Photoshop FOSS alternative GNU Image Manipulation Program 3.0 nearly here Version 3.0 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is nearly ready for release. It has important new and long-awaited abilities – and you can try it now. GIMP 3.0 has reached Release Candidate 1, meaning that it's almost ready for its first major version update in 20 years. GIMP 2.0 appeared in March 2004, and GIMP 1.0 …
The image is just an accompaniment to the article, to serve as an illustration of what the interface looks like (it's the cherry, not the cake), so a (reasonable-quality, but not overly-compressed) JPEG is an entirely reasonable choice, being an acceptable trade-off between image quality and file size, bandwidth usage, and download time. This seems perfectly acceptable for a news article, although you would indeed probably want to use a lossless format such as PNG if the image were part of an encyclopaedia article or instruction manual, etc.
> The UI simplification was much needed
If so then I might give GIMP another go.
This was for me, the single biggest problem with it. I'm not an everyday graphics user, so having to navigate GIMP's badly designed UI turned what should have been easy jobs into an annoying chore.
It is something that should have been fixed years - decades - ago. But I suppose UIs are not as sexy as diddling about with complex, obscure, functions. And much more difficult to get right.
> turns out it's just not Photoshop.
You have a point there.
I have used GIMP much more than Photoshop so a UI that is more Photoshop-like is no better at all for me personally.
But that is specifically why I called out 2 or 3 successor projects based on the GIMP codebase.
> The GIMP UI being Photoshop-alike is what made me switch to Affinity. But that's on the Mac, on Linux there's no other option
Have you tried Pinta (https://www.pinta-project.com/)?
It may not have all the Photoshop type bells and whistles but for simple image editing it works fine
You may want to consider this guide for running Affinity Suite for Windows under Wine.
It works acceptably for me. There are a few minor rendering / window manager quirks, but nothing that is a deal breaker.
Of course, for funsies the Mac license is not transferable to Windows if I understand.
> it's just not Photoshop
Still, if a Photoshop-trained user decides to switch to GIMP, there is a huge, steep learning curve. You waste a lot of time telling yourself "this feature has to exist, but what did they call it, and where is it hidden?". So, if you need maximum efficiency (because work) you keep using Photoshop, even if you wanted to switch (for reasons too many to list).
What I'm saying is that Photoshop is a de facto standard in image manipulation, everybody doing this for a living has learned using it. It's far worse than the MS Word/Excel "standards" (from which I fortunately was able to break free when Microsoft introduced the "ribbon", forcing me to discard years of muscle memory. At that point I decided to invest in getting used to LibreOffice instead).
GIMP should not be a Photoshop clone, I'm just suggesting that if it wants to draw more professionals over, it has find a way to help people trained on Photoshop.
If you are a professional doing graphics for a living, then use the tool that works best for you. The cost is just a business expense, for you or your employer.
For the rest of us who occasionally want to edit an image, make an illustration, or tweak a home video, paying $89.99/mo is not necessary. GIMP, Inkskape and Openshot will do it for free.
Locking yourself into a particular vendor's workflow means that you are locked into using that product and have to accept whatever pricing the vendor decides. The result of this can be seen in this year's 10% price increases for a single Creative Cloud product.
> Annual prepaid: Increase of £24.09, from £238.42 to £262.51 per year
https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/x-productkb/policy-pricing/subscription-price-increase-2023-individual-plans.html
If people want to avoid being locked in they have accept that other tools are different from Photoshop. This is also true for commercial tools. If an application were too similar to Photoshop, Abode might sue on the grounds of copying their "trade dress". The legal costs would me trivial for Adobe; legal costs for a competitor could be crippling even in the unlikely event that they won.
> having to navigate GIMP's badly designed UI
I'm not an every-day graphics tweaker either, as I tried to make plain in the article. So, yes, I sympathise.
Saying that: there are plenty of simpler packages out there, and these days I mostly use those.
(Irfanview is one of the only Windows tools I still miss... Paint Shop Pro was, but it grew into a monster and became too big and complicated for me.)
I have used many different graphics packages over the (many!) years and have found that they are ALL a pain to get to grips with. All of them have terrible UIs, probably because they have so many tools and ways of doing things that get combined in a way which is obvious to whoever built it.
But in all cases after a couple of months of using a package, it becomes somewhat intuitive - because I know where the things I use are.
I do graphics stuff about once a week, so not a heavy user but regular enough to need to be familiar/efficient.
I settled on GIMP about 15 years ago and haven't had a reason to change yet. I can't remember all of the shortcuts for the tools, but I can definitely find them. Yes, it would be great if it were simpler, but that would mean dropping some features which I may not use but others do (or vice versa)
This is welcome news. I use GIMP a fair bit for retouching and enhancing dodgy images. I still get lost when some box or other disappears from where it has been for the last three years because I accidentally hit some arbitrary control combo I shouldn't have. What is the toy called? How the f*** can I search for its recovery spell if I don't know which spell to search for? Will be nice to get past all that at last.
1. It does, at least, warn you that if you continue you're going to lose any changes you made. It doesn't just silently discard them. The difference between "do you want to save first" and "if you continue, you'll lose changes" is just a couple clicks. (And you DO save regularly and obsessively anyway, right?)
2. Yes, the UI definitely needed work. But considering the price difference between GIMP and Photoshop (free vs $$$), the choice for a home user has always been obvious.
3. You're using GIMP on a daily basis? And if one program's poor UI is "the worst part of using Linux on a daily basis", I'd say that's a major win. Compare to Team's UI (can't open a file while chatting with someone about it), Outlook (keeps opening a web browser alongside the desktop software), OneDrive (lost ALL a colleague's files - twice)...
> The difference between "do you want to save first" and "if you continue, you'll lose changes" is just a couple clicks.
And now we see why the GIMP UI is crap. There ya go. Exhibit A. Thank you for making my point.
> You're using GIMP on a daily basis?
No, I use Linux on a daily basis. Unfortunately. Photoshop doesn't run on Linux. I still remember the one time I had to draw a bunch of arrows pointing to stuff. I'm still paying for therapy from that. Now it's "I'll draw a straight line pointing to it, and that's the best you're getting"
> > The difference between "do you want to save first" and "if you continue, you'll lose changes" is just a couple clicks.
> And now we see why the GIMP UI is crap. There ya go. Exhibit A. Thank you for making my point.
And now we see the molehills that people are willing to die on rather than real progress.
> I still remember the one time I had to draw a bunch of arrows pointing to stuff.
I use Inkscape for anything more precise than a rough sweep of the pencil. When happy, export as png with transparent background, open GIMP and drop png over bitmap. If not quite right, tweak vector source and repeat. "Drawing" on a bitmap is a lazy and dangerous shortcut, serves you right.
Weird, for many years I used GIMP and Photoshop and I always said Photoshop was alarmingly unintuitive compared to GIMP. Which was annoying because Photoshop could do more overall (working with RAW files for example) but I took that to be the natural consequence of more powerful software.
Haven’t used either very much lately, Lightroom has replaced them for what I mostly do.
Apparently there are people out there that use Gimp to do useful stuff. How did you find out how to use it?
I tried GIMPShop some years ago simply because you could follow Photoshop tutorials, which are easily findable.
In case it's not obvious, I'm not a graphic designer. Pinta is nearer my level, to be honest.
-A.
There are useful tutorials at gimp.org as a starting point, from memory. I used to use Picture Publisher then Paint Shop Pro plus some Photoshop. I just sort of bulldozed my way through learning GIMP, based on my experience with the other programs.
As with any sufficiently complex software, you have to start with the simple stuff.
Yeah, I think a lot of people forget the learning curve they went through many years ago learning their $program of choice and somehow expect to just jump into a totally new similar $program almost immediately. Anyone here old enough to remember trying to switch from WordStar to Word Perfect, or SuperCalc to Lotus? And I do wish marketers would stop using the word "intuitive". Software is rarely intuitive unless it's more or less a copy of something you've already used, and even then I'd not describe that process as "intuitive", just reusing existing workflows.
I learned from the official user manual. Effectively what is now at https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/ but the version that was current 23 years ago.
> How did you find out how to use it?
The same as with any gimp. Abuse it until the torture becomes fun.
> In case it's not obvious, I'm not a graphic designer.
Don't worry you're in good company. Neither are any of the gimp's other 3 users and none of its developers would even know which end of a pencil to hold.
--> Is joke. Or is?
In the old days when we had 4K screens, menu bars didn't matter, with the newer 1080p screens I think this is still, mainly, the case.
As we get leading edge and move to 1024*768 it's going to get more important to save a dozen pixels.
I've personally seen in the development labs of major CRT leaders 640*480 and cutting edge 320*240 screens that will be coming down the line to the masses.
This is where every pixel will count and CSD will really be critical to get the best from this new technology.
Yeah, I love having to click a button to take the window out of maximised mode, potentially have the window decide to pop up on another monitor and then hunt for the single pixel that lets me drag it.
I wouldn't even be using the mouse for window management on Windows if the keyboard shortcuts for flinging them around didn't spaz out more and more with every update. They were pretty much perfect and all I needed in 7 through 8, or possibly early versions of !0, but trying to use them in Win11 is just asking for chaos (no surprise there as it's Win11).
Dunno what that CSD link is on about with making things "more space-efficient"; there seems to have been a huge trend with applications and websites the past few years to include as much empty space as possible so I'm not sure how eliminating bits of the window frame is going to do anything except annoy people and continue the dumbing-down of everything good.
It looks lovely with a lot of potential but... on the home page it says "Painted Dreams — Made using nondestructive boolean operations and procedural dot patterns" That language is a major turn-off for artists/designers. It is not because they can't understand, or they are dumb, it is just fit to an academic paper rather than a creative program.
On the topic, I installed gimp3 rc immediately to my Linux Desktop and at the first photo I tried to edit (test actually) it prompted me to convert its colour profile from industry (de facto?) standard SRGB to its own SRGB with some complex technical term. That is the first impression an average user would get...
Off topic, but ...
I didn't see an announcement in El Reg. that FreeCAD is now at 1.0. Actually, 1.1.0. So I posted this.
I use FreeCAD and GIMP frequently. Both are fabulous tools for those of us who use Linux, and|or don't have the big bucks required to buy commercial products.
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