GIMP 2.99.14 Released As Another Step Toward GIMP 3.0

[Tawheed]

ONE question: do professionals uses gimp and what's the purpose of this program?

[prokoudine]

ONE question: do professionals uses gimp and what's the purpose of this program?

Yes, they do.

GIMP is an image editor.

[ClosedSource]

ONE question: do professionals uses gimp and what's the purpose of this program?

Gimp is used to edit raster images, design raster logos, or change colors of photos. It does an excellent job there.
However, there are cases though where things like gimp and Photoshop are not useful. You can make vector drawings with adobe illustrator or inkscape.

[kpedersen]

ONE question: do professionals uses gimp and what's the purpose of this program?

Gimp doesn't even need to really compete. We just need to wait for Photoshop to become unusable in the cloud like it rapidly is doing and Gimp will win by default.

The purpose of it is to pick up the slack from Photoshop as it disappears.

We are seeing similar happening with Blender vs Max and Maya.

[prokoudine]

The purpose of it is to pick up the slack from Photoshop as it disappears.

LOL, that was never the intention of the GIMP team

The idea is that users in the FOSS ecosystem deserve a sophisticated image editor that is good enough to do serious work in a professional and prosumer environment. So GIMP is trying to be that image editor. Take it from a former team member.

[linuxgeex]

GIMP 2.99.14 is out this weekend as the latest development release on the way toward the elusive GIMP 3.0...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GIMP-2.99.14-Released

Maybe they should give GIMP 3.0 the code name "Forever" in honour of another famously late piece of software...

DukeNukemForever.jpg

[ll1025]

The more inspecific comments people leave elsewhere (as opposed to specific reports in the bugtracker), the less fixes they will get. Up to you, I guess?

I've given projects like this (LibreOffice, actually but same core issue of bad UI) very specific details with a usability study to back it up, and got a "thanks so much for bringing this to our attention".

Guess how much difference it makes, how much of that feedback was acted on?

This tends to be a major weakspot in FOSS projects where people treat the UX / UI as an afterthought or respond to valid criticism with,

Maybe it is not so bad, maybe it just different from what you're used to.

No, it really is that bad if people who use it for a living find it "rough around the edges" and comment on how excited they are for standard features like CMYK, and others remark how they hate it but use it out of pure spite for Adobe.

The sheer arrogance that comes out of some of these projects in refusing to take UX seriously is a huge impairment to their viability. Paint.NET on Windows manages to be incredibly useful because it focused on having a reasonable interface, and that's a project of like one guy. Why can't the GIMP project make a release cycle about providing a new default interface that isn't horrendous?

[prokoudine]

I've given projects like this (LibreOffice, actually but same core issue of bad UI) very specific details with a usability study to back it up, and got a "thanks so much for bringing this to our attention".

So you lost your faith. There's not much I can do about that, sorry.

The sheer arrogance that comes out of some of these projects in refusing to take UX seriously is a huge impairment to their viability.

Although I've definitely seen this kind of attitude, I've also witnessed how a request for clarification end elaboration (e.g. "we are not familiar with how program X does it, please tell us more") is then twisted into "bad developers refused fixing UX" and spread across forums like a wildfire. So I don't feel comfortable discussing arbitrary projects and arbitrary requests without knowing the details, and since I don't have the time to dive into details and cases, there's not much point continuing with this line of conversation to me. I trust you to have had bad experience with one project or another, I don't feel like questioning it, but I'm also not going to pursue this further.

Why can't the GIMP project make a release cycle about providing a new default interface that isn't horrendous?

That's something I would definitely welcome. Personally, I fully support shorter release cycles with a focus on just one or two things. The problem with a UX-focused release is multi-fold.

On one level, you gotta have people experienced in UX/UI design involved. GIMP doesn't have anyone with that experience currently (there were some past activities of the kind before, various parts of UX/UI have improved thanks to that).

On another level, you need more people involved who can do the programming, because the maintenance load in the GIMP project keeps increasing: over 3700 bug reports and feature requests last time I checked, spread over just a few active contributors. That includes over 600 crash reports that are, like, an urgent thing to work on. You can see that for yourself: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/...%5D=1.%20Crash

I am not making any of this shit about too few developers up either. If you look at the sliding 12-months summary here - https://openhub.net/p/gimp/contributors/summary - you'll see one person in charge for 45% of commits to the source code, then two translators who are very active, then the next active developer is in charge for just 4% of all commits. The third actively involved person is a GSoC student this year who decided to stick with the project past the GSoC time and since then keeps doing great things. But that is not enough. The project needs a bigger team to both maintain and develop the program.

On yet another level, there's a kind of a social contract between the team and the community that v3.2 will be devoted to non-destructive editing. The lack of this feature is a deal breaker for many. It's one of those essential features in a professional environment. Postponing this for god knows how many more years will be heart-breaking and soul-crushing for everyone involved.

[Danielsan]

ONE question: do professionals uses gimp and what's the purpose of this program?

If you are a real professional you can work also with Gimp, which has and had features that are still missing on Fotosciop. However, when GEGL will be fully integrated, not only Fotosciop but the entire image retouching ecosystem will slowly decline, as we already seen with OBS, Darktable and Blender, it needs to reach the critical point and this time we are getting very closer...

[Danielsan]

This tends to be a major weakspot in FOSS projects where people treat the UX / UI as an afterthought or respond to valid criticism with...

People used to complain because their prior experience taht are mostly based on shared assumptions and wrong expectations. If you start using GIMP first you will find Fotosciop awkward as well. I use both and I personally find confusing the two of them, in terms of confused interface both are on the same level...

With 2.10 version, Gimp fixed the UI, they did a great job and by the way you could always arrange it the way you like; nowadays the bigger UX problem GIMP is facing is GTK3 which are designed to make Gnome 3 somewhat useful the way that RH employs like and from that we evinced that using software like Gimp is not their main activity, now we have ugly buttons and sliders, a lot of real estate pixel wasted for nothing... Blame the gnome team (which are 90% RH employs ) since they have been driving the last GTK3~4 development.

And by the way GIMP is not a commercial software so it doesn't need to please anyone, it is made by a bunch of few volunteers in their spare time, and if we measure money and time invested on both projects... Gimp is the only winner...