After New GIMP Release, Core Developer Discusses Future of GIMP and GEGL (girinstud.io)

GIMP 2.9.4 was released earlier this month, featuring "symmetry painting" and the ability to remove holes when selecting a region, as well as improvements to many of its other graphics-editing tools. But today core developer Jehan Pages discussed the vision for GIMP's future, writing that the Generic Graphics (GEGL) programming library "is a hell of a cool project and I think it could be the future of Free and Open Source image processing": I want to imagine a future where most big graphics programs integrate GEGL, where Blender for instance would have GEGL as the new implementation of nodes, with image processing graphs which can be exchanged between programs, where darktable would share buffers with GIMP so that images can be edited in one program and updated in real time in the other, and so on. Well of course the short/mid-term improvements will be non-destructive editing with live preview on high bit depth images, and that's already awesomely cool right...?

[C]ontributing to Free Software is not just adding any random feature, that's also about discussing, discovering others' workflow, comparing, sometimes even compromising or realizing that our ideas are not always perfect. This is part of the process and actually a pretty good mental builder. In any case we will work hard for a better GIMP

Comments

Current Version is GIMP 2.8.18

[DERoss]

The current end-user version of GIMP is 2.8.18. Per the GIMP Web site home page, version 2.9.4 is a development version and not an end-user, stable version. The next end-user, stable version will be 2.10. Use 2.9.4 at your own risk.

Go to http://www.gimp.org/downloads/ and scroll down about 2/3 to "Development snapshots".

Re:Current Version is GIMP 2.8.18

[SolemnLord]

What real world work can be done in Photoshop but not GIMP?

It isn't that GIMP lacks features Photoshop has, it's that Adobe has focused on making work easier at the professional level. It simply has smarter tools and systems that are designed to help streamline workflows. Content aware fill is a decent example: GIMP has a plugin that can do the same task, but it's slower, not as effective, and doesn't come out-of-the-box. Sure, content aware fill isn't a necessary tool, and GIMP has its own version, but Photoshop's is faster and better. And in the real world, that matters more than straightforward feature parity.

I'm absolutely no fan of GIMP*, but for most people's needs it's absolutely got the tools necessary to do the job needed. But when your entire career is working with digital images** having that extra power and efficiency in your workflow makes a huge difference. And some of those benefits happen to pan out for everybody.

*I'm no pro, and Photoshop would mostly be wasted on me. I use Pixelmator for image editing.
**Print support is a red herring, since GIMP isn't concerned with it, so it's not worth bringing up beyond this footnote.

Re:Current Version is GIMP 2.8.18

[postglock]

What real world work can be done in Photoshop but not GIMP? I'm not trolling, this is a serious question ... often obscure seldom-used features get compared ... out there in the world of practical productive work, what are the true shortcomings?

For me, the major shortcoming is adjustment layers. In Photoshop, you can apply a non-destructive layer/filter over your image to modify parameters such as brightness, contrast, colour levels, etc. You can then directly edit your image "below" this filter, e.g. cropping it. You can then modify the adjustment layer later.

In GIMP, once you modify brightness or contrast, that's it. You can't come back and remove/change these setting later. This has been a requested feature for at least 14 years.

Re:Current Version is GIMP 2.8.18

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want to throw in that it is also not just saving an hour or a half an hour of work a month. I do tech work for a creative group within a standard company (but my stories compare closely to tech guys at post-production houses I've talked with) and I constantly find myself at odds with the "creatives" playing around in photoshop (and I even have an art degree...). I have had complaints that the 5 lines of instructions on how to install and use a 1-button replacement (1 line of the instructions was "push the button") for a 10-step workflow were too complicated, so they had just decided to run the manual 10-step workflow 20-30 times a day instead...for months...

Re-branding GIMP 2.9.4 to "GIMP 2016" and holding off any updates until 2017 would be worth $100 a month in productivity gains from my co-workers not getting dazed and confused. The GIMP download page has an MD5 hash on it, and the Cinelerra download page (we do a lot of video...) is basically a shell script transcribed on a web page. If I showed most of my co-workers those, they'd fall out of their chairs and vomit. Not really, but they would say "I don't have time for this" and go get some cheese from the fridge while I did the download for them. Adobe has you sign in, download the "Creative Cloud" program, and then pick and choose your apps like you're a phone. Even my sound guy can figure that one out...(I'm a lighting guy, we've got a pretty solid rivalry...)

Also, we need better than 8-bit color (our video cameras record at 10 or 12 bits per channel and Premiere handles that fine). And we need the integration of video/audio/raster/vector/3d/ingest/logging/etc. to achieve reasonably paced results. Even for corporate messaging, being able to pull a psd with a 3ds Max model thru After Effects into Premiere and retain easy adjustments to both the skinning and the animation can save hours in a single day, much less over a month. I'll keep donating to the OSS projects (Blender, Apache, and OpenOffice being my current top choices), but I can't convince corporate finance to drop that $1300 a month while telling them it will take us 10x as long to achieve results that are 1/10 as good...

Re:Current Version is GIMP 2.8.18

[Kjella]

The most aggravating thing for me at the moment is the layer masking capability - GIMP can do it AFAIK but it can't import the masking in from a PSD file. Which is not altogether surprising given that PSD is proprietary and effectively undocumented.

*cough*

Re:Current Version is GIMP 2.8.18

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

For me, the major shortcoming is adjustment layers. In Photoshop, you can apply a non-destructive layer/filter over your image to modify parameters such as brightness, contrast, colour levels, etc. You can then directly edit your image "below" this filter, e.g. cropping it. You can then modify the adjustment layer later.

In GIMP, once you modify brightness or contrast, that's it. You can't come back and remove/change these setting later. This has been a requested feature for at least 14 years.

I wanted to quote this, not just for agreement, but to point out that ... yes.. this is a seriously large issue for professional work. I'm not sure that the 'why' of its importance is widely understood around here either so I just wanted to add some detail to it.

I think that the common mindset might be that once you've made a change, you're done, there's very little journey for you after that. That's true in many cases, such as simple photo editing etc. The value in having what amounts to variables in your stack of layers may not seem high enough to warrant Adobe's price.

When you consider that professional work being done means there's an economic advantage to getting done faster, then the idea of being able to create non-destructive templates in Photoshop means $$$ becomes a little clearer. Some time I invest in creating image 1 could mean I spend half the time creating image 2. It also means that if an image is kicked back to me for revision I can really quickly make that adjustment as opposed to re-tracing a number of steps. Again, time is money.

If I were asked to come up with a programming metaphor I'd give you this really shitty one: Imagine people urging you to switch to a clone of Python that doesn't let you create your own modules. Many of them don't need or want to create their own modules, but for plenty of people who have dug deep into it they feel they'd need them from day one, suffering greatly from the lack of that feature.

I've mentioned before that GIMP may be free, but that it wouldn't actually save me money over Photoshop, this is precisely why.

OLE/COM

[CockMonster]

Microsoft did it

ink vs pixels is still a thing

[globaljustin]

/EVERY/ printer I've gone to prints in CYMK. They can convert RGB to CYMK, but the colors won't match 100%

IAA(part-time)SP and I can confirm.

Saying 'CMYK is not needed' goes too far.

Yes, plenty has changed but making color on an opaque surface is still completely different than rendering it in pixels on a screen.