GIMP Not Enough for Linux Users?

nursegirl writes "Novell has been running a survey about apps that people need in order to convert their data centers or desktops to Linux. The online survey has been running since Jan 13, and Adobe Photoshop was at the top of the list as of February 1. Desktoplinux.com has an interesting article about why the existence of the GIMP isn't enough for many professionals."

How can we take this seriously...

...when the author suggests that Linux using webdevelopers need Dreamweaver to create sites?

Krita is better alternative to Adobe Photoshop

Krita [koffice.org], the painting and image editing application for KOffice [koffice.org] is probably a better alternative to Adobe Photoshop on the Linux desktop. It is nicely integrated in KDE and its codebase is cleaner than that of GIMP, so it is easier to add features at a fast rate. In fact, even GNOME devs have been amazed [gnome.org] by how fast it's growing.

Re:How can we take this seriously...

I must say, well said. I don't agree with much of it, but you make your point well. I think the failings are in Linux and OSS and not in society. People often better themselves, the problem is that time is a limited resource, and which topic they choose to better themselves with is frequently an exclusive option. Given a 4 hour time block, a typical artist might have a choice... they can dive into one of their projects, add shadows, retouch some photographs... or they can spend it learning a new application. Most people will choose to better themselves by refining their ability to do what they already do well. Maybe using the GIMP would be a marvelous idea that enables them to surpass their wildest creative dreams. But there's really no way to know that before doing it. A person is just as likely to spend hours a day for a few weeks learning a new program only to discover it doesn't offer some core functionality they already had in an existing program.

People aren't stupid. The elitests who believe the average user, and average person, is a gibbering idiot is usually just as dumb when they are confronted with tasks outside their element. A Linux guru might wonder why everyone else is just too dumb to use all the wonderful CLI tools and scripting capabilities, yet when confronted with an automechanical problem, the mechanic is chuckling to himself about how Mr. Linux Guru is too dumb to even perform basic maintenance on his own car.

Like I said, time is a limited resource. Everyone can't spend all their time being an expert at everything.

Re:How can we take this seriously...

I'm a pretty advanced Photoshop user - I use it for both print and digital purposes and I've been doing so for over 10 years now. I like Linux and I'd really like to be able to switch to a Linux desktop completely one day. That said I'm giving GIMP a try every once in a while. People say it rocks once you clear the Photoshop mist and once you get familiar with the somewhat weird GUI you'll find it, well, awesome.

My conclusion so far is that while GIMP has a Photoshop resembling toolset it's really not a Photoshop competitor. Really. While Photoshop is overkill for John Doe, especially regarding the price (yeah, most people pirate it, I know), GIMP is quite sufficient. It's an awesome tool for removing red eyes in photos, fixing resolutions, brightness/contrast and stuff like that - but it's not competing with Photoshop. It's obviously not made for print due to the lack of CMYK-support, and for web production.. well, compare Photoshops "Save for web"-module vs GIMP's "Select a JPEG compression percentage please"-prompt.

I've seen work by one or two people who do some seriously impressing stuff with GIMP - and that's it. Those two people also seem to have been involved in the GIMP project since the dawn of mankind, might be a good indicator on how much time you need to spend before being able to use it fluently enough.

Some people who doesn't work with graphics professionally (or claim GIMPs awesomeness without even using it) will probably disagree with me and claim that I'm wrong. But hey, at least I've TRIED to use it. It's just completely pointless for me to even spend time with it when I have access to a (legal) Photoshop license. I don't think the GIMP project is useless though, as I said - it's good enough for the average guy, even though I think the UI could improve tremendeously.

Re:How can we take this seriously...

People aren't stupid. The elitests who believe the average user, and average person, is a gibbering idiot is usually just as dumb when they are confronted with tasks outside their element. A Linux guru might wonder why everyone else is just too dumb to use all the wonderful CLI tools and scripting capabilities, yet when confronted with an automechanical problem, the mechanic is chuckling to himself about how Mr. Linux Guru is too dumb to even perform basic maintenance on his own car.

Mmmh, no. You underestimate the stupidity of the average user.
We are talking about people who can't install a program in Windows, who can't guess that if you want to open a file you might want to check "file" menu.
I've seen people using Word to copy files (open & save as) and centering lines using spaces completely ignoring align icons.

What you forget is that User Interfaces are designed to make interaction easy while car engines are not.

Using your analogy an average user wouldn't know how to change gears or which pedal is the brake.

Re:How can we take this seriously...

The elitests who believe the average user, and average person, is a gibbering idiot is usually just as dumb when they are confronted with tasks outside their element.

I take it you have not worked retail, tech support, or at a law firm.

No, but seriously, I understand when I take my car to the garage, I am the gibbering idiot. Otherwise, I wouldn't need to take my car there. People should understand this fact on both sides of the fence.

My car mechanic doesn't need to treat me like a gibbering idiot, but neither should I claim that I know more than my mechanic. When someone calls me for computer assistant, I don't treat them like an idiot, but they shouldn't act like they know more than me and should quietly assume to be the idiot.

Heck, when I call my ISP, out of respect I play dumb in order to make the call go faster and make the person on the other ends job a whole lot easier than I would to try to say "hey... your an idiot... i know more than you!" because you know... If I didn't know how to fix this on my own I wouldn't have called (even if I knew it was something like a NIC card refresh etc and knew what the other person had to do... i'm not going to demean them over it).

We are all gibbering idiots outside our realm of expertise. Otherwise, we wouldn't have capitalism.

Re:How can we take this seriously...

It's obviously not made for print due to the lack of CMYK-support

It seems that Adobe and their patents play a role in that, but its true of course that this is a serious limitation for those whoms work is going to be used in print.

and for web production.. well, compare Photoshops "Save for web"-module vs GIMP's "Select a JPEG compression percentage please"-prompt.

If you are doing graphics work professionally, is it too much to ask that you have some idea about how different compression levels work out? This is pretty equivalent to knowing how different kinds of paper work out when you profession is printing.

I am not a graphics artist, but I do run some websites that are used by graphics artists for publication. I had to tell each of them to stop using the bloody 'save for web' module for their pictures because the result of it is crap. Rather, they should be using jpegs in 1280x1024 resolution or better, compressed at 90% quality or better. The website will do recompression when needed. Of course the recompression by the website is why you should feed it high quality sources, but the 'save for web' confuses the hell out of those graphics artists exactly because it explicitly hides what it is doing from the user.

Re:How can we take this seriously...

"It comes odwn to laziness i guess."

No, it comes down to the fact that the vast majority of graphic designers and artists don't work in a vacuum. Artwork gets sent to customers for approval. It gets sent to publishers and print shops for production. Those people have to be able to read those files with no hassle. They have to maintain color accuracy. They have to work.

If you're billing clients top dollar, and have print runs on the line that can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, then risking that account just to keep from spending $600 on a professional-grade, industry-standard tool is... well... stupid.

Re:How can we take this seriously...

They just don't realize it and don't really have (as you said) the time to put into it. Which is still a failing of society.

Oh come on!, a lot of people do not *have* the time just because they DO NOT CARE!. They prefer playing with their Playstation, getting drunk or fixing their car than to get into the computer.

You fail to see that, at the same way you (and I) enjoy hacking the computer, normally people enjoy hacking their cars, stereo system or any other hobby they have. And it does not mean that the society is failing.

We all have our priorities, and although for you, the computer could be a very important tool, there is people who only use it as a comunication tool. Think as the telephone, you do not care how your telephone work... you may not care how is it programmed, you just want to pick up the phone, press the buttons and speak.

We all have our priorities, and the fact that the priorities of other people are not the same as yours does not mean their are doing any wrong.

Although I arrived late to the article, let me state something. This last week, I have been working in some simulations. I made a simulation on the computer wich gave me as results something like 400,00 MB in numbers.

Now, I needed to do statistical analysis on those things, unfortunately, the deadline of the paper is for this wednesday, and I have never used any of those Statistical analysis tools. I didnt need anything too fancy, only std. deviation and averages.

Guess what I used, Excel, it has an OK statistical analysis package. Now, I wont "rant" about the absence of that on OpenOffice, I did everything I needed in MS Office, but to do that I had to import my text files (delimited by a space) to Excel. I did some simple C programs to process my code and then just imported with the File/Open function of excel, it detected it was text file and a wizzard guided me through the import stages.

Now, what does all of this have to do with the "linux still not ready"?, well, after finishing, I thought "how could I do it with OpenOffice" because you know, everybody says OpenOffice is as good as Ms Office (something I do not believe). Well, I tried to open one of those files with the File/Open IN OpenCalc and it just opened a OpenWrite window with the numbers HA!

I looked for an "Import" button, I tried with the "Document Import wizzard" without luck. So I could not even *start* to compare it.

Now there are a number of several details that I *doubt* OpenCalc has, that Excel does besides importing a file or being able to make cross references between worksheets and books but, you must see that the devil of the commercial vs open software is (as in everything else) in the DETAILS. Those small details that people take from granted when using Photoshop, Excel, Word, etc. And the fact that in some of those products you can go from 0 to a complete work in a few minutes (God, this is the first time I do a *real* statistics analysis).

Lorraborox

Sorry mate, I use UNIX every day, to run really big serious programs costing tens of thousands of dollars per year in licensing. I do it from the GUI. Sure, I occasionally type in real hard to understand commands like 'mdi', or 'dtfile' into the command line, but mostly it is just me and that big old boring HP UNIX GUI. The longest batch file I've ever written has 3 lines.

Elitism such as yours is both misplaced and counter productive. There is no really hard reason why a Knoppix type system, and a bit of fine tuning, would not make a consumer level OS. The problem is not the underlying OS, the problem is at the GUI level, and as such is solvable by scripting at the VB level.

Re:How can we take this seriously...

Bluefish is sort of a programmer's editor with extra features for HTML, not a web site design tool like Dreamweaver. The user shouldn't have to look at HTML source much, if at all.

*blink*

A web designer shouldn't have to look at HTML source much?

Re:How can we take this seriously...

If you are a freelance web designer, you "must" know the subtile differences between CSS rendering on Firefox and on Internet Explorer. You shouldn't be afraid to open notepad and write the HTML code directly. You must know all the little tricks. If you don't then you are doomed.

But...When you work inside a web agency, then roles are defined. The web designer concentrates on...design. He/she makes the lay-out according to the corporate identity, the marketing stuffs, ergonomy, and so on. His/her role is purely on design. There is another guy, a technician guy who knows everything about techniques. He/she will transform his/her work into a working HTML based lay-out.

He will give all the guarantees that it will work on all major browsers.

Then a web developer will put the lay-out inside the CMS, or as the user interface on a custom built web application.

This is a team.

On large scale project, you've got enough work justify a full-time job on design and another one to make the result HTML compliant.

My company, a small web agency outsources everything related to design. We use traditionnal infographists. We had to "educate" them on basic stuffs, but it in the end, it helps us to concentrate ourselves on the web site features and technical parts.

Most technicians are extremely bad at communication/graphism and so on. Most of us can't understand why we should spend hours to make a stupid paragraph aligned with some tiny parts of the lay-out, nor can we understand that the customer may get mad because font is Arial 10 instead of Arial 12 on the subtitle. We simply can't understand why it matters so much and why the customers cannot understand the beauty of our new CMS with all the new features that let us make multilingual content with simple clicks or this new XML import feature that works automatically with one of their partners.

A lot of talended designer are bad on the technician part. They simply don't care about how it works.

Re:How can we take this seriously...

I'm sure there are plenty of developers that simply want Dreamweaver etc. who are quite capable of coding a standards compliant web page by hand. Nowhere in my original post did I say or imply otherwise. That doesn't take away the fact that a large number of web developers are completely lost without their tools. I've done a ton of web development for major corporations (mainly server side programming not the HTML/CSS) and I've worked with a ton of them. I also have many contacts who are web developers and the good ones always get a kick out of how many so called professionals in the industry are completely lost without their tools.

They have a point...

As powerful as GIMP is, I find myself struggling to complete tasks that would be easier in Photoshop. More frustrating, however, is having to compile my own plugins. I still have not managed to compile one successfully (and I've been working with Linux since Red Hat 7.3).

Re:They have a point...

Being that there is a UNIX version of Photoshop (OS X) it should not be too difficult to wrap the inners with an X GUI outers.

I don't understand why people find this so impossible to understand -- the MacOS APIs (Carbon and Cocoa) do not exist on other platforms. You can can compile vanilla Unix applications on MacOS X, but you can't trivially recompile (or wrap) a Cocoa app on Linux.

Re:They have a point...

So perhaps someone should start a project similar to WINE, to add Carbon and Cocoa API compatibility.

Re:They have a point...

Well, for Cocoa anyway, there's GNUstep [gnustep.org], as, if I'm not mistaken, it's an implementation of the OpenStep specification that was created for NeXT and is still used today for MacOS X as Cocoa. Once GNUstep is reasonably completed, it would in theory be possible to have a certain amount of source-compatibility between any platform with GNUstep and Cocoa. Carbon, now that's a different story...

Yeah, like rezising a brush for instance!

As powerful as GIMP is, I find myself struggling to complete tasks that would be easier in Photoshop.

You mean stuff like resizing the brush with a keypress? After reading the manual, going to google, setting any arcanely named binding that might be it in the shortcuts preferences, the Gimp just sits there and stares stubbornly at me when I try it. Do these people never paint anything? OTOH, this is the same people that think that CTRL-K is much more logical for deleteing stuff than say, oh, I don't know... delete, maybe?

Apart from that, a lot of why the Gimp is such a struggle to use is those right click menus and image menus that the Gimp people are so proud of because they can do anything. Sure, they can do anything - but it also lists *everything*, always! It's called a context menu, and it could be incredibly powerful if it had any context. Oh, and things sorted in real categories.

I could very well live without a Photoshop interface, but I want a human interface.

GUI perhaps?

(dons flame resistant suit of anonymity)

Maybe this is because GIMP has one of the most god-awful GUIs known to man. I mean seriously, it seems to be designed to hide functions and impede work, not t'other way round.

Re:GUI perhaps?

"I mean seriously, it seems to be designed to hide functions and impede work, not t'other way round."

So, err, you want GIMP to hide work and impede functions?

Re:GUI perhaps?

Which part of the Gimp GUI?

1. The right-click-on-photo part that brings up every command?
2. The pull down menu above the photo that brings up every command?
3. The floating toolbox that brings up every command?
4. The customizable tab box which permits instant access to your most important subset of commands?
5. That near every subset of commands can be 'torn off' as a floating toolbar?
6. Or the part that doesn't look like Photoshop's unique boxes-in-boxes interface, a GUI style last universally popular in the Windows 3.x days?

Re:GUI perhaps?

The right-click-on-photo part that brings up every command?

That sucks. It should only bring up stuff relevant to manipulating bits of the image. The right-click menu is also known as the context menu - if I'm right-clicking on pixels I want something that relates to pixels. Some things that definitely should not be there: File, View, Image, and then most of the things on the sub-menus (which are also arranged in terms of GIMP internals rather than in terms of user-oriented categories).

The pull down menu above the photo that brings up every command?

It's not so much the menu as the fact that everything is impossible to find in the menu because it was apparently arranged by a seriously deranged individual bent on avoiding natural categories. Even when you can find something it takes 3-4 non-obvious menu options in sequence to do something that is one menu option in other drawing software. The floating toolbox that brings up every command?

The customizable tab box which permits instant access to your most important subset of commands?

Sensible defaults are better than telling people to customise what is out of the box the Worst... Interface... Ever.

That near every subset of commands can be 'torn off' as a floating toolbar?

What the hell does this have to do with anything? Actually, now that I think of it, it does have something to do with the problem since these floating toolbars don't - they sink right to bloody bottom of the window stack and you have to go hunting for the bastards (this doesn't happen in an MDI interface by the way).

Or the part that doesn't look like Photoshop's unique boxes-in-boxes interface, a GUI style last universally popular in the Windows 3.x days?

And yet a style that is retained in every serious image editor*... but nooo, the GIMP people are right and everybody else is wrong.

GIMP's user interface really is a festering pile of crap. Go ahead, GIMP-fans, do your worst to my karma - I have plenty.

* Yes I know GIMP doesn't have it. I meant what I said.

Re:GUI perhaps?

It's odd, isn't it.

Fact: Many users have experience with Photoshop and the GIMP.

Fact: Most of those users find Photoshop's UI to be vastly superior, or at least the GIMP's UI to be vastly inferior.

Fact: Those in charge of the GIMP dismiss such experienced users in the field as feeble-minded ignoramuses.

My $1,000,000,000 prediction: this comment will be just as applicable 3 years from now.

Re:GUI perhaps?

Actually I was using GIMP before I came here. Yeah the interface sucks. I have to have an entire virtual desktop reserved for it alone, and even then there are dialogs that pop up behind the window. I have to spend more time resizing windows than actually working. And if you have a lot of images open the taskbar groups them so that it takes two clicks to get to anything.

Why not have a nice tabbed interface?

Also the name sucks. At best its confusing, at worst its offensive.

Its pretty sad when its obvious to everyone what the problem is, yet its still the same thing after what, six years?

Re:GUI perhaps?

Also the name sucks. At best its confusing, at worst its offensive.

How's it offensive?

I was born with a left club foot. Fortunately, it was braced and reset before I can remember. Even though I've always walked with a slight (almost unoticeable) limp, I've never considered myself inferior in any way. The word gimp has never crossed my mind as being offensive. What I find offensive though, is when people try to tell me that I should be offended by. Gimp (in one of its definitions) is just a descriptive word for someone with a limp, so I'm a gimp, big fricking deal...

Re:GUI perhaps?

It seems to me that if it hasn't been changed in six years then it's not that great of a problem for most users.

Oh My God. Oh My God.

That is the single least insightful thing I have ever read at /.. Could there possibly be another reason for things not changing? If Microsoft has kept something crummy for six years, would it be reasonable for you to state that it's not a problem for most users, and thus nothing to complain about?

My suggestion to all the people bitching about how GIMP sucks (...) is to become a part of the community.

This is so typical of what is wrong with the open source movement. In real life (which was what TFA was about) most people can't afford to "become part of the community" because they have real, actual work to do. I use at least ten applications on a very regular basis. I most certainly can't afford to "be part of the community" for all of those. In the real world, what counts is how well stuff actually works right now, not how good they could possibly become in the future if everybody would just help out. Sorry, but that's the way it is.

I think it's a little unseemly to bash people who give you something for free.

TFA is about why people don't use the free stuff. That makes this comment a bit disingenious, don't you think?

It doesn't make sense to be oblivious to real user needs and, simultaneously, to bash real users for not using specific stuff. I know I'm Captain Obvious for spelling this out, but it seems to be needed.

Re:GUI perhaps?

If you're pissed off (...)

Well, I'm not pissed off, but I am disappointed.

First of all, for the record it should be noted that I never use either GIMP or PS. I'm talking about the open source community and their attitudes in general. I do feel very strongly that the thoughts dicussed in the post I replied to applies to most, if not all, free software projects. That's my opinion, not a verifiable fact. If you differ, fine, but please be aware that just having a different opinion won't make me use alternative software. Nor will it convince many others.

Closed source companies in general, and Microsoft in particular, are incredibly much better at building applications that are usable for regular, professional users. By professional I mean users who use the software for work and who, accordingly, are prepared to pay for the service of using the software. I do not mean "super power users".

Too many people in the open source community dismisses these people as morons or worse. That's fine, I suppose. It's not like the "morons" care on way or the other. The problem is that a lot of pepople really want to affect lasting change, making users switch from MS to free stuff. And if one wants that, that attitude simply won't cut it.

This thread explains why perfectly clearly, but too many people here refuses to acknowledge that. To me, that is disappointing, because it means that Excel will continue to be better than the alternatives. So will SQL Server, Visio and Photoshop. It doesn't *have* to be that way, because usability isn't that difficult. But it requires a completely different mindset than what is currently prevailing.

Finally, good usability requires huge amounts of humility. Isn't it ironic (in the English sense of the word) that in this particular case Microsoft has that humility, whereas the open source community lacks it?

Re:GUI perhaps?

a) Pay someone to do the changes

Kind of misses the point of free software. When you say, "it's free, so stop your bitching," what you're really saying is "you get what you pay for, and you're better off paying for it." How does that make open source software better again?

b) Do the changes yourself

Not everybody is a programmer. This is the first excuse that a lot of people run for, and it's weak. The whole point of an "open-source community" is the idea of people exchanging ideas to create really useful software for everybody. End users's opinions shouldn't be shot down just because they're not programmers. Even real programmers might have good opinions but just not enough spare time in their day to dive into the cruft of somebody else's buggy code and start making it better.

One of the biggest complaints of the guy who cobbled together GimpShop was that all the resources were scattered around with no rhyme or reason, making tracking things down really hard to do. If a programmer came in and fixed all that, who's to guarantee that the maintainers will buy it? There are egos involved, not to mention a "community;" one person can't fix everybody else's mistakes at one go.

c) Don't use GIMP and STFU

Yep, that's a sure-fire way to make the Gimp better. "Sure, our program sucks, but you don't have to use it." Might as well pack it in and call it quits with that kind of attitude. What's the point of creating software if people don't want to use it? Why even make it public it if you're not prepared to hear what the rest of the world hears about it?

What we're talking about is the large majority of serious Photoshop users, not just one or two malcontents. I think it would be cool if the Gimp competed. There are just a few basics that could be implemented that would make some serious waves in Gimp adoption, without turning the Gimp into some sort of bastardized Photoshop clone.

Re:GUI perhaps?

"Its pretty sad when its obvious to everyone what the problem is, yet its still the same thing after what, six years?"

It seems to me that if it hasn't been changed in six years then it's not that great of a problem for most users

You're possibly right, but I guess it's a pretty major problem for a lot of non-users. I bet a fair few potential users will have loaded it up, gone 'WTF' and gone back to their previous image editing tool of choice. I know I did.

Much as I support the idea of a powerful, free graphics package, I really could not be bothered with trying to get past (in my view) one of the most user-unfriendly UIs that I've seen for a very long time. I also couldn't be bothered to go and code my own amended UI (I want to edit images, not develop the tool) or go start harassing the actual dev community, who would quite likely come back with either "Well, we like it" or "Well, go write your own".

At the end of the day, I'm happy enough with Photoshop Elements for most of what I want to achieve, and therefore can't be bothered to spend any significant time trying to make GIMP better (if it were improved, I may well go back and give it another go, however).

My suggestion to all the people bitching about how GIMP sucks and how much they hate using it (why are you using it then?) is to become a part of the community. Contribute and if enough of you contribute enough then your needs will probably be taken care of too. Failing that you could always take up a collection and offer a bounty.

And this is exactly the sort of response that I'm talking about. I am interested in a decent, usable graphics editor. I don't really care what that tool is. I am not bitching about the UI, and saying that it should be changed. I simply care that the graphics tool that I use has a UI that I can get on with. GIMP doesn't, so I don't use it. I don't actually care enough about GIMP as a project to spend valuable time working to improve it. If that means I will never get a decent free graphics app, and instead have to stump up £50 or whatever to get Photoshop Elements, then so be it.

I think it's a little unseemly to bash people who give you something for free. If you don't like it you are under no obligation to use it. Just steal photoshop like everybody else at /. does.

And yet you're bashing someone who's giving you advice for free. As you say - if you don't like it, your're under no obligation to use it. But if you're actually interested in creating a tool that people will use, not because it's free, but because it's better, then you might want to consider the views of the people that don't currently use it.

And don't try to take the stance that the only choice is GIMP or theft. As I've said, I use (and have bought) Photoshop Elements (I've also bought the ACDSee suite, but decided that Photoshop was better, I would have been happy to use - even pay for - GIMP had been been usable enough for me).

Re:GUI perhaps?

Actually you are quite right. The big problem in the linux community is that they are not really open to this kind of criticism. People have been saying for years that UI sucks and for years it has continued to suck.

Lets face it, the GIMP UI is pretty bad. It is going to take some major rearchitecting to fix that. One reason why that won't happen is that the people who are supposed to do that obviously don't get it (just look at the current UI ...).

Photoshop

The article says:

"It's also not really thought of as a "Windows" application in many shops. For many graphic pros, it's a Mac OS program."

Then...

"I was also told that while GIMP's functionality may rival Photoshop's, how you get there is very different. For instance, to users who know Photoshop, GIMP's SDI (Single Document Interface) can be confusing. In GIMP, each image gets a separate window, whereas Photoshop's MDI (Multiple Document Interface) groups them all together in a single window."

Photoshop is a SDI application on the Mac. SDI vs MDI is hardly the reason professionals will not switch to The GIMP.

Like the article mentions, it's all about colour management and plugins. The former could be solved with code, but the latter is very much chicken/egg; third-parties won't write GIMP plugins until companies start using it, and companies won't start using it until their plugins are available.

Not to mention all the licensing fun of releasing closed plugins for a GPL application. That'd be fun...

Re:Photoshop

You just demonstrated that you don't understand the "big problem" with color management. Formal color management is about reconciling various RGB and CMYK color spaces in a perceptually consistent way (i.e., transforming monitor color to printer color), and has nearly nothing to do with licensing. Spot colors like PANTONE are a very small subset of the domain of color management.

Re:Photoshop

Spot colors like PANTONE are a very small subset of the domain of color management.

While spot colours may be a small part of the technical side of colour management, the ability to shave several hundred dollars off the cost of a print run by using a two or three tone Pantone process rather than full CMYK is far from trivial if you want to stay in the print business. And that's before you even think about special finishes (like metallic), which can't be specified in CMYK or RGB at all.

GIMP won't natively process in 16bpp images

I want to work in my RAW photos in 16-bit as much as possible before converting to 8bpp at the final step. GIMP doesn't do that, so I am forced to use photoshop.

Re:16bpp voodoo, show me specs.

Well, while you are technically correct, you shoot past the who point by miles.

The idea isn't to try to actually view at that color depth. Its already beyond the capabilities of many video output devices, and even possibly the human eye. But again, thats not the point nor in dispute.

The issue is the accumulated filter effects and tranformations applied to a digital image. Each such effect can create subtle artifacts and degradations. When you start with 8bit/color channel (traditional 24bpp) then these can build up fast to become noticably visible in the final image.

But if you apply those effects to a 16bit/color channel (48bpp) image, the artifacts don't become noticable as quickly, if at all, assuming you are using a good quality image manipulation program. Then when all is done, you can convert your final image to 8bit/channel (24bpp) such as jpeg and have a clean image.

Re:Ugh.

For dealing with photos or even scanned images you will often want more than 8bpp, especially when you want to do things like shadow enhancement or highlight recovery. In this way it lets you choose what will be thrown away instead of having the camera throw information away when it converts to JPEG. There is a lot of detail that is often thrown away that can be brought out with the right software.

For example, one technique used when shooting photos in high contrast lighting conditions is to shoot the photos a bit underexposed then go back and adjust them after the fact, since otherwise the camera can screw up the highlights, often causing them to shift colors due to saturation. Having the extra bits gives a lot more room to change the photo later.

RAW images are becoming increasingly popular, and though there are several different formats, just supporting Canon and Nikon will probably make 90% of the people happy. For those not familiar with raw image formats, most high-end cameras support more than 8 bits per pixel, often 12 bits and preserve the original CCD/CMOS mosaic pattern. Code like dcraw has already been written which can read most of the formats out there. I myself as a Linux user have fallen in love with Bibble, which allows me to quickly go through hundreds or even thousands of photos and fix things like white balance, shadow recovery, lens distortion, sharpening, etc. all while supporting the higher color depth.

Krita

It's not there yet, but look out for Krita. It has great ICCM colour support, but it's kind of slow.

Re:Krita

Krita 1.5 will have, among other things, object layers, group layers, adjustment layers, RGB8, RGB16, CMYK8, CMYK16, L*a*b*16, RGB float 16 and 32 (OpenEXR), LMS32, grayscale, and even a Watercolors colorspace. That's a whole lot of GIMP's deficiencies right off the bat. However, it also (a) is slow (most effort so far has gone into architecture and features, not optimizing), and (b) has an even smaller plugin community than the GIMP's, due to it being pretty new. (On the other hand, nearly everything in Krita is a plugin, including colorspaces, tools, paintops, and obviously filters, so once it picks up it could be pretty nice.)

Irfanview

GIMP is cool, a bit unixy but for a novice it accomplishes much the same as more expensive programs. The thing I'm most missing on my desktop is Irfanview. How to move hundreds of pics from digicam to the computer, crop and rename? GIMP is very unsuitable for this task. Heard it's possible to get Irfanview to run on WINE, though, but a native solution would always be nicer.

I've used both extensively...

I can easily say that the newer versions of Photoshop dwarf the competition. I specifically focus on restoration and cleanup of old photographs, and this is where Photoshop excels. Photoshop's layout seems much more straightforward, and its utilities more accessible and versatile than those in GIMP.

Huh?

>99% of business desktops don't have Photoshop, let alone whatever a "datacenter" involves. If Photoshop is at the top of Novell's list, all it shows is that if you have an open web survey and ask Teh Community for responses, you get replies from 15-year-olds.

Re:Artists' OS Knowledge

I have a diploma in computer graphic design and in mulitmedia. In both classes, there were heaps of who were very computer literate.

One of the main reasons people don't care about GIMP, isn't just the questionably poor usability. It's still the features. Last time I check, things such as the ability to group layers, advanced typographical control, adjustable object effects, and color modes, were still far behind Photoshop.

Even in photography, I still find the GIMP lacking. The lack of LAB mode, which I often use, is one example.

The GIMP is a good project, and it sure has it's uses, but it's still far away from a Photoshop replacment for many people. It's like saying that MySQL is a suitable replacment for Oracles's top-of-the-line DB. For some; sure, for others; no F'n way.

adobe releases

From TFA: "After all, Adobe didn't even release Version 6 (acrobat) for Linux."

              That's about as dissapointing as M$ not porting BOB to Linux.

It's insanely too bad Adobe ported 1st to SGI

People (like me!) complained for years that Photoshop only existed on the Mac and PC, and so, finally, Adobe ported version 3.0 (at apparently great expense) to the SGI. Unfortunately, it was a monumental failure -- Adobe sold perhaps hundreds of copies.

The sad thing about this is that now there is almost no way that Adobe would consider doing anything like that again, with Linux. They've been burned before.

It's a shame. I'm sure that they'd sell many more than a few hundred copies to the Linux market. Maybe even a thousand.

Hardware is so cheap these days, though, that you might as well have a Mac or Windows PC around to run Photoshop when you need it. After all, the software is going to cost you $1,000 or so, you can spring for another kilobuck on some hardware -- or you can dual-boot your Linux box under Windows.

As much as I'd like Photoshop to run under Linux for my visual effects company, in the end I would prefer that Adobe just make better versions that run under the toy operating systems. My painters will be happier that way, anyway.

Thad Beier

Re:It's insanely too bad Adobe ported 1st to SGI

Adobe most certainly sold thousands of copies of Photoshop 3.0 for IRIX, since those came bundled with certain versions of SGI's entry level workstations (Indys, O2s). However, as another poster already mentioned, this was a very shoddy port, essentially just the MacOS version recompiled with a MacOS on Unix library. It looked and worked like the Mac version, was slow and unreliable and was completely out of place on a normal irix desktop. On top of all this, back in those days Photoshop wasn't "the" standard like it is today, it was just one of many image manipulation packages, and especially on Irix, there were quite a few to choose from.

I have licenses for Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere on one of my SGIs at home, as well as the now discontinued Eclipse, and Eclipse was miles ahead of Photoshop back then. I don't use any of the Adobe packages anymore, mostly because i find them totally awkward to use - significantly worse than gimp.

Re:What about....

I do. I'm a professional, not a hobbyist, and want to do my damn work, not fuck around with the interface.

Why GIMP isn't enough

Yes, there are some missing dead-tree output features. But honestly, you know why Photoshop gurus don't like the GIMP?

It's the same reason I'd be pissed if you took all my POSIX utilities away. Or replaced emacs with Visual Slickedit.

The user has spent a very large amount of time learning to use the incumbent software package very, very well. *Any* deviation in UI or featureset means that (a) he has to blow a lot of time relearning a tool and (b) he immediately notices missing features that he depends on, but it takes him a while to discover [logarithmic.net] the things that the challenger can do, but the incumbent can't.

The article mentions the relearning time, but I'd say that 90% of the problem has to be right there.

User knowledge is the nicest of the forms of lock-in that I can think of (from a user standpoint). It's straightforward, it's comparatively easy to assess (the user knows how long it took him to learn a tool), you can't really hide it from a customer, and it never *can't* be overcome if absolutely necessary.

I can't resist...

"GIMP should be enough for anybody."

::ducks::

Gimp is good enough

The Gimp is good enough for most of us. It is different than Photoshop so people need to relearn how to do some basic things which can painful for the easily frustrated. A better GUI for Gimp wouldn't hurt and I think they addressing some of the issues in 2.4. Also others have mentioned GimpShop, I'm not sure how mature that is though. But yes Gimp as it stands is not good enough for photo professionals because it lacks color management and built in CMYK support, even though a plugin exists. But then again how many photo professionals use Linux in the first place?

On a side note I'm really impressed with how much work/research Novell is putting into the Linux desktop. Instead the gradual long-term effort Red Hat has invested, Novell seems to be thinking short-term. Novell desktop 10 looks really interesting [pcworld.com] and their sponsorship of XGL is also really great. I'm glad someone is stepping it up.

Gimp would get a lot more popular if...

If Adobe figured out some way to lock down Photoshop so that it couldn't be pirated as commonly as it is currently. I know tons of people who use Photoshop and praise it to the heavens, but not a single one of them actually put the money down on it. I work in a university environment, so there're lots of legal copies of Photoshop around, but a lot of people work with their own hardware, so many copies that get used for preparing images for publication aren't legitimate.

I use the GIMP for the same tasks, and get results that are just as good, though. I think that for most image processing, the GIMP does everything the average user needs it to do, and more. I'm not denying that it doesn't meet the needs of certain professionals. However, if people weren't able to get pirated copies of Photoshop readily, they'd find that the GIMP does the job they need it to do.

Re:Gimp would get a lot more popular if...

If Adobe figured out some way to lock down Photoshop so that it couldn't be pirated as commonly as it is currently.

Does Adobe even really care? Most everyone who uses Photoshop professionally pays for it (and it's obviously priced for that market). Photoshop probably owes some of its ubiquity in the professional graphics world to its wide availability for piracy.

The fact that pirated Photoshop lives on millions of personal computers owned by people who honestly would never pay the price Adobe is asking for it (mine included, I admit) is costing Adobe very little revenue while giving them huge amounts of exposure, which amounts to free advertising.

For the sake of their stockholders, they publicly mind, but I think the lack of any real attempt to prevent its piracy speaks a lot to how they truly feel about it.

Perfect example of OSS problems

The very fact that this question has to be asked says a lot about why Linux (and other OSS) has trouble making it in fields with established software. I presume that the people who wrote GIMP wrote it to meet their own needs, because they certainly haven't taken the time and effort to meet the needs of print graphics professionals. Even if you ignore the interface and a number of other shortcomings, the lack of CMYK support makes it IMPOSSIBLE for it to be used in a graphic arts environment for printed products.

The primary colors of light (and therefore monitors) are red, green and blue (RGB). The primary colors of printing are cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). A digital image starts out as an RGB and is edited that way, but it must be converted to CMYK before it can be sent to an imagesetter for four-color printing. This isn't a "good thing to have." This is a showstopper not to have. It's like having a car without wheels.

I keep hearing OSS people breezily dismiss criticisms of software such as GIMP or just insist that it IS good enough for professionals. The very fact that some people are arogant enough to try to shove tools onto people that WILL NOT DO THE JOB shows why it's hard to adopt Linux on the desktop. Linux has done well in areas where geeks have written software for other people like themselves. It has not done well in areas where the geeks don't "get" what professionals in other areas must have. A commercial company has a serious incentive to make software that fits the needs of those other people. The people who write OSS tend to just want to write things that are fun and useful to them -- and that severly limits adoption of Linux in non-technical areas. Of course, it also doesn't help that so many Linux people seem to take the attitude that the Linux desktop is fine, but artists and other non-technical types are just too stupid to use it.

David

Re:Perfect example of OSS problems

Look, the lack of CMYK isn't the show stopper that it once was. Many modern workflows use RGB images throughout and have a colour-managed approach to conversion to CMYK that only happens just before the final output stage (be that to PDF or to an image/platesetter)
There are many advantages to an RGB workflow - smaller image sizes and easier for software to work with is one, less RAM and disk space used, less data to crunch etc.
Using a fully ICC profiled workflow, from capture/acquisition through retouching and editing and finally to output means that the one source image can be retargeted at a number of different output devices and keep the highest possible quality. The days of using pre-separated CMYK images are drawing to a close, as once you've converted to CMYK you don't want to go flipping back and forth between that and RGB. Also, once you've got CMYK, you will find it very hard to use the same source image for, say, printing on newsprint at 75lpi and printing the same image in a glossy magazine on high-brightness stock at 175lpi, or using stochastic screening...

Anyway, having said all that, I totally agree with you that the GIMP is totally unsuited to a professional workflow.
Time is money, and the time you waste with GIMP over a couple of weeks will easily cover the purchase price for the entire Adobe Creative Suite where you have a heap of apps that all work together and, more importantly, are recognised in the industry as having proven themselves to work...

Re:Perfect example of OSS problems

You don't have a clue what spamming is, do you?

You also don't seem to understand real-world workflow in printing, at least based on the ludicrous suggestion that a job be sent to a printing company and let the printing company do all of the conversion. A normal printing company expects you to be bright enough to convert your own RGBs to CMYKs. If you want them converting RGBs for you, they're going to charge you extra for this useless work on their part. I've dealt with at least a dozen printing companies with lots of jobs over the last 15 years. If you can regularly send clean files that are ready to be sent to an imagesetter with minimal prep, you're going to get a better price on your work.

If you think lack of CMYK support isn't enough to keep GIMP from being used by people in the printing industry, you're either ignorant or just too stubborn to see that GIMP isn't ready to replace Photoshop in the real world. I honestly don't know which it is.

David

Re:Perfect example of OSS problems

You don't have a clue what spamming is, do you?

Speaking of spamming: for about the 1,000,000th time, Here's the CMYK plug-ins for Gimp [gimp.org]. Yeah, one of those non-existant plug-ins the ignorant jackass in the TFA asserts do not exist for Gimp.

Re:Perfect example of OSS problems

CMYK is just the inverse of RGB.

Thanks. That was a bloody good laugh. If you'd wanted to prove you have no clue about real world colour management and are, in your own words, a 'moron', then congratulations - you just passed with flying colours.

Seriously, learn something about the subject before you spout off.

As a starter for ten, show us your RGB -> CMYK and vice versa conversion functions, if they're "just the inverse".

Hint - consider the information lost when converting from CMYK to RGB. If that's too taxing, think about the Key component.

(Supplementary question - Photoshop is largely a bitmap editing application - guess how many people edit bitmaps by defining the Pantone colour used for each pixel. As other people have said, Pantone is a small part of the equation.)

Underrated point

First of all, Photoshop -- on either Mac OS X or Windows -- is the default photographic and prepress program for serious graphics firms.... Photoshop is simply "The" application that professionals use.

This really is the key. GIMP will never have more than a marginal user base because they don't understand their users. Their users--nearly all of them--are Photoshop users (or potentially ex-Photoshop users).

Good user interface design means not just creating an inteface that "makes sense," it's also creating an interface that works the way the user expects it to work. If over 90% of your users are used to the way Photoshop does function X, then you sure as hell better implement function X the way Photoshop does. Not because that way is better or makes more sense, but because that's what the user expects you to do, and any deviation from those expections means your app is "broken" in their eyes.

Competing on features in this sort of market is futile. Your program may be able to give me the moon on a stick; but if I can't easily make it work, it might as well do nothing at all. The success stories--those projects that have managed to supplant a deeply-entrenched competitive offering--have always acknowledged this fact and have modified the behavior of their own product to compensate. The failures in this arena (GIMP being the most famous) always refuse to acknowledge the effect on their users' expectations caused by their competitor's dominance. For projects like the GIMP, it seems a matter of pride to not be influenced by such an unworthy competitor.

Good docs are another Photoshop advantage

Adobe offers these kits called Classroom in a Book and they are wonderful. Geeks might actually not like them, but they speak the language that artsy types understand. My mom had great success with a Photoshop class, and she says that is one of the biggest reasons. She's not a computer person, she finds them difficult to learn and needs precise instructions, with visuals preferably. These books provide that and using them, she's now gotten far better at Photoshop than I am.

This is extremely important, given that non-computer people are a major market for Photoshop and such. Sure geeks need to use photo editors, but let's be real here, we aren't the core market. The art people, be they prepress, photographers, designers, whatever, they are the ones that really make use of these products. However their computer skills are generally minimal, limited only to knowing what they need to work their tools. Thus having good training material is essential.

crop

I am a normal user and not a graphic designer. Thus, I do not use complicated features in Photoshop or GIMP, just the low level features. One of these, however, is crop. And crop sucks on GIMP. With Photoshop it is simple, I put a box around what I want to crop to and I crop. With GIMP there are three crops, none of which are very good. The only one that I can use is "guillotine", which one uses by going to the ruler, dragging a line out to the middle, going back to the ruler, dragging a line to the middle, going to the other ruler, dragging a line to the middle, going to the other ruler, and dragging a line to the middle again. Then I go through the menu to guillotine crop, and 9 images pop up. I close the eight I don't want, so that I now have the original big one, which I don't want any more, and the cropped version. I can just imagine what the more complex features are like. Or what people who aren't like me think, who don't use Debian as their desktop.

Re:Software patents

Actually no. The main reasoon GIMP is lacking lots of things is lack of active developers. There's really nothing that keeps us from adding support for high color depths and/or other color spaces like CMYK except that GIMP is being developed by a small group of volunteers with limited free time. If you want to help out, there are plenty of tasks in our bug tracker over at bugzilla.gnome.org that are waiting to be implemented. The GIMP developers will be happy to hold your hand and answer your questions.

Classic geek denial

There are just too many Linux people who feel that because you can accomplish this task or that with an application that it is somehow 'just as good' as another application. They refuse to accept the fact that the Human Interface Design, professional documentation, and seemingly 'minor' features the Linux application lacks are User interface, designed workflow control, and substantially deep and broad documentation options and third-party support are HUGE, not marginal, elements of an application like Photoshop. ITS NOT JUST A BUNCH OF FILTERS. Also, most if not all GIMP features *follow*, not *lead*, photoshop implementations. Like most Linux desktop applications, it seeks to duplicate the features and usability of the gold standard commercial app, not lead it. Someone else mentioned that you dont need Dreamweaver to develop webpages - entirely true - but if you are a professional website designer 90% of your workflow revolves around constant mockup revision negotiation between client and designer, following by a final code implementation. Using Photoshop and/or Dreamweaver to revise mockups moves MUCH faster than hand-coding, and as such saves time and money. Also, it is advantageous to design in PS and/or DW because you focus on what the final page needs to look like, and not worry about how it needs to be coded, which is huge.

Photoshop is a Killer App

I use Linux as my primary desktop OS. I have to say that I agree that Photoshop would definitely be a huge boon to be able to run on my desktop. Right now I have a mac that I use for photoshop and although I really like it, it would be very nice to be able to not have to get up and move to a different machine to be able to mess with some textures. While GIMP works for some things (and it actually feels faster working with some larger files than photoshop on similar machines)- the lack of certain plugins (generating normal and image maps, working with .iff files, nVidias photoshop plugins) means that gimp isn't exactly practical.

Why _should_ I use The GIMP?

Let's see: as a photographer, the GIMP is missing 16 bit support (showstopper), the healing brush (saves me hours of time doing dust removal and the like), adjustment layers, speed (I work with 300-500MB large format scans), proper color management, etc. Someone tell me - why _should_ I use The GIMP? To save a few hundred dollars - a small fraction of my total equipment cost? Being the dominant player, it's not for Photoshop to justify its existence - the GIMP needs to provide a compelling reason for people to use it, and I see absolutely none for serious users.

Colour depth.

The annoying thing about the colour depth issues is that there IS a version of GIMP that supports large colour depths - there is an entire fork of the GIMP tree called 'FilmGIMP' - and then, later: 'CinePaint' that's been developed with really comprehensive deep colour support.

The problem is at the core of the GIMP developer team's culture. If you hang out on the GIMP mailing list for any amount of time, you'll find it's an unbelievably hostile list. The members of the team seem to hate each other with a passion! There is constant bickering and any questions that are even a shade off-topic (or even on-topic but in the mailing list archives) will be flamed mercilessly.

It is that innate hostility that drove a wedge between the GIMP team and the consortium of movie art teams that put together FilmGIMP/CinePaint. That the project had to be forked in order to get such a basic feature done is just criminal.

GIMP is great - yes - but it could have been so much greater. It's amazing that it's done as well as it has.

Re:Colour depth.

The mailing lists don't just have the developers biting at each other, but some of the higher up gimp people biting at users and potential users. I dared to compare a feature of Photoshop's clone tool with one on GIMP, and wished for some of the photoshop-like functionality on the gimp, and gimp's resident defender Carol started on with the nasty emails. It was six repetitive emails abusing me, my relationships with women, abusing me for being a control freak and how, by insisting gimp wasn't good enough, I was calling all gimp users morons for using substandard software and she wouldn't stand for that. That's borderline stalking behaviour.

What happened 3 months later? My graphic designer gf got exactly the same treatment in email off list for asking how to do something in gimp that she could do in photoshop, except carol added in the accusation that she could only afford photoshop if she's sleeping with the boss so she didn't have time to speak to people like her. That didn't stop her sending another couple of abusive emails.

This is an open source software mailing list, not a vicious political shitfight where nobody's allowed to question or suggest the slightest thing is wrong with Gimp. Works more like the latter from my experience.

Re:Colour depth.

Carol is not representative for the GIMP developers. The last time we heard about her sending such mails off-list, we asked her to stop it and were told that it wouldn't happen again. If it did indeed happen again (as you said), I would like you to report this incident and show evidence for it (but please not here on slashdot). If your claims are true, then it is probably about time that Carol gets her gimp.org mail address and web space revoked. We have been hesitant to do that until now because she is often very helpful and the content of carol.gimp.org is a very good resource for GIMP users. But her attitude towards some people on the mailing-list is indeed inacceptable and I am afraid that she is doing more harm than good.

Re:Colour depth.

We have realized this a long time ago and have discussed it several times. But a mailing-list is a public place. You don't throw someone out of a public place just because you don't like him/her. Especially not if he/she is also often being helpful and he/she is one of the few people who are actually contributing to the project. It is a difficult situation but at some point it needs to be dealt with. That's why I was asking for evidence so that we can bring it up again if needed.

Game dev

I use the GIMP from time to time in game development (as much as a programmer needs to anyway).

Likes:
-Supports a wide range of file formats
-Tons of image editing and processing options
-Understands the concept of an alpha channel
-Free!

Dislikes:
-Alpha channel support is "inadequate" (to be kind)
-8 bits per channel max
-Starts up very slowly

I don't hate the interface as much as some people, but then I don't work with it all day either. I imagine the bits-per-channel thing could be a pain to fix, depending on how things have been designed. It seems that most problems with it are known and fixable, why is it exactly that they aren't?

Re:Gimp and Photoshop

You're too smart. What are you doing posting to Slashdot? (-:

Incidentally, I just happened to have refuted the inaccuracies in the TFA here [blogspot.com]. Perhaps you can point some of these out to others in this forum? Or add to them over time? I, too, have experience with both (as well as with MGI-photosuite, Macintosh Draw, Windows Paintbrush, xfig, and Corel Draw, and more I've probably forgotten), and am absolutely baffled at how so much flat-out Bull gets spread about one little program. I'm getting to where I have a pet theory that Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is the source of all of it!

But anyway, you being a user of both, I would highly value any input you could provide in the comments sections of my blog's tutorials (scroll down the menu on the left, they're there). I'm fine with porting Photoshop. I'm *not* fine with the mythology going around.

Is this really a surprise?

Hmmmm. Last April when we last talked about this, [slashdot.org] I listed as major hurdles to GIMP replacing Photoshop features including "16-bit" images, adjustment layers, CYMK processing and (with a little help from a commenter at that time) color managment.

(I'd also incorrectly guessed that RAW processing wasn't available at all.)

My understanding is that none of those features is yet addressed, although CMS is due in GIMP 2.4.

In that same time frame, PS has made advancements itself.

I, for one, welcome our new Adobe..., errr, that is, I remain unsuprised by corporate users wanting PS-on-Linux.

Fonts in OS X?

erm last time I loaded up the GIMP I couldn't even use any of the OS X fonts. Maybe you can (can you?) but that's a pretty big reason to use it for home-graphics use (ie when you can't afford/need photoshop). I'm pretty techie but I just couldn't be assed after 10 mins of googling and turning up no answers.

GIMP vs ACR, Lightroom, CS2

What spending 600 quid on Photoshop gave me was hours of my life back. Ignoring the technical issues like 16bit support, LAB, plugins, etc. I still would have spent this money on CS2.

Being able to modify exposure, black point, contrast and white balance in a second or two per image cut my workflow on a standard shoot from about 2 hours to 1 hour. Beign able to do that non-destructively so that I can go back and try something else later is even more valuable. Cutting my time down behind the machine means I can spend more time behind the lens, and that's where the money really is.

Being able to make a change once and then copy it to every other image in the shoot, or a selected subset of those images means that I don't make mistakes.

The other big issue is information available. Adobe Photoshop CS2 for Photographers is an awesome book. It presents 'recipes' that are easily understood, achieve a specific goal and can easily be turned into actions. The Real World Camera RAW book was also fantastic.

Don't be different, okay?

I tried GIMP. I spit four thousand times and I went back to Photoshop. Yes, interface is customizable and simply takes "getting used to" but I don't want to customize nor get used to it, all I wanted was to make a small animated toolbar (which I did in less than 10 minutes at home). Why can't there be a version that does things like Photoshop does?
I think GIMP is in the same UI trap as Lotus products that are trailing Microsoft Office popularity -- "We're different, and we don't care that more popular product has different interface, we'll force users to get used to ours". Yes, there will be perver strange people who will say they like Lotus UI because "it's different" but for most people Microsoft Office interface works, and Microsoft got where it is now not only because of the monopoly tie-in with OS products, but because they copy good things into their products, including UI. By being "different" Lotus office products limited themselves to situation where user is forced to use them. And for home they run for Word or for something that looks and behaves like Word.
Every time you encounter radically new interface it takes time and effort to get used to. People don't want and don't have to do it. Leave the radical and ugly dysfunctional interface to hobbyists, and copy Photoshop interface for the rest of users. If you want to make a point how easier/better GIMP interface is, add a little window that says "You could have easily done it in GIMP native interface by pressing blah blah blah". And, perhaps, allow pieces of interface being switch to native mode, so once user is completely accustomed to GIMP way of doing things whole interface would be reverted to radical mode.
Instead of that all I see is people argue with foam at their mouth on how much better GIMP interface is.

GIMP is not Photoshop, period

And it is not replacement for Photoshop, either. But post scriptum: for PROFESIONALS. For other crowd who pirates Photoshop just for little tweaks (who are also just people who takes "first hit for free") GIMP could be good enough.

See, I said - could be. Yes, GIMP has it's own share of problems and it feels somehow stagnated, sure. It could be better. So it is just too little confusing in GUI and lacks good help mode. That's all.

For professionals it is completely other story.

GIMP sucks as a user experience

I don't care what uber powerful features it supports. If simple operations can be an exercise in frustration then the UI needs fixing.

A simple example which bugged me this weekend. I needed extra space to draw in so I resized the canvas. But I can't actually paint there! Why? Because the canvas size changed but the layer size didn't. This is so stupid. I only had one layer, so why didn't it ask me if I wanted to resize the layer too, or even provide that as a persistent checkbox preference in the Canvas size dialog? GIMP is replete with stupid little things like this. Such as the foreground / background colour selector where it is entirely non obvious how it works with the same tooltip covering 4 distinct actions. Or the scale selection (as far as it works in Win32) does not support proportional scaling and the grabber behaviour is totally insane.

Rather than attempting to play the same complex notes as Photoshop (another lousy experience IMHO), perhaps they should be simplifying its day to day use first. Make the next version a usability & bug fixing release only. People wouldn't be pining so much for Photoshop or any other decent tool if the one which ships with Linux didn't make them want to gnaw their own arm off with frustration.

Why not links in the article?

Novells conclusion [novell.com] from the survay [novell.com]

Agree and Disagree

To an extent, I would agree that GIMP is not enough to make a business convert from Windows to Linux. Windows offers both Photoshop and Paintshop Pro, two extremely great imaging programs and in my strongest opinion, GIMP cannot even compare to those two. But on the other hand, GIMP should be considered a factor in changing operating systems. But let's not forget about the thousands of other exclusive programs found only for Linux... even though more and more are moving away as we speak. For me, I am just happy enough installing the newest version of Cedega and emulating anything I need from every other platform just to keep my Penguin happy.

I just refuted this article's mistakes yesterday:

Right here. [blogspot.com]

Once again: Photoshop ported to GNU/Linux/BSD/etc=good thing. I'm all in favor of it. Then we can all get off the Gimp's back. I've been fighting ignorance about the Gimp for five years, and I'm sick of it. The reasons cited in this article amount to "We need something else for transportation, because cars do not come with steering wheels, tires, and motors." OK, whatever the reason for the insanity, y'all do what you have to.

Watch GIMP Suck Eggs with the Stroke Tool...

Simple test... create a new image, use the ellipse select tool to create a circle, stroke that circle. Look how absolutely nasty and NOT SMOOTH the stroke is. If GIMP can't handle a simple operation like stroke how on earth is it supposed to make people think it can compete with Photoshop?

Re:Gimp Isnt enough.

actually i think he may be ON his period.... don't mess with him.

Re:In other news... you are full of it

Photoshop 9 (CS2) runs just fin on a computer with 256MB of RAM. On a system with a gig, it screams. It does not make you configure scratch disks, and so on. It's easy of use is so far above GIMP's it's not even funny. Had you actually spent any amount of time using Photoshop and looked at it objectively, this would be pretty obvious.

Please, let's cut the crap. This kind of overly optimistic "The opposition sucks, our solution is the best!" is stupid and hurts OSS. The reason it hurts it is because if someone actually listens to you and trys GIMP, expecting it to be better than Photoshop and then find out it's not, they get a very negative impression of OSS. They believe that it's all a bunch of shoddy shit created by amatures, and that the things they hold up as the best products are, in fact, poor quality.

GIMP is fine for people who do non-serious work and are willing to put up with a difficult interface to get what they want. It's not easy for beginners. For that, there's Photoshop Elements.