Features

[chundo]

Detachable menus?

Re:Yay New Features

[bh_doc]

The only effect that has in kwin (3.5) is to remove the minimize button and make the titlebar font smaller.

Re:Yay New Features

[dasunt]

Gimp does suffer if you are used to windows and its tendency to 1. encourage maximized windows and 2. autoraise any focused window.

However, in my WM of choice, it works quite well. I can have a maximized image taking up the entire screen, in focus, and have the tool window on top of it. :)

Re:Yay New Features

[s4m7]

Of course, it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that the GIMP's user interface was haphazardly thrown together by programmers with absolutely no concern for HCI. Photoshop's interface couldn't possibly be better despite the thousands of hours of research and user interface testing that Adobe has put into it. Nope, absolutely none of that matters! Well that may be why they brought together a UI design team. Still it's an argument I've heard from people who don't use PS for anything but resizing photos: "but the gimp's crop tools don't work exactly the same as they do in photoshop." No, I think PS will always be more widely used because hey, only like 60% of the copies of it out there are pirated.

Re:Yay New Features

[scottgfx]

I started using Photoshop in 1994 with version 2.5. Before that I had used many different paint softwares before that, and also a couple of different dedicated graphics systems. When I started with Photoshop, I didn't have any time to learn it. I already knew what I needed to do, and after a little practice and fumbling, I had the basics. All of the features I needed were already there, and I found them pretty quickly.

I've not spent much time in GIMP, but it seems to have the features. If I *had* to use it, I suppose I would figure it out.

What I would like to see is someone re-think the interface. There is some great information on the Net of the history of computer paint software. The stuff goes back to the mid 1970s. Quantel came along in the early `80s with the Paintbox, and it defined the paint environment for an entire generation of broadcast designers. I had DeluxePaint on the Amiga and PC back in the day, and the Photoshop experience seems to be more akin to that.

The thing I liked about Paintbox and some others like ColorGraphics DP4:2:2 was that a "gesture" of "swiping" the pen across the tablet would take the interface away and you looked only at the canvas.

DeluxePaint used the spacebar to toggle the interface on and off, and Photoshop uses the TAB key. These are helpful, but still seem clunky at times. Especially in Photoshop when you have multiple documents open.

There are a half-dozen other things I miss from my earlier days, but the power of Photoshop overcomes most of those wants. I've learned to work within it's idiosyncrasies, and I am for the most part, happy.

You might also find the lawsuits Quantel leveled at Adobe over Photoshop interesting. Look it up, along with the name Alvy Ray Smith, or perhaps Junaid Sheikh.

I would love to find a port of S-Paint or Ampex AVA that I could run on a PC or Mac. :)

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Having multiple windows is crazy if you're using Windows(tm). If you're using Gimp on its native platform, with a decent window manager, then having the possibility to have multiple windows is quite efficient. And remember that it's just a possibility, since you can dock everything in a single window if you like it that way. Did you try this ?

There surely are legit complaints, but some of us really want to keep most of the interface the way it is. We're used to it, and it's efficient. Please don't force on us your "choice" (whatever your reason is) of using an inefficient window manager.

Re:Yay New Features

[s4m7]

Suppose you open GIMP and have 10 tool windows open. Why on earth would you do such a thing?

Re:Yay New Features

[scottgfx]

A mouse?

I used to use a mouse to paint back in my Amiga days.

I use Wacom tablets in my art department, and I hide all of the mouses.

Re:Yay New Features

[Henry Bone]

"batshit insane"

Only on slashdot will you find nouns converted so humourously into adjectives.

I think I'll have to start some sort of collection of these term I find on slashdot that crack me up. :-)

Let's see:-

• arsehat
• "batshit insane"

I'll be keeping an eye out.

Re:Yay New Features

[schotty]

I used to always recommend using GIMP for anyone. Mac users. Windows users. Us linux users well, are pretty much forced to due to little viable competition (and no, I know PS7 works under wine, but that isnt native).

I got yelled at for poor taste. I never understood why.

Then I tried the Windows and Mac ports. They suck. Not just worse versions -- but quite frankly suck.

On the linux front, at least it feels right at home, the others do not have that feel.
On linux, GIMP is _STABLE_ !! On Windows it isn't too bad, not great, but not too shabby. The Mac version is absolute hell to the point of utter uselessness.
On linux the memory management does its job and I can use insanely large caches. The Mac version, I cant get to be useful long enough to know if this is an issue, but the Windows one is/was a real issue.

But to keep it short(er), the only decent version is the Linux/Open/Free/NetBSD flavors. Win32 and OSX ports smell bad, and run worse. To get someone to respect the GIMP, they first need to run it on a decently supported OS.

Just something I noticed. I dunno, am I wrong here? Have things improved in the last 6 months? Is there a usable Mac version? The X11 one is terrible.

Laters.

Re:Yay New Features

[olman]

True to the form, thought, this does not work in Windows.

Re:Yay New Features

[CastrTroy]

Exactly. GIMP may never fully replace photoshop, especially in the professional arena. But it does a very good job for most home users and hobbyists. And even for some professionals, depending upon how big of a shop you work in, and how important print work is to you (which is where photoshop excels). I gave my wife the choice of Photoshop Elements for $100, and GIMP for free, and let her try out both, using the fully featured trial of photoshop. She chose GIMP, not only because it was cheaper but because she actually found it easier to user. I'm sure many users would make the same choice. The only reason so many people use Photoshop, is because they can easily obtain it for free.

Re:Yay New Features

[Coryoth]

On Linux if you have palettes set to hint as "Utility windows" you will get exactly the Mac like behaviour (presuming your window manager understands such hints -- most do), and yes, hitting TAB will toggle visibility of the utility windows, just like photoshop.

Re:Yay New Features

[sjames]

It's worth noting that if the Photoshop interface in Linux looked like windows (rather than just being an error message at the CLI :-), it would be a terrible interface that violates all of the conventions of usability.

Of course, I find the interface in Windows to be terribly clunky in general. By extension, any interface that fits within Windows tends to be clunky as well.

I understand that there's a plugin for GIMP that makes it loo more like Photoshop, but I haven't tried it since I don't want the GIMP to look like Photoshop.

In fairness, GIMP is perfectly ported to Windows. The port is feature complete and behaves the same as in Linux. What you want is a parallel version where the UI is switched out.

Re:Yay New Features

[davolfman]

I'd like to see anybody record the dynamic range I can get off Reala with an electronic sensor in one exposure. Film is still alive, and the best it's ever been. It's simply a specialty market now. Plus I like the fact that I can still use cameras that were made before I was born.

Re:Yay New Features

[davolfman]

I got burned on that early. Probably because I was trying the Windows version which wasn't exactly stable. My linux boxes didn't make the last move so it may be a bit before I can try it again.

Re:Yay New Features

[sjames]

Personally,I like that GIMPs tool windows show up.That way, I have a quick and easy way to bring them to the top.

Re:Yay New Features

[sjames]

When I finish reading /. and want to go back to the image I'm editing, I hit -3 and find everything exactly where I left it. Then, to get back to work, I hit -6 and there's my windows for source code and testing right where I left them.

Re:Yay New Features

[drsquare]

It's not the user's job to design the interface. It's in fact the job of the developers, no matter how much they stand there declaring that there are no tanks in Baghdad.

Re:Yay New Features

[Abcd1234]

It's simply a specialty market now.

Yeah, like I said... a market made up of all three of you. :)

Re:Yay New Features

[Toby_Tyke]

I was pointing out that if set the palates to "Always on top" I would have to manually minimize them to use another program.

Re:Yay New Features

[Toby_Tyke]

Since my original post spawned 22 replies, I decided to put together a quick follow up addressing some of the arguments they made..

I should probably point something out up front which I omitted from my earlier post: I do very little image editing, and what little I do is generally limited to removing some red eye or cropping a picture. The graphic designer in the family is my wife, who's work has adorned several nationally published add campaigns. If you think I dislike Gimp, talk to her.

To start with all the people who pointed out work-arounds, from separate virtual desktops to various window manager tricks, yes, all of those are possible ways to deal with the appalling choices the Gimp designers have made with their defaults, but the fact still remains that they should not be necessary. Make the default better. If I was actually in a position of being forced to work with the Gimp a lot, I would probably put it on its own virtual desktop, and set the palates to "Always on top". Whilst that is a solution, for an app to require its own virtual desktop, and some tweaking of the window manager to make the interface usable is, frankly, appalling.

A few people said that they actually like the Gimps interface, or at least that there are advantages to it. One guy said he liked it because it meant he could view an image in full screen without the palates in the way. I do appreciate that just because I prefer a particular interface, that does not necessarily make it better (quick, tell the Mac users), but when a program has a UI as unusual as the Gimp, it ought to at the very least come with an option to change to something more standard. The very fact that every time the Gimp is mentioned on Slashdot we see hundreds of posts complaining about the UI should be enough to suggest that a large proportion of the user base intensely dislike it.

Which brings me to my final point, namely why not use something else? The short answer is; because there is nothing else. GPL image editing software is pretty much limited to the Gimp. It's the default in every distro I've ever used, and nothing else even comes close. Someone mentioned Cinepaint, but I was under the impression that was geared specifically for film, correct me if I'm wrong. Krita might be a potential replacement one day, but my interest in it lasted exactly as long as it took me to find out that it had no crop tool.

Precisely because Gimp is the leading, nay default, image editor in the GPL/Linux world, it needs to have a more standardised default interface, or at least a straight forward option to switch to one.

Tune in next week, when we'll be talking about CMYK!

Re:Yay New Features

[chromatic]

I reject bug reports that read "I found a bug, fix it."

Re:Yay New Features

[zsau]

Indeed; my suspicion is that the Windows port is actually a bad thing for Gimp. People use the Gimp on Windows, conclude the interface is horrible (it is horrible given the Windows UI) and demand it should be fixed. Of course, the Gimp has a very nice UI if you use it in the sort of environment it's made for — and I do at home. Thus, for me the Windows port is a Good Thing; it lets me use a tool I'm comfortable with from home at work. But anyone who thinks the Gimp on Windows is a good way to convert Photoshop users, or is intended as such, is going to be disappointed

Re:Yay New Features

[Sentry21]

In fact, my first experience with the GIMP was using it on Linux in 1998, using Enlightenment (and later, Sawmill/Sawfish) as a window manager; even then, I found it horribly frustrating and misdesigned, and could never understand why on earth they had ever done such an idiotic thing.

Re:Yay New Features

[MobyDisk]

Agreed. I was exagerating with 13. I stand corrected. You must hit alt-tab 4-5 times to get to the next document in GIMP.

Re:Yay New Features

[Sir_Lewk]

So fork or shut the fuck up.

Re:Yay New Features

[Anonymous Coward]

...of course you should also mention, that you still need to hire at least one person to invest at least year to eliminate most of the bugs to get in par with the version R&H uses.

Jam Tomorrow

[allcar]

This feels like one of those releases that will be exciting for the developers, but largely irrelevant to the end users. Hopefully, it will lay the foundations for future releases to have exciting new features and capabilities, but for now there seems little to shout about.
Reminds me of KDE4.

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[i.of.the.storm]

Well, 2.50 is the first development release, there's going to be a ton more (2.3 had over 20 iirc) so we'll see it take shape in the coming months or years. 2.4 was in development for quite a while, so I'd say 2.6 (the final stable version of 2.5) won't be here for quite a while, and it that time it could well be a very important release to end users. This version will probably feature some GUI reworking, which is definitely welcome considering how a lot of people seem to complain about the UI. Personally, the change in this development version seems to be for the worse (according to the description from the picture), but then it will probably be unrecognizable from these pictures by the time the final version comes around.

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[tpwch]

Wrong. Finally getting higher than 8-bit depth is great news for anyone who does more than a bit of hobby work with the gimp.

To take myself as an example I take photos with a digital camera that gives me RAW files. Those are 12-bit files, which means 4096 colors per pixel rather than the 256 you get with 8 bit. Now I will be able to edit those in the gimp without loosing any quality, which means alot less posterisation when adjusting contrast and settings like that. The output image will simply look alot better, with the same tools that we already have in the gimp (assuming that the input image is of good quality of course).

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[cloricus]

The 'complete failure (to do anything but convince users that 3.5.x was a good release)' part or the 'took a lot longer than we said and still isn't remotely stable or all that usable' part?

Heh, I can't even be marked a troll, it's all true.

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[simcop2387]

To take myself as an example I take photos with a digital camera that gives me RAW files. Those are 12-bit files, which means 4096 colors per pixel rather than the 256 you get with 8 bit. just to be pedantic, i doubt you're raw files are actually 12bit per pixel, its most probably 12bit per channel per pixel (and in the case of the gimp it was a maximum of 8bit per channel per pixel). this gives you 12bits * 3 channels (assuming RGB here) per pixel, so its a 2^36 colors (68,719,476,736 ) instead of 2^24 colors (16,777,216). still a dramatic change, but i just figured it'd be nice to have the complete numbers there :)

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[Ford Prefect]

Actually, if his camera has a Bayer filter over the image sensor, they quite probably are 12 bits per pixel - they're interpolated to something more appropriately RGB afterwards. Until then, they're just red OR green OR blue. Not a combination!

If you're loading raw files into the GIMP, they go through the not-half-bad UFRaw loader. I'm not sure what sort of precision that uses internally, but it's pretty high - on a par with Photoshop's raw loader. Correct the basic contrast and curves in the loader, then it'll be way closer to what's needed when downsampling to 8-bits-per-channel. If you still get banding problems after that, then either your camera suffers from no noise whatsoever, or your photo's stuffed and you need to take a new one. Learn how to use a camera?

(I have had pretty nasty banding effects in some images I was editing due to the GIMP's eight-bit limitations - but these where some pretty borderline cases involving very smooth gradients in skies generated in Terragen. Personally, I'm looking forwards to being able to create some proper, HDR skyboxes with Photoshop - but 32-bits-per-channel colour is a bit ridiculous otherwise... ;-) )

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[allcar]

I must have misread TFA. I really look forward to support for higher colour depth. I took

In other words it will get support for higher color depths, more colorspaces and eventually non-destructive editing in The GIMP! to mean that a future version will now be able to support higher. If you are telling me that capability is with us now, then I rejoice, but that's not how the article reads to me.

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[tpwch]

Actually I don't use gimp for that purpose at themoment. I use ufraw-batch as a stand alone app, then run simple app I made afterwards that is just a GUI frontend for a few tools like imagemagick, netpnm, and enfuse (to recover some dynamic range aviable in the raw file, very nice app), to do some simple adjustments. Produces great results imo. But it would be nice to be able to use gimp for some manual adjustments afterwards for the images that need it without having to degrade them to 8-bit.

Also, grandparent, thanks for correcting me, you are right of course.

And the parent is right about the bayer filter as well. If you are into HDR imaging give enfuse a try, produces nicer results than any of the tone mapping software I have seen.

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[tpwch]

I think they mean that its not in there at the moment, but that it will be before the next stable release of gimp is relased. Remember that this discussion is about an early alpha release.

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[compro01]

as near as i can figure, those are "will be implemented later" things. keep in mind this is the first alpha release out of likely a dozen+ releases (didn't 2.3 have about 20 releases before they put out 2.4?) until they hit 2.6.

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[cciRRus]

just to be pedantic, i doubt you're raw files are actually 12bit per pixel, Just to be a grammar nazi... you actually meant "your". :)

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[Enselic]

No GIMP 2.6 will not have support for more than 8 bits per channel since that is a huge project. The transition to more than 8 bits per channel will happen incrementally. The important change in 2.6 with regards to this is elementary integration of GEGL, but that's about it. Good support for more than 8 bits per channel will probably take several years of work.

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[Enselic]

The extremely long development cycle of GIMP 2.4 was not intentional and is something the developers wants to avoid for GIMP 2.6.

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[Attila the Bun]

just to be pedantic, i doubt you're raw files are actually 12bit per pixel, its most probably 12bit per channel per pixel

Just to be even more pedantic, the raw files are in fact 12 (or 14) bits per pixel, because each pixel contains only a single colour channel. To create the displayed image, colours are interpolated for every pixel from the Bayer patterned original.

And before anybody tries to out-pedant me with a reference to Foveon sensors, remember that when quoting pixel numbers the Foveon marketing counts each colour layer separately.

Ahh, there... I feel better now.

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[dddno]

To be even more pedantic: In terms of raw CCD sensor data, the number of bits per pixel is actually likely to be 12 indeed. With the exception of devices like the Foveon CCDs, most have some kind of colour filter mask placed over the individual pixels, either the well-known bayer pattern or a variant such as the CYMK grids used in some Sony CCDs (probably others too, can't be asked to dig it up). Each output colour pixel is interpolated from 4 adjacent, but spatially distinct physical pixels. Simply assuming the bits per colour pixel to be 3*12 is therefore not entirely correct.

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[Anonymous Coward]

To take myself as an example I take photos with a digital camera that gives me RAW files. Those are 12-bit files, which means 4096 colors per pixel rather than the 256 you get with 8 bit. just to be pedantic, i doubt you're raw files are actually 12bit per pixel, its most probably 12bit per channel per pixel (and in the case of the gimp it was a maximum of 8bit per channel per pixel). just to be pedantic, i doubt that. Most cameras measure only one channel per pixel. So it's likely to be 12 bits per pixel.

Once you process the image produced by camera (with proper raw plugin, ufraw, dcraw), you get 3 channels per pixel.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[i.of.the.storm]

Ah, thanks, I didn't know that. But regardless, 2.5 is the unstable branch (same versioning system as Linux kernels) so it's unreasonable to expect the first one to be great.

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[geantvert]

Actually, he is right. In most raw files, each pixels is composed of single channel and the missing two channels are interpolated from the neighbors. So a raw file pixel is indeed 12bit.

Re:Jam Tomorrow

[jilles]

Yes agreed. What is needed is a new architecture that will allow non destructive editing (photoshop doesn't do this very well either), support for all color models at all relevant bit depths, the notion of computational photography, semi-real time editing (e.g. toggling layers is painfully slow in the Gimp 2.4.5 win32) and a UI that supports modern notions of photography workflow such as embedded in products like adobe lightroom or new kids on the block such as a very interesting product called lightzone which seems to have a few nice concepts or features. Also very intriguing is a product called naked light which essentially decouples the (non destructive) editing from bit depth, resolution and color space.

What I'm missing in the Gimp and similar OSS projects is basically a vision for the future. There seems to be no open source projects that are even trying to catch up with before mentioned products. Things like Krita and paint.net are all quite interesting but basically they are stuck trying to imitate adobe photoshop. Their main point seems to be that their UIs don't suck as much as the Gimp. Adobe itself has long moved on to adobe lightroom because they are feeling the heat from commercial competitors rather than OSS.

I'm not sure the Gimp can be evolved to do all this.

Have they changed the name yet?

[Eevee]

I realize that marketing has nothing to do with the features or performance of a program. But it does have a factor in acceptance at work. There's no way I'm going in front of our Engineering Review Board for a product called "The Gimp", no matter how much money it's going to save.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Rob T Firefly]

So call it the "GNU Image Manipulation Program" around your bosses.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[piojo]

I've heard a lot of people complain about this. Why doesn't someone make a friendly fork, that essentially mirrors the source, but calls the project by any name other than "GIMP"? (Agreeing on such a name could be a start.) I hope this wouldn't piss off the developers, but it seems like it would be so easy to implement. It would be easy to install, especially if it got some support from the GIMP developers. Would devs be friendly to this idea? What would we call it?

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[neumayr]

You people take yourselves too seriously.
Seriously.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[explosivejared]

Dude, they have marketing in mind. Just in stead of going for silicon valley, well, they are targeting the strategic market of silicone valley. Think about it, of the two, which has a larger mindshare.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever I have to describe GIMP to the unenlightened.. I just call it:

"The GNU Image Manipulation Program" .. much more appetizing to people used to marketing department generated product names.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[drooling-dog]

There's no way I'm going in front of our Engineering Review Board for a product called "The Gimp", no matter how much money it's going to save. Your engineering board should make it explicit that a fashionable name trumps functionality and cost-effectiveness when it comes to software procurement. In fact, I dare them to.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here. In fact, I never use Yahoo.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[NoGenius]

I couldn't agree more. Names are important (just ask the folks at Canonical i.e Ubuntu), and this name is a turn off.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Artuir]

Or, you know, the software developers could change the name to something that isn't retarded. If you're going to be referring to the product multiple times in a speech, don't you think that would be a bit tiresome to say repeatedly?

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

What would we call it? I nominate "Fetish Slave Guy In Zippered Mask And Assless Chaps."

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Ed Avis]

Could you explain what you find objectionable about the name?

Would your engineering review board also have a problem with the name of the program? Or would they politely pretend not to notice and approve it with a straight face?

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wanted to call it the Natural Image General Generating Enhanced Reimager but folks didn't like that either. Go figure!

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[ThogScully]

It worked for Iceweasel, I suppose. But I'm guessing that adds more confusion than anything else. And that probably pissed of a few people too. I'd think it's just better to call it by it's real full name and not the acronym.
-N

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Millennium]

I nominate "Rose," because what's in a name? That which we call The GIMP by any other word would smell as sweet.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[KGIII]

If they don't know what GIMP is they probably won't know what GNU is either and that's a lot of explaining that you'll have to do. Most of the bosses I've worked for don't have the capacity for such high level thinking. Thinking "outside the box" is just a turn of phrase (in my experience) which is tantamount to an "open door policy." Going to your bosses with GIMP, taking the four hours to then describe what GNU is, then explaining the reality of opensource, and finally trying to convince them that there are better ways to spend their money other than licensing some software will likely result in you finding out about their "open door policy." (Meaning they'll open the door so that you can leave.)

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

So call it the "GNU Image Manipulation Program" around your bosses.

Which then provokes the following conversation:

Boss: What's guh-noo?
Geek: It stands for GNU's not Unix
Boss: What's not Unix?
Geek: GNU's not Unix
Boss: What's not Unix?

And then you could all sit down and have the requisite discussion about mathematical recursion, how it applies to this situation and everyone could have a good laugh.

Honestly - as much as I applaud RMS and everything that he's done, he made a mistake here and needs to fix it instead of remaining pedantic about it. I used to be quite pedantic about the difference between "linux" the kernel and "free, open source software" but I have become much more pragmatic about the situation: don't make people think so much.

When people see that I'm not running Windows on my PC, they ask what it is and I tell 'em it is linux. If I even try to get into explaining it beyond that, they glaze over and I have lost them. That said, FOSS is in need of a huge marketing makeover and GIMP's name is a huge part of this.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[jellomizer]

Open Image Studio is my vote for a name. Or just Image Studio. There is no need to past Open or GNU everywhere. as most people really don't care just as long as it is free as in beer.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

What would we call it?

How about something like... Cropping, Rendering, and Alphas Program?

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[domatic]

Allow me to humbly advance some ideas:

Professional Image Manipulation Program
Simple Image Manipulation Program
Lightmap Image Manipulation Program
Windowed Image Manipulation Program

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[CSMatt]

It should be ported to BSD and called BDSM.

Oh wait...

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Have you heard of the GNU Image Manipulation Program?"
"No, what's its name?"
"... The GNU Image Manipulation Program?"
"It's so new it doesn't have a name yet?"
"We call it GI^H^H Voight-Kampff for short."
"Neat!"

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[owlnation]

Yep, that's exactly right. It's easy to sell Firefox because that's a name that sounds exciting. People want to know what Firefox is just based on the name. Shallow, sure -- but welcome to Earth.

A product named GIMP ain't going nowhere -- face it. Not even if it were a good substitute for its competition, which it still very much is not. While changing the name won't improve the utility of the product, at least it will encourage more people to use it -- and thus maybe develop for it too.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[TheoMurpse]

You've got to be kidding me. Let's look at what "gimp" means:

Gimp is a usually derogatory term used to refer to a (male or female) sexual submissive person, typically dressed in black leather (or rubber), often in a gimp suit, and wearing a bondage hood or mask of the same material.

Would you think it a boneheaded move to name software "Shitting Dick Nipples"? It's not a stupid engineering board; it's people who don't want to stand in front of their boss and say, "DUDES WE TOTALLY NEED THIS SOFTWARE CALLED 'SADOMASOCHISM BONDANGE SLAVE'!!!"

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Free as in fuck you for saying 'free as in beer' because there is no such thing as free beer."

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[mr_da3m0n]

Where it is said that the purpose of the software is to help your company save money?

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

In UK English slang, it also means:

"a person with a limp, injury, or handicap that impairs their ability to walk fluidly."

The tool is therefore associated with what is now seen as a derogatory term for a handicapped person.

Imagine if the program was called "SPASTIC" or "RETARD"...

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[MidnightBrewer]

Or to be completely honest, the "Gnu is Not Unix Image Manipulation Program". Seriously, no, find a real name that doesn't make people feel uncomfortable or insulted. GNU Image Manipulation Program only loses the insulting aspect while maintaining the awkwardness in all its glory.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry. You can hire a consultant to cover yourself. That way you won't be punished for thinking individually.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just fork it and rename it "The Magic Happy Bondage Fuck-Puppet".

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[AlXtreme]

Yep, that's exactly right. It's easy to sell Firefox because that's a name that sounds exciting. People want to know what Firefox is just based on the name. Shallow, sure -- but welcome to Earth.

How about we call it 'FireGimp'? The logo can be some cripple who's on fire.

I'm sure people would find that exciting. Remember, there is no such thing as bad publicity!

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

super paint application

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

"A product named GIMP ain't going nowhere -- face it. Not even if it were a good substitute for its competition, which it still very much is not."

As a data point, I work at mega-corp (100k+ employees). We have The GIMP available. For the typical office worker, GIMP is a god-send. Why? The standard image on the computer does not include a graphic manipulation program other than MS Paint for the Windows boxes. If you want Photoshop, you have to fill out forms and get approval and have the license tracked. It can take a while for that to happen and you can be rejected if someone along the chain doesn't see "graphics" in your job description or your manager is watching their budget.

But many office people need to do more than MS Paint has to offer but not as much as Photshop offers on occasion. The GIMP saves the day here. And in this scenario, I don't care if the UI is clunky. I'm just glad at this point to have it.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[nuzak]

> Gimp is a usually derogatory term used to refer to a (male or female) sexual submissive person

It's synonymous with "cripple", as both a noun and a verb. Pulp Fiction did not invent the word.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[blincoln]

Open Image Studio is my vote for a name. Or just Image Studio.

This gets my vote. It also fits in nicely with "Inkscape".

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[drooling-dog]

Didn't say I liked the name, just found it curious that engineers of all people would make that their overriding criterion. As for me, I use it quite a bit and never even considered not doing so because of the name.

And yes, I would use your Shitting Dick Nipples software if it did what I need done better and more cost-effectively than the alternatives. But I'm just a rebel, I guess.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[TheoMurpse]

Yeah, and "ass" is synonymous with donkey. That doesn't stop it from being bleeped on TV because it also means "butt." Same with "bitch," "dick," "cock," and "faggot." Would you really want to have to tell your boss that you need to install "Faggot" on your computer?

I shouldn't have included the "usually" in there; I'm well aware of the other meanings of "gimp." I just cut-n-pasted from Wikipedia's "gimp (sadomasochism)" page.

My point is that one very real meaning of the name of the software prevents people from using the word in a business setting.

Even if it means a cripple, do you really want to go in front of the higher-ups and suggest you install some software that means "person who is permanently disfigured"? I think that's only moderately better than "submissive sex slave" from a naming perspective.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[TheoMurpse]

I don't care if you would use the software. The implication of the rest of my post is that the decision makers would be less off-put by something like "Imagewave" or something, rather than "Shitting Dick Nippes." It's called tact, and it used to be considered a virtue.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Blakey Rat]

Oh yes, "cripple." That's muuuch better!

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[nuzak]

I'm saying that even in modern vernacular, "gimp" still means "cripple".

Hey, I'm not defending it, it's actually a whole lot worse than the pop culture meaning. You'll get a gasp or two then a sly chuckle if it were just the Pulp Fiction reference. But a really insulting epithet for a physically handicapped person is an "HR Moment". Those defending the name should take note that they still have to defend the name constantly, which is not exactly a good way to start a pitch.

Makes me wonder what else out there has similarly unmarketable names. The scheme compiler called Stalin comes immediately to mind.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[TheoMurpse]

Brainfuck, the programming language, comes to mind as well. Also, I think there's a script kiddie program called Open Orifice.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[lp_bugman]

Let's call it GPaintPro. That sounds good all Corp, Enterprise and with a a lot of synergy going for it! :)

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[nuzak]

Ah right, BackOrifice, from CdC. That actually had some uses back in the day as a remote admin tool for places that were too cheap to spring for a real system management server.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Color Handling Image Manipulation Program

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

LOLZ

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Leynos]

We tend to use Paint.NET for that purpose. It's a little bit more userfriendly to boot. The only people who get the GIMP on their PC are the Linux fanboys so they'll feel a little bit more at home.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how to pronounce GNU, you insensitive clod

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[piojo]

(I'm replying to my own post.) I spoke to a GIMP developer, and I understand why they wouldn't benefit (at least, so they believe) from changing the name. Even if changing the name would be a win for people at big companies, they don't really see that as a useful advantage. GIMP has a very small dev team, and they wouldn't really benefit from corporate sponsorship or wider corporate acceptance. Also, I notice that nobody says that they are offended by the name. They merely say that they are worried about what other people will think.

In any case, if a name-changing fork won't really help the GIMP project, I'm not particularly interested in it. But somebody that's personally bothered by the name should launch that project and keep it sync'd. The name I like best that somebody has said is "Open Image Studio". If somebody wants to implement this, I would recommend applying for a page on sourceforge.net, and working on getting some decent build scripts with some 'sed s/gimp/OpenImageStudio/g' magic...

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[i22yb]

How about ImageMP ?

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

A product named GIMP ain't going nowhere -- face it. FYI, I'm a native English speaker (from New Zealand). As far as I can tell, the word "gimp" has no offensive meaning outside of America.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've personally liked calling Gim Paint or Gim Photo depending on what it needs to be doing.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[yesudeep]

Yeah, right. Like names like "Google" or "Yahoo" or "Linux" were going anywhere? Grow up. It's a program that has its own identity. The people who created it did it with passion and they love working on this program. Rename it to something else and the multitude of people who already know it as "The GIMP" will be confused. Learn something about brand identity already. Besides, an odd name like "The GIMP" is exactly what breaks the monotony of names like "Photoshop". Welcome back to Earth.

Re:Have they changed the name yet?

[yesudeep]

Way too many people care because what helps keep it "free as in beer" is the work of tens of thousands of people letting it be free for you. "Image Studio" has no identity. There are tons of "image studios" out there already. How many of them do you know? Besides, if you google "gimp" you'll know where you'll land. Google "Image studio" and see where you go. It'll end up being "yet another puppy trying to imitate Photoshop". Let the GIMP's identity be.

How long...

[bhunachchicken]

... before the MDI argument kicks off? ;)

Re:How long...

[Ford Prefect]

... before the MDI argument kicks off? ;)

From the release notes: "With the help of the UI team, the Toolbox menu has been merged into the image window. GIMP now always keeps an image window open and the default configuration treats the toolbox and docks as utility windows."

Well, they're doing something about it - although I much preferred the previous way of doing things. It was almost RISC OS-like in its simplicity - context-sensitive menus only! ;-)

As for the article linked by Slashdot, was it just me who got a noisy advert? I heard my earphones muttering about some sort of business opportunities while they were sat on the desk...

Re:How long...

[Rik Sweeney]

... before the MDI argument kicks off? ;)

You need to be more patient, first we're going to discuss CMYK.

Once we're done with that we'll look at your MFI problem...

Re:How long...

[Dekker3D]

well, in order for the gimp to replace photoshop, it needs to stop scaring folks. making the gui more intuitive for those coming from windows and similar stuff would be a great step in that direction.

and yuppers.. you're not the only one who got the ad. i figured i'd refresh and get a different batch of ads, but it came back. it's even invisible... ghostly haunting ads o_O

Re:How long...

[A Jew]

MFI = Million Freakin' Interfaces?

You *know* it hasn't noticeably improved when...

[Anonymous Coward]

...the very first item in the list of "noteworthy" improvements is a new splash screen. :'(

Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[MeditationSensation]

I mean, jeezus, mspaint can make shapes. GIMP can't. It's ridiculous. I'm using Paint.NET on Windows for my web comic for now.

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[neumayr]

Yeah well, it can. But it seems it isn't the right tool for what you're trying to do.
You might want to try some vector drawing tool, like Inkscape.

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[Colonel Korn]

I'm sure it would be hard to dump Paint.NET. It's the third least bloated piece of software I've ever seen. The second if Irfanview, of course, which is the best image viewer on any platform and has been since the 90s, and the first is mars.exe, that voxel-based 3-d "Martian surface" demo from the mid-90s that was like 4 kilobytes (http://www.whisqu.se/per/docs/math37.htm).

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[tepples]

If you want to add shapes to a raster image, try making a selection in the desired shape and then doing Edit > Fill or Edit > Stroke. Useful selection tools for this include the box tool (press r), the oval tool (press e), and the path tool for polygons and Bezier shapes (press b).

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeezus, Photoshop cant make shapes. It's Recidivous!

OMG! The wrong tool for the job is not working!

Why wont this screwdriver pound in nails!!!!

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[jim.hansson]

The second if Irfanview, of course, which is the best image viewer on any platform and has been since the 90s please give the URL were I can download irfanview for Linux, BSD and beos

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[Anonymous Coward]

'm sure it would be hard to dump Paint.NET. It's the third least bloated piece of software I've ever seen.

Only if you already have the .NET framework installed.

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[Anonymous Coward]

please give the URL were I can download irfanview for Linux, BSD and beos

Apparently it works in Linux under Wine (don't know how well though...).

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[The MAZZTer]

Irfanview runs on Wine (although using a custom toolbar skin crashes it, so don't). However it runs a bit slower than on Windows if you use it to page through image-heavy folders.

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[The MAZZTer]

that voxel-based 3-d "Martian surface" demo from the mid-90s that was like 4 kilobytes (http://www.whisqu.se/per/docs/math37.htm). If you want to see more for less, check out these. Check out .kkrieger and .debris especially.

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[nschubach]

But... but... Microsoft Excel is the best program for everything! At least that's how everyone here at work sees it. I don't know how many times someone will open send me an XLS with some checklist that could have been done in the email text itself. It's worse than someone inserting a photo from their drive into Word before sending it to me.

Seriously, I agree with you. Using the right tool for the right job. Photoshop is a tool for editing photos... not making a comic.

GIMP is also known as "The GNU Image Manipulation Program" ... not the "The GNU Image Creation Program"

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[caseih]

Don't you think that you were trying to use the wrong tool for the job to begin with? Gimp is an "Image Manipulation Program" first and foremost. If you are trying to create a web comic, I'd think that a vector graphics program would be you first choice of tools.

Sure Paint.NET and Photoshop blur the lines a bit, but the better tool still, in the proprietary world, would be Adobe Illustrator, or something like Inkscape in the OSS world.

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[R_Dorothy]

...but the better tool [is] still ... something like Inkscape in the OSS world. There are a set of very good video tutorials on how to create comics in Inkscape.

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[crabbz]

But it would be nice if there was an easier/more obvious way to do it than Edit->stroke. Not a lot of people are going to find that, and since gimp can already do these functions adding them to the tool box would seem to do little harm.

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you think that you were trying to use the wrong tool for the job to begin with? Gimp is an "Image Manipulation Program" first and foremost.

I do understand what you're saying, but should it matter? Why shouldn't scalable drawing be considered image manipulation? In 2007 do we still need to make that distinction? Seems to be a bit of a leftover from an earlier era of slower computers. Maybe we should respect the user expectation of an application that can do anything you want with a graphic?

Adobe benefits financially by keeping these separate as long as possible, but that's not the case with OSS. I appreciate that you're squishing trolls, but this is also something can be discussed as a development opportunity.

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[jhol13]

I don't remember Irfanview, but for *nixes the best image viewer was xv. It is extremely light too.

It still is the best by far if you bother to apply a few patches and compile from sources. Even though it has not been maintained for decades (ok, slight exaggeration :-)

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[chmod a x mojo]

Ummm, don't know who modded this numbskull insightful. Photoshop makes shapes, circles squares ellipses.... just about ANY shape you can dream up with with the PEN TOOL THAT IS IS SPECIFICALLY USED FOR VECTOR GRAPHICS in Photoshop...

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[scottgfx]

More than ten years ago, when I was using Photoshop for designing graphics, I had a person tell me that you couldn't do graphic design in Photoshop. He claimed that Photoshop was only for retouching images.

If a program has ways to make selections (or masks) and allows you to paint inside or outside them, or offers ways to shrink or grow masks, then I would imagine one could do design work with it.

My point is that Photoshop had most of the tools I needed to design. I'm sure that GIMP would cover most of that. Having vector tools is a big plus, but there are ways around that.

Re:Meh. Can it make circles and squares?

[scottgfx]

Adobe benefits financially by keeping these separate as long as possible, but that's not the case with OSS. I appreciate that you're squishing trolls, but this is also something can be discussed as a development opportunity. Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator work together quite well. In fact, Photoshop has been given more and more vector tools over the years. You can even take vector data from Photoshop and export it out to Illustrator. You don't need Illustrator, but it does make some things easier.

Re:First looks at gimp 2.5....

[MightyYar]

Let me start it off :)

First of all, let me tell you that its interface is quite redesigned and I think that some users will have problems adjusting with it, but that's just my two cents. Now those users will know how the rest of us feel!

I kid... if it had 16-bit support I would use the Gimp since I don't care about CMYK.

Useless article

[Anonymous Coward]

Not much of an article at all, no content to speak of and a handful of screenshots. I'll save others the trouble of reading it:

1. The menu which on stable version is duplicated in both the toolbar and image windows will exist only in image windows.
2. Gimp has finally switched to GEGL which means we get support for higher bit depths (stable is limited to 8 bits/channel).

Re:You *know* it hasn't noticeably improved when..

[gEvil (beta)]

Yep. My first thought exactly. You know the guy doing the writeup/review really has no clue about the GIMP's shortcomings when he touts a new splashscreen as an exciting improvement.

Ad trap

[Zebedeu]

Wow, that's a bad review!

One can tell that from his very first comment (on the splash screen):

HOT new splash
But probably this is just a temporary one, as the final version will have a totally different splash! Really? You mean the splash screen is a HOT new feature? And you say it will "probably" change on the final version? Amazing!

Then it just goes downhill from there, ending with a description of what The Gimp is.
Thanks, I didn't know what it was before, now I have to read your crappy review once again so it makes sense.

At least there were no shortage of ads, which surprisingly got through my AdBlock Plus.

BAD ADBLOCK! BAD!

Re:Ad trap

[waa]

At least there were no shortage of ads, which surprisingly got through my AdBlock Plus. Mine too for some strange reason. And the number of cookies I had to decline was practically unbelievable. I counted somewhere around 20!
This empty "article" was nothing more than a pathetic attempt at driving up ad views and installing tracking cookies.
But you have to admit, the new GIMP splash screen is HOT! (sigh)

Re:Ad trap

[geminidomino]

They seem to be directly-hosted ads from thier home sites, rather than ad-cyclers.

I managed to catch them with two new rules. /affiliate/

and /\d{1,4}x\d{1,4}.?\.[png|gif|jpg]/

May have to tweak that second one if I come across legit images that put their resolutions in the filename (don't see that often, though).

Re:Ad trap

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just regular old ads either but ads for porn sites no less. Don't click on the link at work! Not cool dude!

Appauling

[Stuidge]

This is a word for word, picture for picture copy of the original at Softpedia (I'm guessing, as the Softpedia article was posted 4 days earlier). The article linked is full of adverts as well. You would be better off reading the offical GIMP release notes.

Re:Appauling

[Eil]

Yup, Slashdot links to yet another plagiarism blog.

1. Find interesting tech story
2. Copy pasta
3. Insert ads
4. Send to Slashdot/Digg
5. Profit!

Re:Appauling

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, fairly obvious as all the images just link straight through to softpedia :)

Re:Appauling

[Peganthyrus]

Except presumably the original Softpedia article doesn't have black images with 'Stolen from Softpedia' instead of actual screenshots.

Re:Appauling

[Anonymous Coward]

Or rather, in this case, step 1 is "find patheticly bad tech article that doesn't deserve the honor of being plagarized."

Re:Appauling

[Paradise Pete]

This is a word for word, picture for picture copy of the original at Softpedia

What do you mean? The Softpedia article doesn't say anything about the HOT Splash Screen! That will probably be replaced!

On another note, you'd think the guy could have at least cleaned up the grammar a bit as he was stealing it.

Re:Appauling

[The_reformant]

2. Copy pasta

Mama Mia!

Malware

[pelago]

Hmm, I'm getting malware popups from 'trustedbrowser.com' from the site in TFA.

Re:Malware

[Anonymous Coward]

It keeps popping up an unprocessed ASP page and auto-forwards me to a horse accessories site after a few seconds hmmm....

Re:Malware

[makomk]

Someone was complaining about the same thing on the last article from techrunch.blogspot.com - I think /. should probably blacklist it or something. (Allgedly, the content is stolen, too.)

Re:Malware

[datajack]

I'm seeing 'trustedantivirus.com' here.

Trusted, my arse.

The Project Leaders need a boot up the...

[distantbody]

Why is The Gimp still the 'fairly decent pile of code, hampered only by its UI'?. To The GIMP Development Team: Please show some respect to the contributers and hire a UI designer before 3.0.

--Feature Creep: just say NO--

Re:The Project Leaders need a boot up the...

[serviscope_minor]

Please show some respect to the contributers and hire a UI designer before 3.0.

So, you're personally going to pony up the cash required for this? Thought not. Until you do, you're just telling other people what to do with their own time and money. If you think that's a reasonable thing to do, then why don't you come over and mow my lawn and then pay me $500?

Single window, please?

[MMC Monster]

Forget changing the name. In the list of requests for 2.8, the number one request is a single window model.

This is likely the number one request for s number of years, yet we have to wait until 2.8 to even see if it will happen?

The Gimp is a nice tool, but it really should listen to it's users.

Re:Single window, please?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is also one of my biggest complaints about gimp. I solved it using xnest.

http://xubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/09/05/howto-run-gimp-in-one-window/

It... uh. sort of solves the problem? Kind of? It's a bit better anyway.

Re:Single window, please?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds to me like the problem is your window manager. MDI is effectively dead; it's window managers not applications that should be responsible for managing windows. If you're stuck on MS Windows try replacing the bloated default shell with something better and faster.

PS: It's always been done like this!

Re:Single window, please?

[Anonymous Coward]

The lack of a background window doesn't bother me that much, but the fact that every window has its own top-level focus is terrible. The toolboxes disappear behind the picture window if they overlap, and if you have another program open that you give focus to, you'll have to restore focus to each GIMP toolbox separately when you get back to GIMP.

I know someone'll blame my "window manager" (i.e. Windows), but the GIMP interface is no less terrible in KDE or Gnome. The only kind of a window manager I can think of that would make GIMP usable might be a tiling window manager that doesn't allow overlapping windows.

Re:Single window, please?

[GauteL]

I am a user and I don't want a single window model. What I want is the multiple window model to work properly and it looks like they are taking steps to make this happen.
(i.e. toolbox should be a utility window that always comes to the front when selecting a gimp window).

Re:Single window, please?

[MMC Monster]

I'm using whatever the default window manager comes with Ubuntu when using desktop effects (compiz).

I shouldn't have to use a different virtual window just for one application. There has been a shift (at least a decade old) of applications using a single window rather than multiple windows. The Gimp designers should get with the times.

Re:Single window, please?

[Anonymous Coward]

but the fact that every window has its own top-level focus is terrible. The toolboxes disappear behind the picture window if they overlap

Right click the title bar and select the "always on top" option, miraculously these windows will always be placed on top of a focused window. Use the stick/pin option to have toolboxes accessible on all your virtual desktops and then distribute the document windows accordingly or shade/rollup document windows you're not using. This becomes second nature in no time and is a clear workflow enhancement when compared against MDI.

I know someone'll blame my "window manager" (i.e. Windows), but the GIMP interface is no less terrible in KDE or Gnome.

The explorer shell performs window management in Microsoft Windows and it can be swapped out. I've not used KDE or Gnome in years, I use XFCE or fluxbox on *nix and blackbox on windows. MDI would be a major step backwards IMHO TDI (tabbed interfaces) are unsuitable for image editing and SDI... it's not so bad in inkscape but I'd still prefer separate windows like sodipodi had.

Re:Single window, please?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using whatever the default window manager comes with Ubuntu when using desktop effects (compiz).

Then what's the problem?

There has been a shift (at least a decade old) of applications using a single window rather than multiple windows.

Tell it to Synfig, pidgin and countless other developers and UI people who recognise that multiple windows are a correct and desirable interface for some apps. As I commented below about sodipodi/inkscape, I prefer CSDI to SDI. Vanilla SDI is not a good match for image editing where you'll commonly want 2-3 images on screen at once -- this is why photoshop on the Mac has separate windows and on MS Windows it still uses MDI. If you want an SDI image editing app, try krita.

Re:Single window, please?

[Coryoth]

On Linux what you want is to set Preferences->Window Management:Hint for Toolbox to "Utility". You may as well set it to that for "Hint for other Docks" as well. Now you will only have image windows appearing in the taskbar, and clicking on the image window will raise the toolbox and other docks with it. Moreover you can hit TAB to make the toolbox and other docks disappear and reappear as needed. You may ask "Why isn't this the default behaviour?!". A fine question -- it doesn't work so well when there is no image window up, such as when GIMP starts up. As noted in TFA, in GIMP 2.5 there is an empty image window on startup, and docks do have "Utility" hints by default... so it will shortly be the default behaviour.

Re:Single window, please?

[lahvak]

Please don't! Make it send all sorts of hints to the window manager if you want, but don't let the application take over the window manager's job. Make it possible for the window manager to ignore those hints if user wants to configure it that way. Don't let GIMP become another OpenOffice.

Re:Single window, please?

[Haeleth]

On Linux what you want is to set Preferences->Window Management:Hint for Toolbox to "Utility". You may as well set it to that for "Hint for other Docks" as well. Now you will only have image windows appearing in the taskbar, and clicking on the image window will raise the toolbox and other docks with it.

Except that this doesn't work in compiz, which is what the GP said he was using, so your wonderful suggestion won't help him in the slightest.

"Change your window manager" is not the answer people want to hear. Why should he have to change his window manager just for one application, when every single other application he uses works just fine with the window manager he wants to use?

Re:Single window, please?

[Haeleth]

Right click the title bar and select the "always on top" option, miraculously these windows will always be placed on top of a focused window.

Including focused windows belonging to other applications, which you might actually want to be on top of the GIMP windows.

Use the stick/pin option to have toolboxes accessible on all your virtual desktops and then distribute the document windows accordingly or shade/rollup document windows you're not using. This becomes second nature in no time and is a clear workflow enhancement when compared against MDI.

Provided you only use your computer for GIMP, yeah. If you actually wanted to multitask, you've just made it a whole lot less efficient to use all those other applications.

Thanks, but I'd rather set my desktop up for my own convenience, not to work around the UI deficiencies of a single idiosyncratic application.

Re:Single window, please?

[Jorophose]

Everyone seems to love hating on the Gimp for its windowing choice, but have you ever used it with a WM that allows you to keep certain windows over others?

Under OSX, Photoshop defaults to multi-windowed mode and there doesn't seem to be an option to change it... Where's everybody's complaints there?

That said, I'm hoping GimpShop will change its name to a more PHB-friendly one, and keep its codebase quickly updated & nearly identicle to the GIMP's with the exception of windowing, obviously. That would probably be the biggest win-win situation.

Re:Single window, please?

[MMC Monster]

An even better question: Why should the end user even have to know which Window Manager he is using?

Re:Single window, please?

[MMC Monster]

Thanks, but I'd rather set my desktop up for my own convenience, not to work around the UI deficiencies of a single idiosyncratic application. Exactly. Imagine every application was set up like this. People would have to extend their virtual desktop space every time they opened a new application.

Gimp gets away with this because no other popular application does this except for instant messaging apps (and you expect them to pop up unexpectedly, anyway).

polygonal selection

[Anonymous Coward]

By public demand, a simple polygonal selection tool was added in this release. Its about fscking time! Now I think I might actually be able to use it for more than 5 minutes at a time without getting completely frustrated and going back to photoshop...

yeah right...

[Anonymous Coward]

As if they didn't like an operative system called "Leopard".

Re:yeah right...

[Paradise Pete]

As if they didn't like an operative system called "Leopard".

Personally I'm slightly embarrassed to say that. I just call it 10.5.

Re:First looks at gimp 2.5....

[twistedsymphony]

you kid but it's right on the money for me... I can't stand GIMP's interface (the old one at least) and it's the only reason I use paint.net instead of GIMP for quick and dirty photo manipulation. Of course I still prefer genuine Photoshop to both of them...

maybe the new interface will bring me back to GIMP... I'll have to download an find out.

The package formerly known as Film GIMP

[tepples]

Why doesn't someone make a friendly fork, that essentially mirrors the source, but calls the project by any name other than "GIMP"? (Agreeing on such a name could be a start.) One such fork from the GIMP 1.x codebase was called CinePaint.

Solen content!!!

[theempire]

Dear Slashdot admin, be aware that the current article (http://techrunch.blogspot.com/2008/04/first-look-gimp-250.html) was completely stolen from Softpedia (http://news.softpedia.com/news/First-Look-The-GIMP-2-5-0-83090.shtml) which was posted, as Stuidge said above, 4 days ago....

Linux theme?

[edmicman]

What's the theme/window manager being used in the screenshots? Is that a "dock"-like interface for Linux?

Re:Linux theme?

[bigtomrodney]

That's Avant Window Navigator.

It is in the Ubuntu Hardy repositories, though it has been available for some time through 3rd party repos.

Re:You *know* it hasn't noticeably improved when..

[Coryoth]

...the very first item in the list of "noteworthy" improvements is a new splash screen. :'( It's a development release. The odd numbered releases (2.1, 2.3, 2.5) are all unstable development releases when new features are integrated in. Usually there are around 20 such development releases (i.e., we got to around 2.3.20 before 2.4 was finally released). In this case we have 2.5.0 -- the very first development release, with just the beginnings to structural changes to integrate new functionality. In this case that means enough behind the scenes work to get GEGL working, and the beginnings of an apparent UI overhaul. Expect another 20 or so releases each adding more improvements before you get the next stable release: 2.6.0.

What we REALLY want...

[L4t3r4lu5]

... is a Liquify-like tool to make our girlfriends' boobs look bigger to show off on Facebook.
 
Oh, that and the "celebrity toe" underwear-removal tool.

Re:What we REALLY want...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just inflate her by another 10 psi.

Re:What we REALLY want...

[ChrisMaple]

Most warping tools are of poor quality so is Photoshop's liquify. Liquify quickly turns the part of the image it's working on to mush.

Re:What we REALLY want...

[L4t3r4lu5]

True, but you can use patch to replace the missing textures, and dodge to alter the tone (if you're feeling lazy).

The eyes!!

[tomatensaft]

Shit! Those eyes... have freaked me off!! I swear, they moved!! =8-(

USA Survey Group?!

[Mr Z]

Am I the only person who keeps having this page redirected to "USA Survey Group" after about 20 - 30 seconds? Looks like it's not just stolen content, but stolen content wrapped around dubious revenue generation.

Re:USA Survey Group?!

[Nimey]

I don't have that problem, but I've got NoScript and Adblock+ running. 'Course, I didn't stick around for long once I saw all the "Stolen from Softpedia" pics.

Anybody else's virus software turn on?

[zyzzx0]

http://techrunch.blogspot.com/2008/04/first-look-gimp-250.html Resulted in the jre kicking in on my machine and a bunch of virus mumbo-jumbo from my (crappy) avast software.

first time avast has ever found anything.

Re:Anybody else's virus software turn on?

[The Phantom Mensch]

Sumantec Endpoint Protection also threw up the red flag on two items that the page downloaded. It then deleted them both after a bit of analysis. Serves me right for reading it with IE 7.

Re:Anybody else's virus software turn on?

[NeuroManson]

Mine did the same, and I don't even get to read the interview, because it automatically kicks me over to some stupid ad site. I'd say turning off javascript is in order.

Re:Anybody else's virus software turn on?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too lazy to log in but honestly, what the hell are they thinking posting this link? Stupid site nearly crashed my computer and I highly suspect attempted to install a key logger. Gonna be going through my computer with a fine-toothed comb for the rest of the day.

THANKS SLASHDOT! :-/

Re:You *know* it hasn't noticeably improved when..

[Millennium]

Well, this is the first development release. Do you honestly expect it to already be feature-complete when the work is only just starting?

GIMP sucks balls on Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

GIMP's a piece of crap! If you want any serious work done, get Paintshop Pro. The money ($59.99 on ebay for a used copy) spent is worth the time and effort saved.

Re:GIMP sucks balls on Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

I use GIMP on Windows all the time to do serious work. Is it perfect? No. Is Paintshop Pro, Photoshop, or insert-your-favorite perfect? No.

Is GIMP pretty damned good at doing most of the things I want it to do for the price I want it to do? Yes.

I understand that we're geeks and we like to get religious about our software and OS choices. There's no reason for this kind of hostility though.

Offtopic Mars.exe was Re:Meh. Can it make ...

[vic-traill]

mars.exe, that voxel-based 3-d "Martian surface" demo from the mid-90s that was like 4 kilobytes

Thanks Colonel. I'd forgotten about this gem - had to go snag it just now to remind myself. Tim Clarke's description of the method he used in this demo of a Martian terrain can be found in the thread at http://www.whisqu.se/per/docs/math37.htm .

Well worth a few minutes reading. And the bonus of a Catch-22 reference in the parent post to boot!

Re:Offtopic Mars.exe was Re:Meh. Can it make ...

[David Gerard]

Where did you actually find a copy?

Re:Offtopic Mars.exe was Re:Meh. Can it make ...

[Colonel Korn]

I couldn't find one online, but I've had a copy since...well...since my computer was a 486. I've made sure to save it every time I upgrade.

Re:Offtopic Mars.exe was Re:Meh. Can it make ...

[David Gerard]

If you can email me a copy (dgerard@gmail.com) it would be most appreciated!

Re:Offtopic Mars.exe was Re:Meh. Can it make ...

[Ford Prefect]

My Google-fu wins all!

MARS.EXE, which I'm about to try in DosBox...

Re:Offtopic Mars.exe was Re:Meh. Can it make ...

[David Gerard]

:-D :-D :-D

Works like a charm in dosbox too!

Thank you, sir!

Paint.NET

[Noodles]

Try Paint.NET on Windows. It is decent and free.

SPAM BLOG

[Anonymous Coward]

WHY is /. linking to a spam blog. look at the name for pete's sake. here's the original: http://news.softpedia.com/news/First-Look-The-GIMP-2-5-0-83090.shtml

The blog is just a giant redirect. Way to editorially review, slashdot. I'm on IE here at work, but Opera kills the scripting on this blog at home. forbid anyone the other way around reads this article.

Re:SPAM BLOG

[AusIV]

Seriously. I started reading the article, noticing that the site kept trying to access more and more ad servers. (I assume that since I use flash block it was finding that the Ad had not loaded, and continued looking for another one). Suddenly it forwarded me to a porn site, which I promptly closed.

You are free to call it anything you want

[flyingfsck]

It is GPL. You can doewnload it and change the name to anything you want.

Re:You are free to call it anything you want

[The_reformant]

Allow me to present iGimp

How to make gimp ui good in no time!

[morphles]

First can someone explain me why they don't like the name? Whats so bad about it?(Maybe because im not native English speaker i don't "sense" something?) And you can always use the long name...

Then some people say it's UI is bad uncomfortable etc etc. But i would say gimp's ui is really really not bad. And i have a good guess why other don't like it: it has many windows. So you go why the f* you need so many windows? to place everything the way i want, i can even detach menus(photoshop can't do this for sure) and this is great feature (i know its from gtk actually). Now to those who say it has too many windows, may i ask: do you know what window manager is? I totally agree working with gimp in windows can be annoying, but thats the case with almost all apps on windows(then you get a bit more windows in your desktop). organizing windows in windows is almost impossible (kinda funny isn't it). But if you have wm with virtual desktops and give one for gimp it becomes really comfortable to use. (many apps also) Also some wm have such unheard features like window grouping and shading and other nice features, witch add usability to many apps.

Sorry to wander from gimp to wm's but i just think that some people blame not the things tha should be blamed.

PS i also think blenders ui is amazing too, very configurable, ant thats not a bed thing, almost always.

Re:How to make gimp ui good in no time!

[Tatsh]

I run GIMP in KDE and use KDE's specific window settings to force GIMP toolbars to one position by default, and to make them stay on top always. I still kind of wish they kept at least those two windows or however many you make, all in one task (meaning it shows as one task on the task bar but shows all related windows except the working window when clicked upon).

Re:How to make gimp ui good in no time!

[LunarCrisis]

A huge number of the GIMP feature requests on slashdot are for feature which already exist! See my other post for this one.

Excited about GEGL

[radarsat1]

Yes, this is great. Forget the bad / stolen / whatever review, a look at the product..

I've been looking forward to them integrating GEGL for some time now, and it looks like they've finally done it. This is going to be the single best thing to happen to open-source image manipulation in a long time.

GEGL will take care of almost all the current complaints from image professionals related to image bit depths, printing features, etc. It'll make layering effects much easier to apply and it makes everything related to image manipulation completely modular.

Also, think about how REALLY nice it is that the image manipulations routines are now librarified (is that a word?)... It means that we'll likely see other new applications pop up here and there taking advantage of this nicely-designed back-end. So don't worry about the lack of changes to the GUI, this will come in time, and even the GUI-related complaints (though I don't understand them) will likely be eventually moot.

I think it's great that they've finally achieved this long sought-after goal of redesigning the GIMP back-end and integrating it into the application. We should all be very excited about this! I use the GIMP all the time for my (non-professional) needs, and it's an amazing piece of software.

I wish they'd drop GTK+.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish they'd drop GTK+ and move to Qt, wxWidgets or one of the other real GUI toolkits. I know that they were the original developers of GTK+, but they'd gain so much by moving to Qt.

Qt, especially Qt 4.x, is a much better platform for portable, large-scale software development. And their recent graphics-related advances would no doubt be very useful for GIMP.

The Windows and Mac OS X ports of GTK+ are, to put it kindly, utter crap. When using GTK+ apps on OS X, even with a Mac OS X theme, there's a horizontal menu across each window. That's just not how it's done on Mac OS X. With Qt apps, on the other hand, it's almost impossible to tell them apart from Cocoa-based Mac OS X apps.

GTK+ harks to a time when Motif was the dominant UI toolkit on UNIX systems. Thankfully, those days are long dead. It's time for the GIMP developers to get with the times.

Re:I wish they'd drop GTK+.

[qbast]

Try Krita. Based on Qt, with all those new hyped features of GIMP (like 16bit channels) available since long time. Sane GUI as a bonus.

Re:I wish they'd drop GTK+.

[Haeleth]

Try Krita. Based on Qt, with all those new hyped features of GIMP (like 16bit channels) available since long time.

Been there, tried it, gave up because it was too immature. Far from having a sane UI, it had crazily mis-designed keyboard shortcuts (loads of cases where multiple tasks were assigned to the same key, even though there were plenty of keys available with no tasks assigned to them at all). Okay, no big deal, you might say: it has a handy interface for configuring your keyboard shortcuts however you like! Yeah, except that it doesn't save your settings. Close Krita, open it again, and it's back to the defaults across the board!

I did eventually manage to get it to use sane keyboard shortcuts by editing them in the source code and recompiling from scratch, but then I ran into some other irritation and gave up on the whole thing. Maybe in a year or two it'll have matured enough to be usable.

Re: Virus Alert

[Anonymous Coward]

Avast! Reported a site virus with a big warning on my screen.

Surf at your own risk.

Thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears to be used without permission. I've notified the Softpedia editors and flagged the article with blogspot.

Good god that site was awful

[Anonymous Coward]

It crashed my browser before I even got a chance to start reading it, sometime after it started playing music. What kind of fracking article is that? Sounds like it wasn't even worth reading, so I guess I didn't miss much. Seriously who filters this stuff out?

meh

[Anonymous Coward]

I want an image program with a good 'add bukkake' tool.

Worms in the ads

[Republican Gun]

Went to read the article and my avast antivirus stopped a worm in one of the ads. Shame, because I wanted to read the article but left to post this.

Re:Worms in the ads

[AusIV]

The original.

GIMP relies on having decent window managers

[Theatetus]

...something Windows and, for the most part, Mac users can't rely on.

Yes, if you have a single desktop (because in your mind it's still 1992 or something), GIMP is a horrible interface. If you have an actual windowing system, it's a whole lot better than some MDI monstrosity.

Remember: the multi-document interface was developed to make up for the window management capabilities Windows and Mac lacked. If your leg is broken, a crutch can be a key to mobility; that doesn't mean the crutch itself is a good.

Re:GIMP relies on having decent window managers

[blincoln]

Yes, if you have a single desktop (because in your mind it's still 1992 or something)

Why would I want multiple desktops? So that I can be even less aware of applications that aren't running in the foreground?

Not everyone's brain works the same way. You may like virtual desktops. I like having three physical monitors with one desktop that spans them so I can see at a glance all of the applications I'm using for a given task.

Re:GIMP relies on having decent window managers

[Kartoffel]

So true. Wish I could mod you up.

Re:GIMP relies on having decent window managers

[Ed Avis]

Your argument would make sense if most other applications on Linux used the same archipelago-of-small-windows approach the Gimp does. It would be the standard way of working to set up multiple virtual desktops with one for each app. But practically no other graphical program is like that, even on Unix-like systems. Even if the Gimp's way is theoretically superior, what matters most of all is consistency and not having each app reinvent the wheel in its own peculiar way. So the Gimp needs to get a more conventional user interface style.

(Are multiple desktops set up by default in a typical Linux distribution these days?)

Re:GIMP relies on having decent window managers

[MobyDisk]

This point comes-up a lot, perhaps because people throw-out the term MDI and don't know what it is. MDI is a feature where multiple documents (AKA top-level windows) can be open inside a single parent window. It was used primarily in Windows 3.1 when there was no task bar. I do not know of any application since Windows 3.1 that uses this. (Perhaps it is still buried inside MS Office or OpenOffice somewhere?)

What you described is not MDI. GIMP does not do MDI, and Windows users no longer expect it. GIMP does something like "reverse MDI" :) It makes CHILD windows act like TOP-LEVEL windows while MDI made TOP-LEVEL windows act like CHILD windows. Both are weird. and distort the expected behavior of ALT-Tab.

Re:GIMP relies on having decent window managers

[Sir_Lewk]

(Are multiple desktops set up by default in a typical Linux distribution these days?) Yes.

Re:GIMP relies on having decent window managers

[Anonymous Coward]

So gimp relies on people having something that an overwhelming percentage of potential users don't?

Re:GIMP relies on having decent window managers

[Leynos]

Yes, they are.

I'm using Ubuntu with Compiz just now, and while multiple desktops is a passable hack, it doesn't make up for the lack of an Expose-like feature. (The nearest clone I found with Compiz shows all desktops rather than all Windows, and doesn't let you drag items from the normal view to the exposed view and back again).

Re:GIMP relies on having decent window managers

[maxwell demon]

Gimp was written for an environment where this feature was standard. Even the very first X window manager I've used (ctwm, back then) came with virtual desktops. That was 1992, some years before the first version of Gimp was published.

Re:GIMP relies on having decent window managers

[Anonymous Coward]

(Are multiple desktops set up by default in a typical Linux distribution these days?) Yes. Go try an Ubuntu LiveCD if you don't believe me. You may want to adjust the number of virtual desktops, though. I prefer four.

Re:GIMP relies on having decent window managers

[tehBoris]

There is a Compiz plugin (which I don't remember if it is among the default installed plugins in Ubuntu) which is often touted as a clone of Mac OS X's Expose, and it is called Scale.

What it does is well... scale all the windows in the current viewport and lay them out on the screen, so you can select one of them. Is that what you were looking for?

(I have set this thing to activate whenever I move the mouse cursor to the top right corner, very handy)

Re:GIMP relies on having decent window managers

[Evil Pete]

Why would I want multiple desktops?

Once you get used to them you really can't stand it when they aren't there. I've used Windows since 3.0, and Linux from well before KDE/Gnome. But even when I though the UI was better in Windows (which it isn't anymore) I thought multiple desktops were a brilliant idea. I eventually decided that MS stayed away from them because they thought Joe-sixpack would just get confused by it.

These days it really pisses me off at work not to have virtual desktops (XP), and I work with dual monitors. I know there are add-ons to do this on windows but ... last time I tried them it was pretty pathetic. Rather have the real thing.

OK. End of rant.

Re:GIMP relies on having decent window managers

[zsau]

Fontforge uses the same UI setup as the Gimp. Inkscape's predecessor, Sodipodi, also did, but it's UI needed a lot of work, and unfortunately (from a perspective of consistency) the Windows weenies got to it.

Of course, I'm usually using small and simple windows from dozens of programs to do a task (e.g. GVim, Xpdf, an xterm, a web browser window, and a single detached email window); it has the same sort of feel. Completely different from the feel of using an IDE, an Office suite, or a Photoshop style app.

Unfortunately for me, I only have two 1920x1200 monitors --- not nearly enough resolution to be able to get away without virtual desktops unless I want to have to use a taskbar and keep minimising windows. Maybe when we have wall monitors...

And yes, Debian and Ubuntu does have virtual desktops by default. I don't know about other distros.

Re:GIMP relies on having decent window managers

[Ed Avis]

I sympathize; I remember in the old days using several small windows but over the past few years I've got more used to having each app in a single window which is always maximized. So my web browser is full screen, as is xemacs, and the mail client, and anything else. This despite desktop resolution being several times greater. Partly the fault is with cluttered interfaces that have too many menubars and toolbars, partly 'Windows weenies' (which might even include me) who are used to a big document window with its own buttons in the window, rather than separate toolbox windows.

Apart from MDI, the biggest user interface design mistake made and perpetuated by Microsoft Windows is the way that you cannot do anything in a window without it being forced to the top. This makes it awkward to use overlapping windows on your screen - you end up either carefully tiling the windows so that they don't overlap, or going with one big maximized window at a time. I greatly prefer the approach taken by ROX where you can work in background windows and they stay background, unless you choose to bring them to the front by clicking on the title bar.

Re:GIMP relies on having decent window managers

[zsau]

Nah, I can't stand full screen windows. One task rarely uses only one program, unless occasionally when you're using an IDE or a word processor, and then you have a program poorly implementing a window manager in a very constraining way. But I probably repeat myself now.

I use ROX-Filer as well, but I prefer focus strictly follows mouse over the ROX/RISC OS method of click-to-focus but raise only when clicking the decorations --- I use my pointer to represent my attention. Once you get into the habit, it because very intuitive: Just move the mouse pointer as you move your eyes significantly. ("Strictly" meaning there's no circumstance when the window with the focus is not the window with the pointer over it, and vice versa; I tried "sloppy focus" where the focus stays on a window when you move onto the desktop, but I found it strangely confusing.)

My computer is set up very differently from most people's, and I don't claim it's remotely normal or useable by anyone other than me (it might be! dunno..). But I guard it jealously and do not look kindly upon any attempt to separate it from me!

Gimp 4 Gimps

[zakeria]

we need an easer gimp!! its extremely frustrating and falls short of requiring a masters degree in order to use! why is it some dam complicated...

"Stolen from Softpedia"?

[antdude]

Terrible article. Why am I seeing http://news.softpedia.com/images/extra/LINUX/small/gimp25preview-small_011.jpg ?

Catching up, but what about the next step?

[astralpancakes]

Nice changes to be sure, and everything listed in the article is very welcome. I'm having no problem thinking of further Photoshop features I wouldn't mind seeing in the GIMP, though (better, or at least faster, brush engine, snappier redraw when working with large files, free transform, adjustment layers...).

However, what I'm really waiting for is for someone to take the next step and implement a proper realtime, non-destructive, node- or stack-based image editor. Something that lets you take an image and add filters, effects, paint operations etc that you can mix, match, add and remove later on. Computer hardware has progressed to a point where it would be possible to do filter operations using shaders on the graphics card, then render them out in the background using spare cycles (or spare CPU cores..), store multiple versions of the same image in memory for quick undo, and so on.

I'm not really expecting Adobe to be the ones to do it, at least not with Photoshop -- there are too many Photoshop users whose livelihood depend on knowing the quirks of the interface by heart for Adobe to risk making any major changes. Ironically, Adobe's own After Effects, though it completely lacks paint tools, among other things, is in many ways fairly close to what I have in mind, and for things like colour adjustments, blurs and effects it's actually a lot smoother and more flexible than Photoshop, even when working with stills.

Re:Catching up, but what about the next step?

[im_thatoneguy]

Yeah because that's nothing like the new smart layers in CS3 and adjustment layers which have been in photoshop for the last 10 years.

I agree I want pure through and through smartly cached node/layer based compositing in photoshop. But considering how long a 4k image takes to update in Nuke or Combustion, I'm not certain we're ready for it yet.

Yes, but...

[Foske]

Does it run Linux ?

Re:First looks at gimp 2.5....

[pipatron]

I kid... if it had 16-bit support I would use the Gimp

Good for you then, the next version will (and this beta probably have it already?)

Re:First looks at gimp 2.5....

[calebt3]

if it had 16-bit support I would use the Gimp since I don't care about CMYK

the integration of GEGL (Generic Graphics Library) which will finally get support for higher color depths

Gimp Cannot Used for Professional Photography

[BrendaEM]

I've used the Gimp a lot in the past, but I think it's a waste of time for developers to work on code trees that cannot do 32-Bit color? I also wish the window-soup would end as well.

Re:Gimp Cannot Used for Professional Photography

[BigSven]

You did realize that GEGL, the new GIMP core that is being integrated right now, does image processing in 32bit floating-point (that's 32 bit per color channel), didn't you?

Worst Spamvertising Ever

[NeuroManson]

After turning off javascript, I finally got to the site. First thing you see is "Stolen from Softpedia" for the graphics.

Too bad the article can't be modded down, I'm guessing /.'s editors are on vacation.

Why it's done this way:

[SanityInAnarchy]

I always found using multiple windows was a good idea -- it lets the window manager actually manage the windows. If it's annoying, in the ways you describe, maybe that says something about your window manager?

Now the reason I think you're wrong is because last time I posted a rant like this, two Mac users pointed out that Photoshop on the Mac does not work like this. Apperently, clicking on any image open in photoshop also brings the tools into focus as well.

At least on OS X, that is how all programs work. Or at least, it is possible to click on an application to raise all of its windows, and command+tab (like alt+tab, but better) will actually raise all of those windows. Windows are actually naturally grouped by application -- I had a keystroke to cycle through open Terminals, and that actually worked really well, because Terminal is actually its own application.

Gimp was developed on Linux, where we've had a few sane windowing ideas that Windows has yet to pick up on, and OS X is only slowly starting to steal. Simple example: Virtual desktops. Put gimp on its own workspace, and you are literally one keystroke away from moving back to that image.

And then there are dual-monitor systems. This is where Photoshop really starts to be annoying, unless there is some way I don't know of to detach the tools (probably is) -- it's possible to put the image itself, completely maximized, on one monitor, and all of the tools on another monitor.

Clicking an image in Gimp should bring the image up along with a full set of editing tools.

Most open source programs try to assume less about their user -- what if you didn't want that full set of editing tools to come up? What if you just want to look at the image, on as much screen area as possible, before you start editing? Why should it be the job of the individual application to work around crappy window managers?

All that said, there's always GimpShop -- haven't tried it myself, but it claims to make Gimp look photoshop-like.

Re:Why it's done this way:

[CatPieMan]

And then there are dual-monitor systems. This is where Photoshop really starts to be annoying, unless there is some way I don't know of to detach the tools (probably is) -- it's possible to put the image itself, completely maximized, on one monitor, and all of the tools on another monitor. This has been doable since Win2K/PhotoShop 7. You have to set the monitors up as different screens, not one large screen. There was something introduced in Win2K that allowed a sub-window (the toolkits) to be movable outside of the main window. I currently use CS3 on XP, and if I don't have the window maximized, I can move the tools outside of the edge of the program (but an image I'm editing will always stay inside of the app). To move the tool, you just click on its top bar and drag it outside of the window.

One of the GP's complaints about the many gimp programs on the tool bar can be fixed with a plugin called something like Anti-Weird, or De-Weird, or so. This will make the gimp app run as a single item on the task bar.

A word of caution about GimpShop -- I tried it and it was very unstable. It may be due to having both Gimp and GimpShop installed on the same machine, but I didn't really look into it. It also tends to run about 1-2 minor releases behind the Gimp.

Re:Why it's done this way:

[Blakey Rat]

Virtual desktops doesn't help in a lot of situations. Say you're editing an image that involves looking at a spreadsheet program side-by-side with the image. (For instance, you're pretty-ify-ing a set of charts.) A virtual desktop can't help you in this situation... you can't put your charts in the same desktop as GIMP, or you have all the same window management headaches the grandparent describes.

The simple point is that all other image editing programs, from the (excuse the pun) gamut from Paint.NET to Photoshop, they all handle windows the same way. GIMP does it a different way for no good reason, and people hate it for that, and GIMP developers are utterly clueless about the whole affair.

Re:Why it's done this way:

[falconwolf]

And then there are dual-monitor systems. This is where Photoshop really starts to be annoying, unless there is some way I don't know of to detach the tools (probably is) -- it's possible to put the image itself, completely maximized, on one monitor, and all of the tools on another monitor.

Photographers do this all the tyme, the photo they're editing is displayed on the large monitor right in front of them while they keep the tool pallets on a smaller monitor to the side.

Falcon

Re:Why it's done this way:

[jhol13]

Excuse me? You have found one specific case where virtual desktops do not help and then claim "for no good reason"!?

Even in the case you mentioned it is an advantage to have the tools windows detached - it gives more room for the two pictures as you are free to put the tools where ever you want (even on different virtual desktop would you so prefer).

I despise GIMP interface (for other reasons like difficulty of readjusting selections or rotating, etc.), but love the detached windows as it just uses less screen real estate.

Re:Why it's done this way:

[SanityInAnarchy]

Say you're editing an image that involves looking at a spreadsheet program side-by-side with the image. (For instance, you're pretty-ify-ing a set of charts.) A virtual desktop can't help you in this situation...

Well, assuming the spreadsheet program is a typical one, and sticks to one (possibly tabbed) window, there's actually a very simple answer to this: In KDE, I have middle-clicking on the taskbar set to send a window to the bottom of the stack.

So, not only do I have more freedom in arranging my stuff around the spreadsheet -- for example, I can put the image on one monitor, and tools+spreadsheet on the other monitor -- but I also have that alt-tab-ish functionality back, where I can simply send the spreadsheet to the bottom, which, since it's the only other thing on the Gimp virtual desktop, means all the Gimp windows go to the top.

GIMP does it a different way for no good reason

You said that "Virtual desktops doesn't help in a lot of situations" -- which implies that there are some in which it does help. Your example of one in which virtual desktops don't help is actually a situation where they do. I'd call that a very good reason.

GIMP developers are utterly clueless about the whole affair.

I think it's more that they know, and don't care. Their way is better, in many situations. And if you really don't like it, there are ways to force Gimp back to a single window.

Re:First looks at gimp 2.5....

[MightyYar]

I know... can't wait! I put it on my work computer because they don't like pirated copies of Photoshop there :) It's just being used to create images for training and documentation, light web and wiki work... stuff like that.

The lack of 16-bit support prevents me from using it at home, though. My scanned photos are all 16-bit TIFFs. I tried using CinePaint for a while, but it is obviously not as much geared for Photography and doesn't have all the same goodies as Gimp.

Re:You *know* it hasn't noticeably improved when..

[LunarCrisis]

Except that the release cycle leading up to 2.4 lasted years longer than it was intended to.

If you're using three applications for one task

[Theatetus]

Then it's your application programmers that need to think about HI questions.

Re:If you're using three applications for one task

[matthewcaudle]

If I'm working on a design project I routinely have indesign, illustrator, photoshop and bridge open. one task, four applications. web design? dreamweaver, flash, firefox, ie (granted with ie view) kinda the same deal. not to mention random text editors, im clients, word, vmware fusion, email app etc that all facilitate me getting my 'task' done.

Re:If you're using three applications for one task

[blincoln]

If you're using three applications for one task, then it's your application programmers that need to think about HI questions.

For developing a web application which talks to a SQL backend: Visual Studio on the middle monitor, Internet Explorer running the application on the right monitor, and SQL Management Studio on the left monitor.

For hacking PS2 games: PCSX2, WinHex, PS2Dis.

For working on music: Sonar, a wave editor, and a synth patch editor.

I doubt I'll find any software for those tasks that does as good a job as the three separate apps, let alone better.

Another thing I do at work is use the Minority Report method of moving apps around between monitors depending on what has my main attention versus other things I'm interested in - but not *as* interested in. So right now I have Outlook on my main monitor, Firefox on my left monitor, IE and IM on my right monitor. I might bring up Excel or Access on the right monitor depending on what I'm doing. I imagine that's more like what people use virtual desktops for, except that my "hotkey" is shifting my vision.

Interface: same old crap

[Wiseman1024]

What new interface? It's the same old crap! The same old crap that requires you to buy two monitors to work beacuse you can't possibly accomodate toolbars and option windows into thin upper/lower and left/right docks; the same old crap that spans over several windows making it require a separate desktop just for GIMP and rendering Alt+tabbing useless, besides spamming your task bar. The same old GIMP crap. And yet, if that were the only reason why I bought Paint Shop Pro and have to dual boot Windows XP... The GIMP is alright as some sort of advanced mspaint.exe, but it's nowhere near the capabilities of state-of-the-art image editing software. Even if we ignore the lack of 16 bits per component or CMYK, you get a piss ugly layer model with layer boundaries you have to keep in mind, sub-par drawing tools, options and brushes, terrible gradient system (Photoshop's blows too), and transparency is unheard of in most of its filters or tools.

Stolen from Softpedia

[LunarCrisis]

Check the article again, they've been owned!

add shapes to a raster image

[pbhj]

No. Wrong tool.

Use inkscape (my preference), sk1, XaraLX, ...

Import your raster image, add a new layer, do your vector drawing over the top. If you still need it rasterised, export and use gimp (or Krita [which does 16bpp and ICC profiles, etc.] or whatever).

Impossible to build and they don't like binaries

[pbhj]

So Gimp-2.5.0 requires GEGL and the GEGL FTP folder only contains a README (ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gegl/). So how can I build and test it?

The Gimp folk say they don't like binaries being distributed ... wtf? So I have a double-owie. They don't want people to test the unstable release? I don't do SVN except for projects I actually want to contribute to with code, users shouldn't need to go to those lengths to test the apps.

Oh and all you rich kids out there don't forget to donate to the LGM (http://pledgie.com/campaigns/613) ... I want my MTV, er Inkscape ...

You shall not pass!

[Spy der Mann]

I refuse to accept a new name for the Gimp until they do 16-bit depth (check), CMYK (missing) and single-window interface (missing). Then, and only then I'll accept a fancy name with the word "shop" on it.

Until that day comes, the Gimp's name shall reflect its capability.

Re:You shall not pass!

[maxwell demon]

Why should it get the word "shop"? I cannot buy anything with it.
And if it ever gets a single window interface, PLEASE make it optional.

Adobe Strap-on, Microsoft Blow-Up Doll

[r_benchley]

First can someone explain me why they don't like the name? Whats so bad about it?(Maybe because im not native English speaker i don't "sense" something?) And you can always use the long name...

The problem with the name is that most english speakers associate the word gimp with the sex slave from the movie Pulp Fiction. The gimp wore a leather suit, leather mask and was kept in a dungeon. For a lot of people, the word gimp is associated with images of sexual bondage and depravity.

Re:Adobe Strap-on, Microsoft Blow-Up Doll

[emptybook]

Gimp also means a lame (as in physically disabled) person. This is the first definition in my mind, and why I prefer referring to GIMP as an initialism rather than an acronym, even though it's unwieldy.

Speaking of a fork..

[SD-Arcadia]

Why not come up with a non-objectionable name + relatively stable single window GUI version? I always hear the argument that the best part of FOSS is that if you don't like it, you can modify it. How come despite mountains of complaints on Slashdot under every GIMP thread, no one has taken the effort to make this happen? Why is GIMPshop always lagging so far behind GIMP versions and is so buggy? (2.2.4 as of now, but finally at least I see a decent website) If there was ever a need for a FOSS fork, it is GIMP!

GIMP actually is not a Photoshop competitor...

[Tetsujin]

Yeah, really wicked. Now all GIMP needs is support for the various colour matching systems such as ANPA,DIC, Fokoltone, HKS, PAntone, Trumatch and TOYO. Sure they cost a lot to license and so are almost guaranteed to NEVER be in Photoshop locking out a huge swathe of the publishing industry.

And really, who cares that it doesn't fit in with CS3 the way photoshop does - it doesn't fit with Krita or Scribus either.

Hey, give it only another decade and it may have some lossless processing gear.

Reality check buddy - Photoshop users aren't out to get Gimp. It doesn't bother them and if it's ever better. Photoshop users only hate clueless Gimp USERS who wouldn't know a proper colour management workflow, from Raw to print to online, if it smashed them in the face with a fully formed colour profile.

How about you continue using GIMP for your happy snaps, and I'll continue using it for aiding in the publication of the newspaper, at which I'm the operations manager, with a distribution of 127,000 copies weekly.

In return for us never crossing into each others territories again, ie you don't pretend you deal with real printing in real quantities and I'll not tell you how to remove auntie's red eyes, we'll stop spreading mis-information such as 'Photoshop users only need CMYK and when GIMP has that they'll be on par.'

I', gonna give you the benefit of the doubt after all that and assume you meant to get modded funny, not half-wit Linuxoverzealot. I applaud your use of sensible information here, it's just a shame you have to be a bit of a dick about it...

For sure it's easy for people who are excited about GIMP and who aren't Photoshop users to take it for granted that GIMP is right on par with Photoshop - when it isn't. To me, 8-bit per color channel is enough to make the distinction perfectly clear - OK, so you've got 24 million colors, right? How many shades of one color? I'd shudder to think of doing any serious manipulation of black-and-white images on GIMP...

But the thing about the GIMP is it was one of the first free apps to deliver its level of capabilities. (I remember Paint Shop Pro before GIMP came out - you could adjust colors and crop and not a whole lot else...) That's very empowering. Nowadays GIMP is just one of many free apps that provide that level (or better) of functionality... I think it's really more appropriate to group all those apps together, call them "personal-grade photo editors" or something, rather than try, as a GIMP enthusiast, to describe GIMP in terms of Photoshop... I'm quite happy to have a photo editor with layers and such, without having to shell out for (or pirate) a program like Photoshop.

Let's look at Inkscape:

[bbyakk]

Inkscape has just had a major new release, 0.46. (Yeah, its number does not look like it's a major release, but it is. It's the biggest one so far).

Inkscape's UI is a lot better than GIMP's. Everyone admits that. And it's much improved in 0.46 anyway.

Inkscape, as a vector application, is simply a better choice for a lot of graphic tasks for which clueless people still try to use GIMP or Photoshop. Just look at the "can it draw circles" thread in this discussion!

AND YET, despite all this, new version of GIMP gets front page news on Slashdot, but any submissions about Inkscape 0.46 are rejected.

This is simply ridiculous.

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[Blakey Rat]

A couple things:

1) If Inkscape is so good, it's version number should at least be 1.0. You can't convince people to download and use pre-alpha software on a daily basis, no matter how 'great' it is. If 0.46 is an accurate description of its version, then it shouldn't be getting press. (It'll get press, people will download it, it'll be a buggy POS, they'll hate the name "Inkscape" for the rest of their days-- bad idea!)

Inkscape, as a vector application, is simply a better choice for a lot of graphic tasks for which clueless people still try to use GIMP or Photoshop. Just look at the "can it draw circles" thread in this discussion!

2) Inkscape is a better choice for graphic tasks that involve vectors. It's not for other graphic tasks. Vector tasks (like making company logos, for example, or program icons) are simply not as common a use-case as bitmap manipulation (photo cleaning.) Yes, I agree that anybody using GIMP or Photoshop for a flow-chart is using the wrong tool. Then again, Inkscape isn't the right tool for that, either-- they'd be better served by something like Visio.

In short, don't assume people are idiots because they talk about GIMP/Photoshop more than vector programs. It's more likely they just use bitmap tools more than they use vector tools.

P.S. Last time I used Inkscape, on X11 on Macintosh, it wasn't even capable of sorting the File->Open dialog in alphabetical order. I reported the bug, and I'd link to it-- except it appears they deleted it from their bug tracker. Classy. Here's a screenshot:
http://schend.net/images/screenshots/alphabetical_disorder.png

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[bbyakk]

> If Inkscape is so good, it's version number should at least be 1.0

Aren't you aware of the fact that open source is very version-shy, in general? And that a quality of an open source application is not correlated with its version number? I thought this was Slashdot where such things need not be explained.

> Inkscape is a better choice for graphic tasks that involve vectors.

Which is the clear majority of all graphic tasks, overall. Draw something? Best done in vector, with full freedom and editability. Compose something out of existing stock art? Pure vector. Anything involving text? Of course vector, using GIMP/Photoshop for text is self-inflicted torture. Banners, diagrams, cartoons, maps, buttons? Vector, vector, vector...

What remains to bitmap editors? Well, editing photos, naturally. Retouching, color correction, RAW work. Also, naturalistic drawing emulating watercolor, oil etc (but this is not the domain of GIMP or Photoshop either, try ArtRage). That's about all. Even things like shadows, bevels, and texturizing can now be done in Inkscape using filters.

> It's more likely they just use bitmap tools more than they use vector tools.

And this is sad. I know Photoshop came first and deeply entrenched itself into the brains of users. But come on people, it's time to give it a second thought. It's 21st century and vector editors have progressed far, far beyond what was available in the 90s.

> Last time I used Inkscape, on X11 on Macintosh, it wasn't even capable of sorting the File->Open dialog in alphabetical order.

It's curious that for your pick, you chose one of the things that is actually common to both Inkscape and GIMP - the file dialog provided by the GTK library! Of course Inkscape does not maliciously missort your files, it's just the default with the GTK version you were using. And I have just searched even deleted and closed bug reports and could not find yours. So, if it's still not fixed in 0.46, please go to https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape and report it.

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[Blakey Rat]

Aren't you aware of the fact that open source is very version-shy, in general? And that a quality of an open source application is not correlated with its version number? I thought this was Slashdot where such things need not be explained.

That's their problem, not mine. If I see "0.46" in front of something, I think "buggy POS with no features." (1.0 also makes me think "buggy POS" with the difference that at least 1.0 has all the features implemented.) The version number system is quite well-established, if the Inkscape coders don't want to use it, then they can do that-- but they also can't complain when normal people like myself look at the version number and think "buggy POS."

Anything involving text? Of course vector, using GIMP/Photoshop for text is self-inflicted torture.

Photoshop stores text as vectors. (Photoshop also has enough vector features to do most, if not all, of the other items on your list-- perhaps a bit more awkwardly, but they can be done.) Doing it in GIMP, yes, is self-inflicted torture, but then again, so is using GIMP at all.

And this is sad. I know Photoshop came first and deeply entrenched itself into the brains of users. But come on people, it's time to give it a second thought. It's 21st century and vector editors have progressed far, far beyond what was available in the 90s.

So has Photoshop. It has a ton of vector features, you seem entirely ignorant of. I'm not saying that Photoshop is the end-all be-all of vector art, obviously Adobe wouldn't snipe sales from their own Illustrator, but it's not nearly as dire as you make it out to be.

It's curious that for your pick, you chose one of the things that is actually common to both Inkscape and GIMP - the file dialog provided by the GTK library! Of course Inkscape does not maliciously missort your files, it's just the default with the GTK version you were using. And I have just searched even deleted and closed bug reports and could not find yours. So, if it's still not fixed in 0.46, please go to https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape and report it.

Yes, Inkscape doesn't give crap about my bug and simply deletes it. (No doubt without fixing it first.) And it's my job to re-submit the bug? Screw that. What reason do I have to believe it would get fixed the second time? If they don't want my input, if they're just going to delete it without comment, they shouldn't ask for bug reports in the first place.

Whether or not you can find it, it was in there. I know, because I still have the URL it was located at on the craptactular SourceForge.net: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=604306&aid=1609779&group_id=93438 It says "Artifact: This Artifact Has Been Made Private. Only Group Members Can View Private ArtifactTypes" which I assume is a retarded SourceForge code for "this bug has been deleted."

From the email, I gather the buck was passed to the "GTK layer" and not by Inkscape itself. I guess it's ok to delete bugs when you pass the buck to some other open source project that also won't bother to fix it. Oh look, there's the link: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391461 "Unconfirmed!"

For the record, I can't test whether it's fixed or not because I don't have a Mac anymore. (At least, not one I'm willing to install X11 on.)

P.S. To any open source developers reading this: If you want bug submissions, please do not use SourceForge.net. It would be hard to find worse bug tracking software.

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[craigmarshall]

>For the record, I can't test whether it's fixed or not because I don't have a Mac anymore. (At least, not one I'm willing to install X11 on.)

Apparently, it's not fixed yet. I just downloaded Inkscape 0.46 (the current release) on OSX, and File->Open currently sorts capital letters before lower-case.

Bizarrely, this is not the case with Inkscape 0.46 on Ubuntu 8.04 beta. I would have guessed the opposite given that GNU/Linux is the natural home of GTK+. Ubuntu mixes upper and lower case in the File->Open dialog, which (to me at least) is a much more natural approach.

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[bbyakk]

> That's their problem, not mine.

If you miss out on one of the best open source applications, and one of the best vector editors in existence, just because of its version number, then it's definitely YOUR problem.

> Photoshop also has enough vector features to do most, if not all, of the other items on your list-- perhaps a bit more awkwardly, but they can be done.

"Awkwardly" is a very mild way to put that. Actually it's an absolutely braindead approach. Vectors are a higher level of abstraction than bitmaps. Forcing vectors into a bitmap editor is exactly like putting a carriage in front of the horse. It is bound to be clumsy and ugly, even if somehow workable - and yes, I did use it in Photoshop so I know what I'm speaking about. Even Illustrator is, although capable, incredibly clumsy and inconvenient; vector stuff in Photoshop is orders of magniture worse than even that simply because it's misplaced. Yet, people demand it because their brains are molded by years of Photoshop quirks, and Adobe complies. Familiarity utterly trumps usability, good design, and plain common sense.

> From the email, I gather the buck was passed to the "GTK layer" and not by Inkscape itself.

Which is exactly the right way of dealing with situations like this.

> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391461 "Unconfirmed!"

So it's not deleted after all. It's an active bug. Its being unconfirmed may mean any number of things - that it was quickly fixed (and therefore not reported or searched for by other bug reporters), or that it was something specific to your system and not reproducible on others, or that simply not enough noise is made about it to motivate someone to fix it. If you care about it, load up latest version on your Mac, test it, and add your comment to that bug report. Or write to GTK list. Or even to Inkscape list - we have some very dedicated OSX maintainers who may at least confirm the bug, and maybe even fix it for you. In short, do something if you care! If you don't, why waste time trying to use your bug as a weapon in a Slashdot discussion? It may fire upon yourself :)

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[Blakey Rat]

Or even to Inkscape list - we have some very dedicated OSX maintainers who may at least confirm the bug, and maybe even fix it for you.

I already added it to the Inkscape list, remember? It was deleted, remember? That's what I was just talking about... remember?

Another Slashdot user has confirmed the bug still exists, BTW, in a sibling post to yours.

In short, do something if you care!

I don't care. I don't even use Inkscape. I tried to for awhile, but when a software program can't even alphabetize a freakin' list correctly, I have no confidence that it can do any other operation correctly, either.

The Inkscape developers care, or at least I thought so-- after all, they solicited bug reports from the public. Now that I know they simply delete the bug reports (or "artifacts!") without fixing the bug, I won't bother reporting any more.

GTK developers obviously don't care, if not one of them has even bothered to download a copy of Inkscape and choose "File->Import" in over a year.

The annoying this is that this happens to me with every single bug report I put in to an open source project, and yet all of those projects keep asking me to put in bug reports. Why? I'm sick of my bugs going unfixed for years at a time, or simply deleted from the tracker (and believe me, Inkscape isn't the first project to delete my bugs.)

Maybe I'll give Inkscape a try again when it reaches version 1.0 in another few decades.

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[pbhj]

That's their problem, not mine. If I see "0.46" in front of something, I think "buggy POS with no features." (1.0 also makes me think "buggy POS" with the difference that at least 1.0 has all the features implemented.) The version number system is quite well-established, if the Inkscape coders don't want to use it, then they can do that-- but they also can't complain when normal people like myself look at the version number and think "buggy POS." You're right it's well established 1.0 means that the app is feature complete and all show-stopper bugs have been fixed. Presumably not all planned features are yet implemented to make this a complete product. FWIW it's complete enough to be useful.

If I can't thumb a lift to your house it's still useful if a generous person gives me a ride to your town.

Yes, Inkscape doesn't give crap about my bug and simply deletes it. I think it's plain from reading the launchpad bug reports that the people working on inkscape and providing their "product" to you for free are doing a great job. If you can't file your bug report in the right place, with the GTK team, how do you expect them to fix it? Or are all open source devs supposed to be your personal slaves.

You may be a great person but you come across as a complete idiot.

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[Blakey Rat]

I think it's plain from reading the launchpad bug reports that the people working on inkscape and providing their "product" to you for free are doing a great job. If you can't file your bug report in the right place, with the GTK team, how do you expect them to fix it? Or are all open source devs supposed to be your personal slaves.

I don't give a crap about buck-passing. Whether the bug is in Inkscape, GTK, or some guy named "Donnie" in Toronto, all I care about is that the bug I reported stay open until it's fixed. I don't think that's an unrealistic expectation.

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[bbyakk]

> but when a software program can't even alphabetize a freakin' list correctly, I have no confidence that it can do any other operation correctly, either.

That sounds ridiculous, yes, but not for the reasons you intended. Guess how many pages I can fill with things that Illustrator "can't even do correctly"? Guess how many bugs big and small remain unfixed for years in any sizeable piece of software, open source or no open source?

The facts of your case are simple: (1) You submitted a bug, it was noted, taken care of, and routed to the correct party. (2) It is, with all due respect, a cosmetic problem that only manifests itself on a minor proprietary platform that few developers use. For example, on Windows, there were also endless complaints about GTK file dialogs (not that they were particularly bad, they were just unfamiliar - remember, familiarity trumps usability), but due to the popularity of the platform, a volunteer eventually came and switched Inkscape's Windows port to using native Windows file dialogs. Voila, problem solved. (3) It's not an Inkscape problem and bears no relation to the quality of Inkscape as a vector editor.

Anything else?

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[Blakey Rat]

Guess how many bugs big and small remain unfixed for years in any sizeable piece of software, open source or no open source?

Open dialogs are a solved problem. Hell, sorting file names is a solved problem. Seriously, none of those great OS X developers has decided to fix this bug? None? A bug that would be embarrassing in a Windows 3.11 app?

It's not that it's a big and/or small bug, it's that it's such an obvious bug and nobody's fixed the damned thing.

(1) You submitted a bug, it was noted, taken care of, and routed to the correct party.

Then it was deleted before there was a fix in place.

(2) It is, with all due respect, a cosmetic problem that only manifests itself on a minor proprietary platform that few developers use.

The product isn't intended for developers, it's intended for artists.

For example, on Windows, there were also endless complaints about GTK file dialogs (not that they were particularly bad, they were just unfamiliar - remember, familiarity trumps usability),

Actually, the Windows file dialogs have lots of usability features that the GTK ones do not have, other than just being "unfamiliar." For instance, you can map a network drive in the Windows standard one. Or drag a file into it. The GTK ones are "particularly bad." The fact that GTK doesn't use the OS-standard file dialogs is simply sad... once again, that is a solved problem.

(3) It's not an Inkscape problem and bears no relation to the quality of Inkscape as a vector editor.

Sure it is, and yes it does.

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[JanneM]

Inkscape's UI is a lot better than GIMP's. Everyone admits that. And it's much improved in 0.46 anyway. It's decent but not great. At least it is possible to break out dialogs and tools into their own windows instead of being stuck in the drawing window. Screen estate is limited; the last thing I want is to have the drawing surface compete for space with tool dialogs.

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[bbyakk]

> For instance, you can map a network drive in the Windows standard one. Or drag a file into it.

"For instance," you can one-click add a favorite folder in the GTK file dialog. Or use the very convenient folder hierarchy buttons to jump to any ancestor folder.

See? It works both ways.

I couldn't care less about Windows network drives, but I do use the favorites pane all the time. For this reason, me and others weren't thrilled about the change. But I don't use Windows all that often, so I went with the majority opinion on that.

As for you, I think you are a textbook example of familiarity bias. A really bad case. I'm not sure it's curable :)

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[Blakey Rat]

"For instance," you can one-click add a favorite folder in the GTK file dialog. Or use the very convenient folder hierarchy buttons to jump to any ancestor folder.

Hell I don't even know what an "ancestor folder" is.

I just know if you're writing a Windows application, you should use Windows file dialogs. If you're writing a Mac application, you should write Mac file dialogs. If you don't, you're doing something wrong.

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[pbhj]

Flame on MacDuff

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[bbyakk]

> the last thing I want is to have the drawing surface compete for space with tool dialogs.

Sure, and with every version, more and more things are possible to do right on canvas, without opening any dialogs at all. For example 0.46 does away with the gradient dialog, now gradients are completely editable on canvas including intermediate stops - this is a lot more convenient, precise, and flexible, and no need to ever open any dialog. Color gestures help, too.

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[deathguppie]

I do a a lot of 3d character work in Blender. The fact is that raster images use less memory, and have quite a few more options in dealing with extremely complex images than vector. Have you ever tried making realistic looking dirt in a vector graphic program? Inkscape does have it's place, I'll be the first to admit that, but it would take gigs of memory to handle some the insane amounts of per pixel coloring in vector that raster programs can do easily.

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[bbyakk]

> Have you ever tried making realistic looking dirt in a vector graphic program?

Yes! Just play with filters, new in 0.46. For example, using two turbulence inputs, displacement map, and blur, I was able to get an extremely realistic "watercolor on rough paper" effect.

True, filters are slow, and take a lot of memory. But that is a problem that constantly solves itself thanks to Moore's Law. Besides, very few people really need complex or realistic textures. For most people, a simple blur is all they will ever need. And for them, the advantages of much smaller, human-readable source, scalability, easy editability and maintainability of vector art are paramount.

Re:Let's look at Inkscape:

[pedestrian crossing]

Sort order in Linux is controlled by which locale you use.

Re:Impossible to build and they don't like binarie

[Anonymous Coward]

How hard is it to checkout from SVN? If you've ever used CVS, its a breeze :)

users shouldn't need to go to those lengths to test the apps End users shouldn't be testing this release anyway, it's not even considered alpha.

Re:Impossible to build and they don't like binarie

[pbhj]

Fair enough but with other apps, particularly Inkscape for me, there's a debian repo of nightly builds. I track that and submit bug reports on problems that persist over a couple of weeks in the builds. Seems to help.

Yes I can do SVN, but why link to an FTP page for recent snapshots when there aren't any? It just seems perverse to me that they state on their site they don't want people to make binaries of dev versions available.

>>> "Distribution of binary packages of the development version is discouraged ..."

Don't get me wrong I'm more that thankful for the work done by devs on the GIMP (except the one that named it, she should be shot ;0).

Three words

[darkwhite]

Paint Shop Pro

Well, you just lost a potential convert!

[NeuroManson]

After years of people telling me to switch over to Gimp from Photoshop, I was thinking of doing so. But if looking it up based on Slashdot articles includes the risk of malware being installed on my system, then forget it.

Go ahead and mode me trollbait, but it's the truth. Slashdot should have actually reviewed the article before putting it hear.

Gimp interface

[falconwolf]

There's GimpShop for those who want a Photoshop like interface.

Falcon

Re:Gimp interface

[Anonymous Coward]

GimpShop doesn't change the interface at all, it just renames some of the menu options.

You may be being confused by the fact that the Windows distribution of GimpShop also includes something else called the Gimp Deweirdifyer, which sticks the Gimp's inconvenient three-window interface into a single bigger window. However, this is only available on Windows.

Missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

The devs might be happier with a name more in the spirit of the original name:

Free And GNU Graphics Open-source Tool
Bitmap-based Integrated Toolkit for Color art in High-resolution
New and Improved GNU Graphics Editing Resource

(Sorry, I really tried to be equal-opportunity, but it's surprisingly hard to come up with a name for a graphics program that spells "honky".)

oops

[yankpop]

huh. I don't use MS anymore, but I thought I read that multiple desktops was one of the new features of Vista. I can't find anything about it on microsoft.com, and google only showed me a bunch of third-party projects, so I guess I was mistaken. My bad.

Now that I'm used to my multi-desktop arrangement it would be hard to go back...

yp.

The reason I don't like Photoshop's UI is for this

[falconwolf]

reason: I have a dual monitor setup and I want my picture to fill all of monitor 1 while my tools sit on monitor 2.

I know people who have dual monitor Mac setups that do just this in Photoshop, have the photo being edited open in a window on the large monitor and have the tool palettes open on a smaller monitor. People have been doing this for years, especially photographers.

Falcon

Look at Photoshop on Windows sometime

[Theatetus]

You have a main window with the primary menus, inside which your other windows live.

Mac is similar, although the main window is the entire desktop.

w00t

[Larryish]

tuxpaint uber alles!

multiple windows

[falconwolf]

So, let me explain why many people consider this a bug. Suppose you open GIMP and have 10 tool windows open. To alt-tab back to some other application you must now hit alt-tab 10 times. So GIMP has changed the expected behavior of alt-tab on a system-wide level. Most applicatiosn create a single top-level window and place their tool windows s children of that. So alt-tab switches "applications" or "open documents" not "all open tool windows/dialogs/child windows." Generally ctrl-tab, or ctrl-left/right (on Macs it is ctrl-brackets or alt-apostrophe, depending).

Maybe it's the OS being used? On my Mac I apple-tab to cycle through different apps and to cycle through different windows in the same app I ctrl-tab.

Falcon

Re:multiple windows

[Yvan256]

to cycle through different apps and to cycle through different windows in the same app I ctrl-tab.

Thank you, that was driving me nuts!

Re:You *know* it hasn't noticeably improved when..

[Warbothong]

I wonder which of the new features users will notice first? :P

Seriously though, I think programs with splash screens need some rethinking (why make me wait whilst it loads a multitude of Python extensions and such when I haven't even got an image open? Load enough to open the UI and images, do the rest in the background after it is loaded then get rid of the splash screen)

link to the Release Notes

[BigSven]

Not only is that story outdated and copied from another place, it is also badly researched. And Slashdot could have at least included a link to the official release notes for GIMP 2.5.

Re:Impossible to build and they don't like binarie

[BigSven]

It doesn't only contain a README. Look again, there's a folder with the GEGL 0.0 pre-releases. Just grab the latest tarball (gegl-0.0.16).

Crappy article, Photoshop fanboys crowd the thread

[Anonymous Coward]

So many of the posts on this thread seem to miss the point entirely.

The name GIMP seems more important to many people on this thread than the features of the program. Dumb.

Yet more posters reject GIMP because its interface is not an exact clone of Photoshop. You may think that Photoshop is THE way to do things, but after years of using GIMP for work and pleasure, I find Photoshop's interface counterintuitive.

If you have a bolt to turn, do you complain that a spanner is not the same shape as a ratchet handle and socket? That it doesn't feel right in your hand? Two different tools to do essentially the same job.

Then some clown complains that GIMP can't draw shapes! http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=521692&cid=23062504

Others complain that the scripting language is incomprehensible... meaning that it takes more that a cursory glance to be able to modify a script.

Another cannot comprehend that the options you get when you want to print depend on the underlying print system... and your driver, which in turn depends on the physical printer device. How hard is that to grasp?

Straw-man arguments from people incapable of accepting how useful GIMP can be, when you put in a little effort and leave your prejudices behind.

I accept that there are still some things missing:

• arbitrary colour depth (still stuck at 8bpp),
• No CMYK editing,
• err... adjustment layers...

I'm not convinced about the adjustment layers. I read a couple of on-line Photoshop tutorials to try to understand the term.

I'm sure that what I read is possible in gimp using masks, layer transparency levels and some ingenuity.

But then, if the workflow is not EXACTLY like in Photoshop, the Adobe fanboys rant and foam.

Its GIMP, not Photoshop.

The interface is different, not worse.

The scripting is very powerful, if you can be bothered to learn one of the many languages with bindings.

Re:First looks at gimp 2.5....

[cheater512]

You want dual monitors then.

I love the Gimp with dual monitors.
Multiple images open at the same time and I can still see and manipulate all of them easily.

The Simple Truth...

[Anonymous Coward]

They both suck.

Never ending diatribe

[theolein]

One thing that stands out in the spotlight every time the GIMP is mentioned is the way the generally Linux using developers see the GIMP and the way the generally Windows and Mac using Photoshop users see the GIMP. It is almost always the same flamefest where both sides don't talk to one another but past one another. That means that nothing much ever changes in their views.

The thing is, I own the Adobe CS3 Suite. I love Adobe's tools but yet, I se the GIMP ever so slowly actually starting to reach a point where it can do many of the tasks that Photoshop can do and this latest release, finally bringing to the GIMP the possibility of CMYK and 16-bit editing amongst others shows me that it will, sooner or later be "Good enough" for pre-press work (It is already good enough for web images). Eventually it WILL start to squeeze on Photoshop's territory, like it or not. There are already reasons to prefer it to Photoshop for certain applications.

It is far more scriptable than Photoshop, which makes it very useful for batch processing. It starts up in a tenth of the time (generally less than 10 seconds on a low end core 2 duo) which makes it nice for a quick image edit instead of waiting for Photoshop to load up its "Operating System". And, if a Photoshop user can get over their hoary attitudes, one can get used to the interface. I say this because the same people who hate the GIMP like Flash, which has, IMO, the worst interface I've ever seen. Those same people might be using Fireworks, which is also an ex-macromedia UI abortion to which even the GIMP compares favourably.

But the main reason I personally still much prefer Photoshop over the GIMP, is the fact that Adobe pays enormous attention to detail. Resizing of images is done with bicubic interpolation, the GIMP has only the far poorer cubic interpolation. There are many small details like this that will, when they are improved finally make the GIMP "Good enough".

And, it costs a whole damn less.

Re:Never ending diatribe

[Ford Prefect]

But the main reason I personally still much prefer Photoshop over the GIMP, is the fact that Adobe pays enormous attention to detail. Resizing of images is done with bicubic interpolation, the GIMP has only the far poorer cubic interpolation.

Say what? In this case 'cubic' is being used as a synonym for 'bicubic' - the 'bi' is just referring to it being done on a two-dimensional image. It's probably more correct to refer to it as bicubic interpolation, but it's the same algorithm being used.

Having said that, recent versions of The GIMP will also do Lanczos resampling - arguably a far better interpolation algorithm. (Personally, I found it a bit too good at preserving detail when scaling down images, so I'd often stick to cubic interpolation...)

Paint.NyET

[theolein]

I tried out the Paint.Net about 2 months ago. I was simply appalled at how slow it is. It makes the Photoshop start up time, which is nothing to write home about, look gracious and fast. It cannot handle large images well at all, slowing down to a crawl very rapidly as the images grow. That might be, because it's written in C#, which, to be fair, is not much of an improvement over Java in application performance.

It's fine for smaller tasks, but, to be honest, you can do those same tasks in the GIMP.

There's also skippy

[Theatetus]

Which doesn't rely on having a compositing manager (though it also has fewer features).

I think it was written for e but it works well on Gnome and Windowmaker.

You need to enable it

[Theatetus]

And before people start asking me why you should have to enable it, you have to enable expose too, or at least I did the last time I had a Mac.

But it's basically just like expose: put your mouse in the top right corner (or wherever you configure it) and you get all the windows nicely shaded and more or less tiled, pick one, and jump to that desktop with the window in focus.

Re:First looks at gimp 2.5....

[twistedsymphony]

I do have dual monitors... but that does nothing to solve the GIMPs interface problems...

Interesting thoughts...

[XB-70]

Philip McClure has some interesting thoughts posted here http://grimthing.com/archives/2007/01/11/Gimp_vs_Photoshop/. He also follows up with solutions, corrections, plugins and suggestions.

GEGL looks as though it could bring the GIMP to production-ready usability (without PANTONE support).

Anything but "GIMP"

[Catbeller]

That is why no one will use it in a professional environment. It's named for the bottom in a homosexual S&M scene. Just change it. It wasn't funny then and it isn't funny now.

Re:Anything but "GIMP"

[Max_W]

I use it in the professional environment. I handle with it about 500 images a week. GIMP is one of the best things in the world.

You have no idea what you are talking about. GIMP is an excellent software. It gives images a magical touch, which other packages cannot do.

I cannot thank enough Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, major GIMP developers, and also Jernej Simoni for th Windows installer http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

Three more words

[scottgfx]

No Thank You

Gimp kicks Photoshop's UI in the groin

[crazybilly]

I started using the Gimp before I started using Photoshop. And since v2, I think the Gimp's UI makes a CRAPLOAD more sense than Photoshop's.

Like the Gimp, Photoshop has pallettes and image windows detached from each other. But it ALSO has a menu bar on a huge background window that has NOTHING in it. Besides a menu bar. wtg?

In the Gimp, you can dock pallettes together nicely with easily comprehensible icons. You can also do this in Illustrator and InDesign. Good luck on Photoshop. Have fun stacking them.

In the Gimp, I can alt+tab between two detached windows (my tools and my image). Despite the fact that things are detached in Photoshop, I can't alt+tab between them.

Flash 8, imho, works the way the Creative Suite products wish they could work: with a real MDI UI and nice dockable pallettes (granted, I'm comparing to CS2--I haven't tried CS3, so I can't speak to that).

In any case, I think the Gimp makes a CRAPLOAD of sense, at least from a window-manager/toolbar/menu/pallette sense. I could see why somebody might complain about the menu layout. But there's a lot of stuff hidden in Photoshop, too. Try resizing an image sometime. Hint: it's not under "image".

Thank you, that was driving me nuts!

[falconwolf]

Having switched from Windows to OS X another /.er told me how to switch apps and windows.

Falcon