It’s that phenomenon where people who endured trauma to attain something expect others to also endure the trauma.
I’ve tried learning GIMP, and it sucks. I’m not saying GIMP sucks, but you have to be crazy to not see that it’s hard to learn.
Not vonly hard to learn, it lacks some really basic stuff like undestructive ediring (adjusment layers) and such.
I am using 2.99.18 (non release, unstable build). Non destructive editing has landed. You can make adjustments through the usual menus and then enable/disable the adjustment under layer effects.
Wow, that’s greate!
OHH it even works with text layers!!! you can finally add drop shadow to a text without discarding the text information! ;A:
I thought GEGL was supposed to fix that. Does it not, or are we still waiting on it, or what?
The sudden South Indian accent surprised me (vonly)
I’ve tried learning GIMP, and it sucks. I’m not saying GIMP sucks, but you have to be crazy to not see that it’s hard to learn.
I use GIMP for memes and here’s my two favorite tips
-
Hit the forward slash key
/to open a command palette and jump to any action -
To remove backgrounds, use a layer mask. select around the object and paint a white/black section on the layer mask. Here comes the trick: use a Gaussian filter on the layer mask to create a transition from black to white and the crop job looks a lot less choppy.
My anti-tip
- Adding text and shapes sucks and I never found a way to make it better. Export your image and finish the job in Krita, Pinta, Photopea, …
select around the object
Any tricks on getting the fuzzy select tool to work? Even after adjusting the threshold, it is just garbage in my experience. Nothing close to Affinity/Photoshop. Unless I am selecting something that is in front of a very solid background, I just use a paint brush on a layer mask in order to “cut out” an object.
I have no tips and agree with you 100% - never managed to get the fuzzy select or smart scissors going.
-
No, GIMP does suck.
It has the same problem as most FOSS packages that are too wide in breadth and have multiple contributors with their own hobby horses pulling in all different directions, and to this day does not actually provide a feature-complete whole, nor an interface that actually makes sense. And it’s not a matter of the workflow just being different – it categorically fails to replicate functionality that is core to its commercial competitors. Numerous other “big” productivity packages have the same problem including FreeCAD (boy does it ever), LibreOffice, etc. I say this as a staunch supporter of FreeCAD, by the way. It’s the only CAD software I use even though it’s a pain in my ass.
The shining exception to this I see is Inkscape, but it is still significantly less powerful than even early versions of CorelDraw.
For 2D graphics work these days, I hold my nose and just use Corel. I use it for work. Like, actual commercial work. That I get paid for. It is at least a lesser evil than doing business with Adobe.
And if you want to stick it to the man, it is easily pirated.
In FOSS most people can program, but only a hand full of people can design a decent UI.
I always wondered if I could contribute/volunteer to a FOSS somehow with some UIX stuff, but I don’t even know where to start. Would you just draw a concept ui for the team to work out or something?
Not that I’m great at it, but man, we gotta start somewhere, right?
This is probably common. The people that work on UI often aren’t the people who do pull requests. But I think if you want to contribute it would be best to get in touch with a maintainer on the chat of the project. Projects often have a matrix/irc/discord on the git page.
I think you can start a figma or other collaborative UI/UX as an idea first. If a developer is interested in implementing it, then you move on to the next feature
There’s also two main plus one lesser issue that are less commonly discussed:
- Lack of manpower. FOSS devs often doing it as a side project on top of some other and/or a full-time job, so that even lowers one’s ability of concentrate on stuff like the UI, when you’re already working hard on fixing bugs, looking up things (which is getting harder and harder thanks to AI slop - I once managed to destroy a Linux on my Raspberry Pi while trying to adjust the path variables).
- Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable parts of your application. There are many times I haven’t noticed a a very uncomfortable part of my GUI after months of use, then I had to refactor things, which obviously took time away from other things. This also affects the users already in the userbase.
Elitism is also a factor. A lot of people like the feeling of being part of a special group, and for them, the steep learning curve is a feature, not a bug. I’ve seen Blender users being angry at the devs for “spoonfeeding” the normies, and letting in all kinds of people. Also just look at OP’s image.
This never ceases to amaze me.
My old best friend and I used to be a programming tag team that worked pretty well; he’d slap together w semi-functional version of the idea we had and then id go in and make the UI make sense and fix all the logic bugs and typos.
I’m not saying I’m some perfect UI guru or anything but the way he (and other people I’ve met) seem to have no internal base knowledge of shit like “similar settings probably shouldn’t go on completely opposite sides of the screen under different menus” or “5-deep nested drop-down menus hurt people’s souls”
Honestly I still struggle a lot with this. I can click around a UI and feel what might confuse a user, but building a UI from scratch feels like such a shot in the dark.
Blender is also great, probably because it has organized teams, meetings, ongoing large projects, deadlines, etc
I’ve worked professionally both using and developing (proprietary) CAD software, but even I have trouble getting FreeCAD to do what I want.
Same. I have used SolidWorks, SolidEdge, CATIA and Unigraphics/NX…freecad just frustrated me
Oh god FreeCAD is a nightmare to learn. But it does get work done. I wish Blender could move more into that space.
Inkscape is lovely but imo it could use some interface cleanup. (And really it has been getting better each major update.)
The Autodesk forums are 40% this, 20% “just learn to program, spend a few years getting good at it, then write yourself a custom script to do what you are struggling with”, 20% “you are wrong for wanting that in the first place” or “you are wrong for having this issue”, 15% “this has been brought up once at some point in the past two decades, try searching”, 4% “OMG yes I have this issue too!”…
…and 1% split between actual helpful answers, and confirmation that it’s a known issue.
Yeah, I recently found a post there where a person wanted to modify a downloaded mesh. The first comment was telling them they would need years of experience to do it well. The OP responded that they had figured out a solution that they were happy with, to which someone told him that his results were shitty and then explained a way to do it better. When the OP got upset at this back to back dismissal, everyone unanimously decided they were an asshole.
I’m saying GIMP sucks (it sucks)
I stuggled with GIMP at first, it was super frustrating because it does UI things differently than other image tools. i.e. in other tools your active layer masks your drag selection, and in GIMP I would constantly be grabbing lmages from another layer, till I realized the pixel under pointer determines what image is moved. That function can make you highly productive since you don’t need to preset layer, but god was it enraging at first
I’ve tried learning GIMP, and it sucks. I’m not saying GIMP sucks, but you have to be crazy to not see that it’s hard to learn.
“Im not saying it sucks but it does” How do you want us to take you seriously when you don’t even agree with yourself ?
They didn’t say GIMP itself sucks, they said leaning to use it sucks. Those are two different things.
I feel like it would be helpful to include the text of their post rather than just the title:
TL;DR Sorry if this is wrong group. GIMP = Epic POS. Do not use. Please recommend a decent alternative. Don’t waste your time with GIMP help because I am done.
I hope the mods or the bots don’t kill this post right away. It’s a serious and legitimate question from a UX designer with several decades of experience, who doesn’t want anyone else to suffer what I have. I didn’t know where else to post it, so I’m trying here as a first-timer. I apologize if this is not in the spirit of the group.
I quit Adobe, can’t afford the price any more (long story). I thought GIMP could replace Photoshop. But the user interface is horrible, and the app is full o’ bugs.
Here’s the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I tried to make a meme. The font selection overlay was a tiny, pathetic, hard to read joke. Not even a font selection dropdown, let alone one that provided previews with every line item like PS does. Deep breath, continue. I type “Impact”. Red text. I backspaced and typed “Im”. All I got was Impact Condensed. (Yes, I have Impact, and have used it in PS). So I picked it anyway. Then I tried to find the outline font feature. In Photoshop, it’s a simple “choose stroke” feature. GIMP? Hello?
I want to the Web to find a tutorial where it pointed out the feature. No luck. Searched again to find a workaround / hack. Mostly crap. Found one that was current and seemed decent. Followed it carefully. GIMP crashed.
While I appreciate the thoughts of anyone who may be compelled to point out a simple workaround or feature that I missed, don’t bother. This is the last of many dozens of problems I have wasted my time working around while suffering many crashes, and I already uninstalled it.
So. Recommendations?
I think it’s also worth giving the correction that there is a font selection dropdown with previews in GIMP. It’s to the left of the font input box.
Lmao tried to make a meme, cant because addicted to adobe.
Gimp 3 might clear some of that up we will see
I hear good things about Krita.
“several decades of experience”
skill issue central, lets’s go.
anyone who has ever used image editing software professionally knows gimp’s ui sucks very much.
we could have had an opensource photoshop killer if the developers werent adamant to keep the 90s workflow holding it back for so damn long.
“you are using it wrong!!” my ass.
I feel like the issue is that people expect a “Photoshop killer” to be Photoshop verbatim. Instead of focusing on making a good tool, people just constantly compare it to the commercial pack leader.
Most of the complaints I hear about GIMP are just “x isn’t like Photoshop”. I would take the complaints more seriously if any of the people voicing them could actually articulate what should be improved.
I mean, there’s something to be said about adhering to an industry standard. Of course no project has to do so if they don’t want to, but people trying to get on with their work don’t want to spend a bunch of time relearning everything. I think Blender really thrived when they loosened up a little on their ideas of what a workflow should be and gave people industry standard options out of the gate.
Whether we like it or not, GIMP isn’t going to be most people’s first experience with image manipulation. Whether they had a free PS license through school/work, had a subscription at some point, or once got it through ahem alternative means, people will be coming into GIMP with certain expectation of what the workflow should look like and will get frustrated pretty quickly.
That’s fair, but it doesn’t answer any of the questions about what should be improved. “Industry standards” is a vacuous term when the standard is defined by a singular piece of software made by one company.
Sure, GIMP isn’t Photoshop, and those familiar with Photoshop will have to re-learn things to use it. But what exactly needs to be changed? The developers have no chance of improving the program if the feedback is this generic.
this doesn’t even bring in the question of IP and rights to software itself. If GIMP implements an option perfect workflow of photoshop, does that mean adobe can just sue GIMP now? Because they’re basically the same software.
we saw a similar thing with blender, everyone kept shitting their pants over blender, until studios started actually using it, and then nobody cared.
Most of the complaints are just people mad that they have to learn something. As is true for most things in life.
Blender has also undergone multiple UI changes over the years to make it more usable for new people.
this is also true
Blender’s UI has seen incredible changes in the past several years. To the point it has become exceptional today. For a program that accomplishes so much (3d modeling, rendering, compositing, video editing) it manages to keep everything very intuitive and easy to use. Gimp --a fucking image editor-- is like trying to solve quantum entanglement theory.
There was a very distinct switch between ~2.7 to ~3.0 where they actually started listening to the users. If you look up the release posts on social media, you can see the community talking about it at that time. Many of them touch on the exact issue of GIMP failing where Blender succeeded.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/r849q1/blender_30_is_out/
Just run photoshop on linux.
I don’t understand why nobody ever mentions that it just works.
Linux just needs more competition in the image manipulation space.
There isn’t even a real photoshop competitor in the broader market, but you want to further split the hobbyist devs effort on linux as well?
I think instead it would be better to focus all the effort on a single solution that strives to cover all of photoshops features, with at least equal or better usability. Like has been done with Blender and godot for example. (And GIMP is sadly faaar from it still)
Affinity Photo
Can run on Linux via Bottles! I do not have much experience with it, but I got it running with this guide from 2022:
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First google search result
if you agree with the opinion that’s fine, but why would you admit to posting SEO spam? XD
This person still uses Google too haha.
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Is anything I quoted untrue?
You basically quoted thin air: “more features […] for a wide range of advanced editing tasks”. You probably know more than what’s written there, but from my perspective I haven’t learned one concrete feature that PS offers over Affinity. It’s typical SEO spam, which rewards swaths of text with little to zero information density.
I use affinity photo and it’s an acceptable replacement.
Is there an equivalent for lightroom?
Darktable
Sorry not looking for a replacement, just how to run it :)
I am pretty sure it would run in the same wine setup, but nobody bothered to set it up as an install script yet, so you’d need to do some manual dirtywork.
Tried a few times to run it but with no avail, however il try to give this a go.
To be fair, you can’t exactly ask for a GIMP replacement on r/GIMP and not expect that reaction
Sure you can.
I’ve tried using GIMP and it absolutely sucks and I wish there was a good paint.net replacement.
Something I found about a lot of open source projects is that the UI is always terrible
Krita is pretty good.
https://www.pinta-project.com/ based on older version of paint.net source code.
I use https://www.photopea.com/. It is an online editor and never disappointed me.
I recently started having the bug again where Gimp crashes when changing text color. Apparently related to Wayland, but I can’t change back to xorg just for gimp. Extremely frustrating as I’ve had that bug half a year ago, then it went away and now its here again.
Anyway, Krita and Photopea are pretty good replacements. Handling Text in Krita is horrible and working in a WebApp with Photopea is weird, but overall still better than crashing…
Jesus have my expectations for Linux software fallen over the years.
stuff like this is why i’m waiting a few years to move over to wayland properly.
I just don’t have the time and energy for this kind of stuff, sure X is a dinosaur, and fucking ginormous, but it also just fucking works™ and i don’t have to deal with updates, because it’s literally feature complete.
Except when X doesn’t fucking work ™ and hasn’t properly worked in literal decades. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to get rid of horizontal tearing with X. Calling X feature complete is pretty funny, but it isn’t. So many things were never fully implemented, because it’s just an impossible amount of work or would require some major rearchitecting. You don’t have to deal with updates because literally no one wants to develop it any further or even maintain it. The devs have moved on to Wayland or other things.
It’s fine if it works for you, but I’m getting tired of Linux conservatives projecting their own experiences on everyone else and declaring Wayland as “not ready yet” and handwaving all of X’s obvious problems away because they’re used to dealing with them. I’ve used Wayland as a default for all my machines for years. After a rough beginning where major features were still in development, now it works. XWayland works. Native Wayland apps work. I don’t have tearing anymore. I’m not going to pretend that that’s the universal experience, but a lot of people are using it just fine right now.
i switched to i3wm and picom, recently, initially had issues with tearing, but honestly, i just haven’t seen tearing recently, and i’m not sure why.
It’s fine if it works for you, but I’m getting tired of Linux conservatives projecting their own experiences on everyone else and declaring Wayland as “not ready yet” and handwaving all of X’s obvious problems away because they’re used to dealing with them.
valid opinion i guess, but i just stated the reason why i’m waiting a few years until moving to wayland, if i were a linux conservative i would refuse to move off of X lmao.
It’d be nice to use wayland, but from what i’ve heard and what i’ve seen it sounds like it’s going to be equally as annoying as X is, especially more so because i’m currently using nvidia, and wayland doesn’t seem to support nvidia as well as X does, just due to development focus. Currently i just don’t think the CBA is going to be significantly net positive enough to rip up my entire current install, transition from i3wm, to another one, and then start using/learning wayland, just yet.
Like yes major releases and distros are moving to wayland now, that just means they find it stable enough to start doing development on it. I’ll wait a bit and then later move over once things settle down. I have years of experience using X, and significant familiarity with it. I have none with wayland, i’d simply prefer to wait a bit.
wayland doesn’t seem to support nvidia as well as X does, just due to development focus
Ymmv with Nvidia, but that has nothing to do with development focus and everything to do with Nvidia’s refusal to use the same interfaces Intel and AMD use. Most of the way Nvidia works or doesn’t work with X or Wayland is down to Nvidia’s driver stack. Personally I’ve not had much positive experiences with Nvidia on X.
Like yes major releases and distros are moving to wayland now, that just means they find it stable enough to start doing development on it.
That happened literal years ago. The reason you’re only noticing now, might be because KDE has gotten their Wayland implementation to a reasonably stable point. Gnome has supported Wayland for some time now and other DEs probably don’t have the resources to move on from X. I don’t see the distros that are only switching over now as major contributors to any development specific to Wayland.
I don’t take issue with your preferences. Maybe you’re better off with X for now, that’s fine, but you make it sound like Wayland is just full of issues and has barely even entered some kind of pre-release state for software masochists.
Ymmv with Nvidia, but that has nothing to do with development focus and everything to do with Nvidia’s refusal to use the same interfaces Intel and AMD use. Most of the way Nvidia works or doesn’t work with X or Wayland is down to Nvidia’s driver stack. Personally I’ve not had much positive experiences with Nvidia on X.
that’s what i mean, i don’t blame wayland for it lol. I wouldn’t want to develop for nvidia on wayland either. If nvidia was open and accessible, someone somewhere, would be working on it right now, it’s just how things are.
That happened literal years ago.
it’s possible that i missed a few i’ve only been involved for about 4-5 years so far. I don’t know anything about gnome personally because i don’t use it, but it doesn’t surprise me either tbh. I know about KDE because i used it, i know about fedora because i know people who have used it. I feel like i’ve seen more talk about wayland as of recent, but that’s probably irrelevant lol.
I don’t see the distros that are only switching over now as major contributors to any development specific to Wayland.
it’s not the distros and their devs, it’s the users and their unique hardware configs. More data makes a more reliable and usable system.
I don’t take issue with your preferences. Maybe you’re better off with X for now, that’s fine, but you make it sound like Wayland is just full of issues and has barely even entered some kind of pre-release state for software masochists.
that’s not what i intended, i just said it’s the small issues that appear, and disappear with every few updates, that i don’t want to be dealing with, that’s why i no longer use KDE. I prefer my system to be a relatively consistent level of “broken” most of the time.
A lot of people don’t have significant issues with that, i believe the previous poster was rather annoyed by them, i imagine they’ll get better soon, but there will likely be hundreds, if not thousands of bugs like this, dependent on specific hardware configurations, that will crop up shortly. And then just randomly disappear, or morph into other bugs, this is the QOL hell part of development.
X is rather stable on virtue of not being updated anymore, so those aren’t really significant concerns.
That has been my experience with wayland. A bug pops up then goes away in the next release of the software only to reappear later on. You can report the bug you have but it seems no one is finding the actual cause since the bug report never moves.
That’s literally what’s left of Reddit these days. Literally. Just brutal how bad the API affected them and how Reddit doesn’t give two fucks. It’s just a cess pool of ignorance.
That post was two months before Reddit announced it was going to make API changes.
To be fair it looks like it was posted in r/gimp and we don’t know what the OP actually said in the text. In my experience, usually, when something like this happens, they usually heavily criticize something and call it ‘garbage’ or something similar.
It’d be like going into any passionate community about something and calling it trash, then being ‘shocked’ that there’s a bunch of responses belittling them. This isn’t a FOSS specific problem. Go into r/windows or even r/techsupport and trash it while comparing it to anything else like MacOS, Linux, *BSD, whatever and you’ll get a bunch of toxic responses. This would also be mostly true of any other non-computer hobbyist communities surrounding a specific brand or product.
When I would see someone ranting “I’d switch to Linux but the community is toxic” in somewhere like PCMasterRace, I’d ask “Can you link to the post?” and if they did it was so common that they straight up trashed Linux in whatever distro community that they posted to that I don’t recall a single instance of it simply being “Hey I have this problem. What do I do?” and there being nothing from the OP trashing it in responses or the original post.
I’m not sure if it will become the same as the federated community gains popularity and you have more regular user-type people posting in those niche/passionate/whatever communities more regularly.
Yeah but the problem is I’ve seen enough of these “support” forums turn to this, unprovoked, that I don’t quite question this being possible
They didn’t “say” anything. Look at the screenshot. There’s no body, just the headline. So they literally went to that sub asking if there was an alternative.
Here is the post in question. Same comments and everything but the OP post was removed from the screenshot.
First couple of lines from the post:
TL;DR Sorry if this is wrong group. GIMP = Epic POS. Do not use. Please recommend a decent alternative. Don’t waste your time with GIMP help because I am done.
So, in the screenshot where it says it was “submitted by [deleted]”: I can’t be 100%, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it looks like when the post was deleted entirely. It wasn’t a ‘blank’ post. It was a rant against GIMP in the GIMP subreddit as someone else posted here.
No, the body is removed and replaced with a banner that says the user deleted this post. Only the headline survives because that can never be changed.
Reddit could always be aggressive, and if you search up the OP it looks like they went into a passionate community and stirred it up.
They didn’t deserve this level of vitriol or the lack of elucidation though. That’s definitely gotten worse over time. Part of why I left was how aggressively immature it had become, to the point where you couldn’t have normal conversations there anymore.
Reddit has hit rock bottom. I was banned from a sub because their bot crawled thru my history and found I “interacted” with subs they didn’t like (subs like fauxmoi). I said the fit on this girl didn’t do her justice and was shadow banned and my post locked because the sub apparently didn’t allow criticism of any kind. And that’s what Reddit is now. Subs with power hungry mods and admins, Reddit staff not even giving a fuck anymore, all of it makes the place such a ridiculous silo that if you say anything out of line in any sub, it’s downvote and likely removal of content at this point.
All the tech savvy people left (obviously) so now its edgy jokes and dumb suggestions. Call them out, and boom, downvote mob coming in hot.
What a fall in such a short time.
I use Pinta. It’s kinda like the Linux paint.net. Not too many features it’s overwhelming, but just enough to do basic stuff.
krita ai paint is pretty dope
krita ai paint is pretty dope
Oh wow, wasn’t aware of that plugin. Looks nifty.
ai?
stablediffusion
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I kind of agree. I’m not a pro but I’ve been using gimp to do little bits of editing (mostly to make slack emojis and memes) for a few years, and I constantly encounter little things that seem like they should be simple and intuitive, but are not.
I haven’t used Photoshop in over a decade, but I feel like I rarely felt the same frustration regarding basic tasks.
Online forums have not changed since the dawn of the online forum. Tho. Just look at any online forum (and dare I say a Lemmy forum). Same shit, different decade or even century or millenium! Just look at me. I’m drunk and bored and playing with my phone while watching crappy movies. Only time i turn to an online forum. Because i know better.
I don’t know, forums were much smaller back in the day. You could find a good community, because it was possible to organize one. But I don’t think that’s possible at today’s scale.
I’ve never found a “good community” IR or online. Since, like, when I learned how to say my first words, which was in the late 1970s. What I have found is a lot of bullshit about creating community and communities. People are mostly in everything for themselves. It makes sense. You can join a community and leave one. To summarize: Communities exist in the imagination.
Don’t say Lemmy is a forum.
last time I argued that people got irrationally angry.
Krita is great.
I feel like Krita is more focused on digital painting, rather than image editing
I mean, what exactly does gimp or photoshop do (besides the RAW editing tools–but if you’re using those you’re already a professional) that Krita doesn’t?
I tried using Krita instead of gimp but found it hard to do color management: adjust levels, exposure, color curves and such. At the time I simply couldn’t find any dialogs to do many of those tasks.
Yeah you’re right, it’s not meant for that
Right now I’m in a bit of a bind because part of my workflow relies on exporting particular layers and layer groups as separate images. GIMP has a plugin for it, but it uses Python 2, no longer developed, and likely won’t work in GIMP 3. If Krita can do this, I’m switching immediately.
Oh I wish GIMP had a “export visible” functionality. My workaround is usually to “copy visible” and then paste to a new image.
Isn’t that what the basic “Export” does?
You’re right. What I actually wish for is a “export selection” functionality so that you can quickly drag a rectangular selection and export that.
Tux Paint is feckin awesome. Not even photoshop has sound effects when you use a tool.
Back in a day we played with it with my cousins when they were kids (and I was teenager). There was some big insect like hornet or at least wasp with that scary noise. The younger one was afraid of it to the point he would run away, screaming and crying (no exaggeration here). And the older one loved to scary the shit out of his younger bro to the point he still mentions it with a smile sometimes even though they’re now 20+
