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GIMP Dropped From Ubuntu 10.04
kai_hiwatari writes "It looks like the Ubuntu developers consider GIMP to be too powerful for a normal desktop user. They are removing it from the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04. Among the reasons cited are that the UI is too complex, it takes up room on the disc, and 'desktop users just want to edit photos and they can do that in F-Spot.''"
I have no issue with this. Gimp is more than most people need anyhow and maybe it will be a good kick in the nads to get the Gimp guys to clean it up a little more.
Photoshop is a lot more intuitive than Gimp is. I always feel like I have to jump through hoops to do the same thing in Gimp as I do in Photoshop.
Funny. Pulp Fiction joke about the Gimp. I laugh EVERY time!
Rally thogh, there is a mild situational irony in moving Gimp from the Disc to an online annex...
The Gimp was orgiginally envisioned to demonstrate the power and flexibility of free, desktop systems. The creators wanted to show Linux and free software "stone soup" development was capable of producing and supporting software that rivaled what was available as commercial offerings.
One side effect of this was the generation of a new toolkit for the UI - GTK. It was so successful, that when the emerging KDE project chose the quasi-free Qt libraries, Miguel DeIcaza chose GTK as the cornerstone on which he would begin the GNOME UI - following many of the conventions and methods for contribution that made GIMP and early success.
No GIMP? Then no GNOME and prolly no Ubuntu.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'll just grab GIMP using apt.
But if it's in "universe", Canonical won't sell tech support, and it'll probably lag behind in updates.
It's about as close to Photoshop as you're going to get in a free application
The more honest comparison is to Photoshop Elements, but otherwise, your point is valid.
As a long time GUI critic I've never quite understood the resistance all these years towards using a single multiple document style window for graphics editing. The kind of graphics editing I do usually involves dozens of tiny images all open at the same time. In the "real world" desktop with paper and scissors it was once not uncommon for someone to use a cutting tray of some kind that could be moved and set aside without having to move or otherwise deal with dozens of individual image scraps.
Obviously not everybody works the same way, and window managers/desktops these days are better at dealing with groups of windows, but it always seemed crazy not to at least have it as an option.
I remove F-Spot, which I neither like nor use. Actually I nearly despise it due to the hard-coded directory name stupidity introduced a couple of Ubuntu versions ago (every volume with a /photos directory was deemed to be from a digital camera, even if it was a 1TB internal fixed disk). The resulting moronic behavior of the file browser was really Ubuntu's fault, but F-Spot carries the stigma.
Our raw photo processing is done with Bibble Pro and Noise Ninja, both of which sell native Linux versions. GIMP is a keeper for image editing, however, and gets quite a lot of use. Especially by my teenage daughter, who became a GIMP whiz as a pre-teen.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Yet another example of the post literate situation where everyone just wants things to be like that first of the type they see and nobody can bother to read any docs. The "weird interface" makes perfect sense with multiple virtual desktops or multiple screens, you'll see similar things creep into applications like photoshop just as things like undo crept in. Multiple workspaces are no longer just a *nix thing.
To me photoshop was the odd interface because I encountered that after gimp and CAD programs - and then got flamed a great deal when I asked where undo was. The response from several was "real professionals save frequently and will never need undo" along with a prolonged game of kick the newbie that never pretended to be anything else in the first place. The reality is just like CAD and solid modelling programs. There are too many options to make a simple interface possible thus both suck until you've used them a lot.
...too limited for power users
Uh, no. Not any more.
I used Paint Shop Pro from nearly its beginnings until Jasc sold it to Corel. I tried Corel's first version (PSP v9 IIRC) and went back to Jasc's last version (PSP v8.1 or 8.2) since the Corel version offered nothing of significance except more idiot buttons ("click this and it will make your image better!). Then I moved to GIMP when I switched from Windows to Unbuntu-- 2007 / 2008, about 18 months in transition. Much of the transition involved learning GIMP's menus, and with changes in the last version I think this is now going to be easier for newcomers.
If you are doing commercial image work for hardcopy printing, then you need to have at least one copy of Photoshop available for the specific tools it provides for that kind of stuff (CMYK color separation, etc). And you have probably gotten your formal schooling on Photoshop and it probably isn't worth it to you to build skills with any other interface.
For everyone else, including commercial work for electronic presentation (PowerPoint, PDFs, web pages, texture and billboards in 3D modeling and animation, etc), PSP used to be an excellent low cost alternative to Photoshop. Upgrades were adding new significant new features and there was a large and active community providing an incredible amount of support. But Corel appears to be more focused on developing more idiot buttons for the digital camera amateur than in making improvements to the core code.
Meanwhile, GIMP has gained significant new capabilities and is now the clear leader in all aspects of image preparation with two exceptions: it does not have the specialized tools for interfacing with hardcopy print shops; it uses a different menu structure and nomenclature than that used in Photoshop based schools. GIMP's core is under active improvement, with new releases happening more frequently than Photoshop or Corel can manage. There is a large community of users who are providing the same kind of support that PSP users used to enjoy.
The GIMP has layering, masking, and filtering that is equivalent to Photoshop. It has a plugin capability and the community has provided a very broad range of additional features through this. It is a product that can do serious image work.
Back to the main topic of this thread-- I think Ubuntu is right in dropping the GIMP from automatic inclusion. Those of us who are into serious image work will have no trouble adding it back in. Persons who are looking for quick fixes for their snapshots are better served by Picassa or something like that (I haven't done any work with F-Spot so I can't say anything about it).
Will
Similar things have happened with other products like Audacity. My mother-in-law runs a dance studio and was banging ahead against the software she was using to mix tracks for a recital. I suggested Audacity, but she was convinced that because it was free it couldn't possibly be better than what she had. The next year I saw she was using Audacity and commented that I saw she had taken my advice. She told me that this wasn't a free program, that it had come with some piece of hardware she'd purchased. I shook my head and moved on, but I found it interesting that audacity was gaining a user base through inclusion with hardware.
People like this, I usually say you're right, it isn't free. It comes bundled if you buy a computer with Linux. But for this software, the authors don't mind if you use it on Windows too.
I'd be interested in what hardware it was bundled with. So interested I found this page actually:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/bundlers
Sound cards, ADC audio capture, USB electric guitars (wtf is that anyway), other misc packages. If the software is good, people will put it wherever is needs to be. I guess GIMP is more useful as a toolkit than an application.
Actually, that's incorrect. GIMP was first made with Motif, and because of restrictions associated with Motif, the GIMP developers decided to create their own toolkit, GTK (aka the GIMP ToolKit). GIMP came first, GTK was later.
As far as GIMP interface goes, it seems to be rather fashionable to complain about it, but I don't think it is that terrible. One thing I would really like to have is a simple way to create a custom menu or toolbox with most frequently used tools and filters. If that was easy to do, I would have nothing whatsoever against GIMPs user interface. Of course, having 16 bit channels would be nice.
AccountKiller
Though dweebs here like to throw out buzzwords like CMYK and > 8 bits, the most obvious missing thing is that you cannot "group" the layers so that the compositing operation is done between them and then the result is overlayed. For instance you cannot non-destructively colorize a lineart layer and put it on top of a background, something that Photoshop makes easy.
More than 3 channels (CMYK is one minor use of that) would be nice. In professional special effects graphics these are used mostly for mattes and effects channels and information such as the normals of the surfaces. Use for the printing "black" is a minor insignificant detail compared to these other things.
Having worked with professional graphics quite a bit I have to say that "color management" is 95% bullshit. It is not possible to make a reflective printout the "same" as a light-emitting screen, anybody claiming this is lying.
Photo manipulation and painting is helped considerably by not losing information on display, this means that on current 8-bit images and 8-bit displays, any method other than 1:1 mapping of the image values to the display is WRONG, and thus most "color management" is in fact harmful (dithering and error diffusion can resolve this problem some, but nobody is doing it because users don't like the slightly-visible patterns, 10-bit displays may help here).
If you really want to manage actual light data, the most important step is to change the internal representation to a "linear" format where the emitted energy is proportional to the stored number, but the "color management" people refuse to do it because it would make "color management" (ie changing the primaries) into a trivial matrix transform and put them out of business. Also it is not practical in any integer-based storage format.
I very much hope they forget completely about any integers > 8 bits. If you are going to use 16 bits then use ILM/Nvidia "half" floating-point format. Stop living in the previous century and pretending something Photoshop did then is actually modern...
Honestly. F-spot is awful. Gthumb actually works -- you can do complicated stuff like decide which directory you want photos to be in. First thing I do with a new ubuntu install is dump f-spot, install gthumb, go through the effing rigamorole to make it the default app for that, and curse a whole bunch. For any actual image processing, it's gimp. Duh.
The gnome devs have so many stupid defaults sometimes I wonder what planet they live on. Just one example: you can't rename the desktop icons for media. It's "8GB-drive" or whatever. I have about three separate USB thumbdrives, all 8GB, and no way to name them something useful because I'm such a dumb user that would confuse me.
The only one with enough clout to kick those guys is probably Shuttleworth. So why in hell isn't he doing it?
Group layers and a single window interface are in current SVN.
For everything else you'll have to wait a year or two until the Gimp developers integrate their new GEGL framework, revamping Gimp into something else entirely along the way. It'll use float-based RGB as its internal representation, but handle anything as input and output. The current implementation of GEGL is dog-slow though, so don't bother to try it.
As for the GP's suggestion for adjustment layers, no it's not enough. And yes, Adjustment layers could be implemented without waiting for GEGL integration, but the Gimp developers refuse to do it worrying that it'll make the integration harder (And because they want to come up with a completely new UI for them).