this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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Blender is fantastic
GIMP needs a total overhaul by designers. The image processing is fine, plugin ecosystem is good too, but the interface needs to be updated to include concepts that have changed.
For example you can’t add an outline around text, it’s very much a raster editor with layers, when most workflows benefit from vector concepts.
Isn't that what GIMP 3.0 is going for? It's not out yet, but it is a big overhaul.
I’m not sure, but that’s exciting if so
GIMP UI as is hasn’t changed much in 20 years.
I remember GIMPshop being a thing back in the day. It was much easier for me, but it was abandoned ages ago. PhotoGIMP is fine, but it's missing a lot of the QoL stuff that makes Photoshop better.
Yeah
And that’s not to say GIMP is bad software, it’s competing with a design app that’s almost a monopoly worth billions of dollars. That’s a high bar to beat for free.
Oh, no kidding! I have nothing but love for it. I'm just over here musing about it. The fact that it can do so much and get that close is damned amazing.
And their invented forced onto you file system 🤢you can't open a jpg, change sonething and then you jhave to dance around the export, nit save when clising etc etc. Why devs, why?
Would be super cool if they got things up just a bit.
When you're opening a jpeg it is transformed into a Gimp datafile so you can edit it.
"Saving" as jpeg would remove all your editing history, collapse all layers, and perform lossy compression on the resulting image.
Since losing most of the info included in your open file is not really what you want when you hit "save", they put it behind the "Export" button.
I guess it would be more logically consistent if the workflow for editing images was to create a new Gimp project, then import a jpeg into it, the way some video editing software does it.
But that would be even less convenient.
Yeah I know, I just don't want to save that clutter in a file format you can't use elsewhere.
Photoshop only makes you save in the .psd format if you have added layers, data outside the image etc. Otherwise it just saves it to a jpg or png or whatever it was when you opened it. This is the correct way IMO.
you can't do what ? I have trouble following you
They are complaining that Gimp only allows to save in reconstructable formats (e.g. xcf) even when you opened baked fileformats (in this case jpeg)
In Gimp you have to export to those file formats as you would lose layer and history data as they don't support that.
ah, yes, saving and exporting used to be conflated. That shouldn't be a problem, just hit export instead of save
Yeah and then when you close the image it says it hasn't been saved, which is both annoying and error prone.
Not a super big deal you'd say but when you resize lots of images it is, for example. Especially as it worked differently and one day they forced this bad UX choice.
I see how that’s useful for workflows…
I have the same complaint with Affinity Photo when I make Star Trek memes and now have a bunch of .afphoto project files, when I’m often just adding text to a jpeg.
No, regrettably there won't be a major UI overhaul as part of GIMP 3, it's very much under-the-hood improvements. From what I've seen, the maintainers are very open to a UI overhaul, but they don't have the right contributors to do it in a significant way.
That said, functionality like text outlines aren't really a UI/UX feature in the main.