7 ms·

Can you go into more detail? I often wonder what issues people have with GIMP's UI.

by asdfs 13y ago

knieveltech 13y ago
It's fucking hard to use. What are you fishing for here?
- mintplant 13y ago
  Specific criticisms, perhaps? I, for one, prefer GIMP's user interface, and find Photoshop's unintuitive and difficult to use.
  - kamesh419 13y ago
    I for one coming from Microsoft based tools, could not figure out how to draw a straight line in GIMP without some googling. I bet it would have been easier in Photoshop. Even now, it is so unintuitive to make small edits for novice users in GIMP.
  - Angostura 13y ago
    ... and your specific criticisms of Photoshop are...?
e12e 13y ago
It's gotten better, but is still less consistent than Photoshop. Also, it suffers from being "not Photoshop" -- to the extent that there've been various(?) projects in changing the UI to mimic Photoshop (eg: gimpshop). Personally I've grown more accustomed to Gimp (and the UI has improved) -- but I still find Photoshop to be a better experience. But the difference is more subtle than it used to be.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  > It's gotten better, but is still less consistent than Photoshop. And that says a lot. Photoshop has a pretty clumsy UI. But it's serviceable and it's well known, so it's passable. GIMP, somehow, manages to be even worse. That's the downside of having a graphics tool designed by systems engineers.
  - e12e 13y ago
    Then again, Photoshop has also gotten better over the years.
mynegation 13y ago
For me it was mainly about multiple windows that I never could find fast enough when I needed them
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  You can change that now. Gimp supports a single window mode, it's a lot nicer.
- Wohui 13y ago
  It must have been Gimp that made multi-window interfaces repellant to me for years after.
angersock 13y ago
Things that are obnoxious about the gimp: --Working with transparent layers and channels (compared with PS) is clunky. --Too much duplication of buttons and window tabs; there are like four ways of exiting the program from the same place (window toolbar, tool pallette toolbar, WM exit, right-click tool panel, etc.) --Weird script/filter difference (why are there both? why do some destroy undo history and others not?) --No great selection tools (color matching, fuzzy matching, etc. compared to PS). --Really really obnoxious "Save as..." which directs you to export for using non-xcf files (and it'll even chide you about that, when it's obvious what you want to do). --Thousands of other miscellaneous gripes and grumbles.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  Background: I'm a long time GIMP user. I've tried Photoshop in the past and hated it's way of doing things too - Corel Draw seemed to make most sense to me. Anyway the new pedantic approach to saving/exporting seems to be pretty unfriendly - like you say it chides you, you go to save and GIMP says "n-uh, you can only save in XCF; what you want is to 'export' to a new format". Argh! Whilst it's correct that you're exporting, there's no need for the duplication between save/export other than to indicate to the user that some formats will lose information.
  - angersock 13y ago
    Yep. It's one thing to simply have a "Save as..." dialog that only lists .xcf--then I have to figure out to use export instead and all is well. But, to have that dialog box somehow actually say "Aha, we knew you were looking for those other formats, go here instead!" pretty much shows that the developers know what the user wants to do and are maliciously putting a roadblock in their way. It's smug and overbearing and quite annoying.
scriptproof 13y ago
We should build a list of all the Gimp drawbacks somewhere. I would add for example: why several steps are involved to create a new image with a transparent background? I always create new images like that.
- morsch 13y ago
  http://imgur.com/BwoFwdZ http://imgur.com/BwoFwdZ
  - dfc 13y ago
    I can not believe how complicated that was.
redditivist 13y ago
One extremist person's view that Gimp should not support MDI (mulitple document interface) persisted for 15 years, then they relented and added MDI, after the person who was against MDI violently criticized Gimpshop (I think the homepage for gimpshop has been hijacked, don't use it). That person got others to start a lengthy and patronizing "UI ideas process" that was a smokescreen for going back on the MDI idea - when in reality the problem was the code to allow the UIs to dock properly - and to this day when I use GIMP the way they dock and tab the UIs goes against any learning model in my mind, and takes me forever to realize that what I am trying to find it hidden away somewhere. There's no good model to the UI (and the problem isn't even a difficult one) because it's trying to straddle one person's personal ideas with a common and clear mental model of how certain actions should be grouped.
ANTSANTS 13y ago
After expanding an image (as in, adding blank space on the borders), you have to manually expand every layer to fit the image, or you won't be able to draw anything in the new area. Deferring layer resize until you draw on the resized layer might have been an acceptable micro-optimization. Making me resize the layers myself is just stupid. Your editor has a problem when it's faster to copy the whole image into a new, larger image than it is to just use the provided resize command. (angry swears omitted here, because I'm not sure what exactly HN will autokill) Instead of following the image editor standard of having a selection edit tool and an "edit the pixels selected tool," you have separate tools for scaling a region, moving a region, and so on. A fairly intuitive operation in Photoshop or Paint.NET (drag the corners of a bounding box, switch to the other mode, drag the corners to scale or move the box to move, etc) requires switching between several tools in a way that I have never been able to understand. Suffers from what I call "emacs syndrome" -- wasting valuable hotkeys on things that no one ever uses. See E, one of the easiest keys to hit with your left hand, which is bound to... select ellipse. Clearly we select ellipses more than we erase, which is bound to Shift-E... I've used it for a few personal projects out of curiosity, and I still don't understand how you're supposed to do basic things like make a color palette with it. Googling "how to do X with GIMP" always makes me laugh: How do I place two images side by side? "Make a big image, paste the two images into different layers, position them yourself, and crop" is the only answer. Clearly that's what people were looking for. I don't understand how it's possible to create such a stupid program. I've barely used it, but every time I do, I encounter new sources of frustration. I have literally never had a positive moment with this program. It's like the developers have never actually used it to draw something or edit a photo. Open source devs sometimes get flack for copying popular closed source programs. I wish the GIMP devs had just blatantly copied Photoshop every step of the way. They're just wasting their time now. No one cares about technical improvements to an editor that you can't even use.
- byuu 13y ago
  > It's like the developers have never actually used it to draw something or edit a photo. That seems like an unfortunately common trend. If you ever try any of the hex editors on Linux (ghex, Bless, etc), it's very evident that they were written by people who have no experience actually using hex editors. It's as if they saw a missing tool on Linux, and decided to make it, despite having no personal experience or desire for said tool. It's just a checkbox to tick off.
zb 13y ago
I recently had to use GIMP on a Mac, and as of 2013 it remains completely unusable. Every action requires 15 clicks because the input focus is always in the wrong place. To make matters worse, there's no visual indication at all of where the input focus is, so you have to guess both where it is and where it wants it. I know a lot of this is down to a combination of cross-platform issues and GIMP's daft window model, but some of it applies even within a single window. There's no visual difference between "nothing selected" and "everything selected" - both show a marquee border. There's not even akeyboard shortcut to drop a selection (Select -> None) afaict. When you paste something, it appears in a separate "layer" - even if you're in quick mask mode. Want to move that thing you just pasted? Nope! You have to select the layer move tool first. Oh ho! But now your focus is in the wrong window. Not that you can see that. It's unutterably painful. The complaints about lack of features (adjustment layers in PhotoShop are great, and I really miss the Extract filter) are valid, but I used PhotoShop 2.5 and even though the UI was too complicated even back then, it was at least one order of magnitude easier to use than GIMP is 20(!) years later.
- dfc 13y ago
  > There's not even akeyboard shortcut to drop a selection (Select -> None) afaict. Apple + shift + A
drvortex 13y ago
GIMP is not trying to emulate Photoshop. That is their problem. Really, they should ape every single one of Photoshop's functional features. Photoshop is the standard in the arts industry. Photoshop is also darn good at what it does, certainly no competitors even in the proprietary space. There were at one time: Corel Photopaint , and Paint Shop Pro and so on. Photoshop won that war for a reason. GIMP needs to be a FOSS Photoshop first. And if there are improvements they can include them. Like dumping GTK and using Qt, for instance.
- fzltrp 13y ago
  > Really, they should ape every single one of Photoshop's functional features. That's a very uncertain territory there. What sort of legal action could Adobe start if gimp started mimmicking their flagship product UI? And who would pay the legal fees to support Gimp? Would you participate? > Like dumping GTK and using Qt, for instance. You're saying that as if it were just a finger snap away. GTK and QT are quite different in spirit and implementation. Besides, before becoming the Gnome Toolkit, GTK was really the Gimp Toolkit. It seems very unlikely that they would dump it in favor of QT, which is used by a major competiting desktop environment.
  - mlinksva 13y ago
    > What sort of legal action could Adobe start if gimp started mimmicking their flagship product UI? Unlikely they'd start any: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_Int'l,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_In....

Can you go into more detail? I often wonder what issues people have with GIMP's UI.

by asdfs 13y ago

Can you go into more detail? I often wonder what issues people have with GIMP's UI.

knieveltech 13y ago

It's fucking hard to use. What are you fishing for here?

mintplant 13y ago
Specific criticisms, perhaps? I, for one, prefer GIMP's user interface, and find Photoshop's unintuitive and difficult to use.
- kamesh419 13y ago
  I for one coming from Microsoft based tools, could not figure out how to draw a straight line in GIMP without some googling. I bet it would have been easier in Photoshop. Even now, it is so unintuitive to make small edits for novice users in GIMP.
- Angostura 13y ago
  ... and your specific criticisms of Photoshop are...?

e12e 13y ago

It's gotten better, but is still less consistent than Photoshop. Also, it suffers from being "not Photoshop" -- to the extent that there've been various(?) projects in changing the UI to mimic Photoshop (eg: gimpshop). Personally I've grown more accustomed to Gimp (and the UI has improved) -- but I still find Photoshop to be a better experience. But the difference is more subtle than it used to be.

InclinedPlane 13y ago
> It's gotten better, but is still less consistent than Photoshop. And that says a lot. Photoshop has a pretty clumsy UI. But it's serviceable and it's well known, so it's passable. GIMP, somehow, manages to be even worse. That's the downside of having a graphics tool designed by systems engineers.
- e12e 13y ago
  Then again, Photoshop has also gotten better over the years.

mynegation 13y ago

For me it was mainly about multiple windows that I never could find fast enough when I needed them

dkuntz2 13y ago
You can change that now. Gimp supports a single window mode, it's a lot nicer.
Wohui 13y ago
It must have been Gimp that made multi-window interfaces repellant to me for years after.

angersock 13y ago

Things that are obnoxious about the gimp: --Working with transparent layers and channels (compared with PS) is clunky. --Too much duplication of buttons and window tabs; there are like four ways of exiting the program from the same place (window toolbar, tool pallette toolbar, WM exit, right-click tool panel, etc.) --Weird script/filter difference (why are there both? why do some destroy undo history and others not?) --No great selection tools (color matching, fuzzy matching, etc. compared to PS). --Really really obnoxious "Save as..." which directs you to export for using non-xcf files (and it'll even chide you about that, when it's obvious what you want to do). --Thousands of other miscellaneous gripes and grumbles.

pbhjpbhj 13y ago
Background: I'm a long time GIMP user. I've tried Photoshop in the past and hated it's way of doing things too - Corel Draw seemed to make most sense to me. Anyway the new pedantic approach to saving/exporting seems to be pretty unfriendly - like you say it chides you, you go to save and GIMP says "n-uh, you can only save in XCF; what you want is to 'export' to a new format". Argh! Whilst it's correct that you're exporting, there's no need for the duplication between save/export other than to indicate to the user that some formats will lose information.
- angersock 13y ago
  Yep. It's one thing to simply have a "Save as..." dialog that only lists .xcf--then I have to figure out to use export instead and all is well. But, to have that dialog box somehow actually say "Aha, we knew you were looking for those other formats, go here instead!" pretty much shows that the developers know what the user wants to do and are maliciously putting a roadblock in their way. It's smug and overbearing and quite annoying.

scriptproof 13y ago

We should build a list of all the Gimp drawbacks somewhere. I would add for example: why several steps are involved to create a new image with a transparent background? I always create new images like that.

morsch 13y ago
http://imgur.com/BwoFwdZ http://imgur.com/BwoFwdZ
- dfc 13y ago
  I can not believe how complicated that was.

redditivist 13y ago

One extremist person's view that Gimp should not support MDI (mulitple document interface) persisted for 15 years, then they relented and added MDI, after the person who was against MDI violently criticized Gimpshop (I think the homepage for gimpshop has been hijacked, don't use it). That person got others to start a lengthy and patronizing "UI ideas process" that was a smokescreen for going back on the MDI idea - when in reality the problem was the code to allow the UIs to dock properly - and to this day when I use GIMP the way they dock and tab the UIs goes against any learning model in my mind, and takes me forever to realize that what I am trying to find it hidden away somewhere. There's no good model to the UI (and the problem isn't even a difficult one) because it's trying to straddle one person's personal ideas with a common and clear mental model of how certain actions should be grouped.

ANTSANTS 13y ago

After expanding an image (as in, adding blank space on the borders), you have to manually expand every layer to fit the image, or you won't be able to draw anything in the new area. Deferring layer resize until you draw on the resized layer might have been an acceptable micro-optimization. Making me resize the layers myself is just stupid. Your editor has a problem when it's faster to copy the whole image into a new, larger image than it is to just use the provided resize command. (angry swears omitted here, because I'm not sure what exactly HN will autokill) Instead of following the image editor standard of having a selection edit tool and an "edit the pixels selected tool," you have separate tools for scaling a region, moving a region, and so on. A fairly intuitive operation in Photoshop or Paint.NET (drag the corners of a bounding box, switch to the other mode, drag the corners to scale or move the box to move, etc) requires switching between several tools in a way that I have never been able to understand. Suffers from what I call "emacs syndrome" -- wasting valuable hotkeys on things that no one ever uses. See E, one of the easiest keys to hit with your left hand, which is bound to... select ellipse. Clearly we select ellipses more than we erase, which is bound to Shift-E... I've used it for a few personal projects out of curiosity, and I still don't understand how you're supposed to do basic things like make a color palette with it. Googling "how to do X with GIMP" always makes me laugh: How do I place two images side by side? "Make a big image, paste the two images into different layers, position them yourself, and crop" is the only answer. Clearly that's what people were looking for. I don't understand how it's possible to create such a stupid program. I've barely used it, but every time I do, I encounter new sources of frustration. I have literally never had a positive moment with this program. It's like the developers have never actually used it to draw something or edit a photo. Open source devs sometimes get flack for copying popular closed source programs. I wish the GIMP devs had just blatantly copied Photoshop every step of the way. They're just wasting their time now. No one cares about technical improvements to an editor that you can't even use.

byuu 13y ago
> It's like the developers have never actually used it to draw something or edit a photo. That seems like an unfortunately common trend. If you ever try any of the hex editors on Linux (ghex, Bless, etc), it's very evident that they were written by people who have no experience actually using hex editors. It's as if they saw a missing tool on Linux, and decided to make it, despite having no personal experience or desire for said tool. It's just a checkbox to tick off.

zb 13y ago

I recently had to use GIMP on a Mac, and as of 2013 it remains completely unusable. Every action requires 15 clicks because the input focus is always in the wrong place. To make matters worse, there's no visual indication at all of where the input focus is, so you have to guess both where it is and where it wants it. I know a lot of this is down to a combination of cross-platform issues and GIMP's daft window model, but some of it applies even within a single window. There's no visual difference between "nothing selected" and "everything selected" - both show a marquee border. There's not even akeyboard shortcut to drop a selection (Select -> None) afaict. When you paste something, it appears in a separate "layer" - even if you're in quick mask mode. Want to move that thing you just pasted? Nope! You have to select the layer move tool first. Oh ho! But now your focus is in the wrong window. Not that you can see that. It's unutterably painful. The complaints about lack of features (adjustment layers in PhotoShop are great, and I really miss the Extract filter) are valid, but I used PhotoShop 2.5 and even though the UI was too complicated even back then, it was at least one order of magnitude easier to use than GIMP is 20(!) years later.

dfc 13y ago
> There's not even akeyboard shortcut to drop a selection (Select -> None) afaict. Apple + shift + A

drvortex 13y ago

GIMP is not trying to emulate Photoshop. That is their problem. Really, they should ape every single one of Photoshop's functional features. Photoshop is the standard in the arts industry. Photoshop is also darn good at what it does, certainly no competitors even in the proprietary space. There were at one time: Corel Photopaint , and Paint Shop Pro and so on. Photoshop won that war for a reason. GIMP needs to be a FOSS Photoshop first. And if there are improvements they can include them. Like dumping GTK and using Qt, for instance.

fzltrp 13y ago
> Really, they should ape every single one of Photoshop's functional features. That's a very uncertain territory there. What sort of legal action could Adobe start if gimp started mimmicking their flagship product UI? And who would pay the legal fees to support Gimp? Would you participate? > Like dumping GTK and using Qt, for instance. You're saying that as if it were just a finger snap away. GTK and QT are quite different in spirit and implementation. Besides, before becoming the Gnome Toolkit, GTK was really the Gimp Toolkit. It seems very unlikely that they would dump it in favor of QT, which is used by a major competiting desktop environment.
- mlinksva 13y ago
  > What sort of legal action could Adobe start if gimp started mimmicking their flagship product UI? Unlikely they'd start any: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_Int'l,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_In....