
Gimp 2.10.10 released - Ultramanoid
https://www.gimp.org/news/2019/04/07/gimp-2-10-10-released/
======
ethagnawl
Gimp is a fantastic tool. I'm a developer who occasionally has to do some
light graphics work and since I've started using it (~10 years ago?) have
never missed Photoshop.

It'd be interesting to hear from Photoshop power users, who've made the
switch, what they miss and what Gimp does better.

For those who didn't make it past the highlight list, here's the
donation/support link:
[https://www.gimp.org/donating/](https://www.gimp.org/donating/) I just made a
small donation and encourage others who use Gimp regularly to do the same.

~~~
ptero
Gimp _is_ a fantastic tool for developers. It does well the tasks that can be
automated or thought about in terms of algorithms (rotate all images, resize,
stretch levels to 0-255, etc.). Great product! Kudos to its developers.

It is, however, a lame duck to photographers (and I think many other artists)
when compared with Photoshop. Those who want a _visual_ interface to drag
sliders around, instanly see how things would _look_ and edit based on tight
coupling with that _visual_ perception still choose Photoshop. I have seen
many, many artists try Gimp only to go back. Maybe Gimp does not need to be
that tool for artists, but if it does its developer community needs to be more
engaged with photography crowd.

As a data point: current Adobe licensing model is almost universally hated. If
there were a viable option many users would migrate. I would (and I am just a
hobbyist). And it is not for lack of trying -- they do try Gimp (and Liminar,
and Affinity and such). But the fact that they curse Adobe but still use
Photoshop tells you a lot about the fact that Gimp just does not cut it for
them. My 2c.

~~~
Pizzaputer
I agree. I used to be a professional photographer and videographer. I switched
jobs, but I still keep my gear around. One piece of virtual gear that I don't
keep around is anything Adobe. Whereas before, I could buy an actual product
and use it when I need it, now it would have to become a subscription I
constantly turn on and off when I want to do a small, sometimes pro-bono,
photo or video shoot.

Affinity Photo is a pretty good alternative. Familiar interface and features,
and a one-time affordable purchase. Not entirely sure what an equivalent might
be for video.

~~~
eropple
I still use Photoshop and Illustrator (because for my money there's nothing
comparable, and I'll pay for them because of it) but for video I've moved
almost entirely over to DaVinci Resolve. BlackMagic's free version is really
complete and (possibly because it started life mostly as a color grading
application) I find that the way it presents options and tools works better
with the way I like to do things.

The Studio version's pretty cheap, too, if you want to upgrade.

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IvanK_net
I would like to point out, that GIMP made a huge progress in recent years :)

I am the author of [https://www.Photopea.com](https://www.Photopea.com), which
is the image editor with the second best support for GIMP files (XCF) after
the GIMP itself :) In the latest GIMP releases, I really appreciate Editable
Text Layers and the support for DEFLATE data compression, which makes XCF
files even smaller.

I created a document with a white background layer and a simple text layer
both as PSD and XCF, and then ZIPped it:

XCF: 8.25 kB unzipped, 4.03 kB zipped

PSD: 81.10 kB unzipped, 7.96 kB zipped

~~~
0xcoffee
Photopea is amazing, it actually replaced Gimp for me. Only thing I am missing
is ability to close many tabs (e.g. close all except this one). Amazing
project.

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shakna
Tons of awesome stuff, especially around GEGL, but this one is truly
fantastic:

> This includes support for CMYK ICC profiles in babl (at this point, through
> LCMS2), direct CMYK support as part of relevant GEGL functions and core
> operations, and support for reading/writing CMYK data in TIFF and JPEG
> files. While not done yet, this work goes towards adding first-class CMYK
> support to GIMP.

GIMP's poorer CMYK handling was one of about three reasons it didn't take
pride of center in a small graphic design shop (attached to a professional
printer) I joined as an undergrad.

~~~
tropo
It's sad to see Gimp giving in to the CMYK myth. I suppose it was simply too
difficult to educate all the users who were somehow convinced of the need to
work in CMYK space.

Some of us remember when Microsoft Word document formatting would get all
messed up if you moved the document to a computer with a different model of
printer. The trouble was that documents were expressed in terms of specific
printing hardware. Using CMYK has a very similar problem. You can't get a
generic CMYK that just magically works directly on every printer, and even if
such a thing existed you still wouldn't be able to see it on your screen. The
black is also a problem; a 4-color space is overspecified. You'd really need
CMY.

The actual CMYK needed is only known to the printer driver or even just
internal to the printer. You'll need to convert. Since you are converting
anyway, there is no need to start from a color space as awkward as CMYK.

There are really just two things of use beyond RGB, gamut mapping/alerting and
spot colors.

Gamut mapping distorts your color space to fit the output device. Alerting is
an alternative, for example by making out-of-gamut colors flash on the screen
to tell you that they are not going to be printed correctly. Both of these are
deeply problematic, because they require knowledge of the specific printer
that will be used. That includes the paper color, the ink currently installed,
the hardware model, the driver, and maybe even the intended viewing light.

Spot colors are for crazy kinds of ink that need to be handled separately. The
ink might have sparkles, UV fluorescence, magnetism, and so on. These kinds of
inks don't normally get treated as part of the colorspace. They shouldn't be
affected by operations like adjusting saturation. The way these inks are
displayed on the screen may be quite unrelated to how they actually look. You
should be able to configure an on-screen appearance with any desired color or
filter effect or even with flashing.

~~~
shakna
> The actual CMYK needed is only known to the printer driver or even just
> internal to the printer. You'll need to convert. Since you are converting
> anyway, there is no need to start from a color space as awkward as CMYK.

Note that this rarely applies to professional printers - as there is no
"driver" as such. It's a several stage process, which relies heavily on the
person involved. The 4 colours are mostly for cost reasons, otherwise you have
to resort to spot colours.

The Pantone colourset is well-defined, and transfers to process printing well,
but it is CMYK.

The average person has no need of it, but the professional will find it
essential.

~~~
tropo
Pantone is not CMYK and can not even be represented by CMYK. From Wikipedia:
_" However, most of the Pantone system's 1,114 spot colors cannot be simulated
with CMYK but with 13 base pigments (14 including black) mixed in specified
amounts."_

Every printer has something equivalent to a driver. It may be called something
else. It may be a special printer program to run, or even a web service on the
printing hardware that will accept jobs. All sorts of crazy variation is
possible, and it doesn't matter. At some point in the process, there is a
mechanism to convert from device-independent colors to device-specific colors.
There is no good reason for the device-independent colors to be CMYK, and
plenty of reasons to avoid CMYK.

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Kyrio
Nice to see G'MIC's smart colorize algorithm making its way into core GIMP.
The research team worked with David Revoy, the character designer of several
Blender open movies (such as Sintel or Spring), so I've heard a lot about it
from him. He's written a few blog posts (e.g. [1]) and videos on how to use
the Krita and GIMP implementations of the feature.

[1] [https://www.davidrevoy.com/article324/smart-coloring-
preview...](https://www.davidrevoy.com/article324/smart-coloring-preview-of-a-
new-gmic-filter)

~~~
lovasoa
Fore those interested, here is the link to the paper introducing the
algorithm: [https://hal.archives-
ouvertes.fr/hal-01891876/document](https://hal.archives-
ouvertes.fr/hal-01891876/document)

It has a lot of nice illustrations.

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puppable
This release contains my first ever contribution to the project! It's a small
one, but I still feel proud of it as a novice developer!

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kurtisc
GIMP 2.10 felt like a big step-up in quality-of-life changes for me, I really
recommend giving it a go if you've got an older version (Ubuntu 18.04 has 2.8)

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neals
I'm having a hard time moving to GIMP. But I really want to love it.

I've used Photoshop for almost 2 decades and recently moved over to Ubuntu. I
always struggle with shortcuts and generally 'how it works'. Simply opening a
file, doing some cropping or resizing and saving it as a different file type
causes me headaches because I still think too much in Photoshop concepts.

How do I get out of this?

~~~
bitbang
Once of the biggest hang-ups people seem to run into is the concept of layers.
In photoshop layers are abstract and infinite. In gimp they are explicit and
finite. In gimp a layer has size, that may or may not match the image size.
They can be scaled, resized, cropped, etc independent of any such transforms
to the image itself.

Differences in workflow themselves are usually not hard to overcome. It's the
conceptual paradigm the lies beneath the workflow that people have to wrap
their heads around in order to understand _why_ a workflow is different.

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nineteen999
As someone who has used Gimp on/off since the pre 1.0 days ie. when it was a
Motif (Lesstif?) app, it certainly has come a long way.

One of the things that held it back (for me) for a long time was the lack of
16/32-bit colour processing, which it didn't get until the 2.9 (development
builds) in 2015:

[https://petapixel.com/2015/11/29/gimp-
version-2-9-2-brings-1...](https://petapixel.com/2015/11/29/gimp-
version-2-9-2-brings-1632-bit-support-and-more/)

And of course this didn't make it into stable builds until around a year ago.
I am very pleased with 2.10 overall, and these days I only start up Photoshop
if there is something I can't do in Gimp 2.10.

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RandomBacon
Is it easy to for someone to transition from Photoshop to, yet?

Or is there any easy-to-underatand transition guides?

~~~
vgoh1
I was a Photoshop user from the late 90's until about 3-4 years ago. It was a
slow transition to FOSS tools, because there was never a concerted effort to
switch to FOSS, it just happened because I like the tools better, and it's
easier to not have to deal with licensing.

Photoshop is a bit a of jack of all trades, and the FOSS tools are usually
more targeted. So Gimp may have all that you need, but that depends on what
you use Photoshop for. I would look at the capabilities of not only Gimp, but
Krita (for digital painting), Darktable if you want a more specialized tool
than Gimp for photo manipulation, Inkscape for vector editing, Libresprite for
pixel art (which is a fork of Aseprite, which went from open to closed
source).

As far as being easy to transition to, I would say that it's a bit easier now
than it has been in the past, but they make no effort to be a Photoshop clone.
The biggest hurdle is re-training your muscle memory. I would suggest to do
what I did, and do a project here and there using Gimp, and eventually the
muscle memory problem will not be such a hurdle.

~~~
Kyrio
Just for clarification, Aseprite is "source-available": you're free to browse
[1], clone and build the source for your own usage as long as you don't
redistribute your build. There's even a tutorial for it. Official builds, of
course, are paid.

[1]
[https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite](https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite)

~~~
mkesper
Being able to distribute your builds and improvements is one of the essential
freedoms of Free Software.

~~~
Kyrio
Aseprite is not free software. But it is not "closed-source" either, hence my
clarification.

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mixmastamyk
Love gimp and have used it forever, but not sure what they did with arbitrary
rotation in the 2.10 branch, it's a bit of a mess. It used to be easy to fix
photos with non-level horizons.

Now, every time I need to select the higher interpolation quality, preview
results (huh), and put in my own guidelines manually since the builtin
rotation guides are on the image itself (and rotate with it) instead of
perpendicular to the window (wtf). Bass-ackwards?

Wonder if that was fixed, or perhaps I'm doing something wrong?

~~~
Grue3
Have you tried straightening with Measure Tool? Just create a line along the
horizon, then press "Straighten" and voila. Another option is corrective
rotation with Guides set to "Number of lines" with a sufficiently large
number.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Interesting. The number of (non-manual) guides is meaningless to me however,
since the are attached to the image instead of the window.

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Theizestooke
Anyone know if editing large images is less sluggish now than it was in the
previous iteration of 2.10? I'm still using 2.8 because of that.

