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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
[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
I think it could be extended to Inkscape too. Imagine the three software - GIMP, Blender and Inkscape - working as modules, sharing the same user file model.
Honestly, I do a lot of graphical work and I find Inkscape (vector drawing) to fit the bill in almost every single case. I go to gimp when I must and it has sufficed for the simple things that are left over.
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I must be getting in early as there is no whining so far about GIMP being far inferior to Photoshop.
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?
In my own basic world, where I do stuff for the web and some (print) book covers, I've done fine with GIMP for quite a while.
I must be getting in early as there is no whining so far about GIMP being far inferior to Photoshop. 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?
Well in the stable 2.8.x series you only have 8 bit support, not 16/32 bit as far as I know. That alone makes it pretty unsuitable for any serious photography work. From the bullet points of the 2.9.2 development release last year:
16/32bit per color channel processing
So they finally did it in 2015... well except it's not stable yet. They've only been talking about it for like 15 years. The other big one is non-destructive edits, basically Photoshop will let you do many operations that you can tweak later because it'll reapply them to the original image. That way you're not stuck with a linear undo-redo history you can actually modify an operation you did several steps back. The rest are as you say obscure functions, but much like Excel many people need a few of them so they add up. And often it's not can you do it, but is it equally intuitive and powerful. Five minutes extra here and there add up.
Personally I've found Paint.NET on Windows and Krita on Linux to cover my needs and somehow they feel more right to me. Photoshop is more of a "I'm sure it's powerful if I'd only bother to learn it" tool, while GIMP... I feel it's just trying to be odd for no particular reason, it's not that it doesn't work but it feel like they have their own pet UX theory. Like the DVORAK keyboard of editing tools.
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The lack of CMYK is mostly a problem when a color was selected outside of the screen, for example when the logotype color was picked from a Pantone color chart.
The RGB and CMYK color spaces aren't perfectly overlapping so there are colors that can be represented in CMYK that can't be represented in RGB unless the file format allows values over 1.0 (Or 255 depending on what your 100% value is.)
Sure, you can crop it down to whatever fits, but then the printed colors won't be as vibrant.
A skilled designer/artist won't need a perfect representation on screen, but being unable to even chose the color you want is a bit frustrating.
There are also visible colors that can't be represented as either CMYK or RGB but the actual boundary for what is visible or not varies between individuals.