The GIMP UI Redesign

sekra writes "The GIMP UI Redesign Team has created a blog to collect ideas for a new design of the most popular image manipulation program. Everyone is free to submit suggestions to be published in the blog. Will a new GUI finally get more users to choose The GIMP as their program of choice?"

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LOL at the urban definition of a Gimp

[Anonymous Coward]

(1) a derrogatory term for someone that is disabled or has a medicial problem that results in physical impairment.

(2) An insult implying that someone is incompetent, stupid, etc. Can also be used to imply that the person is uncool or can't/won't do what everyone else is doing.

(3) A sex slave or submissive, usually male, as popularlized by the movie Pulp Fiction.

Look at that gimp in the wheelchair

Dude, quit being a gimp and take a hit!

Bring out the gimp!

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gimp [urbandictionary.com]

so to the "street" (or younger population who you should be targetting) its an insult (has been my whole life and im 39), hardly surprising nobody wants to use it

the skin is not the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I was working at the cottage, which is linked to the outside world by a noisy party line, which allows me to run @ 15Kbps (ie 1/3 of normal dialup speed). The etiquette up north is that you can check your email for 10 minutes or so, and in any case even ssh over that kind of link is a bit choppy. So I booted my notebook into linux mode and coded against the centos server running lamp. I wanted to use the Gimp so I would not have to keep flipping between OSs. The Gimp turned out to be pretty good, at least for the simple stuff (text boxes layered onto web-resolution jpegs etc) that I was doing.

However, when I got home, I found that the text tool boxes in my gimp files was rendered as shapes by photoshop. I then did a test in reverse and found the same to be true: text tool boxes created in photoshop rendered as shapes when loaded in gimp.

So until that fixed, the gimp is less than useful for most commercial purposes. If you were working on something that you were 100% sure you would never have to export to psd and share with a photoshopper, then sure. But otherwise no.

Re:QT please

[jZnat]

There's already Krita [koffice.org] (part of KOffice, KDE) which uses Qt and looks and acts quite like Photoshop, so come KOffice 2.0, perhaps Krita will become the most popular open source image editor since it'll have native Windows and Mac ports.

You should also note that GTK stands for GIMP ToolKit as it was written as a widget toolkit for GIMP in the first place. I doubt they'll be changing it anytime soon.

Re:Most Popular??

[masdog]

Nearly everything? I doubt it. The GIMP can do a lot, but it doesn't come close to matching the functionality of Photoshop. According to the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:

Comparison with Adobe Photoshop

Like Photoshop, GIMP features support for 8-bit per-channel images. Its Intelligent Scissors are similar to Photoshop's Magnetic Lasso tool, and many basic tools and filters have identical functionality in both.

Photoshop features several advantages in color management. It has support for 16-bit, 32-bit, and floating point images,[10] support for the Pantone color matching system, or spot color and support for color models other than RGB(A) and greyscale, such as CIE XYZ.[11] Photoshop features extensive gamma correction support.

GIMP features no or (with the PSPI plug-in) very weak support for plugins designed for Photoshop, such as 8BF filters.[12]

In addition, Photoshop contains several productivity features and tools not supported by the GIMP, such as native support for Adjustment layers (layers which act like filters),[13], undo history "snapshots" that persist between sessions, the history brush tool, folders in the layer window, a free transform tool to rotate, scale and move in one tool, and an interpolation code to draw smooth brush strokes using a tablet. The GIMP also requires basic programming knowledge to build an automation upon it, usually Script-Fu (scheme) or Python-Fu, while Photoshop can record your actions and repeat them with a "Play" button.

The GIMP's open development model means that it is much more readily available at low or zero cost than Photoshop, on more operating systems, and plugin development is not limited by developers; by comparison, access to Adobe Photoshop's SDK requires authorization.

So, it seems like the GIMP is just barely scratching the surface of what Photoshop can do...

UI isn't my problem with GIMP

[Speare]

Call me wacky, but the UI isn't a problem. Any tool can be learned in a few days or weeks of using it.

Instead, here's my wishlist:

• icc profiles for display and printer
• deep color (16bit/channel or deeper) and hdri color
• better support for huge images in moderate memory
• filter layer types

Being on Mac OSX, my top wish is for an updated Mac OSX build (even if it still must be under X11.app). The OSX-ready builds are far behind the main development releases, and for the glacial pace of GIMP development, that is really saying something. I bet all of the above items are ready on Linux, just not the officially recognized OSX-ready builds on macports or the website.

Wilbur Animates

[Rik Sweeney]

I know I say this every time they have a story about GIMP, but Wilbur (the coyote) is the only icon on Slashdot that animates.

Watch, his eyes move very subtly.

Re:Most Popular??

[Glytch]

The problem is that Gimp doesn't do everything Photoshop does, or even come close. There's no 16 or 32 bit channel support, no adjustment layers, no colorspaces aside from RGB and greyscale, no usable colour profile support. Those four things on their own eliminate Gimp as a usable high-end photography tool. The interface is not the problem. The underlying libraries are.

Krita from the Koffice suite is far more modern. It has all four of the above capabilities I mentioned. Some more polish and it'll be a very capable tool.

Anyone know what's really going on with GEGL?

Plugin support and availability

[Anonymous Coward]

GIMP features no or (with the PSPI plug-in) very weak support for plugins designed for Photoshop, such as 8BF filters.[12]

PhotoShop features no support for plugins or scripts designed for the GIMP. GIMP has many free/open source plugins & scripts. PhotoShop has some, but many more are commercial and proprietary.

Re:This is exactly why I hate GUIs

[Richard W.M. Jones]

I know it was a joke, but the GIMP already has a command line interface, if you can write Scheme. I think they do Perl now as well. It was horrible and undocumented last time I used it.

Rich.

Re:Hmmmm

[sekra]

Should be the most popular OPEN SOURCE image manipulation program

Right, and that's exactly what I wanted to write in the summary... shame on me.

Re:stupidest key combo decision ever

[Enselic]

That is fixed in GIMP 2.4 which btw is out pretty soon. GIMP 2.4 rc2 has been released since a while.

Gimp 2.4

[scottied]

I have been watching the development versions of Gimp for months, and I can say that there have been a ton of improvements in the UI and functionality of Gimp. For all the naysayers I recommend that they check out the release candidate of Gimp 2.4, which is included on development Ubuntu live CDs and possibly fedora. These improvements, along with the massive scripting potential, give the more-than-casual Gimp user something worthwhile to work with.

Re:Why even have static key bindings?

[grumbel]

GTK and Gimp can do this for a long long time, you have to unlock it in the Gimp preferences (Interface->Use dynamic keyboard shortcuts), but once done you simply hover over a menu item, press the combo you like to assign to it and you are done with binding that item to the given shortcut, by far the easiest way to configure keyboard bindings I have ever seen anywhere.

Re:wxWidgets!

[Directrix1]

He was advocating using wxWidgets as the toolkit. wxWidgets uses native toolkits (Windows on Windows, GTK on Linux, Aqua [or whatever it is] on Mac).

Re:QT please

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, Krita has a grid, and has layer groups...

Boudewijn Rempt, Krita maintainer

xv is NOT open source

[Anonymous Coward]

xv is shareware that lets you download the source. Still, I'd bet imagemagick is fairly popular

Re:OK here we go

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the very few women who contribute to open source

Sorry, but you are wrong. According to what I read on the mailing lists and what I see in the ChangeLog files, Carol does not contribute to open source. She had started a redesign of the web site several years ago, but then gave up and others had to pick up the pieces that she left behind (of course she accused the others of "destroying her work" after she quit but this is a different story). I have not seen any significant contribution from Carol in the last two or three years, or maybe even more. Her only contributions seem to be rants, complaints and other things that drive people away from GIMP. She has some nice tutorials on her private web site, but she does not include them in the GIMP web site so I do not think that she is interested in any contribution to GIMP or open source, contrary to what you wrote.

There are several other women contributing to GIMP and open source. And they are praised for their contributions. If you look in the GIMP ChangeLog, you will probably see several contributions from edhel (Karine Delvare). Several other women contribute tutorials or help users in various forums. On the other hand, many users (men or women) describe Carol as being a poisonous person. So I do not think that there is any sexism involved here.

Re:Most Popular??

[HeroreV]

I agree. GIMP's interface isn't the problem. I've only used Photoshop and GIMP a little, but even a basic user like me can tell that Photoshop is much more powerful.

In both GIMP and Photoshop, I can add a drop shadow to a layer. But with Photoshop, I can make all kinds of adjustments to the shadow (angle, opacity, spread, etc) and see it updated in real time. When I edit the layer, (e.g. cutting away parts of it, moving it around) the shadow is instantly updated. In GIMP, the shadow just sits there doing nothing, so I have to delete it and then recreate it again and again.

I use only Linux on my desktop, and I try to use mostly libre software (drivers and maybe codecs being the only major exceptions). That means I use GIMP instead of Photoshop. However, it's very clear to me that even for basic users Photoshop is highly superior to GIMP.

Re:Risking flaming here

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no need for a fork. Carol does not seem to contribute to the GIMP project anyway. She only appears in some GIMP-related IRC channels or mailing lists and she pollutes Bugzilla (the bug tracking system) with useless rants. But I cannot see any real contribution from her and I saw several developers stating explicitly that she is not a member of the project.

According to what I read in the mailing list archives, the only problem seems to be that the admin who gave her a gimp.org e-mail address does not want to take it away from her despite the damage she did and still does to the project. I am wondering why the GIMP guys do not push that admin harder because she seems to be a major nuisance to the project. But maybe that admin is a nuisance as well? I don't know, he doesn't seem to post that much. But at least he contributes some code so he is an active developer. Unlike that Carol who does not write any code and is just hanging around to scare away the newbies.

Wrong way to go about it

[Anonymous Coward]

From the blog:

Explain your idea in an image or two.

But eye candy is not what we need. What's wrong with the GIMP has nothing to do with the visual interface. It has to do with workflow, or rather work-barriers. Shortcut keys need to be consistent and intuitive (if alt- modifies tool A in way X, then alt- should modify tool B in way X as well). Focus needs to switch to the right window when you close another window or dialog; for each and every combination of possibly open windows and dialogs. When you're working on a project in the GIMP, the user interface is something you shouldn't have to think about; it should be something which just allows you to focus on your work, and to get that work done as swiftly as possible. Both when you're working exclusively with the mouse, or exclusively with the keyboard, or using a combination of both.

Re:UI is not the only diff

[eMartin]

I don't know about GIMP, but Photoshop splits the image into several tiles, where stored changes and redraws are done only for the tiles that are affected by the current action.

There's some info on this at:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=320005 [adobe.com]

Re:One True Library?

[EsbenMoseHansen]

I never understood the point of these huge, monolithic libraries. They're a bitch to maintain & if you want to use an improved aspect in PART of the library (e.g. a better database interface), you often must upgrade ALL uses of the library that you might be happy with (e.g. the GUI). In Open Sources 2.0 [amazon.com], Chris DiBona states "when developing, I like to use large libraries only when I either don't want to deal with a technology, or I don't fully understand it and don't feel qualified to implement it." It seems that many *nix hackers feel similarly about userland tools. So why is QT so popular?

Well, first of QT is split into several sublibraries (as of 4.0), so it's not monolithic as such. As to why it is popular, try using it. It's popular because it is very well made. To the grandparent, QT takes longer to compile because it is C++, which is a language that is hard on the compiler. GTK, on the other hand, is written in C, which is very easy on the compiler. (Insert language flamewar here).

Re:wxWidgets!

[Anonymous Coward]

an easier way to do this, at least in newer versions of firefox, is to go to about:config and change "ui.allow_platform_file_picker" to "false"

just thinking about the gtk file browser gives me hives--its good i can get rid of it in at least one app that defaults to using it

Re:LOL at the urban definition of a Gimp

[FooBarWidget]

Complaining here is nice and all, but how much effort are you willing to put into making them change the name? [slashdot.org]

Re:Hmmmm

[mashade]

Except that XV isn't open source. From the homepage [trilon.com]:

What's It Cost?

Surprisingly little. Here's the deal:
Single User Licenses

xv is shareware for personal use only.

Common misconception.

Re:Hmmmm

[budgenator]

I imagine that's a lot easier said than done, let me tell you a sad tail, a long time ago there was this project that forked off from the GIMP originally called film Gimp and is now called cinepaint [cinepaint.org] and that happened about version 1.3 for the GIMP. It different from the gimp because it was designed movies with big honking frames at 32 bit color depth, and I'm not talking 8+8+8 = 24 bits, were talking 32 * three color channels! So when the UI gets bloated it really bogs the whole system down. Cinepaint is currently undergoing a rewrite of the core to better support high color depth images and undergoing a change in the UI from GTK to FLTK. What they should have done was first separate the UI code from the program logic and made sure very thing still compiled and worked, then changed from the increasingly bloated, slow and ugly GTK to the still ugly but small and fast FLTK. What the Gimp team needs to do is get their code-Nazi's to finish the GEGL [gegl.org] overhaul and then separate the code for the user interface so it can be worked on without FUBARing the whole project. The other problem that the GIMP has is the GTK, Gimp Tool Kit that they wrote for the gimp is now integral with gnome so whatever evils gnome introduce the GIMP inherits and there is a limit to what they can fix.

Re:Most Popular??

[soupdevil]

Photoshop also has excellent text tools, compared to the rudimentary tools in GIMP, and the excellent "Save for Web" feature, which makes it easy to compare the size and quality of png, gif and jpg options for your image exports.

Re:Paint.net

[passthecrackpipe]

I cant figure out freeserifsoftware.com - right next to the "Its all FREE!!!" "amazing VALUE!!!" banner there is a "buy online" banner. "Visit our AMAZING SHOP!!! Save $$$ where they try and sell you stuff that is also free? and have a ridiculously high "original price" discounted with ridiculous margins. Sorry, but the site alone hit many of my red flags.