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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."
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?
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
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
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...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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.
Try Paint.NET on Windows. It is decent and free.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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+ 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.
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!
...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.
All's true that is mistrusted
Screenshots or it didn't happen!
Oh wait. The GIMP, Photoshop CS3. Behold some passing similarities!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
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.
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
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!
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
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.
My bicyles
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.
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).
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.