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The Gimp

GIMP 3.0 - a Milestone For Open-Source Image Editing 31

Posted by msmash from the going-strong dept.
LWN: The long-awaited release of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) 3.0 is on the way, marking the first major update since version 2.10 was released in April 2018. It now features a GTK 3 user interface and GIMP 3.0 introduces significant changes to the core platform and plugins. This release also brings performance and usability improvements, as well as more compatibility with Wayland and complex input sources.

GIMP 3.0 is the first release to use GTK 3, a more modern foundation than the GTK 2 base of prior releases. GTK 4 has been available for a few years now, and is on the project's radar, but the plan was always to finish the GTK 3 work first. Moving to GTK 3 brings initial Wayland compatibility and HiDPI scaling. In addition, this allows for GIMP users to take advantage of multi-touch input, bringing pinch-to-zoom gestures to the program, and offering a better experience when working with complex peripherals, such as advanced drawing tablets. These features were not previously possible due to the limitations of GTK 2.

A secondary result of the transition to GTK 3 is a refreshed user interface (UI), now with support for CSS themes included. In this release, four themes are available by default, including light, dark, and gray themes, along with a high-contrast theme for users with visual impairments. Additionally, this release has transitioned to using GTK's header bar component, typically used to combine an application's toolbar and title bar into one unit. To maintain familiarity with previous releases, however, GIMP 3.0 still supports the traditional menu interface.

GIMP 3.0 - a Milestone For Open-Source Image Editing More | Reply

GIMP 3.0 - a Milestone For Open-Source Image Editing

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  • GTK3 (Score:3)

    by Blymie ( 231220 ) on Friday November 29, 2024 @08:09AM (#64979097)

    Ah, excellent gtk3!

    Look for a massive amount of whitespace for absolutely no reason, an almost incomprehensible task for end users to theme, and just general weirdness.

    • >"Ah, excellent gtk3! Look for a massive amount of whitespace for absolutely no reason, an almost incomprehensible task for end users to theme, and just general weirdness."

      Exactly. Thank you. It is nice to hear from those who also find GTK3 to be a massive step backwards in so many ways. I shutter to think about what GTK4 "improvements" are coming (something I haven't been forced to deal with yet).

      • Shudder.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Octorian ( 14086 )

        As someone who has a HiDPI display, I find GTK2 apps to be nearly unusable now. So the GTK3 update alone is enormously welcome.

        Fortunately, most GTK2 apps are semi-abandonware at this point, but they still tend to have no obvious drop-in replacements.

        Unfortunately, there's also long tail of niche commercial Qt4 apps with similar issues, which the vendors have zero incentive to ever update unless Microsoft horribly breaks their DPI compatibility hacks on Windows.

        • >"As someone who has a HiDPI display, I find GTK2 apps to be nearly unusable now. So the GTK3 update alone is enormously welcome."

          I don't want to imply that everything GTK3 is garbage. It isn't. My problem is that the developers locked down themes and controls in an extremely hostile way. It is apparently "their way or the highway". And many of us don't like what they have done with the UI and simply want control to have traditional options (and without hacking the hell out of stuff to get it).

    • > massive amount of whitespace for absolutely no reason

      It's probably to make it "tablet friendly" for finger pointing. But often that hurts mouse users, as it adds unnecessary scrolling because less fits in the target real-estate.

      Mousing is still the primary pointing method for productivity-oriented applications: apps used for hours on end. Making stuff pro-mobile usually kicks mousers. UI designers often forget a top rule while chasing fads: Know Your Audience.

      • LOL Welcome to FOSS. The devs know better than the users. Or "that's difficult, we'll just take the easy way out".... FOSS in general would be light years ahead of only the devs stopped designing GUI's. There was an industrial designer who offered to help redesign the GIMP front end. This guy has an amazing cv of building user systems. He was basically told, well of you want to redo the menu icons, we'll think about taking as look at it. Needless to say his enthusiasm for the project vanished into the
      • LOL Welcome to FOSS. The devs know better that users. FOSS in general would be light years ahead of only the devs stopped designing GUI's. There was an industrial designer who offered to help redesign the GIMP front end. This guy has an amazing cv of building user systems. He was basically told, well of you want to redo the menu icons, we'll think about taking as look at it. Needless to say his enthusiasm for the project vanished into the night.

    • The GTK3 port was kinda started back in 2012. https://www.phoronix.com/news/... [phoronix.com]
      At this rate, maybe it would be faster to switch to Qt?

  • Hoping (Score:3)

    by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Friday November 29, 2024 @08:13AM (#64979107)

    >"To maintain familiarity with previous releases, however, GIMP 3.0 still supports the traditional menu interface."

    Whew. I really don't want to adjust to but so many changes at once. This has been a big disconnect with many things (looking at you GNOME and GTK) where developers make radical changes just "because". I HATE hamburger menus, menus in title bars, menu options lacking icons (will GIMP 3 even be able to have menu icons, because they destroyed that in GTK 3), menus that fade in and out or scroll in and out (wasting my time and slowing remote displays), disappearing scroll bars, scroll bars that don't indicate size of view, etc.

    • From the announcement:

      Additionally, this release has transitioned to using GTK's header bar component, typically used to combine an application's toolbar and title bar into one unit. To maintain familiarity with previous releases, however, GIMP 3.0 still supports the traditional menu interface.

      I prefer the old interface with seperate windows for images and what groups of tools I make. Could never stand the single window interface of Photoshop.

      • >"I prefer the old interface with seperate windows for images and what groups of tools I make. Could never stand the single window interface of Photoshop."

        Interesting, there are times I like one and times I like the other. As long as I have a choice for single or multi-window in GIMP, I am happy. Choice is good. And that is something that GTK developers worked VERY hard to take away from us (extremely evident in GTK 3). Thankfully, GIMP developers seem to like/understand/respect user choice.

  • Gimp really boggles my mind (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday November 29, 2024 @08:53AM (#64979161)
    Yeah it's behind Photoshop in some ways but it could absolutely hang with it. It's along with open office and Linux in general one of the greatest success stories. Thousands and thousands of dollars worth of software for free.

    If you go down to South America you will find people doing absolutely amazing things with it because they can't afford the Adobe licenses and Gimp is right there. I came across those guys when I was buying a drawing tablet as a gift for a buddy of mine.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      FWIW, I prefer the inteface The GIMP had a decade ago to the current one. This causes me to wonder if the next will be even worse. Inkscape had a better interface then too.

      • Re:Gimp really boggles my mind (Score:5, Informative)

        by ThePyro ( 645161 ) on Friday November 29, 2024 @10:13AM (#64979283)

        It's the simple things. I had to update GIMP recently, and the UI changes were so significant that I ended up having to Google search just for how to customize the brush size. One of my most commonly used features was just hard to find.

        I'll give the new UI a try, but it's rather painful to throw years of experience out the window. It'd be easier to justify if I used the software more often, but I don't... I pull it out, rarely, for "quick" jobs, and it sucks having to relearn stuff in that context. I was expecting a 2 minute session, not 20 minutes of looking up tutorials.

        • Ha! I once spent three hours finding out how to do something I did in 2 minutes with ’Shop

        • One of my most commonly used features was just hard to find.

          Hard to find, or simply not in the place that you trained yourself over the years to look? Just for fun I looked up a youtube video from Gimp 2.10 on brush sizes, and I saw where to click even before the person explained it. With the Brush selected apparently you can change your brush size in the "Tool Options" pane on the right. What a mind-blowingly hard place to find a tool option!!!!

          Now to be clear I'm not questioning your intelligence or anything like that, but pointing out there is a difference betwee

  • the important part (Score:4, Informative)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Friday November 29, 2024 @09:51AM (#64979243) Homepage Journal

    Besides UI improvements of course, the big important part of GIMP 3.0 is non-destructive editing. FTFA:

    A major focus of this release is greater integration with the Generic Graphics Library (GEGL), first introduced in 2000 for the purpose of improving GIMP's image-processing capabilities through a scene-graph-based architecture. As part of this effort, there have been numerous optimizations to GIMP's core and to its standard plugins. In tandem with memory management and multi-threading improvements, these changes should bring significant speed boosts when applying filters and effects, even on larger images.

    GEGL allows image-processing operations to be chained together in such a way that the original image data is preserved, along with a record of every edit. This is referred to as non-destructive editing, and GIMP 3.0 is the first stable release of the project to make this workflow available, though there is still more work to be done. Users can apply filters and effects to any layer without altering the original image. As a result, effect parameters can be changed even after they've been applied. This change removes the need to perform an undo any time a filter or effect does not have the desired result. Filters, and any plugins that use GEGL operations, now offer real-time previews.

    This is the core of why it has historically been far easier to achieve specific ends with Photoshop than GIMP. Photoshop has offered non-destructive editing through its "layer effects" literally since before it was called Photoshop, but this became a main focus around version 2.5 and it has been responsible for much of its success. Being able to fiddle these effects means not having to re-do things if you want to make a change to something you did in the middle of your work. Some of what people mistake for UI superiority in Photoshop was actually that it had this functionality to even have a UI for. Implementing it as effects for layers was almost the only reasonable way to do it, what else do you attach them to?

  • Not previously possible? (Score:3)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Friday November 29, 2024 @09:54AM (#64979249) Homepage

    "These features were not previously possible due to the limitations of GTK 2."

    GTK is just a wrapper on top of Xlib so code around it if it doesn't do what you need.

  • Sounds... Pointless (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Friday November 29, 2024 @10:03AM (#64979265)

    The goal for development should be better tools and a more intuitive interface to access those tools.

    If you're worried about themes, presumably your product is otherwise perfect because a theme for your image editor should be among the very last things you care about.

    I'm pretty sure Gimp is not perfect.

    • New for version 3.0: UI Updated to 1998 style.

      • Right. Because "modern" means hiding everything, tons of whitespace, no menu icons, no menus other than hamburger, time-wasting menu animations, less-functional scrollbars, and not allowing UI preferences to change those things.

        I will take old stuff, then :)

    • You're so angry at someone migrating GTK versions you missed the fact that it enables precisely what you mentioned. One of the issues for GTK is that over the years attempts to do certain things cause them to break. You want a more intuitive interface? That is facilited by the features provided in a modern interface toolkit. The theming is completely secondary effect.

      Gimp isn't perfect, they are trying to make it so by doing what you want - making the interface more intuitive. It's like criticising a car co

  • GIMP could make significant inroads if it mocked Photoshop’s UI.

    Millions of people are proficient with Photoshop, and they hit a wall whenever they have to work with GIMP, which really earned it’s name.

    But nooooo. GIMP is marred by an arcane UI thought off by geeks who have no clue about professional workflow.

    I remember taking three hours trying to do what takes 2 minutes with Photoshop. This experienced burned GIMP for me in a very durable way!

    • Indeed. GIMP has many fundamental problems:

      1. Idiotic acronym. Sadly, branding matters. Yes, the acronym "makes sense" -- to geeks -- but for everyone else it sounds fucking stupid.

      2. No option for Photoshop hotkeys. There used to be IIRC a 1.x plug-in that switched all the hotkeys to the equivalent Photoshop ones -- of course it is "abandoned". The GIMP team has NEVER understood: You want to streamline the onboarding process. This isn't rocket science. At the initial startup show a dialog box:

      [Photos

    • I'm an amateur. I hate the GIMP UI. I hate the Photoshop UI. But since the number of howto's for Photoshop is about 10 million times the number for GIMP, I wish it at least had a toggle to use the Photoshop UI.

      It reminds me of an argument I had with gatekeepers at LibreOffice a several years ago, askng that the UI be more like Excel. Their argument: it should be more like Lotus. This was when Excel had like 90% of the market or more.

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