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

Software Modularity is a Dream?

[ramorim]

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.

Re:Software Modularity is a Dream?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, the name is a fork-bomb.

1. expansion gives GNU Image Manipulation Program

2. expansion gives GNU's not Unix Image Manipulation Program

3. expansion gives GNU's not Unix's not Unix Image Manipulation Program

4. expansion gives GNU's not Unix's not Unix's not Unix Image Manipulation Program

etc etc

Re:Software Modularity is a Dream?

[invictusvoyd]

:(){ :|:& };:

Gimp... We're still waiting for something, right?

[fustakrakich]

CMYK.. I think? Can't really remember, but suddenly the Village People came to mind.

Re:Gimp... We're still waiting for something, righ

[Drakster]

I wish the GIMP team will produce a stable release of the new branch, as CYMK has been in it for multiple years now.

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

[chipschap]

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.

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

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Current Version is GIMP 2.8.18

[Tapewolf]

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?

Vectors. I'm not sure to what extent Photoshop can do them because I don't use it much, but I do receive PSD files with speech bubbles and such that aren't there once GIMP has imported it.

I think Photoshop can also do significantly more advanced layer effects than GIMP currently has - the nondestructive editing features may cover that, but it's maybe a decade away at the current rate of progress.

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.

A lot has been said about Krita as a substitute for GIMP, and although it seems to have made astonishing progress recently, it's aimed almost exclusively at digital painting. Last I saw (2.9) it fails miserably if you attempt to use it for pixel art, cel-shading and other comic-related tasks that I currently use GIMP for. I will certainly keep an eye on it, though as it shows a lot of promise.

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.

Re:Current Version is GIMP 2.8.18

[postglock]

To be fair, you can save "presets" in GIMP, allowing you to use the same (e.g. level) settings as a template. However, I'm not sure if you can save multiple levels of presets in Photoshop... you can't in GIMP anyway.

Re:Gimp... We're still waiting for something, righ

[fluffernutter]

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.

Re:Gimp... We're still waiting for something, righ

[quetwo]

/EVERY/ printer I've gone to prints in CYMK. They can convert RGB to CYMK, but the colors won't match 100%. Hell, many desktop printers (Canon, Epson, etc) use CYMK in their printing process, and upscale from RGB.

OLE/COM

[CockMonster]

Microsoft did it

Re:OLE/COM

[reboot246]

. . . in the kitchen with a lead pipe.

I'm sorry. I couldn't resist.

Re:OLE/COM

[phantomfive]

COM - a great architecture that was buried under one of the most miserable APIs in existence. It was so bad, Microsoft created a macro library to make things easier, but even that didn't help much. It took me years of using COM before I realized there was anything good in it at all.

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.

Re: ink vs pixels is still a thing

[silanea]

[...] anything else is just a conversion from rgb.

Absolutely true. But only in a universe where "just a conversion" is defined as "that one step in the whole weeks-long process that will make or break the final product and decide whether you will be throwing away a truckload of stuff because QA/your boss/your customer says the colours do not match what they want".

Re: ink vs pixels is still a thing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Sadly a dying project..

[thesupraman]

Just perhaps, before the GIMP people go trying to entice others, they should clean up their own back yard.

The number of years GIMP has been limping along on minimum life support is embarrassing, for a project that was once highly active and supported.
A LOT of that comes down to them being taken over by a small cadre of people at the top with a 'vision' for GIMP, and that vision was basically that it should only work well for them, and who the hell cares about the rest of the users.

The classic example of that was the removal of the ability to save back to the loaded file format. Save *STILL* requires saving to GIMPs own file format, and you can only export to other file formats. After a LOT of user complaints they finally allowed there to actually be a faster hotkey path for export, but refuse to budge on saving. Why? God only knows, they need to be special, it seems.

Windows support is another notable area, where the GIMP 2.9 series was broken for a long LONG time due to a few rather basic screwups, and they really just didnt care because... well, I can only guess users dont matter. They finally got around to fixing it, but it was a long LONG time, for little reason.

Also take for example the newer builds icon sets - changed to new icons that seems to be someones pet project, but make very little visual sense other than confusing long time users, and therefore slowing down workflow significantly. They also seem to enjoy moving areas of the UI for little obvious reason other than change - again messing with users workflows. These things can be put back, but change for change sake is good?

Most of the issue comes down to the fact that too many active contributors got burnt with 'no, your overlords and masters dont want you to do that, go away and redo it the was WE want' thinking, iften with little or no reason or consideration.

So, no, I doubt GEGL is a good idea for anyone else, not because of a technical reason, but because of a much more practical one, GIMP has been a withering and dying project for a few years now, which is a great pity.