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The UI is absolutely horrendous and despite decades of opportunity to fix it, there’s been zero attempt. Blender has made some big UI gains. I used it a long t
by grapeskin 4y ago
The UI is absolutely horrendous and despite decades of opportunity to fix it, there’s been zero attempt.
Blender has made some big UI gains. I used it a long time ago, and the hidden menus and backwards control scheme made it unusable for anyone with basic computing knowledge (right click was select? Insanity) and doubly so for anyone with 3D knowledge. They revamped it a few years back and it’s usable now. I went from a blender hater to happily dropping paid 3D software and preaching about how good blender is.
Companies could throw money at gimp. But that doesn’t mean it’ll ever have a control scheme that’s usable to the 99.9% of people with prior digital art experience who go in expecting something similar to 99.999% of other software, only to find it’s completely backwards.
Literally just putting aside all other development plans and going all in for a year on making the UI usable would launch the project to success.
And comments like this always get a “well, it’s open source so you could fix it yourself if it’s that bad!” I could and so could others. But there’s usable software out there, and instead of dedicating loads of time to trying to fix a decades-old mess, we’d all rather just use a better product even if it costs money and get to work, or make something different from the ground up.
- unknownaccount 4y agoI believe it is intentionally gimped because they are not allowed to make the UX too close to Photoshop(which, unfortunately happens to have the most intuitive / comfortable interface for photo editing) or else they would be sued by Adobe. Blame the horrendous interface on Adobe and their aggressive enforcement of software patents.
- Ygg2 4y agoBut what about other editors with similar UX? Do Krita/PaintShopPro ever got hit by spurious patent claim?
- omnimus 4y agoNonsense. You can 100% copy ux of a product. There are many mac apps that closely replicate Photoshop (affinity, pixelmator, acorn)and none of them were sued by Adobe. Also i think Photoshop is intuitive mainly because everybody is so used to it. Gimp just has very bad ux because they cant colectivelly agree and unify the ux. If the ux was very different but very good it might be even advantage but now its lot worse PS.
- egypturnash 4y agoFlash 4 had a very nice interface full of palettes. Flash 5 dropped them all in favor of a "smart" inspector that never showed me what I wanted to see without a couple of extra clicks and a half-second wait. This was about half of why I dropped out of the animation industry, it was a complete flow-killer. This happened because Adobe sued Macromedia over palettes. Annoyingly enough, the interface has not substantially changed in the intervening years despite Adobe eating MM.
- hiccuphippo 4y agoAs an occasional user of Gimp, Photoshop's ux is anything but intuitive. The same for Krita. I guess they are only intuitive if you use a graphics tablet?
- tredre3 4y ago> Companies could throw money at gimp. But that doesn’t mean it’ll ever have a control scheme that’s usable to the 99.9% of people with prior digital art experience who go in expecting something similar to 99.999% of other software, only to find it’s completely backwards. For what it's worth, GIMP does indeed have about a million dollars sitting in their donation account. So money isn't their issue, project management is.
- prokoudine 4y ago> The UI is absolutely horrendous and despite decades of opportunity to fix it, there’s been zero attempt. I'm afraid you are dismissing quite a lot of work to improve the UX/UI. Could more be done? Absolutely! Was there zero attempt? Not really, no.
- grapeskin 4y agoHonestly, if there have been decades of efforts and it’s still this bad, that’s even less motivation to give them money. It’s like: if you’re a large manufacturer, would you prefer investing in a city where government officials pocket the cash and roads don’t exist but with handwavy excuses that something might improve with a little more cash, or invest literally anywhere else where the roads improve every year and things are getting cleaner? Gimp seems to be spinning its tires for infinity. I’ve tried it once a year or so for 15 years. It hasn’t changed much. It’s incredible. Almost no company is going to throw them cash and it’s obvious why.
- prmoustache 4y agoI am pretty sure they would welcome your pull request.
- grapeskin 4y agoMentioned that in my first comment. There’s perfectly good software out there. I’d rather get work done and use that, than spend forever trying to make sense of some mess of an ancient project’s code and trying to fix it. There are even free projects with usable UI that would be a better use of time if I were to want to contribute to something. Krita’s been mentioned here a few times and it seems to have a brighter future.
- Arisaka1 4y agoBeing able to open a PR and getting accepted to be merged are 2 totally different things. IMO, one of the core reasons why UI/UX in open source applications (that aren't backed or actively contributed by dedicated staff in big companies that keeps them on a salary for the sole purpose of contributing) is because it's more widely accepted for programmers to contribute to open source than UI/UX designers. In this case the best one can do is design mockups, but then who implements it? Who even has to be convinced that the mockup is a step forward or backwards, the moment every design decision is treated as having the same value as the next one, on the grounds of "it's just an opinion"? My point is, we don't lack programmers/developers we lack UI/UX people willing to contribute, and we also lack the former to actually listen to what they have these people to say instead of dismissing their suggestions as "not data driven enough", "too opinionated" etc.
- tpoacher 4y agoHow much of this is just personal opinion rather than just canon? I love the GIMP, use it all the time, find it super-intuitive, and last time I had to use Photoshop I felt like a fresh vim user who couldnt wait to figure out how to get the hell out of there.
- grapeskin 4y agoThe fact it’s been struggling to get widespread support for decades and there’s always someone complaining about the UI is a sign. Most people don’t even think about photoshop UI. Same with Microsoft paint: users can get in and start figuring out what they want to do just by clicking around.
- prokoudine 4y ago> The fact it’s been struggling to get widespread support for decades There's hundreds of thousands downloads every month. I'm sure you have better facts at your disposal and will share them easily.
- prmoustache 4y agoI think it does get widespread support.
- happymellon 4y agoIt's probably personal opinion. I'm not a photo editor, I have never used Photoshop so that has not introduced bias. But I have found Gimp to be wildly inconsistent in the UI. I never remember how to draw a circle, for example, when I just want to add something to a screenshot because you have to use the circle cut tool and then choose a different option which I never remember because it is unintuitive. Yet its easy to have a paintbrush that draws one of those texture patterns that I can't imagine anyone ever using. As such I then don't use it.
- Tijdreiziger 4y agoFor drawing shapes I tend to just use Inkscape.
- publicola1990 4y agoI'd say Photoshop UI is nothing exemplary. So why should Gimp not emulating it be a complain? Infact I find the MDI interface to be quite ergonomic.
- mort96 4y agoNobody complained that GIMP isn't emulating photoshop.