Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
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.
...the very first item in the list of "noteworthy" improvements is a new splash screen. :'(
I kid... if it had 16-bit support I would use the Gimp since I don't care about CMYK.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
This guy's the limit!
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!
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.
Hmm, I'm getting malware popups from 'trustedbrowser.com' from the site in TFA.
... 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...
Summation 2
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.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
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).
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....
...the very first item in the list of "noteworthy" improvements is a new splash screen.Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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.
Try Paint.NET on Windows. It is decent and free.
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.
It is GPL. You can doewnload it and change the name to anything you want.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
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.
... not the "The GNU Image Creation Program"
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"
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
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.
...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
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
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.
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)
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.