
GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future - ashitlerferad
http://girinstud.io/news/2016/07/gimp-2-9-4-and-our-vision-for-gimp-future/
======
imurray
Gimp 2.8 frustrated me: I could no longer open a .png, edit it and easily
resave it back to .png. The Gimp developers knew better and made the UI
strongly favor saving as .xcf, which makes sense in some use-cases, but not
mine.

I found this fix, which made quick uses of GIMP less painful for me:
[http://shallowsky.com/software/gimp-
save/](http://shallowsky.com/software/gimp-save/)

I'm assuming the new save behavior persists in Gimp 2.9.x, but I don't know.

~~~
StevePerkins
> less painful for me

I realize that this is common UX jargon, but is it literally "painful" to
click "File->Export" rather than "File->Save"?

I frequently hear front-end developer peers arguing that it's "painful" to
read 10 or 20 lines of XML. Back-end peers retort that it's more "painful" to
look at large complex structures in JSON.

There's a hundred other cases in which this comes up. Are people really
walking around in crippling pain, due to various software having trivial
differences from their ideal preference?

~~~
phkahler
>> I realize that this is common UX jargon, but is it literally "painful" to
click "File->Export" rather than "File->Save"?

One can also make that statement to the person who decided the default save
format should be different from the one the user opened. IMHO most people want
to save in the format they started with and if they want to change it,
something other than "save" is warranted.

~~~
pfranz
This isn't just a problem with Gimp. It's a problem with Photoshop and
basically every discipline where there's a bunch of file formats that have
varying levels of support for features.

"Open" would then more correctly called "Import" for most file formats. If you
want Open and Save to work with all file formats, you'd then need to restrict
the UI to operations that work with the file format you have open. Otherwise,
you lose data when saving.

>> IMHO most people want to save in the format they started with and if they
want to change it, something other than "save" is warranted.

Most people when they save a file expect everything to be there when they open
it later. That's only possible when you save using that applications
proprietary file format.

~~~
chickenfries
If I open a PNG in Photoshop, crop it or resize it, it stays in PNG when I
save it. This is such a common workflow that it makes me wonder if you use
Photoshop.

I understand your points, but it doesn't mean that there aren't pragmatic UX
choices to be made here.

------
Kjeldahl
Be aware, if you recommend GIMP to people on Macs with retina screens they are
going to be very disappointed. TLDR; retina screens on Macs simply aren't
supported properly (everything you do will be at a minimum of 2x scale). See
[https://medium.com/@kjeldahl/gimp-and-inkscape-on-retina-
mac...](https://medium.com/@kjeldahl/gimp-and-inkscape-on-retina-macs-do-not-
work-9601c3052e86#.tq62wux1j) for more details.

------
phkahler
Still waiting. They need to prioritize 3 things IMHO, and those are 1) GEGL
integration - this was claimed to be 80 percent done in 6 weeks (several years
ago). Updating core code and libraries should be done quickly, not spread out
over years concurrently with other development. 2) Update to GTK3. How can a
flagship OSS program still be using a many-years-old GUI toolkit? And finally
3) Wayland support. This will be easier with GTK3 and is still slightly
future-looking, but I'm writing this on a Wayland desktop so it won't be long
before GIMP on the whole is completely built on outdated technology. I know
all of these are in the works, but it seems like a nice sprint could get each
one done in a month or two at this point. Yet here we are seeing another blog
about anything but these...

~~~
timonovici
It would probably be done in few months, if GIMP had a few full-time
developers. But as it stands, with people working in their free time, don't
expect miracles. If anything, I find it amazing that it's still developed at
all.

------
pritambaral
The action search feature is nice. I like it that more software is getting
search-across-all-menu-entries.

I'd have really liked Ubuntu's HUD menu-search to have become a standard on
the Linux desktop; adding search-across-menus would become much easier for
softwares, most wouldn't need any addition of code.

~~~
kozhevnikov
It's one of the better features built into OS X, ⌘⇧? will search through all
menu items, combined with ability to assign a shortcut to one even if it had
none originally.

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oggedintocom
GIMP is an icon of open-source software, but do any professional designers use
it full-time over Photoshop?

Compare with Sketch, which has taken scores of users from Illustrator.

~~~
cobalt
unlikely, while a certainly poewrful piece of software that can do much of
what photoshop can (in the 2D realm), it has no support for 3D work, real
vector support, active filters (this is a huge one in traditional 2D work, esp
icons/logos)

~~~
maweki
The one feature that breaks it for me for professional work is that filters
happen to a layer instead of being attached to them an are able to be changed
on a whim. It's impossible to do any real work if you have to render and re-
render every shadow on every text and object when its size changes. I think I
could do without everything else but that.

~~~
kuschku
That’s why I love Krita so much – it can do all those things, can do
animation, and, partially, already 3D, too.

------
lnanek2
Really not a fan of this. In a link he says he took the code for
saving/exporting and split it apart:
[http://girinstud.io/news/2015/09/improving-the-export-
proces...](http://girinstud.io/news/2015/09/improving-the-export-process-in-
gimp/)

The only way I ever use GIMP is through forked builds that let you save as
whatever you want without the annoying save/export distinction, so they seem
to making it tougher for people who are making good forks of their bad
software to do their job.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Saving and exporting are different tasks: the former saves the current work-
in-progress project with no loss of data, the latter exports to a particular
image format and is inherently lossy. If you combine them, you risk misleading
users.

And by keeping them split, it makes some things more convenient. When I edit
images, I save a .xcf and I also export a .png. Having to manually switch
between these file-types and manually remember and reënter the (possibly
differing) filenames when saving would be a pain. Keeping Export and Save as
separate means I don't have to. It also means that Ctrl-S saves the project,
rather than overwriting my last export. And as the part you linked to points
out, this means you can do things like change the scale at export time.

~~~
userbinator
What's the difference, and why should it matter? I just want to persist my
changes to a file.

IMHO just keep things simple and use Save for saving in the same format as the
original (possibly if a warning if it doesn't support some things you've done
to the file), or Save As for saving in a different format.

~~~
pfranz
Simply, you expect Open > Save to persist your file format. In the use case
they target Save > Open persist what you were editing. Things like Live Text,
Smart Objects, alpha layers (for many file formats), etc will stay around.
It's a common approach I've seen in other image editors (including Photoshop),
3d tools, and I imagine text editors do this, too.

------
qwertyuiop924
GIMP is a handy tool: I use it for a lot of my image editing needs, for when
very basic tools won't do. I rarely need the power of PS, and can't afford it
anyway (although I do miss that magnetic lasso: GIMP's magic scissors don't
quite have a good enough algorithm). All of this talk about the future is
exciting.

However, yes, GIMP is quite rarely an acceptable replacement for PS, and I
find this unlikely to change any time soon.

Also, GAP is really, REALLY, _REALLY_ awkward and unwieldy to use. I would
reccomend Synfig Studio for animation instead.

~~~
goatface
GIMP's new (though not actually young) engine - GEGL, contains ffmpeg frame
sources and sinks, provides a good abstraction for creating interfaces better
than GAP for animation or video editing - see
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJJPgLGrSgc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJJPgLGrSgc)
for an example of a video that has been edited and encoded using GEGL this
year.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Well, yeah, but why would I write a new interface, when Synfig is already
there and, to some extent, comparable to Flash?

~~~
goatface
Synfig focuses on more cartoon based vector animation. What GEGL provides good
foundations for doing is video editing/compositing with keyframed properties
for filters.

As mentioned in the linked article of this story - having an eco system of
applications using GEGL would benefit both these applications and GIMP - since
they would be sharing image processing operations and plugins.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Well, I AM doing cartoon animation. Although video editing/compositing is
always handy. Do you know if sombody's created a UI for this stuff yet?

