ES version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
56% Positive
Analyzed from 6553 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#gimp#photoshop#don#layer#more#used#using#never#years#different
Discussion (205 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
It's not a startup that has just raised a series A and opened a flashy San Francisco office.
All that is to say that I don't think the problem is the GIMP devs not knowing what the problems are and needing them explained over and over again.
The problem is a shortage of developers to address them.
So if you can, contribute.
No need to relearn anytime I have to edit something.
My primary use case for gimp is using path and selection tools for removing backgrounds and the UI and shortcuts in gimp are painful coming from a decade of adobe use.
Even though I have a background in UX design, I'm not cut out for this kind of open source work. I've tried.
That's the answer IMO, yeah now there's two UX to maintain but it's a step forward.
But I guess it's easier to come up with reasons for not contributing than actually contributing.
> So if you can, contribute.
Well, that requires knowledge of C. That already excludes like 98% of the user base or so, or perhaps 90%.
Also, even aside from this, if a majority wants feature xyz but you don't like that, what can you do? It is a constant time investment to convince a majority that what they want may not be great.
You make it sound as if the only bottleneck is lack of developers. I think there are many more bottlenecks than merely lack of developers.
Unfortunately I think this is why most of the time you don't see progress in applications like this until there is a fork or a whole new application. Especially with AI based development now, I think the problem is often not the lacking people to make code, but lacking people that allow the code to be contributed in the first place.
Most graphics programs let you select a region, copy it and then move the copy around to where you want it, the end. You can usually paste into new layer if needed.
But not in GIMP for some reason you have to copy something and 'anchor it' or convert it to a new layer before you ever see it.
This kind of thing just makes me use other software.
1. Select region with mouse.
2. Ctrl-C: Copy the region.
3. Ctrl-V: Paste (with the selection still active, so that it pastes in the same place).
4. Ctrl-Shift-N: Makes the resulting "temporary layer" into a permanent new layer.
5. Use the new layer.
I wish I could skip step 4. It's usually not necessary, and if I need to place the temporary layer into the same layer that I was already using, I can just merge the two myself.
Of course, sometimes you do need the ability to directly paste into the same thing, such as if you're editing a layer mask rather than the actual layer itself...
I select something, copy it, paste it, and I can see and move it right away. Is that not working for you? I’m on GIMP 3.2.2.
I've gotten equal parts praise and complaints for working on that - some people think it makes GIMP much more intuitive, while others find it interfers with their workflow of quickly copying, editing, and merging back down pieces of a layer.
Now if GIMP would just stop rewriting the file on each run, making it difficult to keep in revision control....
On the flip side, I'd love a darktable that is closer the lightroom's UI, for similar reasons. Somehow, i find it more difficult to get the same speed and flow with darktable.
Is it? Why? Looking at the screenshot on this, it just seems like a few items were moved around a bit, presumably because that's where Photoshop has them.
Every few years I give GIMP a shot, and every time I give up because it's completely inscrutable. Adobe is evil, and Pixelmator lacks features, but at least you can figure out how to use them in short order.
But you know what's even worse, people that use Illustrator to create SVG's for the web. Inkscape creates proper readable SVG's at 5KB, compared to 50MB SVG's I get from Illustrator experts.
https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/desktop/get-started/techni...
At least, if you're doing digital art. Not as full featured for editing of photo's.
But most of all, any comparison is going to be silly. Photoshop has lots of amazing features and in sure is better in a technical comparison to Gimp in many ways.
A lot of times the best tool for the job is the one that works great for you.
2. GIMP needs RAW support, precision support, and a better data backbone
3. GIMP needs a rename. It's both a sex kink term [1] (not to yuck anyone's yums) and a slur term for disabled people [2]
4. Gen AI will probably disrupt all of this anyway.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I8S3ZHQ
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gimp
2. GIMP isn't a raw editor, use darktable or rawtherapee
3. Poor naming decisions do not warrant a change this late, people know GIMP
4. Keep dreaming
I think you might be equivocating these on their names, but it's simply not the same. People complain about the name of GIMP because it causes them problems when trying to use it in work and school. But nobody is complaining about GIMPS name, right? It's not even software.
Perception matters; Y'all are so wild for this.
It's not like it was an accident, either. GIMP is a backronym because they wanted to name it after the full-body sex slave suit. They shot themselves in the face with that one.
"R----d" is usually just called "the R word", while "the hard R" refers specifically to the standard version of "the N word". (As opposed to "the soft A", which is sometimes used synonymous with "dude".)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop
They taught Photoshop at school, so I found it easier to use GIMPshop than regular GIMP.
- https://github.com/joshgiesbrecht/Glimpse
- https://web.archive.org/web/20190829115212/https://getglimps...
Agreed. I'm already willing to use GIMP in its current state. But though I've used it since I was a child, I have to re-google for things I know it can do.
I had a photo of a barn. I was going to construct it in miniature, so to get scale measurements I wanted an isometric perspective from a photo that had been taken at an angle. I had done this in GIMP before so I was hesitant to start googling for answers but in 25 minutes of playing with it, no combination of inputs would do what I wanted. I had to find some youtube tutorials.
Even simple tasks aren't simple. Annotating a photograph with a couple red arrows is a multi step challenge involving paths, stroking, selections, layers, and maybe some other stuff I'm forgetting. These UI concepts were impenetrable without tutorials -- I never would have figured this out on my own.
GIMP has helped me but it's never been pleasant to use.
We want to make macros simpler (some of the work I helped out with for GIMP 3.0 was to lay the groundwork for automated/recordable operations), but as with all the things on our roadmap it takes time and developers.
Blender never had to play catch up with a proprietary file format. In Blender's world, fbx and any of the video formats are the way to interop with other studios.
In the Photoshop/Gimp world, the interop format is psd. Under full control of Adobe.
There is also the matter of price. Maya and 3dStudioMax are eye watering expensive, while Photoshop is dirt cheap. As a professional photographer, I can get the 300 GBP it costs me to have Lightroom and Photoshop for one year, in an afternoon.
Only Gimp devs would love Gimps interface.
Just the existence of Gimp seems like so much effort flushed down the toilet because of someone's bad, bad taste and incredibly poor user interface design
I cant stand Gimp UI, so not intuitive. And over 25 years of Photoshop use has me locked into a way that image editing should work. This is fantastic and timely.
I never really had an issue with the program UI, though. Maybe because I also never went through the trouble of pirating/buying Photoshop to get used to it. Their new effects system (where they have to be applied and sit on top of the layer until then) was pretty bugged on release on Windows, though.
I'm sure it's a bit like for people who are used to Blender, whereas others find their interface... unique as well.
However, unless they do a Blender and make a sustained effort to improve the UI, understand what people want and how it fits into professional workflows, it's never going to happen.
The attitude seems to be: If you don't like it, fuck you. I think they're genuinely happy with how things are. The inscrutable UI and off-putting name are features not bugs, keeping away the sort of people they don't want.
[1] https://unsung.aresluna.org/photoshops-challenges-with-focus...
We then discuss and test with the reporter and volunteer designers, and try to implement once some consensus has been reached. We welcome feedback from more users, so feel free to contribute your thoughts and design/workflow issues!
I see some discussion on the copy paste. Funnily enough i was copy pasting stuff yesterday in Gimp and yeah there is something funky that I couldn't put my finger on. It makes the app feel really janky clicking here and ther doesn't work, renaming the pasted layer. do i click once ? double click? hit enter? I coudln't work it out as the behaviour seemed inconsistent. I also couldn't work out how to get a pasted layer to align to top left. I had to align it manually every time. sigh.
anyway is ther any decent articles that discuss this anywhere that someone could link me?
Do you remember that foolish Windows-Themes on Linux? Luckily GNOME has killed custom theming. And Apple also. Custom theming is a horrible mess aside from areas where it is intentionally (e.g. Vim color schemes).
But it is also possible that Gimp moves to option A. At some point and they are interested in user-interface improvements. Most people just want to use Single-Window-Mode which shall be default for many years.
This is why Krita is sweeping the floor with gimp - sane UI that's way closer to Photoshop. You need to rebind 5 things and you can use it.
> Luckily GNOME has killed custom theming
Same deal. What do you care what I do with my computer? GNOME is hanging on by nature of being the default, but very few people pick it when they have the choice. It will be dead in 10 years.
> you do decide to actively go against it for decades because you like doing things your way
Perhaps there's a good reason why a developer or a group of developers decide to do things a certain way.
> This is why Krita is sweeping the floor with gimp
Aside from the fact that these programs are intended for pretty different things, the impression I have is that GIMP has a much larger install-base than Krita and more people are aware of it. Far from "sweeping the floor".
> GNOME is hanging on by nature of being the default
Or perhaps some people (and enterprises) want a polished OOTB desktop experience without having to deal with KDE's bugs and Windows-like design language. There are plenty of GNOME installs on Arch Linux for example, where you can't speak of any "defaults" with regards to desktop environments.[0]
[0] https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun/Desktop%20Environments/cur...
In what way has GNOME killed theming? There are lots of themes available on [1] and some of the most downloaded ones are consistently imitations of the latest macOS or Windows style.
[1] https://www.gnome-look.org/browse?cat=135&ord=rating
Some things are wonky though (ctrl+ keybindings instead of cmd+ keybindings) but it's much better. I use it every day now.
https://krita.org/en/download/
That's just normal gimp
- is non-destructive editing implemented yet in GIMP?
- is stability finally improved, can I running without a never ending crashfest on both ubuntu and macos?
bc tbh the UI was never the issue for GIMP, it just wasn't good enough software.
It reminds of my first experience using macOS, as a long time Windows user. The first few months on macOS was a totally frustrating and negative experience for me - "What the ...? why does the ENTER key not open files or folders? Why is it going to 'rename' mode? Why doesn't double-clicking the title bar on a window maximise the window? Why are some windows maximised and others take their own custom width? Why is the Maximise button making apps full screen!?" - and so on.
The point is that I had become so familiar with the Windows UI, that every other OS UI suddenly seemed alien - "This is not how a UI should work on an OS". (This was also the reason that I hated Ubuntu's DE, as it tried to imitate the macOS UI I was then unfamiliar with). Familiarity means when you face a new UI, you have to spend effort to re-learn your way of thinking around a UI, which can be a frustrating experience (especially as you grow older). That effort / stress also unconsciously creates a negative impression in your mind about the UI. Both Apple and Microsoft know this and that is why they deliberately make their UI distinct and different from each other - whether it is Windows vs macOS or Windows Phone vs ios. Recently someone (a non-geek) asked me if they should buy a Macbook as they had an iPhone too. As they were a Windows user, I warned them that the macOS UI would be frustrating and to try macOS before committing to it. They did, and ultimately decided against it and chose to stick to Windows (buying a Surface Tablet).
As a former graphic designer, and an experienced Photoshop user, I only considered GIMP as a replacement when Adobe decided to make it a subscription. And just as with Windows to macOS, re-learning to use the GIMP UI was a frustrating experience because I was always thinking of "this is how it is done in Photoshop". Once you let go of that "familiarity", and are willing to actually test if the "GIMP way" is maybe better, it becomes a less frustrating experience. (All that said, while I have got used to using the GIMP tools the GIMP way, the overall GIMP layout does have a cluttered feeling and I do recommend installing Photo GIMP - it won't really make GIMP a Photoshop clone, but it will make it more "familiar" and thus easier to "re-learn" how to use it).
For example, let's say I added a text block to an image. I then select the text layer, there's a box drawn around the text, and I try moving the text around with the move tool. In every other image editor I've used, this will move the text around, but in GIMP this will move the background layer around unless you specifically click on the text and not just inside the box (which can be difficult depending on the font you used). Every aspect of using GIMP works like this. Everything is implemented in a counterintuitive manner. The closest analogue I can think of is it's like figuring out how to play old versions of Dwarf Fortress from before they overhauled the UI for the Steam release.
As someone who has never used Photoshop, I've always found Gimp to be pretty intuitive, and reading some of the complaints on here I expect I'd find Photoshop strange and unintuitive. For example, one of the comparisons above is about copy/paste, but from their description the Gimp version is much closer to how copy/paste works in general, where you have to paste to create the new copy before you can manipulate it.
For example, basic stuff like zoom in and zoom out are bound differently to literally any other app on any platform. This catches me out every single time I try to use it, and I'll never learn the GIMP way.
Spoiler for anyone unfamiliar: it's not Ctrl+/Ctrl-.
There's absolutely no reason to use Gimp when https://www.photopea.com/ exists.
I have absolutely no ads on Photopea.
Gimp doesn't have any AI feature, and you're free to not use any of the Photopea AI features, so not sure why it's relevant?
Yes, we indeed don't need Gimp when we have a free Photoshop equivalent.
And Photopea does indeed have ads, and "No Ads" is one of the "features" of the premium subscription, as you can check by going to the account page.
I really think most people use Photoshop for the same reason they use Windows - they don't really know/they don't want to learn anything else.
It's like applying to be developer and being told to use Microsoft FrontPage. It's doable, but raises serious questions about the professionalism of the organisation.
These days I use Photopea which meets my needs perfectly (but is not free software).
I'm not a fan of Gimp (haven't given it a shot in over a decade, to be fair) but if it covers the basic capabilities of PS and provides for an almost straight swap for users looking to change, then it is literally the layout and shortcuts that will be the decider for them.
That's always going to be a problem with switching from anything to anything other than a clone. I can't play superior, I'm still clinging to MATE for goodness's sake, but at least I know I'm being dumb and have plans to move.
Back in the Mac vs. PC days, people would argue themselves blue in the face about which system was the 'more logical' with the non-answer essentially boiling down to the extent of one's experience and the preference of one's capacity to plumb the depths of the preferred OS.
Here, we're discussing a means for people who might otherwise not have any desire to use GIMP being able to use GIMP without having to throw said thousands of hours of experience. Whether they then want to transition to a GIMP-first comprehension of the software is another matter entirely.
This gets rid of the speedbump.
Unfortunately, it doesnt get rid of the singularly-offputting name, but that's a matter for another thread.
It's been a few years since I tried GIMP but the last time I did, I couldn't rotate text and then edit it without losing my rotations. Rotating text isn't some obscure feature. This wasn't only shockingly behind Photoshop, it was behind Microsoft Word or even Clarisworks. A quick Google search suggests this remained unsolved as recently as 2024: https://old.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/19ckuo4/text_layers_a...
This isn't blind hatred of OSS or learning new things. I've gotten annoyed with Photoshop now that they decided to replace their UI with web components, and so far Krita has been quite pleasant to use despite not also being identical to Photoshop.
Don't get me wrong, Photoshop sucks hard, Adobe as a company even more, but on a technical level most Photoshop users cannot transition to GIMP.
Edit: Although, I have to highlight that GIMP has made noticeable progress within the last years. I can now, finally, group two layers together and apply a drop shadow effect to the group, which correctly applies to all layers within the group. It's been quite a while...
Photoshop does a lot of advanced editing well, but that's a feature many professionals don't really need. It's a bit like Excel: whole companies have moved from Excel to Google Docs, but many companies will never be able to use anything else because only Excel manages to render their VBA-sheet-database monstrosities correctly.
It's such a little thing that makes gimp annoying to use. And it affects a broad audience. Wedding cards or youtube title thumbnails.
Maybe it works now. I hope.
Non destructive layer resize works now, right?
Non-destructive resize works on vector layers and link layers (essentially "smart objects" in GIMP). We have the capability to do this for regular layers too - just need to connect some things and change some internal assumptions about transform filters.
A year or two ago, I ditched doom and rolled my own emacs config, having gained the necessary knowledge and confidence to do so from my years with doom.
Both doom and spacemacs exist to make the (relatively) strange nature of emacs more welcoming to users of other IDEs. I’m not sure I would have stuck with it without them, so I’m not sure the hard way is always better.
Photopea is also a good solution
Back when they added "export as" in addition to "save as", I told them to please don't do this. Their response was that they want to appeal more to professional designers. I just want a simpler user interface. It is kind of strange that we, as users, depend on upstream developers dictating down UI choices onto us, even more so when things change between versions. I want to be able to choose the UI at all times on my own. Yes, I can patch the source code, but I mean something integrated into the toolkit, as-is. GTK2 had that to a limited extend, you could easily re-assign key combinations, such as in the old bluefish editor. Then GTK3 changed this. I feel that these toolkits are constantly getting worse rather than better over time. One day we need to free ourselves from upstream developers dictating whatever they like to. So, from this point of view, best of luck to the photogimp folks - not sure how well it works, but they make a point with this that I totally understand. (I also have to admit that I often just stick to the default, even though it annoys me, but keeping up with more and more microchanges on my own, also adds to my own burden and time investment. But I really wish I could stop having to accept whatever upstream dictates downstream.)
That being said, the comfort that millions of people have with the Photoshop interface is in itself an institution, and has to be respected as such (imagine the collective number of man-hours put into learning it.) I don't know what the answer is. But the worst possible outcome is the Firefox outcome, where GIMP ends up chasing Photoshop rather than remaining its own thing.
Just, please, try to get out of your head that GIMP's UI is bad. It's not, it's just different. Don't think of it as a knock-off Photoshop. Deal with it on its own terms. Use these Photoshop skins as a transition rather than a destination.
That means I might have a problem with this approach, just because it doesn't allow for a easy switch between classic and Photoshop UI. It's actually annoying to switch back and forth. If it catches on and brings more users to GIMP, it will become the interface, and leave GIMP vulnerable to IP attacks.
The GIMP community has utterly failed to understand that the problem with their UI is not that it's different from one particular competitor, it's that it breaks all user expectations about how GUI software should behave. A simple copy/paste operation between layers requires googling before a new user is able to do it - and all to save utterly trivial amounts of RAM. That's not "just different", that's objectively terrible.
It’s not DWM’s fault. It works fine with programs that support X11 properly. Krita, for example, works perfectly with DWM.
And to summarize and perhaps avert other discussion; it's not so much about being "non-offensive" as it is simply about being professional.
If GIMP had feature-parity with Photoshop, and had been adopted by Condé Nast or ILM, and had a less-offensive name like "Dumm" or "Silly Image Editor", then this would be more comparable.
Names are something that clearly matter to people, and that impacts anyone working with people.
If GIMP would create profit they could call it dogshit and the same people would visit the Shit-Con for business news