Open source image editing application GIMP has always been free, but the work required to continue building and improving the software doesn't come without cost. In a recent post, the team asks GIMP's users to lend financial support to Øyvind Kolås, the man behind the Generic Graphics Library (GEGL) and 42% of its commits.
Kolås is responsible for numerous improvements to the graphics engine GEGL, as well as the pixel data conversion library babl. Thanks to this work, in part, GIMP 2.10 will offer numerous notable features including the previously announced 16-bit and 32-bit color channel processing. However, some requested features are still missing, including CMYK and spot colors support, additional filters, better GPU usage and more.
To help get the ball rolling on those features and others like them, GIMP is pointing users toward a Patreon page for Kolås, where he explains, “GIMP does not redistribute donations to developers/contributors — and I am currently living off savings…” Thus far 186 patrons have lended a total of $793/month support for Kolås. Support options for prospective patrons starts at $2/month, and ranges up to $128/month or higher for institutions.
Sometime you even get blamed by people for software you didn't even write :-) I wrote a tool that is called by another one which does the GUI and received an email of insults because "on each update your f*** programs deletes my preferences".
Program has not been updated in a few years so I checked and it's the GUI overlay (programmed by someone else) that resets preferences on each update. Nonetheless, I got blamed for it and received an email of insults.
Maybe they could try a kickstarter with early access or some special plugins or maybe USB stick install media. Heck, maybe even just a T-shirt. I think it should stay open source, but there's got to be a way to get the biggest fans to help fund all the work they benefit from.
It is all about competition. If we do not support others then it will be photoshop only. It will dictate progress and prices. We all should be interested to maintain alternatives. Although free is not always free of charge, however it is worth doing it.
GIMP and a few other similarly free image editing software are all great and everything, but the dominance of Photoshop and Lightroom in the market is undeniable and the sheeple will always continue using those over anything else EVEN IF the alternatives would someday prove to be not only free or cheaper, but better too!
I always use GIMP at home. It's as capable as Photoshop & Photo Paint, but still it can't compete with Photoshop because cracked Photoshop is always easy to find.
Large corporations will always buy Adobe because they are too stupid to look any further, the greedy prices are irrelevant, and their employees probably say they 'need' it. But I often wonder how many corporate copies of Photoshop are used only to crop photos and do some simple retouching? GIMP, Inkscape, LibreOffice and Blender (to which I donate €10 /month) should all advertise to *small* businesses, for whom obscene multi-thousand dollar Photoshop/Illustrator/MS Office/Maya licences make a massive dent in profits.
I have only so much time to spare for photography. I can now use Lightroom and, to a lesser extent, Photoshop and find both very satisfactory editing tools.
I am not a "sheeple". I'm just a person with limited time and thousands of edited images in a Lightroom Library.
More power to those who have time and energy to learn new editing programs and for the people at GIMP, DxO, Phase One etc. who provide such products.
"I always use GIMP at home. It's as capable as Photoshop & Photo Paint, but still it can't compete with Photoshop because cracked Photoshop is always easy to find."
No, unlike PhotoShop CS, GIMP does not have Selective Color.
(Well and GIMP is easy enough to find. Never managed to find a cracked PS. I'm sure they exist.)
Right, PaintShop doesn't have Selective Color.
Cue up claims that one can select colour with GIMP--not at all what I'm pointing out as lacking from GIMP.
I've only ever seen Selective Color, outside of PhotosShop, in Minolta film scanner software.
@ Camley: i didn't have people like you in mind when referring to certain types of user as "sheeple" ... :)
i was targeting mostly 'pros' who don't know anything outside the ONLY program(s) or hardware systems they have used perhaps since its first release ages ago and they have grown into it and thus are stuck with it FOREVER until the day they die, or the program's vendor dies and now its users will be left helpless and clueless as to what other options are out there for them!
besides, no one says PS or LR are bad programs! there is a reason they are "industry standard" and GIMP or some other are not ... but the problem with most industry standard items out there is that they are a little bit too 'overrated' ...
also, if you're truly into doing only a little editing on your image files, then don't you think using an overly professional program such as Photoshop or even Lightroom is a little bit of overkill maybe? especially if you find yourself obliged to pay for it too ...
@ HowaboutRAW: well, i know your comment wasn't addressed at me ... so, i hope you don't mind: is "Selective Color" the only major item you find superior in PS?
as i said already in my previous comment to Camley, PS is industry standard because it mostly deserves it too ...
but there are certain apparently small yet very important actions and effects that PS simply doesn't do (while GIMP and others do) or worse, there are quite a number of things that PS's interface does in a rather 'weird' if not clumsy way, while others do the same thing (and more) a lot easier!
for example, some of those items PS does after tens if not hundreds of clicks and 'complex behavior' but others do the same thing in only a few clicks and in a much easier and *intuitive* way ... in fact, that's exactly the problem with Photoshop and many so-so graphics programs: their interfaces in majority of cases are >counter-intuitive< which makes their learning curve quite a hassle for majority of users!
I can't comment on all of PhotoShop CS's features.
However, Selective Color is one that GIMP does not have.
Right, one software's interface can make things easy that another's make convoluted.
(Yet, Selective Color is not hidden behind a complex series of steps in GIMP, nor is Vibrance. Albeit Vibrance is a much more common feature--plenty of image programs have it. But it's also one about which I've seen fake claims of being able to recreate the effect with a long series of steps in software like GIMP.)
It's the same reason most people use MS Word, even though LibreOffice is out there. It's just too easy to stay with the industry standard. In the corporate world, paying that licensing fee is usually way cheaper than retraining users. And then when you interchange documents with other companies, they need to be able to edit them, too. And they probably use the industry standard, too.
But just by way of example Open Office (and a variety of other office software--both free and purchased) was years ahead of MS Office with "export to PDF".
Whereas PhotoShop CC/CS still does things that basically no other photo editor will do. Whether you need those features is a different issue.
Then both MS and Adobe played the game of using scare terms like "industry standard" and "literate in Word/Excel", "know PhotoShop" and equated those terms with computer literacy.
MS's claims were laughable decades ago, since all sorts of other software can open Word and Excel files. And Adobe's similar claims only meant anything if you wanted a specific feature in Premier, PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, etc.
Export to PDF is nice, but LibreOffice can't do autofills and csv imports as intelligently as Excel and Formatting is a bit more of a challenge vs Word. And while lots of software can open MS Office documents, there are always some formatting and line break quirks.
Yeah, MS and Adobe have spent a lot of money convincing people to buy their products. It's called marketing. And now that everyone has bought them, there's all the more reason for the rest of us to do so as well. I personally hate Adobe's products for the most part, but there's no denying that you can find thousands of Photoshop tutorials and resources on the web. Meanwhile, the results list is pretty sparse for Corel PSP, even though it's been out forever.
Right, MS Office may do things you need that something else doesn't. However MS Office was years behind others with extract to PDF. I almost never use Excel.
Didn't PaintShop used to be called JASC or something like that?
Microsoft, as an OS supplier, was much better at working with other software companies wanting to make applications than IBM, CPM, Apple, HP, and there are others. (Nothing really to do with MS Office though.)
Try the free version of KingSoft, it's more powerful than LibreOffice and OpenOffice in some regards. There's also Polaris Office.
@ tkbslc: true ... but what about incompatibilities between different versions of the Word program? sometimes a file produced on Word 2010 on computer A fails to show properly on the very same Word 2010 on computer B for example! or, you adjust everything in a very advanced manner on a file created using Word 200x, save it, reopen it, and some of your adjustments are not shown as before!
Haven't really used MSWord since Word2000--which I managed to "run" on my WinXP laptop for years.
When I know the document is to be possibly read/edited in Word I save it in the .doc format (Word 1997-2003), not the .docx format used by later versions of MSWord by default.
"Extract to PDF" is just a small function that is kind of a nice to have but there's PDF printers for that.
Open Office is fine for personal use , but it isn't anywhere close to MS Office, eg when using macro-heavy Excel sheets or database lookup functionality.
But the biggest draw is the very fact that it's industry standard. The cost of software licenses is minimal when compared to the cost of maintaining it, and even that pales to the cost of training. You can safely assume that a new employee will know the basics of Excel and Word and Powepoint, and if they require help, there's tons available internally and on the web. Switch to a LibreOffice or OpenOffice in a large corporate setting, and you will spend so much money on lost productivity, training and support, the cost of Microsoft Office licenses would seem laughable by comparison. And I haven't even started to talk compatibility and collaboration. Being a standard saves money for large corporate user.
but the main problem in the corporate world (that is also so apt to crash every once awhile, going bankrupt and file for chapter 11 to be bail out with the regular folks hard-earned tax cash btw!) is that almost all big (and most small businesses) suffer from an 'internal packaging over content' syndrome and that's why they keep failing mostly rather than succeeding!
to illustrate my point: the once industry giant IBM's management cares more for their employees dress code than their products quality and that's why now they're practically a forgotten item in the computer world, while Apple's state of the art products are cared for by a (late) CEO who showed up at work with relaxed shorts and sneakers instead of the suffocating ties and formal business suite ...
most Adobe and Micro$oft software remind me of the failed IBM dress code: packaging over content! too much fuss for nothing!
long story short: if we keep our needs simple, simple tools are more than enough!
So you pay no attention to computers. IBM remains a huge computer company, it is not in personal computing.
Apple has no state of the art gear, it's repackaging well worked out gear. Apple has invented very little. Google's main technology isn't even owned by Google, but at least Google tries to do invention.
@ HowaboutRAW > IBM has done quite a number of great innovative things, but as for "inventions", well, none of these guys are 'inventors' really!
they have all been "repackaging" old and sometimes new ideas by everybody based on consumer needs ... (and often times, based on 'created needs' rather than true ones, such as the smartwatch that most people don't buy and the few who do, barely use it unless for a show off!)
recently, the most important item that IBM has come up is the quantum computer ... exciting, but even at that, most people are asking if it's truly a needed item at all ...
long story short: IBM, was the last of the mechanical computer makers (mostly business calculating machines) to jump on the electronic computer bandwagon in the old times ... (its CEO even stated something like, "How many people would buy an electronic computer anyway?")
IBM became important only when it started selling its products at lower prices than others ... it even did so in the Personal Computer market, competing with Apple! :) there's even a song Steve Jobs personally sang and played on the piano lampooning IBM's move to kick Apple out of business! IBM had to take help from Micro$oft in the end, to help them out with an OS ... and Bill Gates was also a very young boy (and a friend of Steve Jobs) when the good old IBM asked M$ for help!
@ HowaboutRAW > you are the one who needs to re-educate himself on the history of computing and computers in here i guess because you sound like one of those old school guys or gals (or a young one with a middle age prejudice?) who thinks "IBM *invented* computers" or something like that?!
no wonder, most millennials born into and after the digital revolution (even many IT professionals) think "Bill Gates INVENTED computers!" ...
Bill Gates himself said in an interview once, something like: "When i was 13 computers came out ..." no sir, when your grandfather was 13 the first 'modern' computers came out! :D
don't be offended please! we all make similar silly mistakes once awhile, don't we? ;-)
@ HowaboutRAW > o my! you never give up, do you? (neither do i! perfect match?) :D
i NEVER said you SAID that! i just said the way you treat IBM as a GOD or something gives the impression that you're one of those people treating the subject as such!
IBM was hot stuff in the 1970s and 1960s mostly while now it is nothing but 'yet another computer firm in the industry' and way below the younger ones such as Apple ...
ask the average computer user (and even some "professionals") and they believe BG officially invented computers!
IBM did come up with OS/2, which was great, but didn't last longer than 2 years, unfortunately! and Windows sucks too!
i am an IT professional btw, doing more computer stuff than i do photography actually, and i know very well what i'm talking about! short: neither Windows, nor OS/2 and not even Macintosh OSX etc are the bets OSes around anymore! Linux rules these days!
and glad you said that about "reprogramable digital computers" going back so long into the past ... shows you know a thing or two about computers too! (here: your IT certification in computer history, granted!) :D
You act like it's difficult to spot your comment, especially on articles about Leica. haha Hey hey say " US born, like me , have the right to criticize" Then " i didn't say i'm US born" and " American born" can be north and south American. LMAO!
The developers of Gimp deserve our thanks and due credit. It's an excellent product, especially when the extensions, such as G'MIC and FX-Foundry, are added. Is it capable of doing professional level photo editing? Yes. Does it have all the tools Photoshop has? No. Does Photoshop have all the tools Gimp has? No. (For example, Gimp had the equivalent of content-aware fill 7 years before Photoshop). Does it have CMYK editing? No, but really who cares unless you're working in a print shop with offset presses? You sure don't need CMYK for the web or ink jet printing. Anyway, pre-press shops prefer to do their own CMYK conversions to carefully match the presses, papers and inks. If you work in a pre-press or design shop that uses Photoshop, should you be a rebel and use Gimp? No. If there's a problem you'll be blamed, even if the problem is nothing to do with you or Gimp. If you're an independent pro photographer, is Gimp (and other open-sources software) a viable option to Photoshop? Yes.
Can somebody tell me something about the difference between 8 and 16/32 bit support? How important is it? I just looked at some comparison photos on the Internet, and the 16 bit photos looked (slightly) cleaner than 8 bit photos.
I've used Gimp for many years, in a fairly advanced way I think. I use layer masks, curves, many different filters, decomposition, etc. and I've been happy with the results. I've printed up to 13x19" many times, and my photos look sharp, detailed, and "not posterized."
Still, I'm always looking for an edge, and I would have to throw away detail that I could retain. Is the 8/16/32 bit thing another manifestation of pixel-peeping (in most cases), or am I missing out on a "Wow!" thing? Thanks.
If you make a large change in colour or tonal range with an 8-bit image you can get posterization or banding, in other words an abrupt change of tones instead of a smooth change. You will also see gaps in the histograms, which may or may not be apparent in the image. The best way to avoid these problems is to make changes in exposure, dynamic range and color in the raw converter. This way you're using the full data from the raw image. 16-bit TIFFs are better than 8-bit JPEGs or TIFFs, but nowhere near as good as raw files.
Sometimes I play with my photos a lot and I notice something like what you're talking about, but only with extreme lifts. And I don't see it much, because most of what I do is through a gray-scale layer mask copy of the layer, so the changes are not applied equally to neighboring pixels. My cameras are only 12 bits in raw anyway! Old DSLRs. I use UFRAW mostly for raw, sometimes dcraw or rawtherapee. It doesn't sound like I need to worry about this too much. Best.
http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/The_Floating_Point_Engine RawTherapee 4 does all calculations in precise 32-bit floating point notation (in contrast to 16-bit integer as used in many other converters like dcraw and also in RawTherapee up to version 3.0) so nothing gets rounded off and lost. Classical converters work with 16-bit integer numbers. A pixel channel has values ranging from 0-65535 in 16-bit (to increase precision converters usually multiply the 12-14 bit camera values to fill the 16-bit range). The numbers have no fractions, so for example there is no value between 102 and 103. In contrast, floating point numbers store a value at a far wider range with a precision of 6-7 significant digits. This helps especially in the highlights, where higher ranges can be recovered. It allows intermediate results in the processing chain to over- or undershoot temporarily without losing information. The fraction values possible also help to smooth color transitions to prevent color banding
OK, I just checked. My version of RawTherapee is 4.2.0.
I haven't used it in a while.
I'm going to play with a couple of raw files tomorrow and see how it turns out.
Maybe I'll post again.
My main reason for using ufraw was that it has a gimp plugin. I see that rawtherapee does too! I got in the gimp-ufraw habit years ago (10?), maybe before rawtherapee was popular and/or had a gimp plugin. Best.
i'm going to second all Hank Pi said, and add this:
be ware of the monitor you're using, especially for editing still imagery, ie, photographs!
hint: majority of 'good' 1080 monitors are more than sufficient for editing most 'regular' video files yet at the same time, barely any 4K (or higher) monitor i know of, is good enough for a true-to-the-point editing of any 'serious' still image higher than 8MP in resolution!
the latest highly pro monitors offered by a few manufacturers only offer enough resolution for 14MP still images ... so, if you have photo files higher than 16MP (especially if they are in MF format) you're still losing a huge amount of pixels and barely see the 'original' really!
Gimp has been an important part of my professional photo workflow since I switched to Linux several years ago. Yes, it would be nice to have 16/32 bit support, but it's not a deal breaker for pro use. If you make large adjustments to color or tonal range in an 8-bit per channel image, there may be visible posterization, but those are the kinds of adjustments that are better made in the raw converter with all the raw data available. Rawtherapee and darktable are very powerful raw converters.
I'm very happy with open-source software. Just wish I had my money back for all orphaned commercial software I purchased in the past - that's thousands of dollars wasted.
HowaboutRAW - you are repeating incorrect information. Shadow/highlight does not produce a result that is reproducible with just Curves. Curves is a simple in/out curve: one value in, another value out per pixel. Shadow/highlight, as implemented in most software, does detail and edge detection with varying outputs based on localized content.
"Learn to use Curves" is not a helpful answer since Curves alone cannot reproduce Shadow/Highlight results. You would need at the very least to create multiple curves and masks for different tonal ranges.
I am not saying either S/H or Curves is better than the other, since that is not true either. In many cases, the best solution is to use both features together...since neither can fully replace the other.
This is news to me, however I did note that shadow/highlight has limits, limits that make things easier.
Thank you for the link, looked at the PDF briefly, that looks a lot like work with curves.
I will download the big file of examples and look further.
"You would need at the very least to create multiple curves and masks for different tonal ranges."
This tells me that yes, we are talking about the same thing. Though I don't use masks Note, I never said that "learning/using curves is easy".
Of course, GIMP does have Color Balance, and that allows for some of what you may be calling "masks".
As for "repeating", mine is personal experience from scanning hundreds of colour film images--some images scanned a dozen times. I wasn't quoting something I read somewhere, if I'd been doing so, I'd have noted that fact.
I'm not sure what you guys are talking about, since we're using words, not pictures, but, it is pretty easy to adjust shadows or highlights smoothly in gimp using the curves tool and a grayscale layer mask.
You add a layer mask to the layer you want to adjust, and choose grayscale copy of layer. That mask will cause your changes in the layer to be visible preferentially in the highlight area. If you invert the colors in the mask, the changes will be visible preferentially in the shadow area. There are a million variations to this. You can drop anything you want into the layer mask area, including layers that you got from decomposition of the photo into different grayscale colorspaces, etc. You can also adjust the layer mask itself with the curves tool before working on the layer (one of my favorite tricks) or gaussian blur, etc. Layer masks are your friend. They provide an almost infinite amount of control over where your changes are visible in the altered layer.
Right, that's about what I thought, but I'm tired of waiting for GIMP 2.8 to open and glitch on my fast Win7 laptop.
Albeit, no, I've not looked into the masking trick you describe--I'm not real familiar with layer work, and not at all familiar with layer work in GIMP.
Indeed that PDF linked by gb seems to slow lots of extreme edge work, unsharp masking, accessed through something like Curves. Oh and much use of the adjective :"Laplacian"--yeah I get he was a mathematician.
I have a Windows laptop with one hard drive. I partitioned it, and put Debian Linux on the other half. You can do this with a very small piece of your hard drive (24 Gb would be more than enough), because you can tell Linux to automatically mount your windows partition (which is sleeping when you run Linux) just as Linux would automatically mount a flash you plug in. So you keep everything stored on the Windows side, which shows up as a folder when Linux is running. When Windows runs, it's the same as it already was.
On my mac, I took out the optical drive, put in a caddie and hard drive, + Linux.
There are lots of ways to install Linux and keep your current system just as it is.
Ubuntu 2016-04 doesn't support serious 3D CAD software yet. (I realize real Unix systems do. Yes, I know about FreeCAD; Linux runs it, Window runs it, but not Ubuntu 16.04 yet--it's a bit of mystery. It's also not very powerful 3D CAD.)
Also with my particular laptop, Ubuntu 16.04 has the glitch of not shutting down fully. Ubuntu 16.04 also doesn't like my laptop's 10bit screen, though irony video playback on the Ubuntu clone looks much better than on Windows 7--my normal/native OS.
Then there's the headaches of things like my film scanners, albeit I've not used them in a few years.
I don't think I'm up to a second Linux OS clone, though of course Ubuntu is so useless to me that I could get rid of that particular Linux variation and try something else.
Right, my Win7 Pro 64 bit system stays just as it is by having its own C drive clone. (I've had partitions "walls" disappear unexpectedly in the past, so I use physically distinct drives+a screwdriver.
Well, you don't have to switch to Linux for everything. My point was just that you can put in a minimal install for Gimp or whatever else you'd like to do.
I use Linux most of the time, but my software needs are less demanding than yours.
Many scanners are plug and play in Linux. I never had a problem with my Epson scanners and printers. Both work from within Gimp. There is an Epson print utility called gutenprint that gives you access to Epson printer functions from within gimp. Xsane also has a gimp plugin and supports epson scanners.
One thing that is generally (not always) true of Linux is that better equipment is supported. That $2,000 Epson printer? Likely supported, and well. The $89 off-brand scanner? Maybe not. That's because the developers have limited time, and they tend to support what's most useful in a professional environment.
bobbarber I guess difficulty is in the eye of the beholder. To me moving a slider (one click + drag) is way easier than creating layers implementing multiple curves.
Gimp is generally not user friendly. I've never liked the multiple window setup.
But like anything that is not user friendly, if you use gimp enough you learn to do the ten things you do most often quickly, and it becomes acceptable.
And there is an argument in favor of layers over a slider: increased control.
Is the increased control worth the extra work? Probably not in most cases. But it's nice to have, if you ever need to spend time with a tricky or important photo.
bobbarber it would be nice to have both but I use the sliders 99.9999999999% of the time so if I had to choose I'd rather have sliders. Extra capability is of not much use if it comes at the expense or in the absence of capability you actually use and need. There's a reason pretty much every other photo editing software has sliders.... they work really well.... better + easier than curves + layers for most people.
Curves don't use sliders because of the multiple points on the in/out curve. You need to get at each point individually.
The reason most shadow/highlight implementations use a slider is because there is more than one number going in and out along the tones. It is doing spatial analysis and edge detection, so you are not simply saying "take tone 23 and make it 26 instead" as you do with a curve. It's beyond masked curves.
You have the illusion of "less control" with a Shadow/Highlight slider because you see a simple slider, but it's a slider because there is more sophisticated and complex processing going on behind the scenes. And frankly, I think I have more real control using Shadow/Highlight because I get the results I want much faster than if I used curves. And I used curves for years and years. And I still use curves for the few remaining edge cases where they're better than shadow/highlight.
Right, the point about using curves stands, of course I use control points--as does anyone doing serious curves work in GIMP, ACR, PhotoShop, or with scanning software.
There is absolutely no possibility, none, zero, zip, zilch, nada, forget about it, that you have as much control with a slider as you do with curves + masks. No matter how sophisticated the algorithm is for the slider, it's a choice that will not be optimal in all cases, as any operation to improve a photo is not optimal in all cases. All of us know that whatever operation in post gave you a fantastic result on one photo, may look so-so or even horrible on the next.
Layer masks allow you to determine exactly which parts of the photo you want to adjust, with intervention by hand if necessary (painting out parts of the photo that you don't want the highlights or shadows adjustment to apply to, etc.), how much to adjust (changing the gray values of the mask up or down, etc.), how to treat adjacent pixels (average or not, with any algorithm you choose, etc.).
No, the answer is not, "Slider didn't do what I wanted. Tough photo. Nothing could improve it."
Slider always does what I want though. I don't enjoy spending hours processing photos.
I recently converted many of my computers back from Linux to Windows because of all the problems. I felt like I was a software developer chasing all the glitches and holes. I may fire it back up to run off a USB for a home NAS though.
Well, that's the argument, and I'm with you on a lot of it. I used to spend a lot more time on photos than I like to spend now. I try to process photos quickly now, and mostly skate by on skills I've already developed. BUT, since I've already learned how to use curves and masks, it's not a big deal. I also drive a stick if that tells you anything. Do I consciously think about shifting gears? Never.
So the slider is the best solution for most people, most of the time, just as an automatic transmission is the best solution for most people, most of the time. I'll go along with that. But it's not fair to claim that sliders give more control than curves and layer masks. Just not true.
bobbarber fair enough. For the record, I drive stick too, and listen to vinyl :-D
I would liken the "automatic transmission" of cameras to be the cell phone. Using sliders over curves is more like running a lower stability control level at the race track.
bobbarber - We are in agreement much more than you think. Earlier I said that many images might require both curves and shadow/highlight. I understand how precise and valuable curves are, and how much more valuable they are when masked to specific areas. But shadow/highlight is also a valuable third way.
It sounds like you're underestimating the shadow/highlight sliders. Remember, there are some types of control you have with those that are difficult with masks. I understand masked curves. But I also understand that S/H and curves cannot completely replace the other.
If you want to work exclusively with curves, that's 100% OK and wonderful. But I strongly believe that dismissing shadow/highlight because it's "just one slider" is as misguided and self-limiting as Scott Kelby's claim that we no longer need to use curves because we now have shadow/highlight. Both are not true.
graybalanced, Yes, I don't think we're too far apart on this. Whatever works, and I know the sliders are excellent. It would be nice to have them in gimp. For now, they're unavailable. Best.
GIMP is great an i support any good opensource projects but it needs a better business model to bring a constant money flow. Not sure what that would be...
They need a good and clear development plan and a team of developers who can dedicate themselves to the project full time - not just 1 or 2 who may burn out after a while.
And right PhotoShop CS, which I have, and CC, which I won't rent, do more than GIMP. I don't think anyone disputes this--well except some really delusional freeware defenders.
Unlike most people that use Wikipedia, I donate every year. I don't expect you to. If you use Wikipedia, you're welcome.
The thing about donating to free things is that it's optional and you get to choose how much (most are donating £1.62/month to Øyvind). There's no mandate you donate. If you choose to, thank you.
I appreciate Wikipedia in many ways, however I don't donate to libertarian causes, and the overlapping post modern philosophy also repels my donations.
Right, Wikipedia can be great if you want to figure out the production years of the Leica M6, or reference the Newtonian equations of motion. (It seemed lacking, in English at least, when I went looking for Nazi-Deutsche-physics earlier today.)
It doesn't for example explain contradictions in optical theory. While clearly better camera lens makers, and Adobe, and GIMP, and Epson, and irony Canon as a printer company, have some familiarity with these issues.
RAW: I don't mind the subscription service... For the amount of use I get out of Photoshop, the monthly fee is a no brainer and CHEAP! Doesn't anyone remember when Photoshop was for PROS only because it cost $700 in 2011? Now that it is available to basically anyone for $10 a month... people complain about "renting software"?
Like it or not - the SAAS model is coming... no need to even own a computer any longer as you can "rent" computer power and use a browser interface to access your software.
And as much as you may wish it.. Adobe isn't going anywhere anytime soon... not sure why all the haters on here... Adobe set the bar and their tools are wonderful... why the hate?
2011 is when I first got PhotoShop, and I a didn't pay near that for CS5.1. It was a special price. Then I paid a couple hundred dollars for the upgrade to CS6.
Now would prefer to pay another few hundred dollars for the hypothetical CS8.
It's not simply the money thing about the rental only policy for CC. It's the big brother crap. It's the dying software and possibly losing access to files if one doesn't pay. It's the having to have CC checked for validity at least once a month by Adobe.
By the way, $700 is not a great deal of money for prolevel software--go price serious 3D CAD software, for example Solidworks.
Rental being an option is fine, rental being the only way, which is what Adobe does, unlike the aforementioned Solidworks, is stupid, creepy and insulting.
Go easy on calling people haters -- it's discourteous.
It rankles people that if you don't keep up with your monthly payments, you will not be allowed to access the files on which you spent some much of your life's time.
Moreover, Adobe dribbles added features to Photoshop at a snail's pace.
And just how beneficial is Context Sensitive Fill?
Years ago, when I was using Framemaker, I paid Adobe $125 for an upgrade. You know what I got? Japanese language support.
The fly in the Adobe ointment is price-gouging Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen.
Creative Suite cost $1,400 more in Australia than in the US. Read about it in "Adobe's CEO Completely Refuses to Answer Questions About Unfair Pricing."
Pat - why can't you access your files? TIFF layers can be read by most software.. nothing Adobe centric there?
RAW: do a quick google search.. you'll see how much PS used to cost.. and it was around that price. Now, deal existed then just like they do now... I remember taking a course at community college JUST to get the student discount on programming software like VB and MS Word because they were too expensive normally.
I'm all for freeware and other programs that are cheap and save money... but still think PS is underestimated... if you are just touching up photos - there are plenty of options.. but the amazing things one can do with layer blending and other adjustments blows most freeware software away.
I know how much PS CS used to cost. However $700 is little money for pro software.
The problem for Adobe remains the rental only model for CC, it is a huge mistake. Rental as an option is fine. Serious CAD software can be rented too.
Right, many people took classes to have access to software at colleges, community colleges, etc. Things have changed. (Also learning SolidWorks is not going to take just say 8 hours.)
Yes.. I hear ya.. but that is the thing about renting anything... as soon you decide you've had enough - no more payments. When PS used to cost big $$$, if you didn't use the product but bought on a whim - you were out. Now, the most you are out is the next $10... want to put it on hold while you check out something else.. no problem. It may not be for everyone - but software companies across industries are gearing up for SAAS... there will come a day when you are not only renting software... but renting computing power as well... working off of dumb terminals again... what's old.. is new!
This is the main problem with "open source" software. No income = no money for product development. And FREE software users see to reason to donate money for something that is FREE!
Open Source software can be quite expensive, it depends on the license. Some license forbid closed software development, so you have to pay for it. And other make money by service. Much of the Internet is running by open source software but as a normal user you will never see it.
@Darkerlight, yes A-patchy Server runs the internet—so what??
What I'm talking about is all the Open Source Projects like the GIMP. Many good projects lose support after awhile because the developers get burned-out (or they get a paying job).
Many open source developers get paid. Myself for example and our office is not that small. Open source was not working for the desktop very well but for software for developers it is.
You lose all the photo editing, the interesting part about a photo editing software, instead getting a for-idiots software with a catalog strapped onto it.
"darktable already fits this niche perfectly" Unlike GIMP, RawTherapee, and Lightzone, Darktable is not available for Windows, the most popular OS on the planet. Open Source software, it's not just for Linux. :)
When Adobe's licensing model became unacceptable a few years back, we did the math and figured out we could use GIMP and specific scripts (that we paid someone to write rather than redirecting someone to do so and diluting efforts internally) to do exactly what we wanted to do. Adobe's offer: annual cost. Our solution: use at will.
It won't be interesting to see what happens next, because our solution is implemented and working.
It's true that Gimp has not been the most friendly editor for photographers; especially those who who shoot RAW. However I have found it most usefull for many other applications over the many years of use and why I'll likely contribute.
More than 10 years ago I dearly asked Gimp devs to implement 16 and 32 bit colour support. Without that it is useless to photographers. Only to be told that was not a priority for them. So I moved on (no, not to Adobe s/w). Now they finally woke up? Wonders will never cease. I wish they get sufficient support to continue, but it won't be from me!
> More than 10 years ago I dearly asked Gimp devs to implement 16 and 32 bit colour support. Without that it is useless to photographers. Only to be told that was not a priority for them.
I'm afraid I can't believe that. Work on GEGL started in 2000. That's 17 years ago. And the focus was on both non-destructive editing and high bit depth support from the very beginning.
What you _actually_ could be told is that the team was working on separating UI from core, at which point rewriting the core was really not a priority for purely technical reasons.
> Now they finally woke up?
Only if you didn't follow the project for the past 10 years :)
The project to add greater colour depths to GIMP, goes back a long way to when the GEGL project started in 2000. Here's an article from 2004 talking about future support https://lwn.net/Articles/78345/. I believe the main reason this hasn't been quicker developed is due to the very low levels of funding that the project receives.
Well, did you offer help/money/resources to implement 16-/32-bit *channel* support to begin with? In any case, I seem to remember using GIMP for digitising some negatives quite some time ago, and it was certainly good enough for that photographic application.
What baffles me is that people withhold their "support" for software that they get for free, even demanding that those things be improved - also for free - by the developers, while at the same time ploughing plenty of money into costly, proprietary software solutions and more or less taking what they're given by vendors of those solutions. (Indeed, for some it's a matter of pride when, say, Apple foists poor solutions on them, perversely.)
But anyway, for the most part, you don't get to tell anyone what to do unless you're paying them.
Amazingly enough for all the idiots commenting without a clue as to what I did, I actually financially supported Gimp and used it since almost the start. And just a little catch-up with reality: I don't feel ANY motivation for supporting a project that took 17 years to, wait for it, STILL NOT be finished. In anyone's book, that is not acceptable. And no, 8-bit colour is NOT acceptable for ANY type of photography editing. But feel free to continue to edit your jpgs, there's a good crowd. And yell "kewl" and other similar nonsense as you gain banding...
First of all, all credit to you for supporting GIMP financially. I suppose that what other people have written about colour depths and the work done to remove the limitations you find problematic won't be a surprise to you at all, then.
However, it is 8 bits *per* *channel*, not "8-bit colour". Maybe that's why you were seeing banding.
You get banding with 8 bit per channel if you are using it for photography. Like it or not. But please feel free to keep on using that for your photography editing. I simply will not.
Thank you for using the correct terminology. As for banding, the more precision the better the result, but I had to refute the "useless to photographers" assertion because that is a matter of opinion.
Maybe I would also not use GIMP for editing, apart from the simple cropping and scaling I already do, but then having had to work with negative scans and having to do postprocessing on them (yes, with the GIMP; no, not with JPEGs) back when the data volumes were more inconvenient for the computers of the day, I don't have any serious interest in editing any more.
Professionals may have other perspectives, but then there are plenty of other tools out there, including Free Software ones. In your case, I hope you found other Free Software tools to use instead.
This further blurs the line between open source and commercial software. Many open source projects are or have been heavily funded by a few supporting companies. I think this is a good thing if it is open source in the end (adding to the code base of mankind) but maybe not so much if it leads to freeware with cumbersome license models and awfully distorting the market forces for all the small software companies out there.
Consider that e.g., Affinity had to be created in a squeeze between the monopole (Photoshop) and the free (Gimp). And it isn't clear yet if it has succeeded at that. In an ironic way, freeware protects the big players in the software industry by keeping small players out of business.
You're quite describing very well at what point the situation is. And that's a sad assessment that very well-intentioned people are, at least in a way, serving now the causes they probably wanted to fight against first. I'm not blaming them though. They did a great work for sure and we need those "hoping" programmers. But I hope they will listen and find other ways than asking for crowd funding their projects in the same failing direction.
Open source has always been promoted as free as speech software, not as free as beer software.
FSF (Free Software Foundation) even explicitly recommends to developers to ask money from the software and not to give it away without payment.
And one of the world greatest software projects, Linux operating system that Linus Torvalds started first with own license and later licensed under GPLv2 (and not later) is most used operating system in the world (you can find it from servers, embedded devices, smartphones etc) by backusers as well users by itself (thanks to Android). And it is totally free, but money put to it is huge.... And it still benefits everyone.
Same is with example Apple, their own XNU operating system is open source and free software as FSF defines and accepts it as well by license. Yet every apple devices uses it and are behind money wall..... And you still can download the OS any day and compile it if you want.
GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, digiKam and Blender are major software in the industry. GIMP for image manipulation Krita for drawing images Inkscape for Vector graphics digiKam for photo organization Blender for 3D modeling and such
And then the libraries like that GEGL or many like that are just amazing by capabilities that not even Photoshop have.
Photographers don't need GEGL, only the GIMP programmers do ... We need something that works. Fanboy speech promoting tools nobody wants but programmers themselves won't help in changing the situation. The main problem with open source programmers is that they don't listen. Look at KDE. KDE 3 was a great Desktop environment. KDE4 loses a big part of its users and why : because they didn't listen. And this is only a sample in numerous others. Your list is forgetting Geeqie and Darktable. These are (were?) probably the best and most really functional tools for photography on Linux. And you just forgot them and ignore them. That's just typically a symptom of what open source developers became : deaf ! The only thing that you say is right is that Linux is everywhere. You simply forget that it is not mainly thanks to open source fans and programmers. It's much more thanks to companies and customers all the way providing a successful business model, responding to real demands.
Well, developers have their vision and lead their product in some direction. They often are not deaf, they simply can't satisfy many different proposal interfering with each other. Open source comes with the freedom that you can build on their work, fork the project and make it to your liking. For example Gnome 3 gave birth to many spinoffs of its previous version. Ubuntu, once the go to distribution for Linux beginners, is now more used as base for other, even easier to use ones like Mint.
Open source best work as donationware: if you have the money for it, you support the project you like and find useful for your work. If not, you can donate for development of features which you miss, encourage other developers to make what you need. And the result benefits public in general. Human collaboration and invention is shared and then built upon in the next generation, as is our nature, and what makes society survive in the long run.
@jnd That's typical of biased vision. Take general and generous ideas to try to prove their model is the right one by using abstracts "vapor" links. Donationware = Good thing because it's good to want to build a better world. Facts : leading products in a decided direction does not mean you must insist with failing ways while facts tell you you do. It's not only about listening to people, it's also about opening our ways to different visions. I rarely seen an open source developer or project owner try to analyse what makes the success of commercial products. Most of the time it's the eternal refrain that leads to "we know we are doing it the right way, no matter what people say". They exactly do what it needs to lead people to think money/commercial model is the right one, or at least the only efficient one while they should focus more on what is really needed and functionally efficient in those products to take them as a source of inspiration in addition to their own innovations.
The problem the OP is describing is more or less a symptom of the popularisation of the "open source" concept, which emphasises cost cutting and efficiency, at the expense of the Free Software concept, which emphasises freedom and control.
Once end-users got it into their heads that "open source" supposedly meant people doing what they love for free, everybody expected an endless stream of free stuff. And big businesses found that they didn't need to make proper investments in software because there would surely be some free stuff out there that they could copy-paste into a product, and to hell with what the licence says.
The fact is that the popularisation of the "open source" concept allowed everyone to ignore the crucial matter of sustainability (central in the Free Software concept) in some kind of consumption bonanza where the people doing the work often bore the burden. If this sounds familiar, just look at wider society to see exactly the same phenomenon.
Gimp's decision to only save in the Gimp format and require export for other (much more common formats) e.g. Jpeg yet still open Jpeg formats to prevent the potential loss of data (users are too dumb to know better, listen to developers) is when I decided they had become too arrogant to support.
Developing something not even close to what GIMP is today is something remarkable, sure is not perfect/intuitive/complete/pro ready or whatever you want, but if you look at what that group of passionate developers/researchers/students had done over the year for free you could also image what can be done with the help of everybody. Every penny worth a features, an improvement and a real help for a developer that is doing that things for everybody to enjoy. Is not lost in a big company bank account. It can make a difference, a huge difference GIMP can't be bought or killed, I'm thinking on Aperture and many others software used by many, also pro, that spent a lot of money and time to learn on a piece of dead software. It's up to you to decide if it worth to help or not but even if you actually don't use it for any of the above reason, it's ok, but you still help with a small amount of money for the simple and beatifull idea that one day it will become the software you really want to use
I am long time user of Gimp and in my opinion it is great tool for its price. All that are complaining about lack of functionality and compare it to Photo Shop, obviously did not compare price. Lately I also purchased paintshop pro for automatic functions for times when I am lazy, but at the end I finished in a Gimp. I also did trial run of Adobe PS Elements on my new MacBook Air, but don't like it. For me Gimp is still best option, since I am not willing to pay for PhotoShop. So, I will happily contribute to developer.
Not sure if you are serious or sarcastic, but for me Gimp is better than mentioned software (paint shop pro and PS elements). I am used to its GUI, so no complains there. In past I was creating posters (big files - 100s of MB) for exhibition with Gimp and there I had problems with stability of Gimp (occasional crash). In that regard PS is definitely professional tool, which GImp is not (yet?).
What's the quality/price ratio if the quality is zero for you, though ? Does it have any meaning ? No doubt developers are enthusiasts and serving people. But they need to get paid for something more useful in my opinion. Something that can compete more seriously with A##be's products. Or, if not, something much more simple and easy to use for basic purpose that can have a better reputation of being practical for more final users. Also, at this time where crowdfunding is becoming questionable at least, I'm sure many will simply pay for a serious finished product instead of simply hope for presumed progress. At least I'm one of these people. GIMP is a long time project, but it needs to change in this changing world. Most people I know that use the GIMP only need a Snapseed equivalent for the purpose. And those who need more specialized tools have other (sadly) few but well known choices if they are serious about it. But it's not the GIMP. At least definitely not for me.
stepenwolfer, i was just joking... you said "it is great tool for its price", but it's a free product :)
and as UneVache said, it is a useful tool because it's free, and if all you want is a feature it already has it's great. But especially because of that you can't really rely on it to implement new stuff, support new cameras in time or ever, etc.
i occasionally use a "portable app" variant of GIMP with a Photoshop-like single window user interface theme (called Gimpshop, I think) - that works quite neatly. It ain't PS but it is quite ok within its scope. Still for most hobbyists an affordable PS Elements is probably worth the little investment instead.
I wanted to use affinity a while back, but they didn't support windows. Now i see they added windows support... and it looks pretty neat. Lightroom and Photoshop together for $50 for life instead of $150 per year... I will probably move on as for now i'm still at adobe non CC version :))
It does not really replace Lightroom, just Photoshop. RAW development is shaky say best too. Apparently Serif is working on a Lightroom replacement though, so there's something to look forward too.
affinity have a 20% sale on at the moment too. I am so interested to see what Adobe do about Affinity pricing. PS is still my favourite tool by far, keen to see it compete in the price range too.
@Drive - I did say Photoshop, not Lightroom. However, I don't have issues with their raw development, but mileage may vary. In comparison to other PS alternatives? I can't see what beats it, but Lightroom is a different discussion.
@spqr_ca - Well Affinity Photo is about the price of lunch right now. I definitely love myself enough to spend that on software that will free me from the limitations of Gimp lol
Hope they can evolve. I love then idea of open source software! Atom (code editor) and Blender (3d software) just prove that open source can be just as good. If only to push Photoshop in a better direction too.
The truth is that most people who don't need a professional program such as PS or Lightroom will be much better served by the many inexpensive programs out there which are supported by the developers.
It doesn't because Linux (and Unix in general) tools are designed to do mainly one thing but do it well. You have already Darktable and Rawtherapee for RAW development, then you can use image editor like GIMP.
jnd: Yup. That's a general thing in open source which I consider to be a VERY good thing - the tendency to focus on modularity.
I mostly disagree that UFRaw is not serious - IMO its batch functionality is superior to anything else I've tried to use. (In general, for a set of images, I do a set of adjustments for exposure/color but don't actually kick off the processor-intensive debayering - I save everything as ID files, then kick off a batch script that does the heavy lifting.)
However, I do have issues with ufraw (and dcraw which it is based off of) that have caused me to start moving towards other solutions: 1) dcraw is one gigantic C file that has a bunch of difficult-to-read macros - this effectively restricts development to Dave despite being open source. 2) dcraw is STILL managed using RCS (ancient) and ufraw is still using CVS (slightly less ancient) - these have negative impacts on development
PROs go with Photoshop, it's way better. So GIMP could be aimed at the non-pro market (those with entry level DSLRs for example), but it's GUI is complicated and frustrating.
I mean... an option for NON pro photographers who barely invest on a DSLR and do not want to spend "a ton" of money each month on software they don't know how to use. People who need free-lightroom instead of a free version of Photoshop.
"Future advanced features"? I recommend the GIMP developers spend some quality time on the stability, performance and usability qualities of the current implementation. It's exciting to work on new features, but if the baseline is buggy and slow and painful to use, the program will remain a sideline curiosity.
For years, I've tried hard to reach a "critical mass" level of interest in and proficiency with GIMP. No smiles yet.
A rewrite wasn't optional, as the original GIMP was built on an 8-bit engine, embedded so deep that there was no way to replace it without a complete rewrite. A number of very good updates were proposed to go along with it, most importantly the node-based dataflow language that can be used to specify arbitrarily complex operations that can't be done in any way with Photoshop. But the poor user interface, which I think was originally based in Tk/Tcl was going to be a lead weight on the project. I suspect the present initiative seeks to fix that.
"A number of very good updates were proposed to go along with it, most importantly the node-based dataflow language that can be used to specify arbitrarily complex operations that can't be done in any way with Photoshop."
Sigh... I would decouple and prioritize such functionality separately from core development and optimization. Broadly speaking, such node-based data-flow macro specification capability can potentially enrich the use of applications other than GIMP. And it takes much more than just this capability to be competitive vis-à-vis Photoshop -- starting from the ground up.
The "old and clunky" nature of GIMP is difficult to deny. I say this with deep appreciation to all who have volunteered their time, energy and expertise for the multi-year construction of this program. Easy software is hard.
@Luke Kaven GIMP is the application that started GTK+ toolkit in first place for interfaces.
GTK is taken from GIMP as separate toolkit for others, as GIMP needed something better and nothing was, so they wrote all alone and then released it when others started to use it and separated it.
Alex, thank you for the clarification. You are obviously an authoritative source. Although I seemed to recall that there were serious problems coming up with a 16 bit workflow. Obviously, this was a very late feature to arrive. And I recall other members of your project explaining it in a way very similar to the way I did. I don't mind being set straight, though I don't feel the question is answered.
Nevertheless, I always liked GIMP, believed that many ideas that have gone into it are brilliant, and I feel that plans for the future are strong. I look forward to its next major version very much. Adobe's designers abandoned the idea of innovation a long time ago in Photoshop.
I also remember GIMP in the Motif era. It's also worth remembering that the original authors moved on pretty early, albeit after initiating GTK+, and so the people who've developed it for most of its lifetime had nothing to do with the name.
Yes the GIMP was first released on Motif, what just wasn't available for all. So they quickly (few months or so) re-released with with the GTK (Gimp ToolKit) so it was available for GNU system.
GIMP could have been even more if they would have developed the core functionality (16/32bit support) to be possible made in future easily.
But many problems can be drawn to the early days of ideas of multi-window-environment like how Photoshop use to be on System OS. So all the tools in GIMP were in own separate window. IIRC GIMP had 8 windows by default, or so. A lot for so small screens.
Today I prefer GIMP multi window style over single window style as it supports better all the virtual desktops and task managers visual layouts so you can quickly and easily find all photos or toolbars open.
I don't think you ever needed to have eight windows open to begin with, though, unless you really wanted to see all the different dialogues.
Inkscape is another tool that went the single window route, and I find the way the panels compete for space to be distracting. Of course, tear-off panels have been supported by toolkits for years: I remember Tk getting that a very long time ago.
As for the 8-bit channel limitation, I don't know how CinePaint dealt with that, but it's worth remembering that when GIMP was created, you still had workstations with 8-bit *colour* and private colourmaps. I guess if you told kids that these days, they wouldn't believe you (after having it explained to them, of course).
Re "I don't mind being set straight, though I don't feel the question is answered." -- I'm afraid the question was lost in the discussion? Could you please repeat it? I'm happy to answer.
I tried and tried and tried over the years to like the GIMP, but always got frustrated by its GUI. I'd be happy to contribute if I could like it enough to use it. I wish they'd make the interface just like PaintShop Pro But for those who use it, it's a good idea to keep it alive by supporting it financially, and it's a small amount.
I think very few really appreciate the role GIMP has had in getting new image processing technology out there. Lots of PhD theses and other academic research projects became real stuff by plugging-into GIMP, and the fork of CinePaint had a pretty significant role in the movie industry.
The catch is that you can't just build a major software tool and say "done!" Bit rot is real, and so is the need to add support for new things. It's happily shockingly common that people will donate years of effort to making free software (I have myself), but very few are willing to make one free program their life's work (I'm not). In sum, these are people passionate about the community service they are providing, and they deserve to be supported.
While we're at it, also think about the many other key bits of software that come out of such passion; e.g., Dave Coffin's dcraw. These folks are heroes.
Right, these complex projects really need benevolent dictators for life, like Linus Torvalds. Strong leader who push the project forward. There are many from operating systems to niche products and I'm thankful for all, they are available for my using whenever I need.
I don't like the non intuitive design of gimp. I admit I haven't used it in any depth but that's because I've hated it every time I open it. Like just today I was trying to just simply add some text onto an image and the little text popup is all buggy and crazy - you can't select text properly and the first character won't delete and the box covers a bit of your text., etc., etc....totally illogical.
Everyone makes errors. Do you think that Adobe delivers bug-free software? I'm software developer, my company spends more money on test than on development. But even then, some errors will only be found in the field. It's a matter of facts.
Probably Gimp will contain more errors than Adobe does. But there are no testers that get paid to find errors in Gimp. You are free to pay whoever you want to test software and find bugs. But please don't complain about a free (as in beer) product to contain errors. You always get what you pay.
I think there might be more contributions if people could make single one time donations. Think about all the complaining about the Adobe subscription model. I couldn't find any way to make a one time donation on the Patreon page.
In a way, Alex's response just illustrates the general problem with GIMP. The way you make a one-time donation is not up front to be easily found by most users, but it is there if you want to geekily dig deeper into an option way off to the side, buried deep in some github commit...obscurely invisible to all non-geeks, just like the way a lot of GIMP works.
This also puts light on the problem with one-time donations: They are often not sustainable. Patreon is not Kickstarter where there is one goal and one amount. Those who use Patreon need long term help. They don't need a wave of one-time donations that only last a few months and then the money is out again.
Funny thing is, the GIMP developers came to the same conclusion as Adobe, Microsoft, etc: The most helpful financial stream is the one that's the most constant: Monthly payments. As much as we all might oppose subscriptions, it is revealing that even the open source community has chosen to ask for monthly payments too.
Alex, I don't even understand anything on the page you suggested. PayPal is fine, but why isn't there a simple donation account? Companies and developers may not like one-time donations. They want streams of money. I understand that. But as a purchaser or donator I don't like that model. In the case of products I just go elsewhere, e.g. NO ADOBE. In the case of open source I guess I will just continue to ride along for free. But choosing to not set up for one-time donations is something that I think is limiting in this case. Maybe one-time donations would cannibalize donation streams more than it would gain. I don't know. But I think it is a mistake.
Hey Alex, thanks for pointing that out, I stand corrected. This is a great opportunity to clear up confusion.
Some money is being asked for by individual GIMP developers. This article is only about Øyvind Kolas asking for monthly donations to support his work.
But the general GIMP project also asks for money. Those can be one-time donations through the GNOME Foundation, further down the GIMP page link.
Anyone who uses GIMP, especially out of dislike for commercial options, should give money to support GIMP development, unless their goal is to not pay anyone.
But as with so many things GIMP, the financial end lacks unity and cohesiveness, which leads to extensive user confusion which does not help the GIMP cause. If you give money to GIMP, make sure you understand who and what it is you are supporting. If you want to support the project in general, go through the GNOME Foundation. If you give through the Patreon link in this article, you're supporting one GIMP developer.
GIMP isn't a real product. They have no responsibility to a paying public.
I've tried to like GIMP over the years, but it's just too far behind. It lacks some of the most basic professional features. While I haven't used it for several years, it's hard to believe it still doesn't have CMYK support. That's basic. And it's only more than a decade (well more) since Photoshop, and most inexpensive editing software has had 16 bits per channel.
Adobe likes to buy companies and kill their products -- I've gone through that with Pixmantec Rawshooter and Serious Magic DV Rack. Some of the technology subsequently resurfaces in Adobe products, but much of the functionality or simplicity will be lost.
Lightroom to this day is clumsier, slower and buggier than Rawshooter was, and it has had the benefit of going through six major revisions. Granted Lightroom also has a lot more functionality than Rawshooter, but the problems it has (poor performance and memory leaks requiring periodic restarts) are due to poor design decisions on Adobe's part.
Maybe seek assistance from the camera manufacturer's like Nikon, Canon and Sony....? They're also fundraising platforms out there, but then the project might not be viewed as much as open source at that point if people are making money off funding it (ie. investing in the project). (That and unless Canon, Nikon and Sony are bound by agreements by Adobe and/or Phase One that will prevent them from supporting open source/free apps.)
@melgross I don't know about Nikon or Sony, but Canon's DPP specializes in RAW development and photo library managerment, analogous to Lightroom. It complements, rather than compete with, Photoshop or GIMP.
Not that I expect Canon to give money to GIMP. NIH is strong in that company.
In order to continue being the best opensource Photoshop alternative, GIMP should finally be ported to Gtk3, it's nonsense that an image editing tool is unusable on HiDPI displays!
I'd give them $7.50 if they promised to add Selective Color (the Photoshop CS/CC name for the feature.) Cue up confusion with features that allow users to select colours. Not even close to the same thing.
Well, and of course the software needs to be a good bit faster. Opening PhotoShop CS6 on my system takes less time than opening GIMP 2.8.
It opens almost instantly on my 7 years old machine. Well, it takes a few seconds on a Raspberry Pi, but even there it is bearable. Photoshop on the other hand would not run on a Raspberry Pi.
Do people understand that PS is a full range professional program? It won't run on the PI. Seriously folks! Even if you were to struggle using GIMP for heavy work, as I have tried over the years, you still need a major piece of computing equipment to do so. In fact, you need a better CPU than with PS, because it doesn't have any real GPU support, or effective multiprocessor support.
It has problems with color management. Printing support is primitive, etc.
Did you even bother read what I posted? It sure doesn't look like it.
I have seen what PS calls "Selective Color" in exactly one software group--that's my Minolta film scanners' drivers. (Yes, one of the film scanners has the K-M name on it but it's a Minolta model, not a Konica design in any way shape or form.)
Thanks for trying, really. You made my point perfectly. If totally predictably.
And my point is that I've always found GIMP much slower on my system than PS CS6, or CS5. (GIMP 2.8 did help things a bit.)
Now, I don't do much layers work with PS CS6, nor when I do extractions with ACR 9 into PhotoShop CS6 do I paint in localized changes with a "brush". Obviously those PS CS6 features aren't really available in GIMP, and those processes really eat up a CPU capcity and RAM space.
Of course, GIMP is not PS. No discussion about that. It was just about the time it takes to start the programm. GIMP is unbelevebly resource friendly. First start can take a while. And when you have installed new plug-ins or fonts. I tried it on a Raspberry Pi for fun. Just because I was curious. It worked fine. Much better than surfing the web.
I use GIMP only occasionally. Just a few layers. I use it on Linux and Win7 on core 2 machines with SSD. Starting it have alway been quick. Last PS i used was the first CS version.
Opening 2.8.18, including data files, fonts extensions etc, takes about 15-20 sec on my 2007 MBP (4GB RAM). Less once closed and reopened again, about 10 sec.
2008 Thinkpad with 4GB RAM and Linux takes about 6 seconds to open GIMP 2.8.10 first time after boot up. Core 2 Duo. Probably the same modell your MBP has. (But with DDR3-RAM).
Updated, a bit faster, much actually, on the second try. The first time it took several minutes. However, it glitched on try 2 and threw up a dialog box that I had to close to get it to fully open. Try 1 did the same, but it as I said that took on the order of 4 minutes.
It's a problem on a fast Windows 7 laptop.
It's very fast to open files, once the program is open.
Mine took many minutes (too), first time after updating. In fact, it really struggled and I nearly gave up, until I read somewhere that that happens/is normal (?) after updating...
That is nice indeed. I have only matte 1440x900 but it is also only 14,1". Much better than my matte 1280x800 Dell in the same size. Not only in resolution, also in colour. And thanks to PC-Card, ich have USB 3.0. (both).
I use GIMP pretty much daily at work. Most of my needs are cleaning/separating/tweaking images to be used in technical documentation so GIMP is a step up from "paint". I've gotten fairly conversant with it, but do confess to using the "GIMPshop" front end. As a result of using it at work, I use it at home for similar purposes. I don't do any photo post processing in it because of the 8 bit limitation. What I really don't understand is the current state of GIMP. Throughout the website they refer to v2.9.x, yet v2.8.x is listed as the current stable version on the website and v2.9.x is only found on the download page by scrolling way down to the bottom. If v2.9.x is unstable, then why is it available?
As a Windows user, it was a nice finger to the the eye from the UFRAW developer when he decided that MS was evil and wasn't going to compile his addin for Windows any longer.
Thank goodness Partha doesn't have these issues.....
I've sent developers money directly in the past with no effective gain. Won't be doing that again. I contribute to GIMP project in order for them to continue development. If they aren't funding developers, then progress will stop and I will no longer contribute.
It may be Windows only, and one does need the .NET from MS--careful Paint.NET's installer will download .NET, which you don't want the installer to do. Installing offline is a much better bet.
Paint.NET is much faster to open than GIMP, has curves, doesn't have colour balance though.
There's also Krita, but I'm less familiar with that.
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"...excuse me if I don’t walk around in front of [my client] shooting bloody BTS because somebody on social media wants to see it because they can’t be arsed to attend a proper controlled seminar and learn properly, they’d rather be ‘cheap’ and just try to reverse engineer BTS stuff."
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