GIMP 2.10 Released With A Ton Of Improvements

[ElectricPrism]

Some people are really dissappointed that the software they paid a fortune for (GIMP) is not up to bar......

This joke hilights an important fallacy: some people think money is the only resource of value.

Some people are time rich and cash poor, some people are cash rich and time poor.

If a person is time poor spending 1 - 4 days mucking around just to figure out how to do basic text transformations and configuring their expected shortcuts, figuring out how tools function & differ, etc... comes at a high time price.

Many would gladly give $100 for a tool on linux that is half as good as photoshop if not literally pay a monthly subscription fee to have photoshop or an equal. I have already purchased Pixeluvo for basic cropping and color editing.

GIMP is improving, I hope their newfound zeal carries them into 3.0 rather quickly (8 months - 1 year)

[Danielsan]

When I started to use Photoshop, at that time I hadn't heard about Linux yet, it was the fourth version. I am speaking about more than 20 years ago. And Photoshop 4 was quite crappy like Gimp 2.6, but I remember it was like the god of the photo retouching, the best of the best. At that time the computers were really expensive and a good monitor was even more expensive that the computer itself. By the way professionals were absolutely happy with Photoshop and their jobs were amazing like the ones of today.

When I work with Gimp (from 2.6 to 2.10) I don't feel uncomfortable maybe because, the current paradigms, even Photoshop 4 and 5 were crappy. I recognized that some features are pretty neat, especially non-destructive editing, but most of us can live without it, of course I would never get rid of this, but these commercial software aren't becoming more professional but are becoming more easier: targeting people with few or almost nothing experience. The latest version of Photoshop has like short tutorial for each command of the tools. I guess that Adobe is not doing this for me, neither for you. I work in this industries since almost 20 years and I hope to work for at least the same time, that means there are a lot of people that have been working for a lot of time without these super cool features and know how work without those. For that reason the only way to catch new prospects is converting these software in something that appears easier instead of professional.

From the Gnu side instead there is a lot power with few control. GEGL is a poweful framework but it will take still long time before it will transform GIMP in the software that the most would have. I don't consider GIMP a software lesser professional than Photoshop, even the lack of the CMYK is not eventually an essential feature if you can have color simulation on screen, since many years the trend is to leave other software the duty of converting in four colors. If you work on digital advertising you don't need to use cmyk either.

The combination of a bunch of GNU graphic applications together is portentous but is not easier to handle but yet professional indeed. What you can achieve when you combine Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus, Ghostscript, Imagemagick, Pdftk and many others smaller application is stunning and funny. Probably you must reach this peak to understand that you can do this job embracing the awesomeness of the FLOSS, if you consider this latter something worth to fight for. If you don't, then live happily forever with your favorite software but let be us today happy because Gimp have been released!

To close, my bold statement is the day that all the GNU graphic software will be powerful and polish like Blenders does all the commercial counter parts would decide to die or to be open source, they cannot escape from this destiny.

[finalzone]

And perhaps I am one of them. I tested GIMP 2.10 and discovered that it does still not support CR2 RAW files from my Cannon 550 DSLR which I purchased in 2011.

To complement dungeon's points, you can use Gimp support importing RAW files via Darktable as well as highlighted on the release note. Open Preferences - > Image Import/Export and look for Raw Image Importer .Hope it helps

[finalzone]

I don't consider GIMP a software lesser professional than Photoshop, even the lack of the CMYK is not eventually an essential feature if you can have color simulation on screen, since many years the trend is to leave other software the duty of converting in four colors. If you work on digital advertising you don't need to use cmyk either.

The highlights are some viewers failed to understand what is the difference CMYK, a subtractive colour scheme display notably on ink i.e organic substance from RGB, an additive colour scheme as seen on screen (light spectrum). For that reason, it is much easier to work primarily with RGB from which all screen are designed from then convert into CMYK for printing purpose then vice versa. Viewers need to deeply study theories of colours to fully grasp the subject

Note that it is possible to get CMYK ray depending the angle of light from the dispersion but that is another matter.

[clavko]

When I started my company, we were really short on cash, so we opted for a free options, using GIMP, Inkscape, Geany, awk, Imagemagick and the likes. Software inspectors were pissed, but we didn't have a single pirated piece of software

I can say that you can use GIMP for almost any graphical work, slicing, retouching, cropping, resizing, you name it. It is good enough, and it is great value for startups and even more serious companies. If you want to pay for hand holding software, I understand, and it's your money, but I'll tell you one thing... You could never compete on price with what we were able to offer using floss. It enabled me (and many more, I believe) to become highly paid professional, and I'm grateful for it.

[prokoudine]

And perhaps I am one of them. I tested GIMP 2.10 and discovered that it does still not support CR2 RAW files from my Cannon 550 DSLR which I purchased in 2011.

Well, I'm disappointed that you should have seen a suggestion to install darkrable or RawTherapee to be able to open it, and yet here you are.

[Sonadow]

I can say that you can use GIMP for almost any graphical work, slicing, retouching, cropping, resizing, you name it.

All of which can be done on MS Paint starting from the version bundled in Vista. And available right out of the box without needing to download additional software.

[randomizer]

It is disappointing that such important software is still stuck at GTK2!

GTK+ 3 (or possibly 4) is the primary roadmap "feature" for GIMP 3.0. That could still be years away though. Who knows?

All of which can be done on MS Paint starting from the version bundled in Vista. And available right out of the box without needing to download additional software.

I'd be interested to see the result of retouching with MS Paint. I think it would be infuriating to do anything remotely complex in an editor that immediately flattens the image to a single layer as soon as the selection is lost.

[plonoma]

Big complex software is often too awkward to upgrade things like UI toolkits if portability isn't thought about from an early point in the project. Anything Gtk+ or Gnome often have too many dependencies to be very portable and light anyway.

That said, important software such as Maya is still using an old version of Qt so it is quite common place to make sure you are using an operating system that has a good focus on backwards compatibility.

It's called win32

If you want an operating system that's focused on backwards compatibility then use ReactOS.

https://www.reactos.org/

It's still in alpha but testing is encouraged.

[cybertraveler]

When I started my company, we were really short on cash, so we opted for a free options, using GIMP, Inkscape, Geany, awk, Imagemagick and the likes. Software inspectors were pissed, but we didn't have a single pirated piece of software

"Software inspectors"? Did you actually have people come to your office to check licensing? Who were they? Government people? I haven't heard of this before.