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GIMP Development Update
- socalgal2 1mo ago[flagged]
- muhehe 1mo agoWhat would you consider good modern design?
- supriyo-biswas 1mo agoSQLar[1], see [2] for some reasoning around why a database is preferred over zipped XML. Though, I'd be fine with a DBM-style database too as we only need the key-value part of it. [1] https://sqlite.org/sqlar/doc/trunk/README.md https://sqlite.org/sqlar/doc/trunk/README.md [2] https://www.sqlite.org/affcase1.html https://www.sqlite.org/affcase1.html
- chungy 1mo agothe SQLite archive format (it's probably worth linking to the main documentation[1], instead of the very old experimental repository) may not really be a good fit for something like GIMP's native file format. (To be clear, "SQLite archives" are not special compared to any other database: it's just a well-defined schema for an sqlar table, which the sqlite3 command line tool is able to create, update, and extract using syntax like the tar command.) That being said, SQLite would still be a good choice, especially as it's a format that's really intended to be modified in-place, and has good data integrity features (eg: keep WAL enabled so that mid-save crashes/shutdowns don't corrupt your file), neither of which are provided by Zip. You could even just run zlib on data (be it XML or what have you) if optimizing the on-disk size of the file is desirable. [1] https://sqlite.org/cli.html#sqlite_archive_support https://sqlite.org/cli.html#sqlite_archive_support
- happymellon 1mo agoIsn't the implementation the spec for SQLite? Not really a great option for an image format, where we therefore can't have multiple implementations. Unless I misremembered.
- SQLite 1mo agoSQLite file format spec: <https://sqlite.org/fileformat.html https://sqlite.org/fileformat.html>
- happymellon 1mo agoThank you for the prompt clarification!
- flohofwoe 1mo agoThe problem with using database blobs for load/save is that you usually need a full database client in the application. SQlite advertises that use case, but it is complete overkill. You never need to run any sort of complex SQL query on an image file format for instance. Using XML+ZIP in this day and age is also a strange decision, but at least that way the data is inspectable with unzip, a text editor and an image viewer (assuming they use a standard image format to store the raw pixel data).
- TeMPOraL 1mo ago> You never need to run any sort of complex SQL query on an image file format for instance. Sure you will. Plenty of features that don't exist, or are implemented badly, because you can't easily do it. Quick mental translation table: if you think "iterate over every ..." or a `for` loop, that's your SELECT query. If you think about `if` conditions, that's the parts that go after FROM clause.
- x3ro 1mo agoIn order to have any advantage from this, you would have the added complexity of splitting your file format into tables that can be queried in a useful manner. However, for an image file format, you most likely need to hold the entire definition in memory at all times anyway. Assuming that’s the case, doesn’t XPath get you there most of the way (assuming XML), with _way_ less complexity?
- TeMPOraL 1mo agoImage data is just binary blobs. You aren't splitting that into channel columns or anything. But an image file for an editor like Gimp isn't one image blob. It's dozens or hundreds of them - one or more per layer - along with tons of associated metadata at every level. All that tends to fit sensible schemas and managing it is what SQLite shines at.
- x3ro 1mo agoI don’t see how this addresses my point that zipped XML gives you the same thing, but simpler. I understand that a GIMP file is many images, so that makes a zip feel like a great fit to me. The only advantage I see for using a full-blown DB is ensuring consistency with references, which admittedly is a plus. But beyond that, what do you gain?
- speedgoose 1mo agoCompressed JSON with the binary content encoded in base64 strings, obviously.
- einpoklum 1mo agoWhy would zipped JSON be fundamentally superior to zipped XML?
- speedgoose 1mo agoTo answer seriously, my parent comment is a joke, JSON is a simpler format that maps better to most programming languages internal memory representations. Developers tend to prefer JSON’s simplicity over XML.
- berkes 1mo ago> most programming languages internal memory representations Often heard wrt JSON but incorrect. It maps to the primitive types in JavaScript. But almost all programming languages treat floats and integers different, make distinction between char and strings and many have some form of date/time. JSON has neither. In that direction, XML is much closer since every node is a triple (name, value, attributes) so can have type info, json is a tuple. And Protobuf, while not popular, gets this completely right.
- speedgoose 1mo agoI think it's too risky to treat numbers in JSON as something else than IEEE754 64bits floats. But yes, JSON is small and doesn't do datetimes, char, comments, and a million other things XML does. But you don't need to think much about memory representation when you parse a JSON, and the developer experience is a lot more pleasing than browsing a XML tree. That what used to matter.
- einpoklum 1mo agoIf this is intended for reading and writing by humans, then JSON doesn't cut it since you don't get comments (and perhaps also because of the weirdness of 64-bit floating-point values). Plus, XML is more "structurally nuanced". I suppose JSON is simpler to parse, but it's a trade-off of features, it's not like one is bad and the other is good.
- ACCount37 1mo agoLet's be honest, the real 1999 design would have been a custom binary format that happens to use the endian of the system it was developed on, and leaks bits and pieces of unflushed memory buffers whenever it writes to disk.
- flohofwoe 1mo agoNo that would be an early 1990s file format ;) 1999 is exactly right for the start of the XML hype, everything had to be XML, it would single handedly solve the software crisis (after OOP failed to do that) because everything would be able to talk to everything!
- anygivnthursday 1mo agoIndeed, early 00s was still the SOAP XML era if I remember right, WSD, SOA, ...
- reddalo 1mo agoSOAP XML is so uselessly convoluted. The whole Italian e-invoicing system is based on SOAP XML, and it's atrocious. They approved the specs in 2013, so it was already dated when it came out.
- stuaxo 1mo agoJar
- falcor84 1mo agoWell, they weren't quite wrong - it is an order of magnitude easier to reverse engineer an xml-based format than a binary one, especially now with LLMs.
- elric 1mo agoWelcome to 2026 unfounded hot takes. Or less snarky: what's your gripe with zipped XML? It compresses reasonably well, has a useful structure, and has decades of mature tooling around it.
- x3ro 1mo agoThanks! I had the exact same question for various of these posts here. I know these may be different groups of people, but I always see people advocating for simplicity, and zipped-XML is as simple as it gets, needs barely any extra dependencies (none in GIMP I assume), and is proven to work well (Word etc). I also don’t understand why SQLite would be preferable here, considering you will likely also store large binary files alongside your document definition.. What does a db engine give me here?
- OskarS 1mo agoThe obvious alternative is SQLite, and it has many advantages. If you want to do a "zipped list of files", SQLite does that just fine (that's what SQLar is), but it can do so much richer data. Even if you don't want that, it still offers resiliency that "zipped XML" can't match: if your software or computer crashes in the middle of saving your file, it'll almost certainly corrupt it. With SQLite, not an issue: all transactions are atomic, they either happen entirely or not at all. I don't know what "mature tooling" you're talking about for zipped XML, but I guarantee you it's not going to be better (or more mature) than SQLite and its ecosystem.
- hahahaa 1mo agoWhy XML bad?
- MrVandemar 1mo agoFundamentally, it's not. The problem was that people hyped it up as the solution for every problem and all the world's ills, so it wound up being used where it had no business being used (and therefore badly). XML was a hammer used to bang in a lot of things that weren't remotely nail-shaped, and accordingly, a certain percentage of traumatised people despise it and react to any mention of it with fear and loathing. It's kind of neat when you have an application for it that really leans into its strengths.
- TiredOfLife 1mo agoI thought every developer of this moved to the Glimpse fork
- herbst 1mo ago[flagged]
- clarionbell 1mo agohttps://itsfoss.com/news/glimpse-gimp-fork-archived/ https://itsfoss.com/news/glimpse-gimp-fork-archived/ Yep, it's dead.
- Lammy 1mo agoI don't want to revel in the fork's demise for any reason besides relief that it didn't end up splitting GIMP's contributors and community in a way that would have harmed both projects. > we could not find contributors willing to step up and help with non-code tasks like moderating communication channels Gotta say though it feels ironic that they couldn't find enough people to be comment janitors considering the whole thing was based on wanting people to stop saying a particular word. > As a result, we struggled to scale the project to match increasing demand. ‘Glimpse didn't fail; it was actually too popular’?
- ChocolateGod 1mo agoThat's the thing, they didn't take any GIMP contributors. Everyone that was behind Glimpse was third party to the GIMP project.
- pndy 1mo agoThis wasn't even a serious project but an example of malicious virtue signaling with a long-term plan for sort of hostile takeover. People involved just took the original code and replaced every GIMP occurrence with Glimpse, added new logo/icon and called job done. Then went to the news sites trying to raise awareness of the supposed name controversy hoping noise will discredit GIMP while they'll portrait themselves as the saviors. Because who'd want to contribute to a software that has such bad reputation. It's been over 24 years for me since I've used GIMP for the first time and the only problem that I had was always with GUI ergonomics. You had to understand everything anew after being more accustomed to proprietary software pieces. My friend never adapted to anything else but Photoshop - even Krita is beyond her abilities. Nearly every discussion regarding GIMP on hn will include thread about the name 'problem' and this is getting tiresome. The name won't change and those who feel offended should focus on problems whose solution is genuinely productive.
- spider-mario 1mo ago> For instance, we’re quite proud that a XCF file made by a small company for their logo in 1998 still renders the same way in the latest version of GIMP How do they pronounce “XCF” such that it’s “a XCF file” and not “an XCF file”? “Xeceff”?
- Choco31415 1mo agoThe beginning of “XCF” sounds similar to the beginning of “Exit”. With “a” vs “an”, the pronunciation is more important than the spelling.
- SwellJoe 1mo agoYou say "a exit"?
- kbelder 1mo agoThere are words that some British accents pronounce with an initial consonant while Americans it with a vowel sound, so accordingly Brits use the 'a' article while Americans use 'an'. A case where accent changes the grammar of a sentence. Similar to the name 'Herb' vs the vegetative 'herb'. A Herb vs an herb.
- SwellJoe 1mo agoSo you pronounce it "a hexit" with a hard "h"?
- spider-mario 1mo ago> With “a” vs “an”, the pronunciation is more important than the spelling. I know, hence my question about the pronunciation. If I had thought the spelling was more important, the “X” would have settled it so I wouldn’t have asked.
- ajcp 1mo agoI find some word processors don't test for vowel sound, and only adhere to the actual vowel letter.
- dm319 1mo agoNon-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.
- roschdal 1mo agoZipped XML sounds like a bad idea. It's slow and bad. I say XCF forever.
- EvanAnderson 1mo agoSQLite would have been a lot better choice, in my opinion.
- Arainach 1mo ago> It's slow and bad. Seems to have been working great for MS Office.
- dijit 1mo ago“Great”. No offence to anyone, but I would not consider the performance of MS office to be great. I guess it's comparative, but then I compare to its previous editions which used a sliver of the resources to accomplish 95% of what modern o365 does.
- Ygg2 1mo agoOffice documents since the 2007 have used a zipped XML approach. Just take an .docx and open it in 7zip. EDIT: Narrowed the date.
- dijit 1mo agoI’m aware. IIRC this was a response to Microsoft being forced to use some “open” protocol or something.
- mdp2021 1mo ago> previous editions... used a sliver of the resources Well of course, but given that the previously employed technique was blitting, fliedumping memory areas, you can't be more efficient than that. Using XML is for transparency (readability). (And, note, in context, I regard the ms office file format as lousy. The OpenOffice/LibreOffice format is good.)
- mimasama 1mo agoZipped XML? Isn't that just OpenRaster? (which is already supported by GIMP anyway, but also supported by Krita and other image editors)
- Ygg2 1mo agoIt'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.
- herrherrmann 1mo agoYep, even music software like Ableton Live is using zipped XML for the project files (although the much bigger audio files are stored independently in sub-folders). There were even efforts to use the XML format to manage Ableton project files with git in order to have a nicer change history (https://github.com/clintburgos/ableton-git https://github.com/clintburgos/ableton-git).
- Ygg2 1mo agoI mean, zipping files in an archive and presenting them as a file is an ancient tradition in video games. For example Warcraft 3 used the MoPaQ archive to store data in .w3x file. And Starcraft 2 data is just bunch of XML files.
- herrherrmann 1mo agoCool, I didn’t know that! But makes a lot of sense.
- TeMPOraL 1mo agoExcept MoPaQ weren't zips IIRC, they had their own clever format here - at least the OG StarCraft / SCBW MoPaQs were, playing with that is what I learned binary data handling on :). The idea of zipping data files applies, of course (and many a game used a literal ZIP with custom extension). But there's one material difference between StarCraft/Warcraft and Gimp: in Blizzard games, those were "zips" of heavy data files, notably read only data blobs. The game would read them, unpack in memory, and serve appropriately. Most of that data was key-value, text resources, or flat assets - images, sfx. With Gimp, we're talking highly structured data that's continuously being mutated. Very much not the best representation for that, even if you're just persisting it. They're only getting away with this because of SSDs - on spinning rust, you'd feel this. (Also worth noting that, at least in StarCraft/SCBW, most of the files inside were custom, well-optimized binary formats. This predated the XML insanity of encoding data with 90%+ markup overhead.)
- bulgur999 1mo agoAs usual, whenever GIMP is involved, all we get are negative, often unfounded comments about an excellent piece of free software that is massively used and developed with very limited resources, doing its job really well. There’s something so pleasant about having GIMP around, efficient and so far removed from the disgusting greed that drives so many of the projects featured here.
- lukan 1mo agoDo you have your special dark mode glasses on? Because I fail to see all the comments here as negative and unfounded. (and my guess why there is often negativity towards GIMP, is because it was too often advertised as a adequate Photoshop replacement, which it is not, so people got disappointed with it)
- herrherrmann 1mo ago… and the sizes of their updates are usually impressive! Seems to be a big project that is managed well to keep a good pace and keep the community in the loop. (Although I don’t know much about their inner workings.)
- unpopularopp 1mo agoI’m going to take the bait: I know a lot of people don't like that but sometimes I feel that FOSS projects are intentionally sabotaging themselves by ignoring industry standard options/conventions and instead they are following open source ideas just to be different. GIMP is the perfect example of that and generally speaking UI/UX is the main symptom. Blender was able to move forward by not listening to the FOSS crowd but to the industry. And see where are they now compared to GIMP.
- ChrisGreenHeur 1mo agoimportant here to remember that Blender was created within the industry as a commercial tool. When open sourced the leader of the project remained and knew quite well what separated a good creative tool from a bad one. It was always situated in a position where the core users were either hobbyists or professionals. Gimp was never in such a situation. Culture is important.
- mattkevan 1mo ago[flagged]
- actionfromafar 1mo agoCould you be very specific about what's sloppy? It would be very interesting to hear. I think I'm too numb from years of exposure.
- dsego 1mo agoJust look at the spacing and button layout, nothing is aligned, buttons are touching, the plus button is wider than the minus button, sizing is all over the place.
- voidUpdate 1mo ago> "Nothing is aligned" The first two items in each row are aligned, and each item is aligned to one of two columns > "Buttons are touching" The only buttons that are touching are the + and - buttons which are part of the number input, as they are one connected part, and the units dropdown which is also part of the number selection in one item
- crote 1mo agoLooking at the toolbar: - The icon theming is inconsistent. There's a group of black-and-white icons, a group of blue icons, and a group of colored icons. They are jumbled together and don't seem to indicate any kind of function. - Tools are not functionally grouped in way which (to me) makes sense. Why is there no separation between "Select", "Adjust", and "Create" tools? Why is the color pipette not part of the color select thingy? Tool options: - Why does the Font selector have its label on top and to the right, rather than to the left? - Why is there no spacing between the "+" of Size and the unit dropdown, like with the labels and the text selector right above? - Why are window openers in the middle of text properties? - Why do some options randomly have bold labels? - Why are Hinting/Color/Style more to the right than the Justify options? - Why does Color have a weird not-quite-rectangle with grey gaps, rather than reusing the design of the color selector in the toolbox? - Why are there radio buttons for Justify, but dropdowns for Hinting, Style, and Box - despite them all having about the same number of options? - Why do the options below Justify have icons rather than labels? Why is the first one using a different look and not visually centered with the other two? - Why is the label for "Language" above the input field, rather than to the left of it? Edit dialog on the screen: - Why is the spacing between "backspace" and "bold" different from that between "bold"/"italic"/"underline"/"strikethrough"? - Why is the spacing different from that between the font name and size? - Why is there no spacing between font size and unit? Or, if they are a connected control, why are they not properly connected like -/+? - Why is "reset to initial"(?) not a proper button? - Why is the text size number field a different length than the other two? Do we expect people to enter 5-digit font sizes? - Why does the gap to the right of "strikethrough" not match with anything? So yes, I would say it is indeed a bit sloppy. There's probably another discussion to be had about its higher-level UX design, but (as a backend designer) this is the kind of stuff a backend developer ends up creating as a quick-and-dirty proof-of-concept before any of the front-end designers get involved. It is functional, but definitely not enough effort went into making it good.
- AltruisticGapHN 1mo ago[flagged]
- lightwords 1mo agoYou 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.
- nomilk 1mo agoI 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.
- consumer451 1mo agoFriendly reminder to everyone that https://photopea.com https://photopea.com exists. If you are used to Photoshop, then the UI will be quite familiar. I only need to do somewhat basic stuff these days, so photopea.com is more than enough for me. However, now that I look it has tons of new features. Nothing to install, is ad-sponsored by default, and runs entirely client-side. IIRC, this is a lone developer, who has previously refused what seemed like lucrative catch & kill acquisition offers. Here is a post with lots of info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33334521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33334521
- dvh 1mo agoI just installed Ubuntu 26.04 and it's gimp starts for 14 seconds.
- lopis 1mo agoIs the Ubuntu version of GIMP distributed as a snap package? I've had horrible performance with snap apps.
- Joeboy 1mo agoAfter the first run (where it has to evaluate plugins etc) it starts in under 4s on 26.04 on my Lenovo P53 (laptop from 2019). Which is admittedly not exactly snappy, but it's OK IMO.
- dvh 1mo agoThis was my third run.
- kvemkon 1mo agoZipped XML Preparation for the future XCF (24.09.2023) https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/work_items/10076 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/work_items/10076 Someone proposed newer ser-/deserialization approaches, but this didn't result in a discussion.
- cmyk_student 1mo agoThat 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).
- kvemkon 1mo agoI mean the one of the commenters, since the maintainer asked for comments.
- amelius 1mo agoThey should make it easy to install and use GenAI plugins (without messing with GPU drivers, etc.)
- pinkmuffinere 1mo agoAutosave 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.
- Liftyee 1mo agoI 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.
- barrkel 1mo agoExport and Save As should be the same menu item with an option in the dialog. There are many many more but start with the app having the overbearing assumption that it thinks you want save to its file format rather than make an ad hoc edit.
- flufluflufluffy 1mo agoThat “overbearing assumption” is made by practically every other X-media editing app, for good reason — you can save your work and continue/revert stuff later. If all you’ve ever used is MS paint then I guess it’s an unexpected thing, but any other image/video editing app, digital audio workstation, 3D modeling software, etc… work exactly the same way. It would be unexpected to me if “save as” exported a flat file.
- account42 1mo agoGimp doesn't save undo history in the XCF.
- barrkel 1mo agoI guess the idea is you can do edits via non-destructive layer effects and compositing a stack of layers, where somewhere amongst the stack is your original unmolested data. Though that has not been my experience with Gimp - it's far more likely to want to to commit to a rasterizing decision far earlier than Photoshop would.
- bobspoogeragi 1mo ago[dead]
- time4tea 1mo agoZipped xml i wouldn't tbh. Its just not a great random access container. Compressed xml in a sqlite? Sure.
- RugnirViking 1mo agoBasically 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 photoshop
- squidbeak 1mo agoThis 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."
- HugoTea 1mo agoIt's lovely to see such a positive changelog combining the efforts of multiple foss developers, some of which are brand new contributors fixing bugs. Especially in this dark age of opensource closing contributions to defend against endless AI slop committers.
- PunchyHamster 1mo ago> The new project file format will follow a more common “zipped XML” structure. While the technical details are still being designed and implemented, this change will allow for faster saving since we’ll only need to update parts of the file instead of the whole thing each time. How even you do that without file fragmentation, zip doesn't exactly have defragment without complete file rewrite. Feels like if they want to have incremental changes SQLite would be better option as you can just VACUUM while file is not being accessed
- account42 1mo agoYeah I'd also be worried about leaving invisible data in the file that the user has removed from the project.
- cmyk_student 1mo agoWe didn't go into this in the news post since it was a quick overview, but GIMP uses GEGL for its main color and pixel engine. GEGL has a feature where you can automatically sync data between "buffers" in memory and in file - so as you're editing the image/layer/etc in GIMP, the buffers in the new format will automatically auto-save the data from the canvas. It's still in-progress, so we'll have more technical details in the 3.3.2 release news.
- sho_hn 1mo agoGIMP 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.
- sho_hn 1mo agoI 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?
- haunter 1mo ago>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
- whywhywhywhy 1mo agoNow imagine the world if the GIMP team had the epiphany the Blender team had a few years ago
- pavel_lishin 1mo agoWhat was their epiphany?
- ProfessorLayton 1mo agoOlder Blender versions had terrible UX like Gimp does now, their epiphany was realizing that they should fix it.
- gamblor956 1mo agoBlender 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.
- VCFundedGenYer 1mo agoI 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.
- mancerayder 1mo agoIs 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.
- coumbaya 1mo agoAdding to the mass of one off experiences, last week I had to modify a plan with basic stuffs: colored rectangles, dashed lines and text, at various angles. Tried gimp for the 4th time in my life (most of my life I've been using cracked Paint Shop Pro or Paint.net). Could absolutely bot figure out anything about the UI, littérally nothing about the UI follow standards or is intuitive. Tried Pintea, I found almost everything I needed instantly, the only think I couldn't figure out was how to rotate text, except by rotating the whole layer, which worked.