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

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...

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.

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: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

[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.

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.