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20 Years of GIMP (gimp.org)
jones_supa writes: Back in 1995, University of California students Peter Mattis and Kimball Spencer were members of the eXperimental Computing Facility, a Berkeley campus organization. In June of that year, the two hinted at their intentions to write a free graphical image manipulation program as a means of giving back to the free software community. On November 21st, 20 years ago today, Peter Mattis announced the availability of the "General Image Manipulation Program" on Usenet (later "GNU Image Manipulation Program"). Over the years, GIMP amassed a huge amount of new features designed for all kinds of users and practical applications: general image editing, retouching and color grading, digital painting, graphic design, science imaging, and so on. To celebrate the 20th anniversary, there is an update of the current stable branch of GIMP. The newly released version 2.8.16 features support for layer groups in OpenRaster files, fixes for layer groups support in PSD, various user interface improvements, OSX build system fixes, translation updates, and more.
And Sadly its about 10 years since the developers pretty much stopped listening to the users, and 5 years since development ground to a halt.
Pity really, it was hijacked by a group of people with 'certain ideas' of how everything must be, and no willingness to compromise with the general user base.
After that, less and less developers contribute, the user base shrunk (or at best stopped growing).
3.0 has become a sad joke.
All of which is a great great pity. Compare it with Blender, with a healthy and energetic user and developer base, a continuous flow of real and useful new features, and a rapidly growing and actively using user base.
The day GIMP started trying to force people to save in its own proprietary format (to the great unhappiness of a large portion of its user base) rather than the format the file was OPENED in pretty much marks its death.
As anyone stepped up to create a fork yet?
Unless the code base is truly awful, I wouldn't mind maintaining some user interface sanity patches if there's interest.
I've certainly had enough of XCF being the default saving format when 95% of the time I'm just doing a quick edit on a image.
I remember reading a few years ago, possibly here on /., that GIMP was going to be rewritten to get rid of all the "spaghetti code", whatever happened with that?
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
The parent comment actually does make a very good, and relevant, point: the open source community would have been much better off if GTK+ had never been developed. From its very beginning it wasn't much more than a really bad rip-off of Motif, a toolkit which itself was already considered ancient and awful at that time. Things only went downhill from there. GTK+ begat GNOME, which only served to split the open source desktop community. Those who wanted a solid, reliable, usable desktop environment backed Qt and KDE. Those who were ideologically driven went with GTK+, although inferior to Qt, and GNOME, although inferior to KDE. This is true even today, so many years later. Qt and KDE are seen as the premiere GUI toolkit and desktop environment, while GTK+ and GNOME play second fiddle. If GIMP had used Qt instead of GTK+, it would've been much more successful. It would've been faster, easier to develop, and would've been portable to more systems. Even today, GTK+ is terrible on OS X and Windows, yet Qt is, for all intents and purposes, essentially native on all of the platforms it supports. It's sometimes claimed that GTK+ being written in C allows for easier bindings for other languages, yet all of the GTK+ bindings are utter shit. Even Gtkmm, the C++ binding for GTK+, is terrible, and it's the binding that should be easiest to have made since almost all C code is a subset of C++! All of the effort put into GTK+ and GNOME has been a total waste. Doing a poor job of imitating Motif was never a good thing. The creation of an entire desktop environment on this mediocre toolkit didn't help, either. And here we are, 2 decades later, and Linux still has no presence on the desktop because of the ideologically-driven schism that GTK+ and GNOME forced on the community that was otherwise very happy using Qt and KDE.
Posted by samzenpus on 2015-11-22 16:00 from the happy-birthday dept.
On November 21st, 20 years ago today
Too bad the latest version is integrated with SystemD so you can't leave init.
http://saveie6.com/
How about we port Paint.net to Linux using Mono? It is opensourced and can do many of the same functions. It can't be too hard to port and will require hell of alot less effort than rewriting Gimp. It is designed for plugins and already has a much better menu system
http://saveie6.com/
I tried using GIMP, I really did. I gave it several good chances, struggled with the docs, struggled learning the hotkeys, struggled with the sometimes-different names for stuff in the interface, etc etc...I really did. But I just couldn't use it as fluidly and as productively as either Photoshop or CorelDraw.
Maybe it was me, maybe it wasn't...all I know is I liked the idea of a truly open-source graphics tool and I would have been happy to support it but I just never really felt like I was getting in the groove with it, so to speak.
And then Photoshop started coming out with boatloads of brushes and plugins and filters that did some genuinely cool and useful stuff, and I just stopped using GIMP. I had stuff to do and for whatever reason I found I could always manage to do it in Photoshop faster and more easily than GIMP. I don't know why.
There are also about a billion tutorials on Photoshop available (some good, some that suck) and I could almost always find a page with info on what I needed to do in Photoshop. Sadly, the same simply wasn't true of GIMP. The docs were "eh" but the lack of a good tutorial base was a major stumbling block for me personally.
I'm probably not the only one to go through this. I really liked the idea of using GIMP but it just never really coalesced for me.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Why not fork from them and make your own Gimp version since it is open sourced?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Each time I'm using GIMP it makes me angry.
A standard task like separating object/background takes a whole
tutorial to figure out: https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tutorial-quickie-separate.html
The docs don't agree with the actual software (at least for the Mac version I'm using).
Adding/changing text to images is buggy as hell.
Good luck finding the layers list in the menu. Hint: it's *not* under 'Layer'.
Stay away, if possible use other tools.
From the perspective of someone who uses the GIMP daily, Photoshop utterly sucks, on the rare occasions I try to use it. Mainly it's because I don't use it daily and I'm not used to it, so I can't find anything and the workflow seems unintuitive. That's the thing with complicated software: you have to use it enough to get comfortable with it. You stick with Photoshop; you probably need the small number of things it does that the GIMP doesn't do, whereas I don't. I'll stick with the GIMP because I can't afford Photoshop, I don't need that small number of things, I don't trust Adobe not to fill my system with unwanted crap, and I absolutely hate their horrible update processes.
And the open-source world has nothing that even approaches Lightroom.
Been using GIMP to do real, "professional" work for about 15 years.
But I'm not some AC with a propensity for self-serving generalisations, so what do I know.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
No, but the other issues mentioned were genuine functional differences. What it happens to be called should not matter anywhere nearly as much as whether it will actually help someone with the stuff they really need to get done, and if it actually could do the latter, I might imagine that the only reason one would still complain about the former is if they personally didn't actually have any real use for the software in the first place.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Does it at all? Is it completely a labour of love? I havent used it in a while, but it was (is?) ad free - is that still the case?
This is the power of GEGL. Gimp 2.10 is the next version of Gimp and a huge milestone for the project. The team is working to port all of Gimp's drawing operations to make use of GEGL and when it's finally complete, all the nice features that people have demanded over the years will not be difficult to deliver using GEGL.
And it still sucks donkeyballs.
Gimp is ok (I guess), it just needs some one to step up and write a better (which wouldn't be hard) UI for it, Gimp has The Worst UI of any gfx manip app I've ever used, and I've used plenty. Sure, when it comes to doing some quick pic editing I use it, but with reluctance. I very much wish there was a native port of something like LView Pro for Linux. I find the UI so intuitive I can Just Use it, Not so gimp. I've read reviews of gimp that say that Gimp isn't meant for image processing along those lines. Great, so what is it for? Again, I'm not saying Gimp isn't powerful, I can see that under the covers the gimp has some serous gfx horsepower there, I know some amazing things can be done with it. But when I have to spend 5 hours just to figure out how to coax one feature out of the thing, its simply not very useful. If it had a UI like LView Pro, I'd be using it every day.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
I use Gnu Image manipulation program all the time in game development. I fortunately saved a version just before the adware got bundled in. Whew.
God spoke to me
Don't forget that the project's widget library, the GIMP Toolkit, became one of the most popular widget libraries, and spawned GNOME as well.
I notice you put "professional" in quotes.
That says a lot, really.
I'm not entirely sure what you meant to imply by that, but I have been using GIMP to do pixel art work in projects for which I was paid.
What's a "professional" again?
Since it was about web graphics from day one and not pre-press stuff it's like comparing a text editor to a desktop publishing application - different tools for different jobs.
If a co-worker wants to crop baby photos gimp is the tool. If a co-worker wants to take screenshots and put them in reports gimp is the tool. If an expensive per hour graphic artist wants to do something that it took them ages to learn then something like photoshop is the tool. For those of us who didn't go to art school gimp is more than enough.
As for your last comment - gimp started with some more functionality than photoshop at the time, such as the "undo" function. I started a flamewar on a newsgroup by accident by asking where "undo" was in photoshop when I was attempting to use it on a machine with a licenced copy. Apparently "no true professional will ever need undo because they will know to save before every major step". Of course the feature was added to photoshop a few years later no matter what the fanboys thought.
You sir however do indeed seem to be a tool. A complete and utter one.
What is it with these people?
To those not in the know, Krita is officially a digital painting and illustration app. But its feature set is amazing, almost on par with Photoshop, whereas Gimp still lacks basic features that photoshop had 15 years ago. Those who seek a photshop replacement will find it a much better tool. Krita is also lovde by its user based (not just tolerated!), actively maintained and new features are added all the time.
Digicam is a much better Digital Asset Manager (DAM) than Lightroom, however Lightroom does some half arsed raw developing for people who don't know how to use Photoshop.
I say this as a semi-professional photographer/artist who uses Photoshop and Lightroom almost daily.
I tried to use GIMP, but things like actions, and some advanced editing techniques were just too hard or less efficient in GIMP.
it runs not even half the speed on windows as it does on linux
I notice you put "professional" in quotes.
That says a lot, really.
GIMP is not even a shadow of PhotoShop, both in functionality and usability, and never will be.
Oh FFS. One of the "my definition of professional is the real professional" hardliners. Professional is stuff done for money, which usually means stuff done for businesses/public sector by businesses. Just take a look around you walking. Not everything is an iPhone advert in a high end magazine. Then again, half the iPhone ads seem to be photos designed to make me think the taker was on his "gap yah" (go watch that video). Anyway, things I see in on my way into work:
Large sign indicating where the bust stops are during construction works. It's text with a stick figure walking. The stick figure is not only pixellated, but fucking Jpegged.
One of those flappy signs someone sticks out on the street for a barber shop. Not only is the person in the picture rather pixellated, but the saturation has been jacked up so far he's nearly orange.
An old advert for some theatre production where it's got a beautiful gradient across it due to uneven illumination by the sun. Where's your colour matching now?
A post office sign (JPEGged, natch) printed out on an inkjet, faded and water streaked and taped to the inside of a show window with yellowing tape.
That's a small selection. I happen to have an eye for these things because apparently other people don't feel that jpeg artefacts make their eyes bleed. But I digress. All of those things are professional. Not top end professional, sure, but all professional in that it's all business stuff for business. I'd day 99% of stuff is like that in that it's not some award winning photo, but a cheapass sign necessary for some purpose.
If you think the gimp is not up to "professional" work like that, then your opinion is simply whacky. Ooh look, I put professional in quotes. GIMP is actually more than good enough for 99% of actual professional work.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
For those of us who didn't go to art school gimp is more than enough.
I'd say that too. I do photo touch up occasionally with the GIMP. No one seems to be able to tell the photos were modified. I vaguely gather photoshop has some additional tools which might help in certain areas, but the GIMP lets me do a very serviceable job.
Personally I like the GIMP on the whole. There are some things wretched and appalling about it, most of which are inherited from the underlying toolkit, but it's on the whole OK.
But GIMP/GTK: your file dialog sucks even compared to athena. Seriously. If athena did something better than you, you have deeply, massively fucked up somewhere. ...
That's hilarious about undo. :)
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If a co-worker wants to crop baby photos gimp is the tool. If a co-worker wants to take screenshots and put them in reports gimp is the tool.
Not according to the GIMP developers it's not.
I can only assume this means they'll continue to make GIMP worse for people that just want to use it rather than live their lives with it.
I remember the first time i ever started gimp. It was on this OSS CD i bought (because back then, you bought your OSS software on CD because downloading was to expensive and would take to much time).
It was even worse then MS Paint, it had this Motif GUI and looked horrible, it also couldn't do much, i didn't leave it installed on my system.
Second time i tried it, there was no need anymore to buy a CD and it was included in the distro. Motif was replace by the Gimp ToolKit and Gimp itself was able to do already some nifty stuff.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Undo came in with version 5, so only a couple of years after those annoying fanboys were telling me it would never be needed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Anything else you want to do other than call me a liar based on nothing but a guess? Were you really paying attention during those 30 years?
Not just because it doesn't have hardware acceleration
Actually it did/does. I know it had both MIPS (including mipsel) and Altivec optimization. Altivec enhancements were why running certain filters is faster on GIMP running on say..a PS3 with a YDL install vs running on X86.
AFAIK GIMP doesn't have any GPU enhancements though.
You're essentially arguing that amateur work is professional because it serves a professional purpose. I can get my brother's nephew's cousin who took a design class once to make me a flyer but that doesn't make it professional. Even if I use it to market my business, that in itself doesn't make it professional. Professional work is done by a pro, not by someone who downloaded a program, dropped in some clip art and spent 10 minutes trying to decide between Papyrus or Comic Sans for the text.
All the examples you've given can be done in MS Word, just like html pages can be built in word. That doesn't mean Word is good enough for 99% of actual professional design work, much like GIMP isn't either.
Peter and I created the GIMP to scratch an itch. In my experience, that's always the best motivation to start work on an ambitious software project.
We'd just gotten to the University of California at Berkeley. It was 1993. Pete was a freshman, I was a sophomore. Unix was new to us; we'd come from a world of 68K Macs and PCs running Windows 3.1. Berkeley opened up a wonderful new world of discovery. We were blown away by the Unix philosophy, the free software ethos, and the powerful tools whose fundamentals were just laid out in the open, begging to be understood and learned from. Richard Stallman was like some kind of God to us. We fell over ourselves to dump Windows and install Linux and FreeBSD. I even bought a used Sun Microsystems Sparcstation running SunOS 4.1.3. No day went by where I failed to learn something new.
But we missed Photoshop. Dual booting to Windows or keeping the old Mac around felt impure. Xv, xpaint, netpbm were all cool and useful tools but they felt limiting. So one night we sat down and wrote up a manifesto of what we wanted from such a program. I wish we still had a copy of that original document, but it's been long lost.
There was a point somewhere through the first year of development where someone else posted on comp.windows.x.apps mentioning their work on a remarkably similar application, but with even more features, and it sounded a lot further along with development. We were crushed. All of our excitement at our progress and hopes that we could make a meaningful contribution back to the community turned to ash in our mouths. We were listless and didn't work on it much over the course of a week or so, but then our original enthusiasm returned and we said, "what the hell..." and got back to work. We kept expecting the competing application to appear at any moment, but we never heard from that original poster again. So a word of advice: talk is cheap, ideas are cheap. Execution counts for everything.
Peter and I are still working together. More than 22 years now. We worked together at Google to build the Google Servlet Engine and Colossus. We've started two companies together, most recently Cockroach Labs to build CockroachDB: https://github.com/cockroachdb....
It's a wonderful thing to see how far open source software has come and how pervasive and influential. We stopped working on the GIMP in 1997 and it's only gotten better and better over the years. It's one of the first pieces of software I download when I get a new MacBook. Viva el GIMP! With luck, it'll see another couple of decades, or be surpassed by another ambitious open source project, brought to life by people who want to give back, make a name, or just solve a problem which won't stop bugging them.
Both Gimp and Photoshop interfaces leave a great deal to be desired. Once I fought my way through Photoshop, I became just tolerably comfortable with it. Now I am fighting my way through Gimp. Gimp's just as non-intuitive. It feels worse because habits from Photoshop make me look first in the wrong places. I'll learn. I'll curse.
I think it has most to do with what one learns first on.
Don't step on the baby.
Hi there Gimp developer!
There it is, the old "The name isn't offensive to foreigners" excuse Yeah that's the standard Gimpdev response now since euro-devs now. dominate Gimp development The classic "Gimpel is an attractive european bullfinch" response, for example.
Well, that's bunk. As TFA states, the GIMP was a project at an AMERICAN university, started by NATIVE English speakers who should have known better than to give it that name but were so in love with their own cleverness and geeky-Pulp fiction-reference-making that they kept it.
They should have known better.
And it's a shame that all of the content mentioned sucked, usually also containing misused apostrophes and poor grammar. Because that's the important thing - not what fucking tool you use to gin up the graphics.
That is all.
And you missed mine, which is that once gimp meets a person's functional requirements, the name is unlikely to matter to many more people. I would suggest that it only significantly gets associated with the negative meaning of a homophone for its name by people because it isn't adequate in the first place.
Plus, you can call it whatever the heck you want.... it's open source you could even make a fork.... if the fork is just a name change, then such a fork would be quite trivial, if your fork isn't widely adopted by the community, then wouldn't that suggest that the name isn't as big a deal as you are implying?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I went to the download section of gimp.org, but it shows 2.8.14 only...
Krita is what I use now -- even though it's explicit orientation is to digital painting than image editing, it still works quite well for image editing, and supports HDR images. HDR imaging has been important for me since I moved to digital photography. Modern DSLR's produce HDR raw images, so downgrading to 8 bit before manipulating an image can be rather counter-productive, and requires annoying work-arounds to take advantage of the available dynamic range in GIMP.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
So patch it or find somebody to do it for you, that's what Free Software is all about.
I've produced images for several books using GIMP. Good enough for Apress, Wiley, and a couple of other publishers. I've also been using GIMP to produce images for about the last ten years or so for my job with one of the world's biggest software companies, and these appear to be good enough for use in some of the most heavily used online documentation on the planet.
I'd consider that at least as "professional" as some AC's unknown use cases.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
And it had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Adobe's not likely to port Photoshop to Linux until the day after Hell freezes over.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.