I still regularly use GIMP. The interface is pants, yes, but it is slowly getting better. For image manipulation (like its acronymn says) for the web it works well. However mainly I use it because I'm slowly getting used to it. Even now after I paid for my own copy of Photoshop I still tend to fire up the GIMP (Photoshop really isn't that intuitive to learn either. Illustrator is worse.)

If they only fixed some of the more head-bang-on-desk details, like the bizarre suite of transformation tools and the inability to draw simple polygons without going through some byzantine combination of tools, then I'd raise my opinion of it even more.

Honestly though, while GIMP's interface is rather madly programmer centric, I find most premiere art programs to have fairly dense hard to understand intefaces. Adobe's suite seems designed for people who've use Adobe products for the last twenty years, and isn't newbie friendly at all. The only tools I find that are easy to pick up and use are those explicitly designed with simple interfaces, like ArtRage; and Inkscape (and Xara I guess, which I haven't used but Inkscape's UI copied notes from).

Quote: Original post by adam_o
GIMP on the Mac is lousy. It takes forever to load (even compared to Photoshop) and it has to go through X11, making it even worse.

For me it's not that bad. Both GIMP and Photoshop take a little while to load in their plugins, but they're around the same in terms of load time. I often have X11 already loaded though, as I use Inkscape a lot.

Quote: Original post by Trapper Zoid
(Photoshop really isn't that intuitive to learn either. Illustrator is worse.)

Agreed on both points. (Tip: The secret to Illustrator is the Pen tool. Until I figured that out, I was floundering aimlessly.)

Quote: Honestly though, while GIMP's interface is rather madly programmer centric, I find most premiere art programs to have fairly dense hard to understand intefaces. Adobe's suite seems designed for people who've use Adobe products for the last twenty years, and isn't newbie friendly at all. The only tools I find that are easy to pick up and use are those explicitly designed with simple interfaces, like ArtRage; and Inkscape (and Xara I guess, which I haven't used but Inkscape's UI copied notes from).

This is a good point, but it's also true of all software that possesses a large number of features. We've seen the beginners say they prefer Dev-C++ to Visual Studio. We're all familiar with people saying Word is "bloated." Maybe there needs to be a concerted push to provide tiered interfaces, revealing the more obscure (statistically) tools in increments from Novice (basic tools only) to Expert (all tools exposed)? As a side effect, doing this work might make it easier for people to create layouts that work very well for them, which they should be able to share online.

Of course, lots of software lets you customize the interface. This usually leads to increased productivity - until the user has to work on a foreign machine that isn't set up "just right." It's like there's no winning here! [smile]

(I know how they've treated you for being in Australia, but it's still a huge disappointment that you haven't been able to use Sketchbook Pro. It is by far the best pure drawing program UI I've ever encountered.)

GIMP's functionality is OK. But its interface shows the symptoms of a sad problem of Linux: it's hard to make a graphic-design program with a proper interface for Linux. GTK doesn't support docking windows inside another window, and that is essential for this kind of software. Qt will hopefully fix that, but to be honest Krita, a painting program for Qt, isn't exactly comparable to Photoshop either.

It's a shame that after all these years, the makers of GIMP still haven't heard the complaints about their usage of a different window for everything, covering it up with things like "we give "hints" to the desktop manager, if it doesn't handle our windows properly it's the desktop manager's fault, not us".

If Adobe would use that reasoning for Photoshop, it wouldn't sell well I think. It's the task of the makers of the program to make sure it works properly in the window manager, not vica versa :p

Lode:
gimp 2.6 has nicely dockable dialogs.

For UI, i really dont think it is much "worse" than photoshop's. One thing I'm always running into is that people always confuse usability and familiarity.
One of examples here:

Quote:
Eg, lets say you want to switch all reds to green, which makes more sense:
Image -> Adjustments -> Replace Color,
or
Colors -> Map -> Color Exchange?
I'd definitely say the former (I found it easily both ways...

how exactly is having "replace color" in 'Image->Adjustments' any more intuitive than in 'Colors->Map' ?
Former does not use descriptive naming at all. Former only could feel natural after you've been using it for a while.

Quote: Original post by Dmytry
Lode:
gimp 2.6 has nicely dockable dialogs.

I don't think those work in KE 3.5... but correct me if I'm wrong.

Under the menu "Windows" is a section "Dockable dialogs". For each one in the list I enable, I get a new window button in the taskbar of KDE. If I have my browser here to type this text, then click on the image I'm editing, then all dialogs (color dialog, layer dialog, ...) all still stay below my web browser. I have to click on each of them in the taskbar to open it.

I think this is the part where Gimp expects something from the desktop manager that far from all desktop managers support.

GTK really doesn't support dockable dialogs. I've even tried to use GTK myself to try to create a program with such dialogs, but had to give up. And WxWidgets, which can be used to create windows-inside-windows in Win32, creates those as tabs instead in GTK.

Quote: Original post by Oluseyi

That's a nice drawing.

EDIT: Fixed wrongness.

[Edited by - owl on March 15, 2009 11:18:04 AM]

Quote: Original post by Lode

Quote: Original post by Dmytry
Lode:
gimp 2.6 has nicely dockable dialogs.

I don't think those work in KE 3.5... but correct me if I'm wrong.

Under the menu "Windows" is a section "Dockable dialogs". For each one in the list I enable, I get a new window button in the taskbar of KDE. If I have my browser here to type this text, then click on the image I'm editing, then all dialogs (color dialog, layer dialog, ...) all still stay below my web browser. I have to click on each of them in the taskbar to open it.

Are you using gimp 2.4 by chance ?

Quote:

I think this is the part where Gimp expects something from the desktop manager that far from all desktop managers support.

Gimp's dockable dialogs certainly work here. and behaviour was same in KDE last time I checked.

Open the layers dialog, then drag the panel (thing below window title) onto the bottom of toolbox (see horizontal bar here? that's drop target. GTK applications generally do not have non-functional gui elements).
I actually like that more than "usual" docking where application tries to guess what you want to do and docks when you just drag a window over another window, but your mileage may vary.

Quote:


GTK really doesn't support dockable dialogs. I've even tried to use GTK myself to try to create a program with such dialogs, but had to give up. And WxWidgets, which can be used to create windows-inside-windows in Win32, creates those as tabs instead in GTK.

wxAUI (wxwidgets dockable dialog manager) works the same on GTK, win32, and OS X.

I was also turned off by Gimp's interface at first, namely:

1. Layer boundaries -- they've been nothing but a pain in the ass. No use to me at all thus far.

2. Floating selections & moving selected image data -- this actually seems to have gotten worse in recent versions. Just let me draw a selection and move what's inside! If anyone knows of an easier way to do this, let me know. I'm currently using version 2.4.2, and I find that what I have to do is a) draw my selection, b) hit Shift+Ctrl+L to float, c) drag. I was delighted to see that they've added a move tool, but it seems it can only move either an entire layer, or a selection (not image data that I've selected, mind you, but the selection itself, which is redundant because the selection tools already allow you to do that), or a path. There doesn't seem to be an option for moving the image data inside the selection, and so I have to manually float the selection first, and then move it.

3. Separate app dialogs for every window, whether its a parent window, a child window, a document window, or a tool window. The only exception seems to be for modal dialog boxes.

However, I decided to bite the bullet and just work with it for a week or so, and now I don't really notice these problems much anymore. Now, if you have a licensed copy of Photoshop (which I didn't), you may not have any reason or desire to do what I did, and

For me, GIMP falls between two stools.

If I want to do a reasonably simple edit, Paint.net is much easier to use. If I want to do something more complex, I'll just get photoshop and be done with it.

Quote: Original post by Lode
GIMP's functionality is OK. But its interface shows the symptoms of a sad problem of Linux: it's hard to make a graphic-design program with a proper interface for Linux. GTK doesn't support docking windows inside another window, and that is essential for this kind of software. Qt will hopefully fix that, but to be honest Krita, a painting program for Qt, isn't exactly comparable to Photoshop either.

It's a shame that after all these years, the makers of GIMP still haven't heard the complaints about their usage of a different window for everything, covering it up with things like "we give "hints" to the desktop manager, if it doesn't handle our windows properly it's the desktop manager's fault, not us".

If Adobe would use that reasoning for Photoshop, it wouldn't sell well I think. It's the task of the makers of the program to make sure it works properly in the window manager, not vica versa :p

The nice thing about it only giving hints to the window manager is that it actually works well if the window manager does its job and it keeps things consistent with other apps and lets me choose how things should work in a single place (The Window Manager).

For Windows there is no excuse though, there is only one Window Manager that is commonly used, it shouldn't be so damn hard to support it properly in a way that its users are comfortable with.