Just had a look at the GIMP 3.0 milestones page and saw this.
Am I missing anything or is GIMP 3.0 actually going to be released soon?!
Just had a look at the GIMP 3.0 milestones page and saw this.
Am I missing anything or is GIMP 3.0 actually going to be released soon?!
Ah, that is good news! I actually heard about that but kinda forgot, so thanks for reminding me.
Balls.
Well there’s that at least. It seriously needs a tune-up in that department.
I appreciate your candor and your position. I know it must have been many hours of struggle to figure everything out to the degree you have. But as you said, this would help new blood get in the door. After all, sure, overcoming a program’s overly obtuse UI & UX is definitely a thing to be proud of, but frankly it shouldn’t be that obtuse in the first place. Very few people have, or even should be expected to have, the patience to struggle for a half-hour (or more!) to figure out things that in most other programs can be done in seconds. (This isn’t an exaggeration; I’ve had to do this, and only because other programs on Linux were no better.)
This is good to know! I’m frustrated with GIMP but I still love the ideas it represents, and am hoping it improves to be able to meet the expectations users want to have of it!
You are a goddamned saint.
No probs :)
I’m kind of ambivalent about the criticism of GIMP’s UI/UX; I can see it from both sides. Over the years I’d tried it out a few times when I was having problems with Photoshop but it wasn’t immediately obvious how to replicate my workflow. I figured that GIMP was either poorly designed or simply didn’t have the functionality at all and quickly lost faith in it. Around a year ago though, I started exploring it more seriously as I had switched to Linux at home. For some reason, this time I had a ‘flashback’ to when I’d been lost and frustrated when I first started learning Photoshop 20 years ago. After investing some time in watching some GIMP tutorials, reading some articles/forums/documentation and messing around - in exactly the same way as I had with Photoshop - I was able to work 95% as effectively in GIMP as in PS.
I’ve also explored switching to it from Photoshop in a professional setting and what I’ve concluded is that there are a few tools that currently work more efficiently in PS (and some in GIMP to be fair, although less of them), printing is less flexible (at least on Windows 10/11) and that hardware acceleration would be welcome! Once you know where everything is in the menus and dialogues and either learn or change the keyboard shortcuts, the UI is not such a barrier to using GIMP effectively in my opinion.
Where it is a barrier though is when you’ve been using Photoshop week in week out for a couple of decades and it’s seared into your neural pathways! Even now, because I’m still using Photoshop at work, I get mixed up. As things stand right now, with Adobe’s vast resources and the fact that Photoshop has become a universal standard for raster editing, it will be hard for something like GIMP to catch up with it in popularity, let alone overtake it and start setting the agenda for UI/UX expectations. GIMP developers have to spread comparatively minuscule volunteer hours between adding new features, innovating new ones, fixing bugs and improving the UX. On the one hand I think it would be sad to see GIMP losing some of its identity in attempting to be a direct clone of Photoshop but on the other hand I think that it may be the only way it will win over enough users from Photoshop to break out into the mainstream and receive the support that it needs to develop at a faster pace. It should definitely be pointed out too that Adobe are also actively making their own offering worse by ‘enshittifying’ it, seeking to exploit users work and becoming unreliable on some people’s hardware. Just the fact that nobody can be sure whether or not work done for clients using Adobe software can be exclusive any more blows my mind in a professional context.
TLDR: I think GIMP is great but different, just got an awesome update, and has every chance of getting even better!
Sorry, I wasn’t expecting to write such a long comment. Time to have lunch!