Sidebar, it's been interesting to watch the contrast between gimp and blender or even Krita which are truly industry competitive if not industry leaders.
I've been using GIMP for 15 years and it's a great tool for image editing. It doesn't have the cool AI functions that Photoshop had even before generative AI became a thing, but for most common and advanced image editing needs, it's a perfectly suitable tool.
To be fair, I've never used Photoshop. I've started using GIMP as an edgy teenager in 2010 to create the 4chan memes your parents laughed at back then. I'd probably think different about GIMP if I ever had the sweet taste of Adobe, but since I didn't, I don't know what I'm missing.
Ngl gimp never took off because it's UX is terrible, plus it's far from feature complete.
It's like freecad in that regard, it exists, it's foss, but it's massively inferior to the paid options because UX is horrible and it breaks in weird ways.
Foss can be as good or better than non foss, just look at blender or Kicad, but these two aren't it.
'I make all my images with the GIMP." (Cracks whip at chained up leather clad person in a leather body suit and mask) "DRAW FASTER YOU WORTHLESS POS AND MAYBE MOMMY WILL LET YOU SEE AN OUTLINE OF A TITTY LATER."
"Fine" meaning "it's technically possible to use it."
Adding and editing text is a nightmare. I feel like the only way you could say with a straight face is if you haven't used Photoshop since 2006. Hell, PowerPoint has a better interface in a lot of ways.
I hate dunking on them like that but let's not lie to ourselves here. GIMP is good enough but the UI was clearly made by engineers, not artists
Adding and editing text is a nightmare. I feel like the only way you could say with a straight face is if you haven't used Photoshop since 2006. Hell, PowerPoint has a better interface in a lot of ways.
In GIMP? You select the text tool, you click it on the canvas. It's that simple.
And CAD is ridiculously complex. Students also practice like half a year to cope with the proprietary market leaders. I sometimes think people complain because they confuse tools made for professionals with some game on easy mode.
But yeah, FreeCAD also isn't on par with professional tools. It's surprisingly capable and has a lot of features. And they made it crash way less. 2 years ago it used to crash several times each project when adding some chamfers or some other easy stuff and I had to do lots of stuff in order or it wouldn't work. As of now I'd say it's perfectly usable for the average hobby project. Just don't expect any CAD software to be usable without any kind of background knowledge. There's other tools for that kind of 3D design.
FreeCAD still fucks up with chamfers with annoying regularity unless you're really careful. That being said, it doesn't crash from it anymore.
That being said, their workflow is way better now. It used to be that you were expected to remember exact locations of vertices, so it was about 20 years of regression from where most other CAD packages were at the time. Now it's purely graphical and you can actually connect features properly
I've spent 3 years learning freecad, and it's bad, it's entirely incapable of holding up against moderately complex projects, a simple fillet can break the whole model. It got better with 1.0 but it's still so very far from competing with fusion or inventor / catia...
As for gimp... I've really tried adding it to my workflow, but it's been a massive headache, I'd likely use photocraft over it given both options...
I tried the "good UX" one back then when people hype around the update, and it still really hard to learn if you used to photoshop layout. These day, Krita is better i think, and Inkscape for the Illustrator alternative.
It was bad when Gimp had floating windows. That was changed long ago. Since then, the layout is basically the same as in PS: tools on the left, layers on the right, the image in the middle. The biggest difference is probably that the tools panel isn't in one column by default and takes some screen space — but it can be resized, though idk about the minimum width.
Freecad is NOT like gimp. They are not hell bent o forcing people to do things their way. They constantly evolve, and pay real attention to what the community wants. They are one of FOSS' example of how things should be. I really like it and how it's evolving.
Blender is not that bad, not even close in fact. Have you tried learning it at all? I know I have and per hour spent it's far more empowering than other comparatively complex software.
You can't compare a 2d picture editor to a full 3d modeling suite like they're even remotely close. Blender is better.
Blender is horrendous. And that's comparing it to other 3d modelling programs. They throw like 8 different subsystems' UIs onto the screen at once. If I'm trying to model an object, I don't the damn animation timeline taking up half my screen.
My issue is nothing is sectioned off. It shouldn't all be accessible at the same time. And the controls seem to also not be context based. It's been a while soni don't remember specifics but I do recall it not being intuitive to do anything
It is highly customisable though, you could make it work and look more or less any way you wish.
As a UI professional, I kind of resent the idea of something being intuitive. Nothing is truly intuitive, because what we call intuition is just pattern recognition. An interface is only intuitive because it works in a manner we expect, that's to say the interface designers have replicated known patterns. A pattern being well known doesn't necessarily mean it's good.
I stopped using Windows for a few years and now I feel like an idiot anytime I need to do something. It doesn't feel "intuitive." If someone gets their start with blender (like many do nowadays because Blender is a stellar example of FOSS done right) then other software is less likely to feel intuitive to them.
Blender is also a bit of a jack of all trades. Video editing, audio editing, storyboarding, sculpting, animation, 2D animation/illustration, texture painting, shaders. At least they ripped out the game engine some years back.
I'm not saying that it doesn't have a learning curve, certainly it does. What I am saying, is that your unwillingness to learn doesn't mean that the software is bad. It certainly is not.
An interface is only intuitive because it works in a manner we expect
Yeah, that's what intuitive means...
I'm not saying that either. It IS bad, regardless of my willingness to learn. I tried multiple times. It sucks. I'm sure it works fine. But it's clunky as shit, and difficult to navigate.
Other software does those same things with much less friction
I'd say that Photoshop UI is more streamlined than GIMPs in several ways. In how it handles selections and layers and filter application, etc. And, it's not just familiarity. GIMP is clunky.
Whereas Blender compared to Rhino, or Maya, or Sketchup, or Solidworks--there is no one way to do 3D that works better than another. Moving from one to the other, you can only take the basic concepts of a mesh between them, how they get there is all over the map.
Doesn't for me though. I'll just stick to my cycle of waiting five-ish years, trying it again to see if they fixed their crap and then binning it again.
It was made by a programmer who does not understand anything about how professional imaging people use software. It would be like an artist to somehow manages to cobble together some kind of crudely functional IDE, but he's never programmed in his life and he doesn't even know what programming really is.
Cuck coders don't need any IDEs though, they can sit with a WebUI. I think that made them insecure though so now they have resorted to flashy TUIs instead, so they can feel like 1337 pr0 h4xx0r or whatever.
I use FreeCAD professionally. Since their 1.0 release its honestly better software. And feature parity with Fusion 360.
The issue I have with FreeCAD is that there is a massive learning curve to it, due to the accuracy the software needs.
As updates come out the software is getting better at lowering the requirement, but honestly it’s the best CAD software I’ve been able to get my hands on.
Gino on the other hand feels like it’s designed for image manipulation than image creation. Still use it if I need to touch up a photo. But Affinity and Photoshop does a much better job
It's not completely open source, but Photopea is a free web app that looks and works damn near identically to Photoshop, and it's been around for over a decade. It can open and save-as several proprietary formats. [Github]
Oh no you dont understand, the corpo dick suckers say the UX is terrible and the name unmarkatable, its not just their personal preferred way of handling things, aka the way Photoshop handles things.
The name is a huge self-own. I almost convinced a church to go fully FOSS awhile back, but the church people couldn’t handle the photoshop replacement being called gimp. So then they would’ve still needed Photoshop, so the whole Linux thing was kind of a non starter
You shoulda seen the look on the client's face when I told him the name of the software I used to enlarge and tile his image for a print project was "The Rasterbater."
Why is the church using Photoshop and why did they not just use a different tool than GIMP? They did not switch because of GIMP? Why did they not use Krita or something?
Gimp 3 came out this past year and I feel made massive improvements that I use often for my little simple projects but I think everyone still complaining about Gimp 2 because they tried it many years ago and said it sucks and went back to paying adobe.
Ya I mean it stands for GNU Image manipulation program I think but I guess wouldn’t hurt to have a rename because I don’t think it’s fully a GNU project anymore and branched off iirc?
Ironically, this attitude is a major blocker for the GIMP team when it comes to bigger UI/UX changes -- there's a vocal contingent who will react negatively to any change that requires a little adjustment to workflow or muscle memory, or even if things just look different.
Firefox's incredibly light-touch visual changes recently are a great example of this; it's not "this is demonstrably worse," it's "change makes me uncomfortable."
I do totally appreciate that changes can be genuinely problematic for a subset of users, especially the elderly, but the vitriol that gets spewed when a project overhauls a UI embarrasses me as a user.
Side note: the GIMP UI is generally pretty good these days. There's room for improvement, and it has a learning curve (as do all complex applications, to some degree) but it's shed a lot of its least intuitive aspects.
Firefox's incredibly light-touch visual changes recently are a great example of this; it's not "this is demonstrably worse," it's "change makes me uncomfortable."
On mobile the changes are more obnoxious. Tabs now take up a lot of screen real estate, despite chromium being an example of being functional and efficient at that for years.
Also, changing the look just to change the look is dumb. UI/UX changes should have a benefit to them. And what people frustratingly seem unable to understand is that newer doesn't always mean better.
Some people get used to how their daily tools work and look, so when the UI suddenly changes, our efficiency and comfort decreases until we tweak it to our liking and/or get used to it. The closest analogue I can think of, imagine that every few years you wake up to the furniture having been rearranged in your house.
I didn't see the point of the Firefox redesign either, and had to spend some time in userchrome.css to make it not actively repulsive :/ A few weeks later now I reached the state of "eh ok", but I still don't think it's an improvement.
The closest analogue I can think of, imagine that every few years you wake up to the furniture having been rearranged in your house.
maybe every few years you get a new car? it does all the same things, maybe even better things with new bells and whistles, but fuck all y'all who decided to get rid of my buttons [oldmanyellsatclouds.jif]
there’s a vocal contingent who will react negatively to any change that requires a little adjustment to workflow or muscle memory, or even if things just look different.
okay but some of google's icon changes have been really bad
will react negatively to any change that requires a little adjustment to workflow or muscle memory, or even if things just look different.
I wonder if it's possible to build seperate UI that sits on top of the underlying backend and can be switched easily. So that ppl from PS can start quick.
I think a lot of people underestimate the maintenance burden of options like this. It's another trope you see often with UI changes -- "just let me switch it back."
The problem is that now, even if your UI is super nicely decoupled from your engine, everything you change under the hood is likely to need at least regression testing in two places rather than one -- that workload has doubled.
As it happens, though, with your specific example, there's someone actively maintaining a GIMP fork mod called PhotoGIMP to achieve this, but I notice despite recent(ish) commits, they're still a minor version and a year behind.
Photographers went from Photoshop to lightroom quite quickly.
And other proprietary tools as well.
On the open source front many graphics people went to Inkscape instead of gimp.
Gimp methodology and UX is not landing with the majority of people and it's not offering them enough workflow improvements to justify the learning curve.
Amusingly, I am pretty happy with darktable. The UX is a bit kludgy, but the workflow makes a lot of sense to me. If you've used another mainstream RAW processor, like Lightroom, Capture One, or DxO PhotoLab, you'll quickly be ripping through RAW files once you figure out where the handful of things you'll frequently use are. Everything I need is supported.
I've made a few runs at GIMP over the years, but I've given up each time. It's UI is also kludgy, but the workflows do not make sense to me. They will feel very foreign to someone who cut their teeth in Photoshop like tools. There are a ton of editors that have basically the same workflow as Photoshop. Paint.net is a good example. It's nowhere near as full featured as Photoshop, but it's very easy to pick up and run with if you're familiar with Photoshop.
For decades, the only thing they needed was clean, easy Action and Macro support.
Most photographers use half a dozen pretty simple actions that they are absolutely incapable of recreating in gimp. Most photogs are technically competant in very VERY narrow fields. Most of them use paint away the ______ which just masks, sets up a specific color channel and lets you math the removal of that color with brushes.
Now, you need to add in context-aware fill, outpainting and sky replacement.
Yeah its called hyperbole, you should try it sometime.
Seriously though, as someone who's main creative outlet is game dev (among other forms of programming), if I can learn a new engine, including new languages and core concepts required to work with the new tools, they can learn to locate some icons and context menus that moved.
Like Jesus, what do said people do when their OS upgrades versions?
You're just dismissing the claims that the UI is bad and bolstering your ability to adapt. Why can't everyone be just like you? That's not how the world works.
what do said people do when their OS upgrades versions?
If your question were real, you'd probably know that everyone complains about UI changes with updates. Usually it's a temporary annoyance forgotten a week later. Other times, such as windows 11, they switch OSes. People with UI preferences aren't broken and they don't owe you anything. Stubbornly rejecting feedback might get you upvotes itt, but it won't get you very far elsewhere.
I know everyone complains about UI. I'm telling y'all to get the fuck over it.
My point isn't you have to adapt to technology as well as someone who lives and breathes it, my point is in comparison, moving around some icons and context menus isn't that fucking big a change. Especially considering its said people who are making the tools for you.
Its a small fucking ask. Hell, If massive tech companies hadn't spent the last 15 years weaponizing the lie that computers = convinience, mixed with the computer-illiteracy of the average smart phone user, to normalize corporate malware, it probably wouldn't be so bad.
Before that, it was mostly just the older people and less saavy users who complained UI changes, and in those days GIMPs featureset was still a joke compared to PS.
I mean I can kinda get it when companies develop desktop software that looks like an iPad app for hand-holding reasons (see the bit above about weaponizing computer illiteracy), but fuck me, you should be able to re-learn professional software that your job/hobby depends on.
In your mind, this doesn't strengthen the case that you're dismissive? UI design is literally supposed to conform to the user and here you are ridiculing that extremely basic design idea and telling people intuition isn't a thing, be a fucking robot because it's not hard.
If you were correct I could reverse your mouse on both axes and you would just adapt. (You obviously fucking wouldn't and neither would 99.99999% of humans)
If the issue was about basic intuition and not changing a preference which exists because that's just how Adobe did it, you'd have a point.
These are preferences that exist because people learned a single, arbitrary way of doing things invented by Adobe, and can't be fucked to re-find the same icon.
A cursor following mouse movements makes intuitive sense, even to people who've never touched a fucking computer before. Not a professional piece of software that takes training to properly use, and years of experience to master.
Your mouse-axis example is a false equivalence and you know it.
I would say that you know your "facts" are wrong, but that would imply you've ever taken feedback from another human, which you've shown here, is far off the table.
I've used GIMP many times. Every time I do, I fight with it for hours, try looking up tutorials for how to do things only to find out that everything is different in the tutorial compared to what is happening in my version of the program, and then I rage quit and use something else.
Sorry but I do not find GIMP usable. Not that I have any interest in the ai clone either. I've heard good things about Krita, so next time I need to edit something I'll be spending some hours learning how to use that.
GIMP may have good functionality (in GIMP 3.2), but it's a software designed by engineers. Most workflows are more complicated than they would need to be. Sadly, there currently isn't a real alternative for image manipulation out there currently, so we need to stick with what we have.
Krita is a painting and sketching tool and lacks some photo editing capabilities that GIMP has. PhotoCraft is vibe coded (In itself not a bad thing, but many features are incomplete, such as PSD compatibility), I haven't tested the other ones yet. MiniPaint looks fun, but I'll need to test it out.
Yes, Krita is in first line an painting tool (profesional level), but also has photo editing and even animation capabilities, enough for most tasks, even RAW format, the flaw of Gimp. I use both, Krita and Gimp are good complementary apps. For vector graphics I've enough with Libre Office.
And yes, MiniPaint has a misleading name, it's a very powerfull editor, nothing Mini. Well, it isn't PS, but way enough for almost all editing tasks, it's blazing fast (Html5) and ideal for editing something on the go while browsing.
Yep. I hate Adobe, but Photoshop and Lightroom really are excellent products.
I love FOSS suites. I generally use Inkscape over Illustrator when I can, even though I have a full Creative Cloud license. I use QGIS frequently over ArcGIS even though I have ESRI. I use stone tablets and my own blood over Word because fuck Word.
Gimp is designed entirely to be personalized to whatever workflow works best for you. You open some tabs that you want. Pin some tool boxes. move them around to anywhere on the screen, etc...
You can easily make it look like Photoshop if you want. Or you can make it look and function however you want.
Hell, I have three different layouts for Gimp that I use regularly. One for photo editing that keeps the colour and light functions front and centre. One for drawing, which keeps the symmetry tools, colour picker, brushes and paint dynamics front and centre. And one for some basic graphic design, with fonts, gradients, etc... front and centre.
That's literally it's design ethos.
If you're not willing to spend five minutes doing that, that's fine. But that's entirely on you, not them.
I think the trouble with art software is that Photoshop is the biggest over-complicated unwieldy piece of shit ever made, and everybody has to ape it because "it's what artists know".
So meta: the original meme was a blurry photo of a tv broadcast, now it's an ai upscale in the fuck_ai community
it doesn't seem's a screencap from that youtuber that paid like $1000 to purchase the full dvd set from the african broacaster, then watched hundreds of episodes to find it => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP2wiN7aW4U
Objectively you are right. A name doesn't mean anything.
But it's 2026 - it's delusional to still view human beings as rational creatures who make decisions or judgments on an objective, logical basis.
If there were an Android app that cured cancer, 20% of patients would still die waiting for an iOS port. The reality is that getting people to accept something en masse means tailoring it to their philistine, banal, pedestrian expectations.
No, I got your point. I’m rejecting the comparison because paedophilia isn’t a kink and comparing it to one is harmful.
If you renamed Blender to PUSSYLICKER BOOBINATOR 9000, I’d still use it. It’s a good piece of software for the price of nothing. Before you ask; I’m turbo gay. I’m one of those gays who get turned off by tits.
I do use GIMP from time to time. It’s rare for me to need it. The name doesn’t bother me.
Photopea is really good. It pretty much has all the tools i ever need as someone who had a passion for graphics design/photo editing in their youth but never went pro. It gets shit done for some simple stuff i want to slap together now and then.
But some stuff gets laggy really fast. Like worse than PS CS2 on my Pentium 4 shitbox 20 years ago. I wish we could have Photopea without browser technology in an appimage/flatpak or whatever. It would be perfect.
Man, respectfully, for those of us constantly in online spaces a logical answer like this seems to make total sense. In reality, that's ridiculous and totally impractical. And it's ridiculous when a software program that's intending to replace a mainstream commercial program doesn't consider the branding. GIMP has been around for decades and are steadfast about this name, but you are deluding yourself if you truly believe that they wouldn't have made considerably more progress toward broad adoption if they had a better name.
Grids have Snapping so its as precise as you set the grid to be. If it has to look professional then I would expect you to use the grid in PS as well. PS is not "one click", you have to select the ellipse tool, set the options, click the start point, and click the end point. If i recall you can also click for angle?
To me the funny thing about these online squabbles is the people insisting gimp is somehow good. It is not, it has never been - it is an appalling embarrassment of a tool. Sure, a programmer who doesn't really know anything about professional imaging can use it to make a couple icons, but if you want to do any form of professional work, for-fucking-get it. It's a joke and it always has been a joke.
I was a professional game developer/producer for over 20+ years and gimp has ALWAYS been the laughing stock.
Can I ask in a non argumentative way what exactly makes it's unsuitable? Is it just that the professional workflow is built around photoshop, something to do with colour, something about the files?
In most cases I don't really care about x vs y arguments I'm more interested in the fundamental reasons. I've encounted many people saying things are better because or not used in industry when the whole purpose of the product was to take over the industry via free school software etc.
I'm not here to squabble with you people, you all know it's a piece of dog shit. You can already see that people will not accept what I'm saying, this is not an argument by authority, but the fact of the matter is no professional artist would ever use that tool, and you know that.
I was interested in an artist's specific critiques of GIMP. I know GIMP is clunky but I'm not in the industry, so I don't know what's considered necessary or useful for artists.
I was interested in an artist's specific critiques of GIMP.
I can give my very vague hazy input, as someone who used to be an artist. I used GIMP many years ago when I just started digital art, since it was a free image program (and Krita didn't exist at the time). This must have been fifteen years ago or more. I distinctly remember using GIMP to "trace" over my scanned pencil/ink physical art to make digital art, since I didn't have a drawing tablet at the time. I did a decent amount of drawings in GIMP this way, and therefore feel like I must have "got the hang of" the UI during this period of time. So GIMP was the first image manipulation program I used and I used it a lot, so therefore, I would say that means I should have built up some kind of "intuition" or memory on how to use it.
Then, I got a drawing tablet. I don't remember at the time of GIMP had pressure sensitivity or not. But I do remember that around the time I got my Wacom tablet, I figured out how to... 🏴☠️ acquire 🦜 Photoshop. I then basically abandoned GIMP for Photoshop and Paint Tool SAI to draw digital art fully rather than scanning in physical drawings.
Now, not long after, maybe a few/several months later, my mother asked me about needing an image manipulation program. I told her about GIMP, and helped install it for her. Then she eventually came by and asked me how to do some relatively simple image manipulation task — I can't remember exactly, but say something like "rotate a part of an image" — and I told her "oh no problem!" and took her laptop to show her how to do it and... I completely forgot and couldn't even figure it out. Nothing I tried to do that I felt like should have done the simple image manipulation task got me close to doing it. I think the furthest I got was making a "dancing ants" selection but couldn't do a rotate for the life of me (or whatever I had to do). And I'm sure I tried to search Google on how to do it and it didn't help. I eventually got flustered and told her that I had no idea how to do it, and I was pretty embarrassed, considering I had formerly used this program so much for my initial start into digital art.
I think about this memory whenever GIMP UI discussions come up. To me, the fact that I so quickly forgot how to do something so basic not that long after I stopped using it suggests there is something unintuitive about the way things are set up in GIMP. I will go long stints not using Photoshop since I don't really do much art anymore, and yet when I come back, I'll remember how to things, or if I do forget something, the menu l'll find it in makes sense to me. As to what and why something doesn't feel right, I unfortunately can't articulate it well, though I'm sure that's because of how long ago it's been at this point. And one issue about something being intuitive vs not is that it makes it difficult to explain why something "feels right" or doesn't.
Granted, I have seen news that GIMP has recently updated its UI again, and I am curious about trying to out, especially since I heard they're requesting feedback.
Thanks for the input, I get the it doesn't do things intuitively, I've seen it happen before on other software where you just can't figure out how to make it do something. I guess it's like trying to use vi or nano
My dude, No one is trying to squabble here except you. I don't know how much less confrontational someone can be when asking a question, and yet you still came out swinging.
I've been using GIMP to make every one of my thumbnails for the video uploads I make. The issue with GIMP is that it does some things a bit obtusely, and kind of requires you to build a database of art files. Photoshop is better for (surprise!) editing photos, where as GIMP is better at pure "Art" stuff.
GIMP also is not really geared for Tablets, which is also why most people are down on it.
You're not really interested, you're just trying to call bullshit on somebody that has decades of experience. YOU go out and you find me a professional artist that will attest that they prefer gimp, and I'll walk naked down Main Street.
You're making an argument (that Gimp isn't ready for prime time), but responses like this only undermine your argument and your credibility. By my read that user was trying to respond in good faith, or at least appears that they are. By accusing bad faith and demanding they appeal to authority (your experience) you sabotage your own argument.
If as you say all professional artists hate Gimp, you could have used the same number of words to illustrate (no pun intended) one or two reasons why. And then you're boosting your argument and your own credibility by providing facts.
And below you insist 'you all know it's a piece of dog shit'... have you considered the possibility that they don't know? Maybe they aren't professional designers, maybe they are just bystanders who only use graphics programs to occasionally touch up family photos.
If a person asks you for knowledge, replying with accusation only makes you look non-credible.
I am interested, I thought you might provide a bit of insight, and I'm not arguing either way, honestly I couldn't care either way as I'm not a digital artist.
You can see that people don't really want to know, what they want to do is to continue to believe that this tool is good. A tool that they did not build, they do not use, and they cannot evaluate against the comparative pro tools.
I'm not wasting my breath on this bullshit.
I've never in my entire life of professional digital media and development known an artist who would ever use gimp. Because it is utter feces.
I've never in my entire life of professional digital media and development known an artist who would ever use gimp. Because it is utter feces.
No, you've not known anyone who used it mainly because industries do not spend $600 on software per seat and then later admit that It was barely better than a free tool, even if that were true.
You claim not to be trying to squabble but an objective observer would conclude that's the only thing you've done here.
Damn dude, I think you mis-read the post. It had me interested in hearing more from you.
For the record, as someone who's online some significant image editing for scientific stuff, and was primarily using the very non-artsy program ImageJ, I'm lost everytime I try to do much of anything in gimp
Frequently? Then you can surely link some denied PRs from before the AI slop times.
Also forks are a thing. It just needs one single person to take the staff, create a fork, merge all the rejected PRs into it, and merge from upstream every once in a while.
It's not up to a pro to fix somebody else's broken heap of shit. A professional artist is going to pick the professional tools that are made available to them Not their job to correct this piece of dog crap.
Sure. Demand free open source software without contributing anything and then talk shit about the people volunteering their time. It’s not their job either to give you what you want for free. In contrast to closed source shit you have the option to shape it to your needs. Not doing that and then behaving like they owe you anything is pretty arrogant.
No, but they're devoting time and energy to being publicly unpleasant about it, to the point of being outright obnoxious and hostile towards people who defend it.
That's my big sore point. I need something more like Darkroom/Darktable than a full blown editor, but basically nothing supports HDR well.
Darktable can technically output HDR files from RAW, but can't render it! I have no idea what it'll look like when editing. Last I tried, GIMP doesn't support it at all, and almost nothing on Earth will output a gainmapped file. But Adobe software is one of the few that, unfortunately, gets most of it right...
This is demonstrably incorrect. I was doing freelance and I did ALL my graphics in GIMP. My bills were paid because of this project for two straight years because of GIMP.
There is nothing of great essence that Photoshop can offer me that GIMP can't provide.
I think the worst problem with GIMP is not that it isn't a powerful enough tool, but that they make it a point of the project to make it as distinct as possible from photoshop, so a lot of pros don't really want to even bother learning how to use it. I have tried using it a few times in place of my pirated copy of Photoshop (whenever it stops working), and everytime I try, it baffles me how making something that is obvious and intuitive in photoshop needs 5x more work to do it in GIMP.
Ive been using GIMP for years and once you adjust to how it operates, it's quite powerful. In fact it has some rather useful features once you unlearn Photoshop. It reminds one a bit more of Corel Paint from back in the day.
Is this new one pro level? I haven't looked into any of them really, but a friend sent me the CAD one, and it looked like it wasn't 3d, and didn't have the physics/shape engine
I've been a published photog for more than 10 years but I stopped doing paid photography work during covid and it's just a hobby now. Need my lightroom. I don't have time to spend 30 minutes masking a sky or subject when lightroom can do it in 1 second automatically and usually better than I could manually.
Edit: Sorry I misread. I thought you were saying I was new to pro photography. I haven't got a chance to try the reverse engineered lightroom yet but I'm excited to. Fuuuuuuck adobe.
I'm sorry, but the Adobe UIs aren't exactly a National secret. Why did it take me an hour to figure out how clipping masks work, before giving up and just booting my Windows machine like 2 months ago? I promise Clipping Masks are not something I googled with Adobe, I just stumbled on them, and figured it out because the software was designed by designers who understand how humans use it.
One would think the people who care enough to make sure this software exists would have a modicum of that ability. Maybe the GIMP people should talk to the people who work on Blender.
That's a selection, not drawing yet; not to speak of editing the shape afterwards. Anyway, pardon on my part, I actually meant to say circular stroke, like this:
In Pixelitor, Photocraft, Photocraft's miniPaint web tool, the screenshot tools Spectacle and Flameshot this is all trivial to do, why not in GIMP?
Funny thing is, I think that's how you do it in Photoshop as well. The shift/control/alt to lock aspect ratio, origin, etc. is pretty common. MS Paint had it. lmao
If you give your project an edgy, borderline-offensive name, don’t be surprised if the normies steer well away from it, to the point of choosing obvious AI slop if it happens to look like a solid commercial product that was signed off by a corporate legal department.
I don't think it sucks, but people thinking it's painful to use ought to be taken as legitimate feedback instead of blind hate. It's a weird UI. I want to like it but I can barely use it even when I force myself to.
It really does suck, it is one of the worst tools ever made. I have the resume to back this up, I worked in digital media for over 30 years, and was a professional developer for 20. Gimp is an appalling piece of shit, it is a joke. No professional artist who has access to proper tools would ever choose to use it. These are the facts. Gimp is "better than nothing" but just barely.
I myself started my career as a web designer. I'm well versed in Photoshop, illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom, and premiere. Part of what makes those tools good is their fairly consistent UI choices and easy to remember shortcut keys, many of which feel intuitive and based on something.
Gimp definitely lacks some features, but I'd be happy to use it if it had a UI that didn't break my brain. I do not think you're being super fair about your assessment. Every time I've needed it for anything, assuming I had the time and patience, I've been able to do what I needed to in terms of editing with layers, applying effects, etc. But it was always fairly uncomfortable. So yeah I don't think it's an objective fact that no one would ever use it because it's the worst software ever.
Totally agree with you. I struggle to use it because it doesn't function the way I expect it to when I am trying to edit something. Still have it installed anyways because it has decent gif support.
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GIMP is good for most people. The clone is not guaranteed to be maintained.
almost made GIMP a recursive name. 'GIMP is for Most People'
GIMP
Impresses
Most
People
Maintainance and/or support never can be guaranteed in vibe coded crap. Who would patch or update it? The AI?
Cuck coding*
https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode (no AI, FOSS, Apache-2.0 license)
vibe - i wish this worked
Sidebar, it's been interesting to watch the contrast between gimp and blender or even Krita which are truly industry competitive if not industry leaders.
Inkscape too.
I've been using GIMP for 15 years and it's a great tool for image editing. It doesn't have the cool AI functions that Photoshop had even before generative AI became a thing, but for most common and advanced image editing needs, it's a perfectly suitable tool.
AI or not GIMP is garbage. Basically every new normie opens it up, sees the interface and nopes out back into Photoshop
To be fair, I've never used Photoshop. I've started using GIMP as an edgy teenager in 2010 to create the 4chan memes your parents laughed at back then. I'd probably think different about GIMP if I ever had the sweet taste of Adobe, but since I didn't, I don't know what I'm missing.
Actually most people don't pay for or pirate Photoshop and most people need at least light photo editing
In that case, user nopes out and goes back to Paint
No serious photographers use Paint.
YES
Jesus Christ YES
Ngl gimp never took off because it's UX is terrible, plus it's far from feature complete.
It's like freecad in that regard, it exists, it's foss, but it's massively inferior to the paid options because UX is horrible and it breaks in weird ways.
Foss can be as good or better than non foss, just look at blender or Kicad, but these two aren't it.
The name doesn't help
'I make all my images with the GIMP." (Cracks whip at chained up leather clad person in a leather body suit and mask) "DRAW FASTER YOU WORTHLESS POS AND MAYBE MOMMY WILL LET YOU SEE AN OUTLINE OF A TITTY LATER."
With rare exceptions, the venn diagram of FOSS software and software names with broad mass appeal is two circles, a billion light-years apart.
Gimp ux was bad. It's been fine for years.
Freecad is WAY newer, and has had a fraction of the developer time spent on it.
"Fine" meaning "it's technically possible to use it."
Adding and editing text is a nightmare. I feel like the only way you could say with a straight face is if you haven't used Photoshop since 2006. Hell, PowerPoint has a better interface in a lot of ways.
I hate dunking on them like that but let's not lie to ourselves here. GIMP is good enough but the UI was clearly made by engineers, not artists
I'm an engineer and I have no idea what they were going for with that UI
That's fair. I'm an engineer, too, and the UI brings me pain. Especially because my previous career had creative cloud as the daily software.
I guess I meant more the engineer mindset of "I already know how to use it so it's good enough"
It reminds me of AutoCAD, my current daily software, which feels like a thousand bandaids stacked on top of each other over the course of 25 years.
I feel obligated to say that having a bad UI doesn't mean it's bad software. I'm just tired of people pretending it's polished lol
"The ux is fine" doesn't mean it's feature perfect. I agree the text editor sucks, I use other tools like inkscape when I need text.
My point is that you CAN do those things but it's several extra steps. I have to look up how to do things that are straight forward in other software
In GIMP? You select the text tool, you click it on the canvas. It's that simple.
Ok now add a drop shadow. Curve it or add perspective.
Compare that experience to Photoshop
And CAD is ridiculously complex. Students also practice like half a year to cope with the proprietary market leaders. I sometimes think people complain because they confuse tools made for professionals with some game on easy mode.
But yeah, FreeCAD also isn't on par with professional tools. It's surprisingly capable and has a lot of features. And they made it crash way less. 2 years ago it used to crash several times each project when adding some chamfers or some other easy stuff and I had to do lots of stuff in order or it wouldn't work. As of now I'd say it's perfectly usable for the average hobby project. Just don't expect any CAD software to be usable without any kind of background knowledge. There's other tools for that kind of 3D design.
FreeCAD still fucks up with chamfers with annoying regularity unless you're really careful. That being said, it doesn't crash from it anymore.
That being said, their workflow is way better now. It used to be that you were expected to remember exact locations of vertices, so it was about 20 years of regression from where most other CAD packages were at the time. Now it's purely graphical and you can actually connect features properly
I've spent 3 years learning freecad, and it's bad, it's entirely incapable of holding up against moderately complex projects, a simple fillet can break the whole model. It got better with 1.0 but it's still so very far from competing with fusion or inventor / catia...
As for gimp... I've really tried adding it to my workflow, but it's been a massive headache, I'd likely use photocraft over it given both options...
When was the last time you tried? Free CAD evolves at breakneck speed.
1.1 still has a ways to go. I havent worked in 1.2+ all that much
dude i'm designing something right now and freecad is just what i need. Thanks!
I tried the "good UX" one back then when people hype around the update, and it still really hard to learn if you used to photoshop layout. These day, Krita is better i think, and Inkscape for the Illustrator alternative.
Oh yeah Krita is FAR better than Gimp ux wise 100℅
Krita's brush engine is also stellar. Easily up there among the best of them.
Inkscape's UI is very unintuitive to me, as someone used to Illustrator. The necessary tools mostly exist, but not where I would look for them.
> “if you used to photoshop layout”
> look inside
> same layout as in Photoshop, and the panels are movable
By now I'm convinced Photoshop users lack pattern recognition.
Is it? Idk, it's been ages i used it and i never went back since even though every time i need it and people always recommended me it.
It was bad when Gimp had floating windows. That was changed long ago. Since then, the layout is basically the same as in PS: tools on the left, layers on the right, the image in the middle. The biggest difference is probably that the tools panel isn't in one column by default and takes some screen space — but it can be resized, though idk about the minimum width.
Freecad is NOT like gimp. They are not hell bent o forcing people to do things their way. They constantly evolve, and pay real attention to what the community wants. They are one of FOSS' example of how things should be. I really like it and how it's evolving.
Same shit in every thread.
> “UX is terrible”
> look inside
> same UI as in Photoshop
Either Photoshop users lack pattern recognition, or they are all salty about having paid hundreds of dollars to Adobe.
If you're conflating UI and UX then I can't do anything for you :P
Uh.
Blender is not that bad, not even close in fact. Have you tried learning it at all? I know I have and per hour spent it's far more empowering than other comparatively complex software.
You can't compare a 2d picture editor to a full 3d modeling suite like they're even remotely close. Blender is better.
Yes, I did try it. I also know my way around other 3d software and blender's horrible ux has consistently driven me away from it.
And I know that 2d and 3d software packages are different. Duh. Doesn't mean 3d software has to be bad though.
Blender is horrendous. And that's comparing it to other 3d modelling programs. They throw like 8 different subsystems' UIs onto the screen at once. If I'm trying to model an object, I don't the damn animation timeline taking up half my screen.
Then remove it. It's there because it is used for certain things, like physics simulation. If you need to do hair or cloth, then the timeline is used.
My issue is nothing is sectioned off. It shouldn't all be accessible at the same time. And the controls seem to also not be context based. It's been a while soni don't remember specifics but I do recall it not being intuitive to do anything
It is highly customisable though, you could make it work and look more or less any way you wish.
As a UI professional, I kind of resent the idea of something being intuitive. Nothing is truly intuitive, because what we call intuition is just pattern recognition. An interface is only intuitive because it works in a manner we expect, that's to say the interface designers have replicated known patterns. A pattern being well known doesn't necessarily mean it's good.
I stopped using Windows for a few years and now I feel like an idiot anytime I need to do something. It doesn't feel "intuitive." If someone gets their start with blender (like many do nowadays because Blender is a stellar example of FOSS done right) then other software is less likely to feel intuitive to them.
Blender is also a bit of a jack of all trades. Video editing, audio editing, storyboarding, sculpting, animation, 2D animation/illustration, texture painting, shaders. At least they ripped out the game engine some years back.
I'm not saying that it doesn't have a learning curve, certainly it does. What I am saying, is that your unwillingness to learn doesn't mean that the software is bad. It certainly is not.
Yeah, that's what intuitive means...
I'm not saying that either. It IS bad, regardless of my willingness to learn. I tried multiple times. It sucks. I'm sure it works fine. But it's clunky as shit, and difficult to navigate.
Other software does those same things with much less friction
I'd say that Photoshop UI is more streamlined than GIMPs in several ways. In how it handles selections and layers and filter application, etc. And, it's not just familiarity. GIMP is clunky.
Whereas Blender compared to Rhino, or Maya, or Sketchup, or Solidworks--there is no one way to do 3D that works better than another. Moving from one to the other, you can only take the basic concepts of a mesh between them, how they get there is all over the map.
Hey, cool! I'm happy that it works for you!
Doesn't for me though. I'll just stick to my cycle of waiting five-ish years, trying it again to see if they fixed their crap and then binning it again.
It was made by a programmer who does not understand anything about how professional imaging people use software. It would be like an artist to somehow manages to cobble together some kind of crudely functional IDE, but he's never programmed in his life and he doesn't even know what programming really is.
so like vibecoders!
Cuck coders don't need any IDEs though, they can sit with a WebUI. I think that made them insecure though so now they have resorted to flashy TUIs instead, so they can feel like 1337 pr0 h4xx0r or whatever.
I use FreeCAD professionally. Since their 1.0 release its honestly better software. And feature parity with Fusion 360.
The issue I have with FreeCAD is that there is a massive learning curve to it, due to the accuracy the software needs.
As updates come out the software is getting better at lowering the requirement, but honestly it’s the best CAD software I’ve been able to get my hands on.
Gino on the other hand feels like it’s designed for image manipulation than image creation. Still use it if I need to touch up a photo. But Affinity and Photoshop does a much better job
It's not completely open source, but Photopea is a free web app that looks and works damn near identically to Photoshop, and it's been around for over a decade. It can open and save-as several proprietary formats. [Github]
Also a lot of people associate the word 'gimp' with something else
Isn't GIMPs UX just old photoshop ?
Blender had years before it earned the reputation as the exception
Blender is four years older than GIMP. Blender is lightyears ahead of GIMP.
I started with GIMP, and I've stuck with it and enjoyed it for all my use cases for over a decade.
I tried Photoshop a few times and hated it every time.
I love GIMP
Oh no you dont understand, the corpo dick suckers say the UX is terrible and the name unmarkatable, its not just their personal preferred way of handling things, aka the way Photoshop handles things.
The name is a huge self-own. I almost convinced a church to go fully FOSS awhile back, but the church people couldn’t handle the photoshop replacement being called gimp. So then they would’ve still needed Photoshop, so the whole Linux thing was kind of a non starter
You shoulda seen the look on the client's face when I told him the name of the software I used to enlarge and tile his image for a print project was "The Rasterbater."
/c/theyknew
*In English speaking countries.
I knew about GIMP like 6 years before I learned that gimp was an actual English word.
Why is the church using Photoshop and why did they not just use a different tool than GIMP? They did not switch because of GIMP? Why did they not use Krita or something?
I will be forever thankful for GIMP bringing us GTK and GNOME.
@[email protected]
@[email protected] if you are so offended by being called out as a corpo dick sucker, maybe you should suck less corpo dick?
I use GIMP because of no other viable alternatives but let's be honest : it's counterintuitive and not that good.
Gimp 3 came out this past year and I feel made massive improvements that I use often for my little simple projects but I think everyone still complaining about Gimp 2 because they tried it many years ago and said it sucks and went back to paying adobe.
most comlpains I met is about the name, not program itself.
Yeah its really embarassing to say out loud to people with the american (?) context/alternate meaning of "Slur for wheelchair users"
Ya I mean it stands for GNU Image manipulation program I think but I guess wouldn’t hurt to have a rename because I don’t think it’s fully a GNU project anymore and branched off iirc?
It's any kind of handicap or physical disability/deformity
Hell hath no fury like a photographer told to use UX that isn't literally an 1:1 exact clone of Photoshop UX.
What babies.
Ironically, this attitude is a major blocker for the GIMP team when it comes to bigger UI/UX changes -- there's a vocal contingent who will react negatively to any change that requires a little adjustment to workflow or muscle memory, or even if things just look different.
Firefox's incredibly light-touch visual changes recently are a great example of this; it's not "this is demonstrably worse," it's "change makes me uncomfortable."
I do totally appreciate that changes can be genuinely problematic for a subset of users, especially the elderly, but the vitriol that gets spewed when a project overhauls a UI embarrasses me as a user.
Side note: the GIMP UI is generally pretty good these days. There's room for improvement, and it has a learning curve (as do all complex applications, to some degree) but it's shed a lot of its least intuitive aspects.
On mobile the changes are more obnoxious. Tabs now take up a lot of screen real estate, despite chromium being an example of being functional and efficient at that for years.
Also, changing the look just to change the look is dumb. UI/UX changes should have a benefit to them. And what people frustratingly seem unable to understand is that newer doesn't always mean better.
You mean the two buttons, to show the tabs and to add a new tab?
Some people get used to how their daily tools work and look, so when the UI suddenly changes, our efficiency and comfort decreases until we tweak it to our liking and/or get used to it. The closest analogue I can think of, imagine that every few years you wake up to the furniture having been rearranged in your house.
I didn't see the point of the Firefox redesign either, and had to spend some time in userchrome.css to make it not actively repulsive :/ A few weeks later now I reached the state of "eh ok", but I still don't think it's an improvement.
If you just want the pre-Nova UI it's probably easier to about:config > browser.nova.enabled = false
Sadly those flags are only temporary measures, and tend to get removed after a few months.
maybe every few years you get a new car? it does all the same things, maybe even better things with new bells and whistles, but fuck all y'all who decided to get rid of my buttons [oldmanyellsatclouds.jif]
okay but some of google's icon changes have been really bad
I wonder if it's possible to build seperate UI that sits on top of the underlying backend and can be switched easily. So that ppl from PS can start quick.
I think a lot of people underestimate the maintenance burden of options like this. It's another trope you see often with UI changes -- "just let me switch it back."
The problem is that now, even if your UI is super nicely decoupled from your engine, everything you change under the hood is likely to need at least regression testing in two places rather than one -- that workload has doubled.
As it happens, though, with your specific example, there's someone actively maintaining a GIMP
forkmod called PhotoGIMP to achieve this, but I notice despite recent(ish) commits, they're still a minor version and a year behind.The whole conversation reminds me of this XKCD
you just explained fairly well to me why windows decided to lock the taskbar on the bottom for a while. or at least a reason they might.
Like with Linux distros and which DE you run?
there have been several, including one that tried to look like photoshop but then ended up being malware.
You get the same with Apple fans when Apple introduces something new. They all get really angry about it.
It's not that.
Photographers went from Photoshop to lightroom quite quickly.
And other proprietary tools as well.
On the open source front many graphics people went to Inkscape instead of gimp.
Gimp methodology and UX is not landing with the majority of people and it's not offering them enough workflow improvements to justify the learning curve.
wait until you see Lightroom vs Darktable comments :)
Amusingly, I am pretty happy with darktable. The UX is a bit kludgy, but the workflow makes a lot of sense to me. If you've used another mainstream RAW processor, like Lightroom, Capture One, or DxO PhotoLab, you'll quickly be ripping through RAW files once you figure out where the handful of things you'll frequently use are. Everything I need is supported.
I've made a few runs at GIMP over the years, but I've given up each time. It's UI is also kludgy, but the workflows do not make sense to me. They will feel very foreign to someone who cut their teeth in Photoshop like tools. There are a ton of editors that have basically the same workflow as Photoshop. Paint.net is a good example. It's nowhere near as full featured as Photoshop, but it's very easy to pick up and run with if you're familiar with Photoshop.
For decades, the only thing they needed was clean, easy Action and Macro support.
Most photographers use half a dozen pretty simple actions that they are absolutely incapable of recreating in gimp. Most photogs are technically competant in very VERY narrow fields. Most of them use paint away the ______ which just masks, sets up a specific color channel and lets you math the removal of that color with brushes.
Now, you need to add in context-aware fill, outpainting and sky replacement.
Yes, nothing says
Like
Yeah its called hyperbole, you should try it sometime.
Seriously though, as someone who's main creative outlet is game dev (among other forms of programming), if I can learn a new engine, including new languages and core concepts required to work with the new tools, they can learn to locate some icons and context menus that moved.
Like Jesus, what do said people do when their OS upgrades versions?
You're just dismissing the claims that the UI is bad and bolstering your ability to adapt. Why can't everyone be just like you? That's not how the world works.
If your question were real, you'd probably know that everyone complains about UI changes with updates. Usually it's a temporary annoyance forgotten a week later. Other times, such as windows 11, they switch OSes. People with UI preferences aren't broken and they don't owe you anything. Stubbornly rejecting feedback might get you upvotes itt, but it won't get you very far elsewhere.
I know everyone complains about UI. I'm telling y'all to get the fuck over it.
My point isn't you have to adapt to technology as well as someone who lives and breathes it, my point is in comparison, moving around some icons and context menus isn't that fucking big a change. Especially considering its said people who are making the tools for you.
Its a small fucking ask. Hell, If massive tech companies hadn't spent the last 15 years weaponizing the lie that computers = convinience, mixed with the computer-illiteracy of the average smart phone user, to normalize corporate malware, it probably wouldn't be so bad.
Before that, it was mostly just the older people and less saavy users who complained UI changes, and in those days GIMPs featureset was still a joke compared to PS.
I mean I can kinda get it when companies develop desktop software that looks like an iPad app for hand-holding reasons (see the bit above about weaponizing computer illiteracy), but fuck me, you should be able to re-learn professional software that your job/hobby depends on.
In your mind, this doesn't strengthen the case that you're dismissive? UI design is literally supposed to conform to the user and here you are ridiculing that extremely basic design idea and telling people intuition isn't a thing, be a fucking robot because it's not hard.
If you were correct I could reverse your mouse on both axes and you would just adapt. (You obviously fucking wouldn't and neither would 99.99999% of humans)
If the issue was about basic intuition and not changing a preference which exists because that's just how Adobe did it, you'd have a point.
These are preferences that exist because people learned a single, arbitrary way of doing things invented by Adobe, and can't be fucked to re-find the same icon.
A cursor following mouse movements makes intuitive sense, even to people who've never touched a fucking computer before. Not a professional piece of software that takes training to properly use, and years of experience to master.
Your mouse-axis example is a false equivalence and you know it.
I would say that you know your "facts" are wrong, but that would imply you've ever taken feedback from another human, which you've shown here, is far off the table.
Man oh man, let me tell you: some people just never upgrade
Been using GIMP since it got too hard to find an updated cracked warez zip file of Photoshop from Limewire.
I've used GIMP many times. Every time I do, I fight with it for hours, try looking up tutorials for how to do things only to find out that everything is different in the tutorial compared to what is happening in my version of the program, and then I rage quit and use something else.
Sorry but I do not find GIMP usable. Not that I have any interest in the ai clone either. I've heard good things about Krita, so next time I need to edit something I'll be spending some hours learning how to use that.
This.
GIMP may have good functionality (in GIMP 3.2), but it's a software designed by engineers. Most workflows are more complicated than they would need to be. Sadly, there currently isn't a real alternative for image manipulation out there currently, so we need to stick with what we have.
Well, there is also Krita and several other good OpenSource Image/painting editors. In between I use also often MiniPaint direct in the Browser, which is pretty complete with all the basics, tools and filters
Krita is a painting and sketching tool and lacks some photo editing capabilities that GIMP has. PhotoCraft is vibe coded (In itself not a bad thing, but many features are incomplete, such as PSD compatibility), I haven't tested the other ones yet. MiniPaint looks fun, but I'll need to test it out.
Yes, Krita is in first line an painting tool (profesional level), but also has photo editing and even animation capabilities, enough for most tasks, even RAW format, the flaw of Gimp. I use both, Krita and Gimp are good complementary apps. For vector graphics I've enough with Libre Office. And yes, MiniPaint has a misleading name, it's a very powerfull editor, nothing Mini. Well, it isn't PS, but way enough for almost all editing tasks, it's blazing fast (Html5) and ideal for editing something on the go while browsing.
Thanks for the tips, will try them out :)
I tend to resort to paint.net
is this some kind of AI upscale of the meme? His skin has a fabric-like texture, uncanny 👀
Yep. I hate Adobe, but Photoshop and Lightroom really are excellent products.
I love FOSS suites. I generally use Inkscape over Illustrator when I can, even though I have a full Creative Cloud license. I use QGIS frequently over ArcGIS even though I have ESRI. I use stone tablets and my own blood over Word because fuck Word.
But GIMP just doesn't do it.
If GIMP would just eat the complaints of their small, dedicated users, and make the UI more like Photoshop, they'd grow their userbase much faster.
Maybe, that's why they don't do it?
That's what Gimpshop was.
Gimp is designed entirely to be personalized to whatever workflow works best for you. You open some tabs that you want. Pin some tool boxes. move them around to anywhere on the screen, etc...
You can easily make it look like Photoshop if you want. Or you can make it look and function however you want.
Hell, I have three different layouts for Gimp that I use regularly. One for photo editing that keeps the colour and light functions front and centre. One for drawing, which keeps the symmetry tools, colour picker, brushes and paint dynamics front and centre. And one for some basic graphic design, with fonts, gradients, etc... front and centre.
That's literally it's design ethos.
If you're not willing to spend five minutes doing that, that's fine. But that's entirely on you, not them.
Yep. I haven't used it in a while but I remember it being so far off the Photoshop layout and key binds I couldn't use it.
They got the usability entirely wrong. I just can't take GIMP seriously as photo editing software.
I think the trouble with art software is that Photoshop is the biggest over-complicated unwieldy piece of shit ever made, and everybody has to ape it because "it's what artists know".
Bring back Deluxe Paint.
So meta: the original meme was a blurry photo of a tv broadcast, now it's an ai upscale in the fuck_ai community
it doesn't seem's a screencap from that youtuber that paid like $1000 to purchase the full dvd set from the african broacaster, then watched hundreds of episodes to find it => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP2wiN7aW4U
You named it GIMP. It's a joke to YOU, too.
A lot of free software has silly names, it's part of the 80s/90s nerdy computing culture
Google too 🙃
Aww, I remember that. Back when it was fun.
There's a difference between naming something silly and naming something after a well known fetish
Oh noes! A word!
Objectively you are right. A name doesn't mean anything.
But it's 2026 - it's delusional to still view human beings as rational creatures who make decisions or judgments on an objective, logical basis.
If there were an Android app that cured cancer, 20% of patients would still die waiting for an iOS port. The reality is that getting people to accept something en masse means tailoring it to their philistine, banal, pedestrian expectations.
So you'd use a software called "Child Molester 9000" so long as it's FOSS and kinda replaces Photoshop?
Paedophilia isn't a fetish, it's a psychiatric disorder.
Way to miss the point
No, I got your point. I’m rejecting the comparison because paedophilia isn’t a kink and comparing it to one is harmful.
If you renamed Blender to PUSSYLICKER BOOBINATOR 9000, I’d still use it. It’s a good piece of software for the price of nothing. Before you ask; I’m turbo gay. I’m one of those gays who get turned off by tits.
I do use GIMP from time to time. It’s rare for me to need it. The name doesn’t bother me.
I prefer photopea. Completely browser based and ready for anything quick. Haven't tried anything in depth with it though.
Photopea is really good. It pretty much has all the tools i ever need as someone who had a passion for graphics design/photo editing in their youth but never went pro. It gets shit done for some simple stuff i want to slap together now and then.
But some stuff gets laggy really fast. Like worse than PS CS2 on my Pentium 4 shitbox 20 years ago. I wish we could have Photopea without browser technology in an appimage/flatpak or whatever. It would be perfect.
"Yes."
Why yes.
I see a lot of whining about the name. Just use the full name if you don't like the acronym.
Man, respectfully, for those of us constantly in online spaces a logical answer like this seems to make total sense. In reality, that's ridiculous and totally impractical. And it's ridiculous when a software program that's intending to replace a mainstream commercial program doesn't consider the branding. GIMP has been around for decades and are steadfast about this name, but you are deluding yourself if you truly believe that they wouldn't have made considerably more progress toward broad adoption if they had a better name.
It's called gimp cause it's submissive to Photoshop and covered in rubber or leather bondage
It's not the name holding them back. As everyone else in here is saying, it's the UI quirks.
I think it can be more than one thing and the name has never helped.
One mans quirk is another mans standard
HOW DO I DRAW A CIRCLE
the ellipse tool is literally right there.
There is a shape tool you can use to draw shapes, but its more like stamping, I think they recommend krita for actual drawing.
Yes because turning a one click action into what is this, 8 precisely accurate clicks? Makes so much sense in a professional workflow.
Gimp is pretty much the epitome of software where "you can do it, but it's going to be tedious and painful"
Grids have Snapping so its as precise as you set the grid to be. If it has to look professional then I would expect you to use the grid in PS as well. PS is not "one click", you have to select the ellipse tool, set the options, click the start point, and click the end point. If i recall you can also click for angle?
To me the funny thing about these online squabbles is the people insisting gimp is somehow good. It is not, it has never been - it is an appalling embarrassment of a tool. Sure, a programmer who doesn't really know anything about professional imaging can use it to make a couple icons, but if you want to do any form of professional work, for-fucking-get it. It's a joke and it always has been a joke.
I was a professional game developer/producer for over 20+ years and gimp has ALWAYS been the laughing stock.
Can I ask in a non argumentative way what exactly makes it's unsuitable? Is it just that the professional workflow is built around photoshop, something to do with colour, something about the files?
In most cases I don't really care about x vs y arguments I'm more interested in the fundamental reasons. I've encounted many people saying things are better because or not used in industry when the whole purpose of the product was to take over the industry via free school software etc.
Someone ping me if this gets a reply
I'm not here to squabble with you people, you all know it's a piece of dog shit. You can already see that people will not accept what I'm saying, this is not an argument by authority, but the fact of the matter is no professional artist would ever use that tool, and you know that.
I was interested in an artist's specific critiques of GIMP. I know GIMP is clunky but I'm not in the industry, so I don't know what's considered necessary or useful for artists.
If you're having a bad day, just don't comment.
I can give my very vague hazy input, as someone who used to be an artist. I used GIMP many years ago when I just started digital art, since it was a free image program (and Krita didn't exist at the time). This must have been fifteen years ago or more. I distinctly remember using GIMP to "trace" over my scanned pencil/ink physical art to make digital art, since I didn't have a drawing tablet at the time. I did a decent amount of drawings in GIMP this way, and therefore feel like I must have "got the hang of" the UI during this period of time. So GIMP was the first image manipulation program I used and I used it a lot, so therefore, I would say that means I should have built up some kind of "intuition" or memory on how to use it.
Then, I got a drawing tablet. I don't remember at the time of GIMP had pressure sensitivity or not. But I do remember that around the time I got my Wacom tablet, I figured out how to... 🏴☠️ acquire 🦜 Photoshop. I then basically abandoned GIMP for Photoshop and Paint Tool SAI to draw digital art fully rather than scanning in physical drawings.
Now, not long after, maybe a few/several months later, my mother asked me about needing an image manipulation program. I told her about GIMP, and helped install it for her. Then she eventually came by and asked me how to do some relatively simple image manipulation task — I can't remember exactly, but say something like "rotate a part of an image" — and I told her "oh no problem!" and took her laptop to show her how to do it and... I completely forgot and couldn't even figure it out. Nothing I tried to do that I felt like should have done the simple image manipulation task got me close to doing it. I think the furthest I got was making a "dancing ants" selection but couldn't do a rotate for the life of me (or whatever I had to do). And I'm sure I tried to search Google on how to do it and it didn't help. I eventually got flustered and told her that I had no idea how to do it, and I was pretty embarrassed, considering I had formerly used this program so much for my initial start into digital art.
I think about this memory whenever GIMP UI discussions come up. To me, the fact that I so quickly forgot how to do something so basic not that long after I stopped using it suggests there is something unintuitive about the way things are set up in GIMP. I will go long stints not using Photoshop since I don't really do much art anymore, and yet when I come back, I'll remember how to things, or if I do forget something, the menu l'll find it in makes sense to me. As to what and why something doesn't feel right, I unfortunately can't articulate it well, though I'm sure that's because of how long ago it's been at this point. And one issue about something being intuitive vs not is that it makes it difficult to explain why something "feels right" or doesn't.
Granted, I have seen news that GIMP has recently updated its UI again, and I am curious about trying to out, especially since I heard they're requesting feedback.
Thanks for the input, I get the it doesn't do things intuitively, I've seen it happen before on other software where you just can't figure out how to make it do something. I guess it's like trying to use vi or nano
My dude, No one is trying to squabble here except you. I don't know how much less confrontational someone can be when asking a question, and yet you still came out swinging.
Edit: In this particular thread tree.
Totally convinced me!
• Evelyne Schulz: A Denmark-based digital artist and programmer who relies on GIMP as her primary tool alongside Blender for 3D/perspective bases.
• Jeremy Crotty: A digital surrealist painter who creates full digital paintings and abstract pieces directly in GIMP.
• Benedicto Cernal III: A graphic designer known for using GIMP to craft distressed, analog-style poster collages.
• Daniel Lloyd-Miller: A professional painter who uses GIMP for post-processing, color correction, and digital painting preparation.
Gimp 3 also came out this past year and I feel made massive improvements but I think everyone still complaining about gimp 2
I've been using GIMP to make every one of my thumbnails for the video uploads I make. The issue with GIMP is that it does some things a bit obtusely, and kind of requires you to build a database of art files. Photoshop is better for (surprise!) editing photos, where as GIMP is better at pure "Art" stuff.
GIMP also is not really geared for Tablets, which is also why most people are down on it.
What?!?! Mods, this guy is trying to have a real conversation, what the fuck?!?!
You're not really interested, you're just trying to call bullshit on somebody that has decades of experience. YOU go out and you find me a professional artist that will attest that they prefer gimp, and I'll walk naked down Main Street.
You're making an argument (that Gimp isn't ready for prime time), but responses like this only undermine your argument and your credibility. By my read that user was trying to respond in good faith, or at least appears that they are. By accusing bad faith and demanding they appeal to authority (your experience) you sabotage your own argument.
If as you say all professional artists hate Gimp, you could have used the same number of words to illustrate (no pun intended) one or two reasons why. And then you're boosting your argument and your own credibility by providing facts.
And below you insist 'you all know it's a piece of dog shit'... have you considered the possibility that they don't know? Maybe they aren't professional designers, maybe they are just bystanders who only use graphics programs to occasionally touch up family photos.
If a person asks you for knowledge, replying with accusation only makes you look non-credible.
I am interested, I thought you might provide a bit of insight, and I'm not arguing either way, honestly I couldn't care either way as I'm not a digital artist.
You can see that people don't really want to know, what they want to do is to continue to believe that this tool is good. A tool that they did not build, they do not use, and they cannot evaluate against the comparative pro tools.
I'm not wasting my breath on this bullshit.
I've never in my entire life of professional digital media and development known an artist who would ever use gimp. Because it is utter feces.
I really wanted to know. Oh well, bitter mockery will have to do.
Dude you could have just said user interface or something, I'm guessing you never really tried it?
No, you've not known anyone who used it mainly because industries do not spend $600 on software per seat and then later admit that It was barely better than a free tool, even if that were true.
You claim not to be trying to squabble but an objective observer would conclude that's the only thing you've done here.
Lol looks like somebody found some!
https://lemmy.world/comment/26454599
Enjoy struttin' your stuff, hope you kept up with the landscaping! XD
Haha all in good fun, I'm happy someone posted these people because I didn't know about them.
Damn dude, I think you mis-read the post. It had me interested in hearing more from you.
For the record, as someone who's online some significant image editing for scientific stuff, and was primarily using the very non-artsy program ImageJ, I'm lost everytime I try to do much of anything in gimp
If you are an indication of what an average game dev is like then maybe it is a good thing that the industry is collapsing
The funny thing is, there are always “pros” bitching about it, but never doing anything about it.
Pros would FREQUENTLY try to do something about it, create a pull request, get denied for some bullshit reason, and forget about the project entirely.
Frequently? Then you can surely link some denied PRs from before the AI slop times.
Also forks are a thing. It just needs one single person to take the staff, create a fork, merge all the rejected PRs into it, and merge from upstream every once in a while.
It's not up to a pro to fix somebody else's broken heap of shit. A professional artist is going to pick the professional tools that are made available to them Not their job to correct this piece of dog crap.
Sure. Demand free open source software without contributing anything and then talk shit about the people volunteering their time. It’s not their job either to give you what you want for free. In contrast to closed source shit you have the option to shape it to your needs. Not doing that and then behaving like they owe you anything is pretty arrogant.
I didn't think they demanded anything
No, but they're devoting time and energy to being publicly unpleasant about it, to the point of being outright obnoxious and hostile towards people who defend it.
TBF I think certain feature requests in GIMP have been backlogged for 15 years or so. Like a timeline for animating in, for example.
Timeline for animations in an image manipulator? I thought you have to use Krita for this sort of stuff.
Yeah, Photoshop has this. Makes it easy to edit GIFs for memes, as GIFs get split into each frame.
Oh wow thanks, I didn't know that GIMP could do that
https://docs.gimp.org/3.2/en/export-file-formats.html#gimp-exporting-animations
https://itsfoss.com/make-gif-in-gimp/
Apparently it opens each frame? I will have to try this.
Do any of them support HDR colorspaces?
That's my big sore point. I need something more like Darkroom/Darktable than a full blown editor, but basically nothing supports HDR well.
Darktable can technically output HDR files from RAW, but can't render it! I have no idea what it'll look like when editing. Last I tried, GIMP doesn't support it at all, and almost nothing on Earth will output a gainmapped file. But Adobe software is one of the few that, unfortunately, gets most of it right...
Shout out to photopea.
if your pro-OSS avoid Photopeas
Lol no.
Gimp isn't good enough for pro level work.
This is demonstrably incorrect. I was doing freelance and I did ALL my graphics in GIMP. My bills were paid because of this project for two straight years because of GIMP. There is nothing of great essence that Photoshop can offer me that GIMP can't provide.
Can gimp mask a sky or subject automatically and reliably yet?
I shoot in natural light exclusively and rely on those features.
Also what about camera raw profiles for fuji? Last I checked no
"tis a poor carpenter that blames their tools."
A photo with masking takes like an hour to edit manually but minutes with the Adobe AI tools
You can do the same thing in gimp technically, but my time is too valuable now to be tracing tree branches manually with a brush.
I think the worst problem with GIMP is not that it isn't a powerful enough tool, but that they make it a point of the project to make it as distinct as possible from photoshop, so a lot of pros don't really want to even bother learning how to use it. I have tried using it a few times in place of my pirated copy of Photoshop (whenever it stops working), and everytime I try, it baffles me how making something that is obvious and intuitive in photoshop needs 5x more work to do it in GIMP.
Ive been using GIMP for years and once you adjust to how it operates, it's quite powerful. In fact it has some rather useful features once you unlearn Photoshop. It reminds one a bit more of Corel Paint from back in the day.
Is this new one pro level? I haven't looked into any of them really, but a friend sent me the CAD one, and it looked like it wasn't 3d, and didn't have the physics/shape engine
I've been a published photog for more than 10 years but I stopped doing paid photography work during covid and it's just a hobby now. Need my lightroom. I don't have time to spend 30 minutes masking a sky or subject when lightroom can do it in 1 second automatically and usually better than I could manually.
Edit: Sorry I misread. I thought you were saying I was new to pro photography. I haven't got a chance to try the reverse engineered lightroom yet but I'm excited to. Fuuuuuuck adobe.
But what about this new LLM-generated one?
Edited my comment because I can't read apparently
Yes. Yes, you are a joke to me.
:(
I'm sorry, but the Adobe UIs aren't exactly a National secret. Why did it take me an hour to figure out how clipping masks work, before giving up and just booting my Windows machine like 2 months ago? I promise Clipping Masks are not something I googled with Adobe, I just stumbled on them, and figured it out because the software was designed by designers who understand how humans use it.
One would think the people who care enough to make sure this software exists would have a modicum of that ability. Maybe the GIMP people should talk to the people who work on Blender.
GIMP can't draw circles. Bye.
skill issue. it can draw circles just fine, you just refuse to learn anything different.
Show us please. In other software it can be done in 1 click or 2.
To draw a circle in GIMP, select the Ellipse Select Tool (E), hold Shift to lock a 1:1 aspect ratio, drag out your shape
Totally impossible, you are right!
That's a selection, not drawing yet; not to speak of editing the shape afterwards. Anyway, pardon on my part, I actually meant to say circular stroke, like this:
In Pixelitor, Photocraft, Photocraft's miniPaint web tool, the screenshot tools Spectacle and Flameshot this is all trivial to do, why not in GIMP?
I believe that is how you draw one as well. It really isn't that hard. Here is a video where the author accomplishes it in a few seconds.
https://youtu.be/ocx91nYeMUA
Funny thing is, I think that's how you do it in Photoshop as well. The shift/control/alt to lock aspect ratio, origin, etc. is pretty common. MS Paint had it. lmao
lol what
If you give your project an edgy, borderline-offensive name, don’t be surprised if the normies steer well away from it, to the point of choosing obvious AI slop if it happens to look like a solid commercial product that was signed off by a corporate legal department.
This is the real issue, AI slop gives the prudes too much power
gimp fucking sucks though.
I don't think it sucks, but people thinking it's painful to use ought to be taken as legitimate feedback instead of blind hate. It's a weird UI. I want to like it but I can barely use it even when I force myself to.
It really does suck, it is one of the worst tools ever made. I have the resume to back this up, I worked in digital media for over 30 years, and was a professional developer for 20. Gimp is an appalling piece of shit, it is a joke. No professional artist who has access to proper tools would ever choose to use it. These are the facts. Gimp is "better than nothing" but just barely.
I myself started my career as a web designer. I'm well versed in Photoshop, illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom, and premiere. Part of what makes those tools good is their fairly consistent UI choices and easy to remember shortcut keys, many of which feel intuitive and based on something.
Gimp definitely lacks some features, but I'd be happy to use it if it had a UI that didn't break my brain. I do not think you're being super fair about your assessment. Every time I've needed it for anything, assuming I had the time and patience, I've been able to do what I needed to in terms of editing with layers, applying effects, etc. But it was always fairly uncomfortable. So yeah I don't think it's an objective fact that no one would ever use it because it's the worst software ever.
screaming something stupid isn't clever
i used to love gimp, but around gimp 2.0 the other free image editing software worked better for what i needed
Totally agree with you. I struggle to use it because it doesn't function the way I expect it to when I am trying to edit something. Still have it installed anyways because it has decent gif support.
It does and I’m dying on this hill with you.
Good riddance to you both.