
Gimp 2.10.12 - Ultramanoid
https://www.gimp.org/news/2019/06/12/gimp-2-10-12-released/
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xvilka
Is there any estimated date (year?) of GTK3 port release? I think it is the
only major mainstream program that didn't switch from GTK2. Also mandatory
donation link:

[https://www.gimp.org/donating/](https://www.gimp.org/donating/)

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clhodapp
That's really interesting, given that GIMP was originally the "G" in GTK. I
would have naively expected GIMP to be a GTK 3 early adopter.

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jmalkin
I love gimp, love that it's free, but I really wish they paid a little more
attention to the usability

There's all these minor issues that get on your nerves

If it was just a bit more user friendly, I would not need Photoshop

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Crinus
I'll agree as long as you do not see Photoshop as the end goal for user
friendliness :-P. Personally i have used Photoshop only a little and every
time i used it i found it much harder than GIMP for the tasks i wanted it. I'd
like it if GIMP became more user friendly but i'd _really_ wouldn't want GIMP
to become more like Photoshop as i do not see that program as user friendly.

(for reference, the image editor i see as the most user friendly is Paint Shop
Pro, especially versions 5 to 7 - and note that i mean the most user friendly,
not the most capable or robust)

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cptskippy
I personally found Corel Photopaint to be the most user friendly up until I
stopped using it over a decade ago. I use Photoshop for work and sometimes
Gimp but have never fully embraced either because the UI is so bad IMO.

I actually try to do as much as possible in Inkscape whose UI isn't perfect
but the benefits of SVG make working with it a much more palpable.

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behringer
*palatable

Normally I wouldn't get all grammar nazi on anyone but I figured you'd want to
know :)

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tokai
Nice with tiff layers! Also the offset tool is a nice small addition.

Green Is My Pepper.

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cpach
Out of curiosity, in what kinds of situations would one like to use layers in
a TIFF file?

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ktpsns
Oh, there are several programs which generate such files, for instance some
flatbed scanners. Also amongst Adobe Photoshop® professionals, for some reason
multilayer TIFF is the format to go with (don't know why -- maybe because it
is still popular in DTP/printing?)

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VvR-Ox
Exactly, TIFF is very popular because of the printing process. You don't need
layers for that of course and under normal circumstances you'd export your
layered file to a one-layer TIFF.

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stOneskull
gimp is great

a great tool and a great example of free software

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alexwennerberg
Maybe I'm an idiot, but I use GIMP occasionally and find the UI horrendously
confusing. Every time I use it I have a web browser tab open with "How to [X]
in GIMP".

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bscphil
Could you give examples of this? I use Gimp non-professionally a few times a
week. (Photo development work is done in other apps, including RawTherapee and
Lightroom.) I must say that I find GIMP incredibly easy to use, much easier
than Photoshop for example (but also much less powerful than Photoshop).

The tools consistently make sense and are where I expect them to be, and I
find the menu bar to be well set up. Dividing the different functions into
Image / Layer / Colors / Filters makes a lot of sense to me. (I do use the
system GTK theme with color icons, which I don't think is the default, but it
makes the tools much easier to see for me.)

I'm not doubting that some people have trouble using GIMP but I have no idea
what those problems are, because most people aren't specific about what parts
of the UI confuse them. I've yet to see a graphics editing program that was at
least as powerful as GIMP and less confusing.

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Balgair
I'll give one: How do I add a layer to a picture in gimp? Say I want to
overlay a logo onto another image and then just save that resultant image.

In MS Paint, it's like 30 seconds of work: Crtl+A, Crtl+C from one image, make
sure that it's a transparent copy, Crtl+V in the other image, wangle-jangle
the box to be correctly positioned, save it, done.

In gimp? Good God, it's at least 10 trips to google to figure that out.

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bscphil
I must be misunderstanding what it is you want to do. As a test, I opened two
images in GIMP. On the smaller one, I ctrl-c. Tabbing over to the larger one,
I ctrl-v. The small image is overlaid in a temporary layer on top of the
larger one. I can drag it around with the move tool. At this point if I'm done
I can just export it. If I need to do more work I can either flatten it with
Layer -> Anchor Layer or make the new layer permanent with Layer -> To New
Layer.

I don't see how it could possibly be simpler than that. Even the exact same
keyboard shortcuts you used in MS Paint work directly in Gimp with no changes!

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Balgair
Ok, I just tried this in gimp and crtl+C and ctrl+V do not work for me. When I
right click on the other window with all the layers listed, it sees that there
is another layer in there with another picture, but it will not show up in the
resultant image.

I'm going to be honest, I'm not a daily gimp user. Even the terms you've used
here (flatten, anchor, export, tabbing over, temporary, move tool, permanent)
will require me to google those terms.

I'm sure that the shortcuts that I've used 'work' for you. However they do not
'work' for me. Like, I'm honestly going out of my way here to test this out
and trying to follow what you've written there. I'm spending my own time to
try this. I know what AWS is, I know Python and pandas fairly well, I've gone
to talks by Stallman, etc. I'm not grandma.

And I have no idea what to do here or what you're trying to tell me.

Gimp, for me, a semi-tech-literate person, is gobbly-gook and _requires_ loads
of training to get up to speed.

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bscphil
I think any complexity in my explanation is probably inherent to a layers-
based graphics program, and probably can't be further reduced. The "tab" part
of it works exactly the same as every browser in existence. (Are you using an
ancient version of Gimp without tabs or single-window mode? The latest is
2.10.)

I'm also not sure what you're talking about with right-clicking, since the
instructions I gave don't require you to click on the image at all.

If ctrl-c on one image, ctrl-v on another doesn't put the first image on top
of the second for you, it would probably be helpful to report a bug to the
Gimp folks because that's always worked for me and surely _ought_ to work.
(Obviously if you're on MacOS or something the key might be different, cmd-c
or something.)

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Funes-
Whenever some piece of free software is discussed, there has to be someone
that _demands_ former features to come back or new ones to be added. Nothing
wrong with _suggesting_ changes to the software, but _demanding_ them? Go fork
it if you want it so bad instead of complaining to people who most probably
aren't even being paid.

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Crinus
How do you differentiate between suggesting and demanding?

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cwilby
To me demand is a precursor for suggestion, or at least underlines it. Neither
are really bad, at least there's communication.

That being said, there's a difference between

"There seems to be a lot of demand to bring back feature x, how much work
would be involved in including it in the next release?"

vs some variant of

"It sucks you got rid of feature x, bring it back!"

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Crinus
Personally i'd see the first one as suggestion, but the second one is more
complex. If it was just "It sucks you got rid of feature x" i wouldn't see it
as neither suggestion nor demand (personally i dislike some changes in GIMP,
see my other comments in this thread, and do comment on them if they are
brought up, but these are just comments about how i see these changes, not
suggestions and especially not demands).

The "bring it back" makes all the difference though and yeah, to me that makes
a demand.

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anonymousX
Wow, I am surprised users critisize open source software so much for minor
things that work different then what they are used to. Much appreciation for
the devs of Gimp from my side. Did anyone notice how hard they are working on
color management and how few other software packages do that right? We are
about to getting a free-to-use image manipulator with professional featues. If
you complain about the UI, mod it or support the devs to improve it. That is
the benefit of FLOSS. If you saved a .xcf by accident, you can download/build
GIMP and convert the file to any supported format even in 50 years. No data
lost.

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memetomancer
With all due respect, what you seem to be saying here is that you can't
understand why UX is important to the target audience...

A professional artist has to be able to work swiftly and reliably. Gimp's
rough interface and stability issues present significant challenges to that
kind of workflow.

Moreover, this is exactly the kind of feedback needed to drive Gimp to
competency, regardless of how well the project's foundation satisfies a
person's idealistic impulses.

As an aside, holding up that single feature as proof is hardly an argument,
especially when a package like imagemagick is available and (arguably) better
at the xcf conversion example.

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kekeke
I suspect a lot of the hate gimp gets is from people that have not used
2.8/2.10 I used to hate on gimp UI/UX but now it has SIGNIFICANTLY improved.

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Kaiyou
Still can't get over the user hostile changes in 2.8 (save/export) and will
stick to 2.6.

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lucideer
2.8 was.... 2012. If you're waiting for them to revert your pet change, you
might be waiting some time.

Are you referring to the separation of the export functionality into a
distinct menu item. Is this really something you can't get used to over a 7
year period (particularly when this is how every other similar application
does it)?

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Crinus
I also dislike this change and i use GIMP for almost 15 years. The Export As
dialog serves no purpose, the Save As dialog can support all the formats like
it did before and if someone wants to save the currently edited image in
another format they can use the "Save a copy as" command (which again should
support all formats) which can be made to provide the _exact_ same
functionality as the Export As command and "Export" be made (and perhaps
renamed to something more appropriate) to simply repeat whatever "Save a copy
as" did.

This was a stupid change that added absolutely nothing of value, introduced
unnecessary UI complexity and the only reason the GIMP developers did not
revert despite all the users requesting it is arrogance as they believe to
know better than their own users (which is to be expected by anything related
GNOME - see the file dialog woes).

Of course GIMP is free and open source so it isn't like they owe anyone a
better UX or anything, they could replace all brushes with bananas and drop
all file formats except BMP and nobody would have any right to demand anything
from them. But at the same time that doesn't (and shouldn't) stop others from
calling stinky something that smells bad.

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this_was_posted
> This was a stupid change that added absolutely nothing of value, introduced
> unnecessary UI complexity and the only reason the GIMP developers did not
> revert despite all the users requesting it is arrogance as they believe to
> know better than their own users (which is to be expected by anything
> related GNOME - see the file dialog woes).

I can imagine that they made the change due to many beginners being confused
about having lost editing capabilities by storing their work as a png. The
developers probably spend quite some time on the fora where users report these
kinds of questions, so I don't think it is all that arrogant of them to
believe that they know what causes confusion and what doesn't. Thinking that
as a single user you are more knowledgeable on what is better for the over all
ux than the actual developers, that I do think could be seen a little bit
arrogant.

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Crinus
This can be solved in the same way other applications that can save to
multiple formats solve it: if you only use the functionality the target format
supports, saving works transparently (so, e.g., you can create an image, draw
an arrow and save it as a PNG). If you try to use functionality that the
target format doesn't support (e.g. layers on PNG) then GIMP should display a
warning dialog about it, perhaps with an option to save as a XCF instead (but
not default on it).

This has two additional benefits: 1. the beginner will stop be a beginner at
some point, will be informed about the target format they are trying to use
and will know how to save, save as, etc so this issue will stop be a problem
for them and 2. it will get rid of the useless and annoying "do you want to
save" warning whenever you want to create a non-XCF image file (because you
_already_ saved with "Export", you just didn't save the image as an XCF).

The current approach makes the (wrong) assumption that everyone works with XCF
files and only exports to other formats. This might be true for some cases,
but a lot of people want to work with other formats directly.

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prokoudine
GIMP before version 2.8: yell at users that layers will be lost when saving to
JPG/PNG/TIFF etc. Actual result: people lost data.

GIMP since version 2.8: only allow exporting to JPG/PNG/TIFF etc., warn if
data wasn't saved. Actual results: only a few cases of lost data.

We did the math. Now you do yours :)

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Crinus
Unless you have observed all users then you are pulling the "people lost data"
out of thin air.

Here is something that _actually_ happens since version 2.8: if you do not
treat XCF files as the master image file format, GIMP complains all the time.

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prokoudine
Oh yeah, I've been pulling that "out of thin air" for, ugh, 7 years now.
That's 7 years of actual user support, every day.

I'd like to see you prove me wrong.

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snvzz
>GIMP 2.10.12 is mostly a bug fix release as some annoying bugs were
discovered, which is to be expected after a 2.10.10 with so many changes!

Why do we care about a minor bugfix release?

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cpach
Improved Curves tool • Layers support for TIFF exporting • Support for user-
installed fonts on Windows • Faster painting • Improved symmetry painting
support • Incremental mode in the Dodge/Burn tool • Free Select tool now
creates a preliminary selection • New Offset tool

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snvzz
Aren't those part of an older 2.10.10 release?

The changes page is confusing, but this is what I understand from looking at
it.

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Liquid_Fire
It says:

> Still, some very cool improvements are also available:

...before listing those changes. So the changes are from this release.

It's just easy to miss that sentence because of the large comic.

