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The Gimp Graphics Open Source Software

After New GIMP Release, Core Developer Discusses Future of GIMP and GEGL (girinstud.io) 117

Posted by EditorDavid from the bring-out-the-GIMP dept.
GIMP 2.9.4 was released earlier this month, featuring "symmetry painting" and the ability to remove holes when selecting a region, as well as improvements to many of its other graphics-editing tools. But today core developer Jehan Pages discussed the vision for GIMP's future, writing that the Generic Graphics (GEGL) programming library "is a hell of a cool project and I think it could be the future of Free and Open Source image processing": I want to imagine a future where most big graphics programs integrate GEGL, where Blender for instance would have GEGL as the new implementation of nodes, with image processing graphs which can be exchanged between programs, where darktable would share buffers with GIMP so that images can be edited in one program and updated in real time in the other, and so on. Well of course the short/mid-term improvements will be non-destructive editing with live preview on high bit depth images, and that's already awesomely cool right...?

[C]ontributing to Free Software is not just adding any random feature, that's also about discussing, discovering others' workflow, comparing, sometimes even compromising or realizing that our ideas are not always perfect. This is part of the process and actually a pretty good mental builder. In any case we will work hard for a better GIMP
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After New GIMP Release, Core Developer Discusses Future of GIMP and GEGL More

After New GIMP Release, Core Developer Discusses Future of GIMP and GEGL

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  • Software Modularity is a Dream? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ramorim ( 1257654 ) on Saturday July 30, 2016 @06:39PM (#52614097) Homepage Journal
    I think it could be extended to Inkscape too. Imagine the three software - GIMP, Blender and Inkscape - working as modules, sharing the same user file model.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Blender is a nice name. Inkscape is a really nice name.

      But "GIMP"? WTF?

      • Re:Software Modularity is a Dream? (Score:4, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 30, 2016 @06:55PM (#52614169)

        Also, the name is a fork-bomb.

        1. expansion gives GNU Image Manipulation Program

        2. expansion gives GNU's not Unix Image Manipulation Program

        3. expansion gives GNU's not Unix's not Unix Image Manipulation Program

        4. expansion gives GNU's not Unix's not Unix's not Unix Image Manipulation Program

        etc etc

      • Re: Software Modularity is a Dream? (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The name is to remind you that when you can find that one stupid button within GIMP, that you'll then say: "I'ma get medieval on your ass" then whip out a Katana sword and hack the computer into a million pieces.

      • Blender is a nice name. Inkscape is a really nice name.

        But "GIMP"? WTF?

        It is an ill-chosen name for english-speaking users.

        Good thing it's free software. It should be fairly simple to do a fork of every major GIMP release that only changes the name and some of the graphics and leaves everything else as-is. It's not like it would be hard to come up with a name and some graphics resources...

        I guess the name isn't such a big problem after all.

    • Just perhaps, before the GIMP people go trying to entice others, they should clean up their own back yard.

      The number of years GIMP has been limping along on minimum life support is embarrassing, for a project that was once highly active and supported.
      A LOT of that comes down to them being taken over by a small cadre of people at the top with a 'vision' for GIMP, and that vision was basically that it should only work well for them, and who the hell cares about the rest of the users.

      The classic example of tha

  • Gimp... We're still waiting for something, right? (Score:5, Funny)

    by fustakrakich ( 1673220 ) on Saturday July 30, 2016 @07:09PM (#52614225) Journal

    CMYK.. I think? Can't really remember, but suddenly the Village People came to mind.

    • I wish the GIMP team will produce a stable release of the new branch, as CYMK has been in it for multiple years now.

  • Current Version is GIMP 2.8.18 (Score:5, Informative)

    by DERoss ( 1919496 ) on Saturday July 30, 2016 @07:16PM (#52614271)

    The current end-user version of GIMP is 2.8.18. Per the GIMP Web site home page, version 2.9.4 is a development version and not an end-user, stable version. The next end-user, stable version will be 2.10. Use 2.9.4 at your own risk.

    Go to http://www.gimp.org/downloads/ [gimp.org] and scroll down about 2/3 to "Development snapshots".

    • Re:Current Version is GIMP 2.8.18 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by chipschap ( 1444407 ) on Saturday July 30, 2016 @07:23PM (#52614305)

      I must be getting in early as there is no whining so far about GIMP being far inferior to Photoshop.

      What real world work can be done in Photoshop but not GIMP? I'm not trolling, this is a serious question ... often obscure seldom-used features get compared ... out there in the world of practical productive work, what are the true shortcomings?

      In my own basic world, where I do stuff for the web and some (print) book covers, I've done fine with GIMP for quite a while.

      • Re:Current Version is GIMP 2.8.18 (Score:5, Informative)

        by SolemnLord ( 775377 ) on Saturday July 30, 2016 @08:25PM (#52614549)

        What real world work can be done in Photoshop but not GIMP?

        It isn't that GIMP lacks features Photoshop has, it's that Adobe has focused on making work easier at the professional level. It simply has smarter tools and systems that are designed to help streamline workflows. Content aware fill is a decent example: GIMP has a plugin that can do the same task, but it's slower, not as effective, and doesn't come out-of-the-box. Sure, content aware fill isn't a necessary tool, and GIMP has its own version, but Photoshop's is faster and better. And in the real world, that matters more than straightforward feature parity.

        I'm absolutely no fan of GIMP*, but for most people's needs it's absolutely got the tools necessary to do the job needed. But when your entire career is working with digital images** having that extra power and efficiency in your workflow makes a huge difference. And some of those benefits happen to pan out for everybody.

        *I'm no pro, and Photoshop would mostly be wasted on me. I use Pixelmator [pixelmator.com] for image editing.
        **Print support is a red herring, since GIMP isn't concerned with it, so it's not worth bringing up beyond this footnote.

      • Re:Current Version is GIMP 2.8.18 (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Saturday July 30, 2016 @08:32PM (#52614579) Homepage

        I must be getting in early as there is no whining so far about GIMP being far inferior to Photoshop. What real world work can be done in Photoshop but not GIMP? I'm not trolling, this is a serious question ... often obscure seldom-used features get compared ... out there in the world of practical productive work, what are the true shortcomings?

        Well in the stable 2.8.x series you only have 8 bit support, not 16/32 bit as far as I know. That alone makes it pretty unsuitable for any serious photography work. From the bullet points of the 2.9.2 [gimp.org] development release last year:

        16/32bit per color channel processing

        So they finally did it in 2015... well except it's not stable yet. They've only been talking about it for like 15 years. The other big one is non-destructive edits, basically Photoshop will let you do many operations that you can tweak later because it'll reapply them to the original image. That way you're not stuck with a linear undo-redo history you can actually modify an operation you did several steps back. The rest are as you say obscure functions, but much like Excel many people need a few of them so they add up. And often it's not can you do it, but is it equally intuitive and powerful. Five minutes extra here and there add up.

        Personally I've found Paint.NET on Windows and Krita on Linux to cover my needs and somehow they feel more right to me. Photoshop is more of a "I'm sure it's powerful if I'd only bother to learn it" tool, while GIMP... I feel it's just trying to be odd for no particular reason, it's not that it doesn't work but it feel like they have their own pet UX theory. Like the DVORAK keyboard of editing tools.

        • Thanks for some good answers, which really boil down to mostly "time is money" and that is certainly true in the professional world. The difference between free and even $100 per month or whatever is immaterial for a professional who depends on his/her tools to make a living. Saving half an hour or an hour of work a month will seemingly pay for Adobe products. (The point about workflow is really about saving time as well.)

          For the rest of us, who do graphics as a sometimes/non-professional thing, free is goo

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward

            I just want to throw in that it is also not just saving an hour or a half an hour of work a month. I do tech work for a creative group within a standard company (but my stories compare closely to tech guys at post-production houses I've talked with) and I constantly find myself at odds with the "creatives" playing around in photoshop (and I even have an art degree...). I have had complaints that the 5 lines of instructions on how to install and use a 1-button replacement (1 line of the instructions was "pus

          • Thanks for some good answers, which really boil down to mostly "time is money" and that is certainly true in the professional world. The difference between free and even $100 per month or whatever is immaterial for a professional who depends on his/her tools to make a living. Saving half an hour or an hour of work a month will seemingly pay for Adobe products. (The point about workflow is really about saving time as well.)

            For the rest of us, who do graphics as a sometimes/non-professional thing, free is good if we can do "most" things.

            Although I'm no graphics professional, technically I've done professional work on Adobe products, GIMP, Inkscape and whatever else comes to hand, in the sense that it was graphics for my wife's business. What the clear benefit of Adobe is is that it is 'compatible' with real graphics professionals. They can take a file out of photoshop or illustrator or whatever without complaint or problem. Give them something out of GIMP or inkscape and the SVG won't work with their tools, or they'll bitch about the colou

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Xtifr ( 1323 )

          Well in the stable 2.8.x series you only have 8 bit support, not 16/32 bit as far as I know.

          The 2.6 series had 8 bits per channel (32 bits per pixel with the standard four-channel RGBA). The 2.8 series added 16 bits per channel internally by switching to GEGL, but didn't modify the UI to take full advantage. The 2.10 series (of which 2.9.4 is the latest dev pre-release) fixes that.

          Nobody uses 32 bits per channel. Standard computer hardware only supports 8 bits per channel. The only reasons to even include 1

      • I must be getting in early as there is no whining so far about GIMP being far inferior to Photoshop.

        What real world work can be done in Photoshop but not GIMP?

        Vectors. I'm not sure to what extent Photoshop can do them because I don't use it much, but I do receive PSD files with speech bubbles and such that aren't there once GIMP has imported it.

        I think Photoshop can also do significantly more advanced layer effects than GIMP currently has - the nondestructive editing features may cover that, but it's maybe a decade away at the current rate of progress.

        The most aggravating thing for me at the moment is the layer masking capability - GIMP can do it AFAIK but it ca

      • Re:Current Version is GIMP 2.8.18 (Score:4, Informative)

        by postglock ( 917809 ) on Saturday July 30, 2016 @09:30PM (#52614777)

        What real world work can be done in Photoshop but not GIMP? I'm not trolling, this is a serious question ... often obscure seldom-used features get compared ... out there in the world of practical productive work, what are the true shortcomings?

        For me, the major shortcoming is adjustment layers. In Photoshop, you can apply a non-destructive layer/filter over your image to modify parameters such as brightness, contrast, colour levels, etc. You can then directly edit your image "below" this filter, e.g. cropping it. You can then modify the adjustment layer later.

        In GIMP, once you modify brightness or contrast, that's it. You can't come back and remove/change these setting later. This has been a requested feature for at least 14 years [gnome.org].

        • Re:Current Version is GIMP 2.8.18 (Score:4, Informative)

          by MobileTatsu-NJG ( 946591 ) on Sunday July 31, 2016 @12:45AM (#52615227)

          For me, the major shortcoming is adjustment layers. In Photoshop, you can apply a non-destructive layer/filter over your image to modify parameters such as brightness, contrast, colour levels, etc. You can then directly edit your image "below" this filter, e.g. cropping it. You can then modify the adjustment layer later.

          In GIMP, once you modify brightness or contrast, that's it. You can't come back and remove/change these setting later. This has been a requested feature for at least 14 years.

          I wanted to quote this, not just for agreement, but to point out that ... yes.. this is a seriously large issue for professional work. I'm not sure that the 'why' of its importance is widely understood around here either so I just wanted to add some detail to it.

          I think that the common mindset might be that once you've made a change, you're done, there's very little journey for you after that. That's true in many cases, such as simple photo editing etc. The value in having what amounts to variables in your stack of layers may not seem high enough to warrant Adobe's price.

          When you consider that professional work being done means there's an economic advantage to getting done faster, then the idea of being able to create non-destructive templates in Photoshop means $$$ becomes a little clearer. Some time I invest in creating image 1 could mean I spend half the time creating image 2. It also means that if an image is kicked back to me for revision I can really quickly make that adjustment as opposed to re-tracing a number of steps. Again, time is money.

          If I were asked to come up with a programming metaphor I'd give you this really shitty one: Imagine people urging you to switch to a clone of Python that doesn't let you create your own modules. Many of them don't need or want to create their own modules, but for plenty of people who have dug deep into it they feel they'd need them from day one, suffering greatly from the lack of that feature.

          I've mentioned before that GIMP may be free, but that it wouldn't actually save me money over Photoshop, this is precisely why.

          • To be fair, you can save "presets" in GIMP, allowing you to use the same (e.g. level) settings as a template. However, I'm not sure if you can save multiple levels of presets in Photoshop... you can't in GIMP anyway.

      • "Workflows" which can vary from "I trained on this other thing, so it's easier for me" all the way through "there is NO way to do this operation without 17 separate steps, repeated by hand 500 times in the BAD choice, while the GOOD choice enables you to get it done with easy to remember, naturally flowing operations that it automatically records into a macro for you and then you just point it at a folder and it repeats it on every image in the folder."

        I haven't used Photoshop since the 1990s versions, new

      • My wife is a professional graphic designer. I don't know that there's anything she can't accomplish in GIMP, but she does complain that it takes her a lot longer than it does in Photoshop.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          Do remember that *part* of that is the learning curve. Not, admittedly, all. Additionally, the last time I checked there were some add-on tools for PhotoShop that weren't available for The GIMP. (I don't check often, so this information may be stale...but I doubt it.)

      • > I must be getting in early as there is no whining so far about GIMP being far inferior to Photoshop.

        Yup, you're early.

        > What real world work can be done in Photoshop but not GIMP? I'm not trolling, this is a serious question ... often obscure seldom-used features get compared

        Layer Effects are hardly obscure user features.

        I have a Photoshop file I created with CS 2. Yes, years ago, back in ~2004. Gimp _still_ can't import it properly without screwing something up. (Every few years I test to see

  • I would like to see an associated feature - converting to different formats, using capable, standard libraries.
    I use three applications which use their own code for the same conversion.
    Each resulting file is quite different, although each fits into parts of the file standard.

  • OLE/COM (Score:3, Informative)

    by CockMonster ( 886033 ) on Saturday July 30, 2016 @08:09PM (#52614493)
    Microsoft did it

  • Finally (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The GIMP has caught up with Kid Works 2.

  • Fuck that article on an .io domain but (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    GIMP rocks. The portable version for Windows is on portableapps.com. I suggest always use portable everything so it doesn't make your faggot ass Windows registry cry.

    It takes a lot of gnome libraries in Linux but it's worth it. KDE is still night and day better than Gnome. On FreeBSD it is flawless.

  • Consider how scripting languages use lists, dicts, and so on. Having data structures which are binary compatible would enable these structures to be shared copy-on-write between processes running different languages. The approach clojure takes (functional data structures) is useful here. Likewise for stuff like Gegl. The thing is unlike 15 years ago, we have Llvm, and so rather than think in terms of binaries, most of the time stopping the compile at a higher level and distributing that would make more sen

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