GIMP is such a strange tool. I actually have used it, semi-frequently - since the 90s! The overall experience of using it has only changed a little in that time. And it gets the job done. I guess that makes it successful! What else has been so stable?
But of all the software I have ever used, GIMP is the most difficult to learn. I memorized a few tutorials, this must have been around Y2K, to do the a couple things. And basically I have never figured out how to do anything else in it. After twenty years. Sometime, more than a decade ago, they made the tool icons both harder to recognize visually more unpredictable in their toolbox layout, and that still slows me down, too.
I just can't think of anything else I've had this kind of relationship with - other tools, I either master, or I move on from. GIMP is an odd one.
The way I would put it is: GIMP has features, not workflow.
There are a lot of things that are possible, but not by combining the basic tools and metaphors in sensible ways: each time is more like diving into the command line options of a GNU tool, finding the exact thing, and if you really, really need to automate it, it goes in a script where it can be safely forgotten.
Which is, certainly, a way of doing, but not one conducive to pleasurable use or professional scenarios where you need to have it pass through multiple hands.
It's funny because GIMP is one of the tools I hate the most. It's really hard to describe how quickly I want to say no to just about everything that it does. I'm quite open[0] but I'd rather write perl script with imagemagik than use gimp.
[0] i can love both emacs and vi and even ed, I've used just about any 2d/3d program ever
The first time I downloaded the GIMP was when I realized that MS Paint wouldn’t cut it for making convincing Runescape “fakes”. I was too chicken to pirate Photoshop but knew that I needed better tools to do what I needed. I went on to use the GIMP to make Runescape forum signatures (proud member of $clan, $skill in woodcutting, etc). That was the first time I had people PMing me, asking me to make something for them. The first time I “sold” anything. A thrill I don’t experience anymore.
I went on to use the GIMP to make textures for Morrowind mods, diagrams and design mockups in college, and my wedding invitations.
Today I use the GIMP to design software architecture diagrams, mockups, and my D&D battlemaps.
I don’t mean to beat the dead Free Software horse, but this tool was indispensable for my creative young self. I’m gonna go give them some money now for the first time in 15 years of using the software. Thanks for sharing this.
> It took us a little while to come up with the name. We knew we wanted an image manipulation program like Photoshop, but the name IMP sounded wrong. We also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs. At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a single word popped into my mind while we were tossing out name ideas. It only took a few more minutes to determine what the 'G' stood for.
In retrospect it was probably a mistake to choose a name which is either a niche aspect of the BDSM lifestyle or an ableist pejorative. That it was deliberate is even more baffling.
GIMP has been one of my constantly used software for over 20 years. I recall messing with text effects and some Python-fu. Still use it to this day for all kinds of editing.
This deserves to be higher. It spawned GTK, which spawned Gnome and so on. In this way, it is one of the most influential open source software programs around. I recall also that in it's youth, it showed what is possible, it staked out a future. There were not many as advanced GUI programs around like it then, but xv was of course the go-to program in the graphics category.
Very long time Gimp user, also photoshop user here.
Full credit to all the hard working developers on it over the years. You should be proud of what you created.
However.
Gimp was always just slightly too good, mature, stable and complete, to justify alternative projects.
Gimp IMHO is the reason we don't have a layered raster (& vector) editor in 2020 which can hold a candle to Photoshop.
There have been attempts, but Gimp really sucked the wind out of the motivation to do competing OSS projects - for all really good reasons mentioned above.
So no criticism of the software it's self here... just sometimes something succesful can stifle competition.
I'd love to see more clean sheet 'Photoshop alternatives'.
The real reason is that making complicated software is hard, and few people have enough motivation to do that. Blaming lack of persistence on other software is a very strange take on dealing with this.
Yes, the user interface has changed a lot over the years, but the underlying principles of how to compose images are still the same. I am no artist, so my requirements might be quite a bit lower than those of the typical Photoshop user, but GIMP is still my tool of choice if it comes to manipulating individual image files. For Vector Graphics I prefer Inkscape and for photos Darktable, but those are just more specialized use cases. Without Gimp my computer would be missing a crucial tool to edit images.
Thank you GIMP contributors and congratulations to your 25th anniversary.
For me it's a case of being the worst open source image editor, except for all the others.
The scripts always seem broken, the UI was a mess for a while on a Mac. The multi windowed system was great if the windowing manager expected that sort of thing and terrible otherwise.
Ufraw integration seems an awful way of getting to edit raw files and I go years at a time without being able to get it working on a Mac.
Creating an open source desktop app tends to require a different set of skills than what most open source developers have, and getting top notch UX designers and product managers to work on an open source project. When open source developers work on servers, networking, frameworks, etc - they can do top notch work and be their own PMs, it's much much harder for desktop software.
I just gave it another whirl, maybe first time in 10 years. It's still as shocking, UX wise.
I hate Photoshop, I use it very often. It's bloated since before CS1, it's annoying to use, it's DRM rooted with a service running 24/7 on my machine, and it's also very costly.
Sadly, there is literally no option nearly as good. Adobe got me by the balls.
If you're willing to pay for it, the Affinity line and Procreate are both strong contenders. I don't use Photoshop anymore, those tools have replaced it.
Slightly O/T but have F/OSS graphic apps gotten worse over time? Sitting in front of Inkscape on Ubuntu 20.04 and the thing crashes, wouldn't display guides, wouldn't snap, is overloaded with controls to leave a poststamp-sized canvas for your actual work on a notebook, has miniscule icons not really helpful for revealing functionality, and even lacks icons for basic actions so you're basically clicking on black borders to hope to get some actions back. Guess I have to manually calculate and edit SVGs when I just wanted to construct really simple tangents and typographic Bezier curves. Or is it Ubuntu 20.04 and gnome which just suck? It has recently improved a little bit at least, but is bordering on the unusable for me. What is the recommendation for a Linux workstation OS that is at least designed to run the precious few graphic apps we have? I used to run FreeBSD in the 2000s, so that is an option, too, in the hope that FreeBSD will priorize support for running actual X11 apps rather than grand plans for tablet UIs from early 2010s left in a state of neither here nor there.
I used Gimp every so often over the past few years and always loved it... until just about a month ago when I finally tried photoshop for the first time. I really don't like Adobe, but photoshop just blows gimp out of the water. anything you want to do in gimp, you can do in photoshop in a fraction of the time and with higher quality. It makes me feel like I've been unknowingly torturing myself for years
I have had to work on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. One of the GIMP strengths is that I can just install it and do the small task I need to. No hassle with compatibilities and requesting licenses and whatever. Just get it and go.
I'm a developer and my editing needs are very modest. GIMP just feels like the right tool. I've heard lots of praise for Krita too though, should try that out too.
I wish there was an easier Gimp, like Paint shop pro 5 easy, because it may be the most powerful tool for image editing yet I've hard a super hard time creating a simple screenshot with a red arrow. Found some stack overflow tutorials to import some stuff that were broken for which I had to go to internet archive.
Wasted few hoours, still didn't work, so started looking for alternative solutions. Finally found a tool called shuttr which has an in-built image editor which finally does the job that I want including surprisingly most of my other image editing requirements.
I think my fault is when I was using Windows I used Photoshop for everything so I assumed Gimp is the linux version for Photoshop.
>I wish there was an easier Gimp, like Paint shop pro 5 easy, because it may be the most powerful tool for image editing yet I've hard a super hard time creating a simple screenshot with a red arrow.
I find Pinta useful for those sorts of tasks. It's open source and supports most platforms.
Always surprising to see the amount of ire that GIMP can reliably call forward in threads like this.
I've used the thing privately and professionally for countless projects since 1997. Stuff for websites, photo material for several books, restauration work for museums and photo archives, colorizations, weirdo manipulations and just general fun. Have ventured into other software but always come back to GIMP, very quickly so in the case of Photoshop and its various equally useless Adobe siblings.
Yes, GIMP is clunky, and the gradual unclunking mostly seems to happen in geological timeframes, and there's the CMYK problem and the occasional trick which PS does better or smoother. So what? It has gotten the job done. Every time. Thousands of times over nearly 23 years. I raise my virtual paperhat to these dogged, reliable, persistent people. A birthday present will be forthcoming.
The only nice thing I have to say about GIMP's progress since I first started using it back in the 90s as a teen, is that the single window mode was a welcome change.
Otherwise I'm generally very frustrated every time I try use it. It wasn't that way in my teens, back then I would happily spend entire evenings noodling around in it making graphics for web pages and demos/games.
Nowadays just throwing text on a layer makes me want to throw my laptop. That custom widget is so useless, maybe I should try a newer version as I'm still on 2.8 here.
Well I'll be, the software that launched me into design as a career. I remember messing around on it designing (bad) gaming forum banners and trying out wacom tablet styles back in the 00's. Convoluted as hell to somebody barely out of grade school, which well prepared me for how absurd Photoshop is. ;)
Kudos to the software for sticking around, and the team for enabling it.
Is it possible to contribute to the user experience of GIMP? I've tried GIMP a number of times over the past 20 years and it's just totally illogical, imo. It would be great to have an open source alternative to an Adobe product that was more well thought through.
I don't believe Photopea https://www.photopea.com/ is Open Source, but it's a free web-implementation of Photoshop.
Photoshop, itself, is rather general purpose, but if you have a more specific need (like digital painting or photo management and retouching) there are other tools better than Photoshop out there.
I dont know for sure, but I would expect this project to be run like vim - any drastic or useful UX changes lead to you getting told off. But I'm not sure, it could also be that in 25 years nobody ever tried to change the UI/UX.
Any Gimp article wouldnt be complete without a list of all the alternatives so here are some Image Manipulation Programs that are not Gimp but also not Photoshop:
[+] [-] jes5199|5 years ago|reply
But of all the software I have ever used, GIMP is the most difficult to learn. I memorized a few tutorials, this must have been around Y2K, to do the a couple things. And basically I have never figured out how to do anything else in it. After twenty years. Sometime, more than a decade ago, they made the tool icons both harder to recognize visually more unpredictable in their toolbox layout, and that still slows me down, too.
I just can't think of anything else I've had this kind of relationship with - other tools, I either master, or I move on from. GIMP is an odd one.
[+] [-] megameter|5 years ago|reply
There are a lot of things that are possible, but not by combining the basic tools and metaphors in sensible ways: each time is more like diving into the command line options of a GNU tool, finding the exact thing, and if you really, really need to automate it, it goes in a script where it can be safely forgotten.
Which is, certainly, a way of doing, but not one conducive to pleasurable use or professional scenarios where you need to have it pass through multiple hands.
[+] [-] agumonkey|5 years ago|reply
[0] i can love both emacs and vi and even ed, I've used just about any 2d/3d program ever
[+] [-] kody|5 years ago|reply
I went on to use the GIMP to make textures for Morrowind mods, diagrams and design mockups in college, and my wedding invitations.
Today I use the GIMP to design software architecture diagrams, mockups, and my D&D battlemaps.
I don’t mean to beat the dead Free Software horse, but this tool was indispensable for my creative young self. I’m gonna go give them some money now for the first time in 15 years of using the software. Thanks for sharing this.
[+] [-] HeadsUpHigh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neolog|5 years ago|reply
> It took us a little while to come up with the name. We knew we wanted an image manipulation program like Photoshop, but the name IMP sounded wrong. We also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs. At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a single word popped into my mind while we were tossing out name ideas. It only took a few more minutes to determine what the 'G' stood for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP#cite_note-GG1Jan1997-6
[+] [-] bahmboo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelmrose|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] babuskov|5 years ago|reply
Close, but no cigar ;)
[+] [-] gilrain|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jansan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manaskarekar|5 years ago|reply
And it gave us GTK!
Congrats.
[+] [-] mongol|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaygimp|5 years ago|reply
Full credit to all the hard working developers on it over the years. You should be proud of what you created.
However.
Gimp was always just slightly too good, mature, stable and complete, to justify alternative projects.
Gimp IMHO is the reason we don't have a layered raster (& vector) editor in 2020 which can hold a candle to Photoshop.
There have been attempts, but Gimp really sucked the wind out of the motivation to do competing OSS projects - for all really good reasons mentioned above.
So no criticism of the software it's self here... just sometimes something succesful can stifle competition.
I'd love to see more clean sheet 'Photoshop alternatives'.
[+] [-] prokoudine|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gpvos|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arendtio|5 years ago|reply
Yes, the user interface has changed a lot over the years, but the underlying principles of how to compose images are still the same. I am no artist, so my requirements might be quite a bit lower than those of the typical Photoshop user, but GIMP is still my tool of choice if it comes to manipulating individual image files. For Vector Graphics I prefer Inkscape and for photos Darktable, but those are just more specialized use cases. Without Gimp my computer would be missing a crucial tool to edit images.
Thank you GIMP contributors and congratulations to your 25th anniversary.
[+] [-] cs02rm0|5 years ago|reply
The scripts always seem broken, the UI was a mess for a while on a Mac. The multi windowed system was great if the windowing manager expected that sort of thing and terrible otherwise.
Ufraw integration seems an awful way of getting to edit raw files and I go years at a time without being able to get it working on a Mac.
But it's still my first choice.
[+] [-] IshKebab|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prokoudine|5 years ago|reply
No multiple windows, darktable or RawTherapee rather than UFRaw etc.
[+] [-] dvirsky|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wslack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anewguy9000|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keyle|5 years ago|reply
I hate Photoshop, I use it very often. It's bloated since before CS1, it's annoying to use, it's DRM rooted with a service running 24/7 on my machine, and it's also very costly.
Sadly, there is literally no option nearly as good. Adobe got me by the balls.
[+] [-] egonschiele|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warent|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] distances|5 years ago|reply
I'm a developer and my editing needs are very modest. GIMP just feels like the right tool. I've heard lots of praise for Krita too though, should try that out too.
[+] [-] ogre_codes|5 years ago|reply
One of my all time favorite pieces of Open Source Software. I used GIMP for years as my goto photo editor before migrating to the Mac.
[+] [-] Lipsey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghoomketu|5 years ago|reply
Wasted few hoours, still didn't work, so started looking for alternative solutions. Finally found a tool called shuttr which has an in-built image editor which finally does the job that I want including surprisingly most of my other image editing requirements.
I think my fault is when I was using Windows I used Photoshop for everything so I assumed Gimp is the linux version for Photoshop.
[+] [-] ddeck|5 years ago|reply
I find Pinta useful for those sorts of tasks. It's open source and supports most platforms.
https://www.pinta-project.com/
[+] [-] interfixus|5 years ago|reply
Yes, GIMP is clunky, and the gradual unclunking mostly seems to happen in geological timeframes, and there's the CMYK problem and the occasional trick which PS does better or smoother. So what? It has gotten the job done. Every time. Thousands of times over nearly 23 years. I raise my virtual paperhat to these dogged, reliable, persistent people. A birthday present will be forthcoming.
[+] [-] prokoudine|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pengaru|5 years ago|reply
Otherwise I'm generally very frustrated every time I try use it. It wasn't that way in my teens, back then I would happily spend entire evenings noodling around in it making graphics for web pages and demos/games.
Nowadays just throwing text on a layer makes me want to throw my laptop. That custom widget is so useless, maybe I should try a newer version as I'm still on 2.8 here.
[+] [-] kradeelav|5 years ago|reply
Kudos to the software for sticking around, and the team for enabling it.
[+] [-] mushbino|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfranz|5 years ago|reply
I don't believe Photopea https://www.photopea.com/ is Open Source, but it's a free web-implementation of Photoshop.
Photoshop, itself, is rather general purpose, but if you have a more specific need (like digital painting or photo management and retouching) there are other tools better than Photoshop out there.
[+] [-] lionkor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kody|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prokoudine|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] earthboundkid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dau|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awiesenhofer|5 years ago|reply
* Krita (OSS) https://krita.org
* Pinta (OSS, Paint.NET Clone) https://www.pinta-project.com
* Paint.NET (Freeware) https://www.getpaint.net
* Paintshop Pro 4.14 (Last Freeware Version) https://www.pagetutor.com/downloads/psp412.html
* Affinity Photo https://affinity.serif.com
Also https://www.photopea.com and https://pixlr.com in the browser
[+] [-] heavyset_go|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blt|5 years ago|reply
Photoshop had adjustment layers in 1996.