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- Hacker News
- Non-destructive filter layers caught my eye, and has been something I've missed since moving off Windows/Photoshop to Linux. Looking around it seems like they introduced this in V3, which is great to see.by dm319
- That is probably the V3 feature I'd notice most in daily use. Non-destructive editing makes experimentation much less costly; without it, every “maybe this looks better” becomes another layer or file copy.by maya335
- Haven't those existed in Krita forever?by Balinares
- GIMP is excellent software. I've been using it at least every couple of days for 20+ years, and it's never once crashed or given me any kind of reliability issue, has always done the trick, and has been extremely resistant to enshittification. It's a reliable workhorse I'd always trust to insert into a workflow.
Thanks to all the contributors.
by sho_hn - Zipped XML? Isn't that just OpenRaster? (which is already supported by GIMP anyway, but also supported by Krita and other image editors)by mimasama
- It's not that weird. Most of Office and Open office formats are just zipped folders of XMLs.
Better Zipped XML than whatever monstrosity Adobe files are. PDF/PSD... shudder.
by Ygg2 - > Krita and other image editors)
Krita is not an image editor but a digital painting program. GIMP is a much more complete image editor despite its quirks.
by Gualdrapo - We didn't go into it in the news post, but one of the big benefits of this new format is that we can sync GeglBuffers (how pixel data is stored) automatically between GIMP and the new file. So you'll get fast auto-saves as you edit, which we couldn't do with OpenRaster. Also, the OpenRaster standard doesn't support all the features of GIMP/Krita (like non-destructive filters for instance).
(Also, currently our OpenRaster support is a plug-in that calls our PNG plug-in to do the rendering, so we'd have to rewrite it to be a core process if we wanted to use it as our main project file).
by cmyk_student - Basically every complaint about GIMP is also valid for photoshop. People claiming PS is "intuitive" or "easy to use" literally just means they already know the keybindings/icons/quirks of photoshop specifically. It's okay! I have the exact same experience the other way around when I have to use photoshopby RugnirViking
- This isn't true. There have been plenty of other applications (Corel, Paint Shop Pro, Fireworks, Krita etc) with their own workflows and keybindings that weren't confusing for users.
GIMP's UX is just bad. I loathe photoshop and desperately want to like GIMP, but each time I make the attempt the friction is too much and the workflows nonsensical. I used it a few weeks ago to place two images side by side in a larger canvas. It took half an hour in this mental little app to figure out how. I haven't have any issues with Inkscape and even Darktable ended up making sense. This is squarely a Gimp thing. Paraphrasing Kat Williams, "If people are calling you a crackhead for 20 years, you're smoking crack."
by squidbeak - Is there any value in really learning gimp? As in, more than just rudimentary tasks you must do. Photoshop has the artistic aspect of doing interesting things in photography editing. I am wondering if gimp is "equally fun" here and it's just a different learning curve.by mancerayder
- Zipped xml i wouldn't tbh. Its just not a great random access container. Compressed xml in a sqlite? Sure.by time4tea
- Zipped XML
Preparation for the future XCF (24.09.2023)
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/work_items/10076
Someone proposed newer ser-/deserialization approaches, but this didn't result in a discussion.
by kvemkon - That someone is actually the maintainer of GIMP, and the person who is currently developing the new format (unless you mean one of the commenters, not the person who made the initial post).by cmyk_student
- I wish I could enjoy GIMP but that interface is not easy to use. Krita is so much more intuitive and feels like FOSS Photoshop with little to no friction.
- Autosave sounds nice, I’m excited to have that!
I appreciate the backwards compatibility they highlight in the article, and more generally the ownership oss gives you over your files. My small business uses gimp, canva, and Inkscape, and they all have their purpose, but one of the complaints we have with canva is that it’s really hard to get the original files backed up somewhere, aside from canva itself. You have to download each file individually , which is quite a pain (please correct me if there’s an easier way!). Gimps openness is an obvious path for oss, but really is a great feature. If the gimp team stops, we’ll still be able to edit our gimp files. If the canva team stops, we mostly lose all the canva stuff.
- I don't understand the frequent comparisons to Blender at all, to be honest.
I enjoy Blender, but it's a specialist application with a highly complex, mostly unintuitive user interface that requires training and has a steep learning curve.
When people start using Blender, they generally start with a written or video tutorial series and are prepared to put in hours to get productive.
I'm sure Blender's UI is fine for what it does, but it's certainly not any easier to use than e.g. LightWave/Modo/Cinema4D was, and arguably harder.
Are people really saying GIMP is somehow harder than that?
by sho_hn - Blender in the early days before the UI upgrade was like GIMP now: irrationally difficult to use.
Blender is still not beginner-friendly, but that's true of all 3D modeling software. There's a limit to how friendly you can make the UI without making it burdensome to accomplish things.
GIMP is just user-hostile, and deliberately so. GIMP's UI is not laid out logically, nor does its illogical UI make possible any additional functionality. The programming team has made such minimal effort to make the UI better that it's big news when they make even minor UI improvements.
by gamblor956 - >I don't understand the frequent comparisons to Blender at all, to be honest.
From the very beginning it was trying to be an alternative to Photoshop, you know a software used by the professional industry, and 30 years later we are not sure it's any closer to that.
Whereas Blender is not just an alternative to Maya, 3DS Max and all the other options but might even be the leading software in its domain
by haunter - You know what? The hate GIMP gets in the comments is entirely self-inflicted. Everyone praises Krita and Blender because their UIs are consistent and look good. GIMP, on the other hand, looks like a toddler worked on it: switches are huge compared to text, buttons and text have no padding and are squeezed together, and icons are oversized and scattered everywhere.
People might say, "You can just join the project and fix it yourself." But the team and community actively resist change and sabotage efforts to make GIMP more mainstream.
by lightwords - Finally, specific criticisms that aren’t “it’s not Photoshop!”by BeFlatXIII
- I honestly think a lot of the hate that GIMP gets is because as the first major FOSS image editor, people tried to use it for everything with a lot of square hole round peg situations.
In particular, it’s a photo editor at core. You can use it for postprocessing of other image types if you want, or for pasting together memes or whatever. But it’s not designed for e.g. doing illustrations or digital painting or sketches
This isn’t even unique to GIMP in that way. Photoshop is also a sub par art program (though admittedly they’re a little more flexible than GIMP). But if you wanted something better for than Photoshop and were ok with proprietary windows/mac software there’s clip studio paint and before that there was paint tool sai etc.
While until the rise of Krita being actually good (having tried it many times over the years prior, that’s some time around 2018) if you wanted Linux or just wanted FOSS, you had to use Gimp and that breed resentment at it being the wrong tool
by Macha - The attitude partly affects GNOME too, any time you'd constructively criticize it on places like their Issue tracker or r/gnome, their defenders would come with pitchforks at you. Glad I moved to KDE nearly a decade ago.by kushalpandya
- It could also be that the Gimp team and community wants their software a certain way, and I don't see why one should disrespect that?
Those who disagree are welcome to fork- and maintain it, if the users see value in it, they'll switch.
by TheChaplain - Between GIMP releases we saw entire graphics pipelines, conventions and workflows come and go. We had the Affinity suite, Canva, Paint.net, Clip Paint Studio, Sketch, various attempts from Adobe at expanding beyond the Photoshop ecosystem (Anyone remembers XD?), probably something else I’m missing right now. Now we’re in the age of Figma, with its own UI and quirks.
At this point it’s probably easier to accept that the GIMP UI is simply what GIMP developers want it to be.
True, it doesn’t make a lick of sense, but the same could be said about Turbotax, Jira, SAP… or God may have mercy on your soul, Avid Pro Tools.
It is what it is. It’s not like there are no alternatives anymore.
- From tfa
> A lot of new and existing contributors have submitted improvements to GIMP’s user interface and its user experience. We wanted to highlight their efforts, and encourage you all to continue sharing your feedback on our design issue tracker.
I see no active resistance. If you have feedback, maybe share it with them?
- We actually have a design site where we ask for user feedback and UX/UI improvement suggestions: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work_it...
I share this link a lot in the hopes that more people take us up on it, and provide specifics on where problem areas are for their workflow. So many people use GIMP in so many different ways, even something that seems "obviously bad" to one group might not be encountered by others.
by cmyk_student - I once tried to use GIMP and gave up after 2 hours and got the task done in figma in 10 minutes. GIMP is a UX atrocity. The interface is a cluttered mess of meaningless panels and buttons. Worst for me is i'd spend 15 mins googling/reading how to do something, look for the corresponding buttons for 10 minutes, be unable to find them, and later discover they were on a panel that wasn't enabled by default (I didn't even know you had to enable panels; i'd assumed everything that was available was there in front of me). On macOS some panels randomly disappear behind other programs.
It was like using a computer program in your dreams where things don't really have to make sense.
My theory is this is a classic OSS problem where everyone wants to contribute their pet feature but the project lacks discipline and nobody wants to remove, organise, and improve (especially where the latter can be 10x harder and more tedious then the former). This could be an argument for opinionated leaders in OSS projects, because at least they'll say 'no' and do things 'their' way a lot of the time, which is often better than the 'anything goes' philosophy.
by nomilk - I don't get everyone's complaints about the interface. I've been using it for years, once you learn where things are I can get what I need done. The learning curve (finding where functions are, the right tools for each job, etc.) wasn't much different from other software like Blender or Darktable (or even Davinci Resolve).
The panels concept might be the most intuitive part of it, but Blender also has different panels and modes. And the tools being combined into few buttons is similar to CAD programs I've used.
Anyone enlighten me on actual usability problems (and not pedantry like "the spacing of these buttons is uneven"?) Perhaps I've gotten used to using unintuitive software.
by Liftyee - >I don't get everyone's complaints about the interface. I've been using it for years
This made me chuckle.
by heaney-555