worked on it since 1998
Yep. I hate Adobe, but Photoshop and Lightroom really are excellent products.
I love FOSS suites. I generally use Inkscape over Illustrator when I can, even though I have a full Creative Cloud license. I use QGIS frequently over ArcGIS even though I have ESRI. I use stone tablets and my own blood over Word because fuck Word.
But GIMP just doesn’t do it.
Yes. Yes, you are a joke to me.
:(
I think the trouble with art software is that Photoshop is the biggest over-complicated unwieldy piece of shit ever made, and everybody has to ape it because “it’s what artists know”.
Bring back Deluxe Paint.
I started with GIMP, and I’ve stuck with it and enjoyed it for all my use cases for over a decade.
I tried Photoshop a few times and hated it every time.
I love GIMP
Oh no you dont understand, the corpo dick suckers say the UX is terrible and the name unmarkatable, its not just their personal preferred way of handling things, aka the way Photoshop handles things.
I will be forever thankful for GIMP bringing us GTK and GNOME.
If GIMP would just eat the complaints of their small, dedicated users, and make the UI more like Photoshop, they’d grow their userbase much faster.
Maybe, that’s why they don’t do it?
That’s what Gimpshop was.
Yep. I haven’t used it in a while but I remember it being so far off the Photoshop layout and key binds I couldn’t use it.
They got the usability entirely wrong. I just can’t take GIMP seriously as photo editing software.
Why yes.
To me the funny thing about these online squabbles is the people insisting gimp is somehow good. It is not, it has never been - it is an appalling embarrassment of a tool. Sure, a programmer who doesn’t really know anything about professional imaging can use it to make a couple icons, but if you want to do any form of professional work, for-fucking-get it. It’s a joke and it always has been a joke.
I was a professional game developer/producer for over 20+ years and gimp has ALWAYS been the laughing stock.
Can I ask in a non argumentative way what exactly makes it’s unsuitable? Is it just that the professional workflow is built around photoshop, something to do with colour, something about the files?
In most cases I don’t really care about x vs y arguments I’m more interested in the fundamental reasons. I’ve encounted many people saying things are better because <emotional reason> or not used in industry when the whole purpose of the product was to take over the industry via free school software etc.
Someone ping me if this gets a reply
I’m not here to squabble with you people, you all know it’s a piece of dog shit. You can already see that people will not accept what I’m saying, this is not an argument by authority, but the fact of the matter is no professional artist would ever use that tool, and you know that.
I was interested in an artist’s specific critiques of GIMP. I know GIMP is clunky but I’m not in the industry, so I don’t know what’s considered necessary or useful for artists.
If you’re having a bad day, just don’t comment.
My dude, No one is trying to squabble here except you. I don’t know how much less confrontational someone can be when asking a question, and yet you still came out swinging.
Edit: In this particular thread tree.
Totally convinced me!
• Evelyne Schulz: A Denmark-based digital artist and programmer who relies on GIMP as her primary tool alongside Blender for 3D/perspective bases.
• Jeremy Crotty: A digital surrealist painter who creates full digital paintings and abstract pieces directly in GIMP.
• Benedicto Cernal III: A graphic designer known for using GIMP to craft distressed, analog-style poster collages.
• Daniel Lloyd-Miller: A professional painter who uses GIMP for post-processing, color correction, and digital painting preparation.
You’re not really interested, you’re just trying to call bullshit on somebody that has decades of experience. YOU go out and you find me a professional artist that will attest that they prefer gimp, and I’ll walk naked down Main Street.
I am interested, I thought you might provide a bit of insight, and I’m not arguing either way, honestly I couldn’t care either way as I’m not a digital artist.
YOU go out and you find me a professional artist that will attest that they prefer gimp
Lol looks like somebody found some!
https://lemmy.world/comment/26454599
…and I’ll walk naked down Main Street.
Enjoy struttin’ your stuff, hope you kept up with the landscaping! XD
Haha all in good fun, I’m happy someone posted these people because I didn’t know about them.
You’re making an argument (that Gimp isn’t ready for prime time), but responses like this only undermine your argument and your credibility. By my read that user was trying to respond in good faith, or at least appears that they are. By accusing bad faith and demanding they appeal to authority (your experience) you sabotage your own argument.
If as you say all professional artists hate Gimp, you could have used the same number of words to illustrate (no pun intended) one or two reasons why. And then you’re boosting your argument and your own credibility by providing facts.
And below you insist ‘you all know it’s a piece of dog shit’… have you considered the possibility that they don’t know? Maybe they aren’t professional designers, maybe they are just bystanders who only use graphics programs to occasionally touch up family photos.
If a person asks you for knowledge, replying with accusation only makes you look non-credible.
The funny thing is, there are always “pros” bitching about it, but never doing anything about it.
It’s not up to a pro to fix somebody else’s broken heap of shit. A professional artist is going to pick the professional tools that are made available to them Not their job to correct this piece of dog crap.
Sure. Demand free open source software without contributing anything and then talk shit about the people volunteering their time. It’s not their job either to give you what you want for free. In contrast to closed source shit you have the option to shape it to your needs. Not doing that and then behaving like they owe you anything is pretty arrogant.
Pros would FREQUENTLY try to do something about it, create a pull request, get denied for some bullshit reason, and forget about the project entirely.
Frequently? Then you can surely link some denied PRs from before the AI slop times.
Also forks are a thing. It just needs one single person to take the staff, create a fork, merge all the rejected PRs into it, and merge from upstream every once in a while.
So meta: the original meme was a blurry photo of a tv broadcast, now it’s an ai upscale in the fuck_ai community
it doesn’t seem’s a screencap from that youtuber that paid like $1000 to purchase the full dvd set from the african broacaster, then watched hundreds of episodes to find it => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP2wiN7aW4U
is this some kind of AI upscale of the meme? His skin has a fabric-like texture, uncanny 👀
TBF I think certain feature requests in GIMP have been backlogged for 15 years or so. Like a timeline for animating in, for example.
Timeline for animations in an image manipulator? I thought you have to use Krita for this sort of stuff.
HOW DO I DRAW A CIRCLE
There is a shape tool you can use to draw shapes, but its more like stamping, I think they recommend krita for actual drawing.
the ellipse tool is literally right there.
- turn grid on
- use a brush
- use an eraser
- make the brush smaller and click the same spot
Yes because turning a one click action into what is this, 8 precisely accurate clicks? Makes so much sense in a professional workflow.
Gimp is pretty much the epitome of software where “you can do it, but it’s going to be tedious and painful”
Grids have Snapping so its as precise as you set the grid to be. If it has to look professional then I would expect you to use the grid in PS as well. PS is not “one click”, you have to select the ellipse tool, set the options, click the start point, and click the end point.
Hell hath no fury like a photographer told to use UX that isn’t literally an 1:1 exact clone of Photoshop UX.
What babies.
It’s not that.
Photographers went from Photoshop to lightroom quite quickly.
And other proprietary tools as well.
On the open source front many graphics people went to Inkscape instead of gimp.
Gimp methodology and UX is not landing with the majority of people and it’s not offering them enough workflow improvements to justify the learning curve.
wait until you see Lightroom vs Darktable comments :)
Ironically, this attitude is a major blocker for the GIMP team when it comes to bigger UI/UX changes – there’s a vocal contingent who will react negatively to any change that requires a little adjustment to workflow or muscle memory, or even if things just look different.
Firefox’s incredibly light-touch visual changes recently are a great example of this; it’s not “this is demonstrably worse,” it’s “change makes me uncomfortable.”
I do totally appreciate that changes can be genuinely problematic for a subset of users, especially the elderly, but the vitriol that gets spewed when a project overhauls a UI embarrasses me as a user.
Side note: the GIMP UI is generally pretty good these days. There’s room for improvement, and it has a learning curve (as do all complex applications, to some degree) but it’s shed a lot of its least intuitive aspects.
Firefox’s incredibly light-touch visual changes recently are a great example of this; it’s not “this is demonstrably worse,” it’s “change makes me uncomfortable.”
On mobile the changes are more obnoxious. Tabs now take up a lot of screen real estate, despite chromium being an example of being functional and efficient at that for years.
Also, changing the look just to change the look is dumb. UI/UX changes should have a benefit to them. And what people frustratingly seem unable to understand is that newer doesn’t always mean better.
there’s a vocal contingent who will react negatively to any change that requires a little adjustment to workflow or muscle memory, or even if things just look different.
okay but some of google’s icon changes have been really bad
Some people get used to how their daily tools work and look, so when the UI suddenly changes, our efficiency and comfort decreases until we tweak it to our liking and/or get used to it. The closest analogue I can think of, imagine that every few years you wake up to the furniture having been rearranged in your house.
I didn’t see the point of the Firefox redesign either, and had to spend some time in userchrome.css to make it not actively repulsive :/ A few weeks later now I reached the state of “eh ok”, but I still don’t think it’s an improvement.
The closest analogue I can think of, imagine that every few years you wake up to the furniture having been rearranged in your house.
maybe every few years you get a new car? it does all the same things, maybe even better things with new bells and whistles, but fuck all y’all who decided to get rid of my buttons [oldmanyellsatclouds.jif]
will react negatively to any change that requires a little adjustment to workflow or muscle memory, or even if things just look different.
I wonder if it’s possible to build seperate UI that sits on top of the underlying backend and can be switched easily. So that ppl from PS can start quick.
I think a lot of people underestimate the maintenance burden of options like this. It’s another trope you see often with UI changes – “just let me switch it back.”
The problem is that now, even if your UI is super nicely decoupled from your engine, everything you change under the hood is likely to need at least regression testing in two places rather than one – that workload has doubled.
As it happens, though, with your specific example, there’s someone actively maintaining a GIMP
forkmod called PhotoGIMP to achieve this, but I notice despite recent(ish) commits, they’re still a minor version and a year behind.The whole conversation reminds me of this XKCD
you just explained fairly well to me why windows decided to lock the taskbar on the bottom for a while. or at least a reason they might.
there have been several, including one that tried to look like photoshop but then ended up being malware.
Like with Linux distros and which DE you run?
You get the same with Apple fans when Apple introduces something new. They all get really angry about it.
For decades, the only thing they needed was clean, easy Action and Macro support.
Most photographers use half a dozen pretty simple actions that they are absolutely incapable of recreating in gimp. Most photogs are technically competant in very VERY narrow fields. Most of them use paint away the ______ which just masks, sets up a specific color channel and lets you math the removal of that color with brushes.
Now, you need to add in context-aware fill, outpainting and sky replacement.
Yes, nothing says
Hell hath no fury
Like
I don’t know, I just cannot get used to it and I don’t like the shortcut keys.
Yeah its called hyperbole, you should try it sometime.
Seriously though, as someone who’s main creative outlet is game dev (among other forms of programming), if I can learn a new engine, including new languages and core concepts required to work with the new tools, they can learn to locate some icons and context menus that moved.
Like Jesus, what do said people do when their OS upgrades versions?
You’re just dismissing the claims that the UI is bad and bolstering your ability to adapt. Why can’t everyone be just like you? That’s not how the world works.
what do said people do when their OS upgrades versions?
If your question were real, you’d probably know that everyone complains about UI changes with updates. Usually it’s a temporary annoyance forgotten a week later. Other times, such as windows 11, they switch OSes. People with UI preferences aren’t broken and they don’t owe you anything. Stubbornly rejecting feedback might get you upvotes itt, but it won’t get you very far elsewhere.
Like Jesus, what do said people do when their OS upgrades versions?
Man oh man, let me tell you: some people just never upgrade
GNU Image Manipulation Program
I see a lot of whining about the name. Just use the full name if you don’t like the acronym.
Man, respectfully, for those of us constantly in online spaces a logical answer like this seems to make total sense. In reality, that’s ridiculous and totally impractical. And it’s ridiculous when a software program that’s intending to replace a mainstream commercial program doesn’t consider the branding. GIMP has been around for decades and are steadfast about this name, but you are deluding yourself if you truly believe that they wouldn’t have made considerably more progress toward broad adoption if they had a better name.
It’s called gimp cause it’s submissive to Photoshop and covered in rubber or leather bondage
It’s not the name holding them back. As everyone else in here is saying, it’s the UI quirks.
I think it can be more than one thing and the name has never helped.
One mans quirk is another mans standard
Ngl gimp never took off because it’s UX is terrible, plus it’s far from feature complete.
It’s like freecadbin that regard, it exists, it’s foss, but it’s massively inferior to the paid options because UX is horrible and it breaks in weird ways.
Foss can be as good or better than non foss, just look at blender or Kicad, but these two aren’t it.
It was made by a programmer who does not understand anything about how professional imaging people use software. It would be like an artist to somehow manages to cobble together some kind of crudely functional IDE, but he’s never programmed in his life and he doesn’t even know what programming really is.
so like vibecoders!
Cuck coders don’t need any IDEs though, they can sit with a WebUI. I think that made them insecure though so now they have resorted to flashy TUIs instead, so they can feel like 1337 pr0 h4xx0r or whatever.
Freecad is NOT like gimp. They are not hell bent o forcing people to do things their way. They constantly evolve, and pay real attention to what the community wants. They are one of FOSS’ example of how things should be. I really like it and how it’s evolving.
Gimp ux was bad. It’s been fine for years.
Freecad is WAY newer, and has had a fraction of the developer time spent on it.
dude i’m designing something right now and freecad is just what i need. Thanks!
“Fine” meaning “it’s technically possible to use it.”
Adding and editing text is a nightmare. I feel like the only way you could say with a straight face is if you haven’t used Photoshop since 2006. Hell, PowerPoint has a better interface in a lot of ways.
I hate dunking on them like that but let’s not lie to ourselves here. GIMP is good enough but the UI was clearly made by engineers, not artists
Adding and editing text is a nightmare. I feel like the only way you could say with a straight face is if you haven’t used Photoshop since 2006. Hell, PowerPoint has a better interface in a lot of ways.
In GIMP? You select the text tool, you click it on the canvas. It’s that simple.
I’m an engineer and I have no idea what they were going for with that UI
That’s fair. I’m an engineer, too, and the UI brings me pain. Especially because my previous career had creative cloud as the daily software.
I guess I meant more the engineer mindset of “I already know how to use it so it’s good enough”
It reminds me of AutoCAD, my current daily software, which feels like a thousand bandaids stacked on top of each other over the course of 25 years.
I feel obligated to say that having a bad UI doesn’t mean it’s bad software. I’m just tired of people pretending it’s polished lol
And CAD is ridiculously complex. Students also practice like half a year to cope with the proprietary market leaders. I sometimes think people complain because they confuse tools made for professionals with some game on easy mode.
But yeah, FreeCAD also isn’t on par with professional tools. It’s surprisingly capable and has a lot of features. And they made it crash way less. 2 years ago it used to crash several times each project when adding some chamfers or some other easy stuff and I had to do lots of stuff in order or it wouldn’t work. As of now I’d say it’s perfectly usable for the average hobby project. Just don’t expect any CAD software to be usable without any kind of background knowledge. There’s other tools for that kind of 3D design.
FreeCAD still fucks up with chamfers with annoying regularity unless you’re really careful. That being said, it doesn’t crash from it anymore.
That being said, their workflow is way better now. It used to be that you were expected to remember exact locations of vertices, so it was about 20 years of regression from where most other CAD packages were at the time. Now it’s purely graphical and you can actually connect features properly
I’ve spent 3 years learning freecad, and it’s bad, it’s entirely incapable of holding up against moderately complex projects, a simple fillet can break the whole model. It got better with 1.0 but it’s still so very far from competing with fusion or inventor / catia…
As for gimp… I’ve really tried adding it to my workflow, but it’s been a massive headache, I’d likely use photocraft over it given both options…
When was the last time you tried? Free CAD evolves at breakneck speed.
1.1 still has a ways to go. I havent worked in 1.2+ all that much
The name doesn’t help
'I make all my images with the GIMP." (Cracks whip at chained up leather clad person in a leather body suit and mask) “DRAW FASTER YOU WORTHLESS POS AND MAYBE MOMMY WILL LET YOU SEE AN OUTLINE OF A TITTY LATER.”
Also a lot of people associate the word ‘gimp’ with something else
Isn’t GIMPs UX just old photoshop ?
I tried the “good UX” one back then when people hype around the update, and it still really hard to learn if you used to photoshop layout. These day, Krita is better i think, and Inkscape for the Illustrator alternative.
Inkscape’s UI is very unintuitive to me, as someone used to Illustrator. The necessary tools mostly exist, but not where I would look for them.
Oh yeah Krita is FAR better than Gimp ux wise 100℅
Krita’s brush engine is also stellar. Easily up there among the best of them.
bashes gimp for its ui
uses blender as a positive example in that regard
Uh.
I’d say that Photoshop UI is more streamlined than GIMPs in several ways. In how it handles selections and layers and filter application, etc. And, it’s not just familiarity. GIMP is clunky.
Whereas Blender compared to Rhino, or Maya, or Sketchup, or Solidworks--there is no one way to do 3D that works better than another. Moving from one to the other, you can only take the basic concepts of a mesh between them, how they get there is all over the map.
Hey, cool! I’m happy that it works for you!
Doesn’t for me though. I’ll just stick to my cycle of waiting five-ish years, trying it again to see if they fixed their crap and then binning it again.
Blender is not that bad, not even close in fact. Have you tried learning it at all? I know I have and per hour spent it’s far more empowering than other comparatively complex software.
You can’t compare a 2d picture editor to a full 3d modeling suite like they’re even remotely close. Blender is better.
Yes, I did try it. I also know my way around other 3d software and blender’s horrible ux has consistently driven me away from it.
And I know that 2d and 3d software packages are different. Duh. Doesn’t mean 3d software has to be bad though.
Blender is horrendous. And that’s comparing it to other 3d modelling programs. They throw like 8 different subsystems’ UIs onto the screen at once. If I’m trying to model an object, I don’t the damn animation timeline taking up half my screen.
Then remove it. It’s there because it is used for certain things, like physics simulation. If you need to do hair or cloth, then the timeline is used.
Blender had years before it earned the reputation as the exception
Blender is four years older than GIMP. Blender is lightyears ahead of GIMP.
You named it GIMP. It’s a joke to YOU, too.
A lot of free software has silly names, it’s part of the 80s/90s nerdy computing culture
There’s a difference between naming something silly and naming something after a well known fetish
Oh noes! A word!
So you’d use a software called “Child Molester 9000” so long as it’s FOSS and kinda replaces Photoshop?
Paedophilia isn’t a fetish, it’s a psychiatric disorder.
Objectively you are right. A name doesn’t mean anything.
But it’s 2026 - it’s delusional to still view human beings as rational creatures who make decisions or judgments on an objective, logical basis.
If there were an Android app that cured cancer, 20% of patients would still die waiting for an iOS port. The reality is that getting people to accept something en masse means tailoring it to their philistine, banal, pedestrian expectations.
Google too 🙃
Aww, I remember that. Back when it was fun.
