> GIMP 3.0 supports palettes outside of the "Standard Red Green Blue" (sRGB) range, such as "Cyan Magenta Yellow Key" (CMYK) and (CIELAB). This expanded color support, especially for CMYK, is essential to those who work with print and desktop publishing. However, GIMP continues to use sRGB, grayscale, and indexed colors for storing color information internally for now. Conversion to other color spaces is done on output, where necessary.
The wording here is confusing, because it makes it sound like CMYK/CIELAB will only be applied at the very end of the image transformation pipeline. That would really limit the usefulness of adding these extra color spaces, since doing the manipulation in a different color space than RGB is often the point.
But the linked blog post on GIMP.org[0] words it a little differently:
> What it means for color correctness in particular is that we will now do color conversion only when needed (last-second conversion) and therefore won’t lose information when it could have been avoided. For instance, say you color-pick color from an image: if we were to convert to an intermediate format, before using it on a second image (which may or may not be in another color format), we’d do 2 conversions. Which means more possibility of precision loss. The issue is even more flagrant if the input and output formats are the same (i.e. no conversion should happen at all). And this will be even more a problem when we will have core CMYK backend (we really want to avoid doing a round-trip to an intermediate format with CMYK, which doesn’t have bijective conversion with most other color models, even when working unbounded and ignoring precision issues).
That sounds more like the information of the original color space will be kept as well, and transformations will be applied only when necessary, to avoid lossy roundtrips. Which is not quite the same.
I remember "acquiring" Gimp in 2000 from a CD-ROM magazine as a child and using that for a good while until an uncle gave me a pirated copy of Photoshop 7. I actually disliked using Photoshop because I was so used to the way of doing things in Gimp.
Eventually I learned all the more advanced functions in Photoshop, specially the non destructive editing stuff, and couldn't really go back to Gimp. The muscle memory of using it eventually atrophied and nowadays I have a hard time using Gimp.
All that said, I don't do much 2D/3D work nowadays, so I've been using Krita for almost a decade and it feels like a decent PS alternative, with a more similar interface...
> Congrats to the GIMP team, can't imagine the catharsis they will experience when 3.0 officially drops.
Thanks for the catharsis word, I have to look it up for the meaning.
20 years or equivalent to 5 times Olympics games, is a very long time to develop and improve a software. It's now comparable to the real-time Linux kernel, another open-source software albeit it's a kernel not a user application [1].
Any other open-source software that has a comparable development time that I'm not aware of? But as the old adage says it is better to be a tortoise than a hare, as long you're winning the game.
[1] 20 years later, real-time Linux makes it to the kernel:
Blender started ad in-house 3d modeling back in 1994, was open sourced in 2002, and continues with very active and sustainable development today. I used it most 2010-2012, and it has been incredible to see how much has happened since then.
Finally updated UI! I really hope it inspires more updates and brings in even more people, just like when Blender revamped their UX a few years back and saw an amazing boost in popularity.
Does this change include any UX improvements? The article only mentions updated visuals and theming. From the discussions I've read, it's the UX of GIMP that holds it back.
It's just Photoshop addicts needing the UI to be identical to Photoshop because when they use GIMP their muscle memory is broken.
To be fair, though, all industry professionals are forced to be Photoshop addicts. But Photoshop's UI is objectively awful; it's the 10,000 hours you spent in it that makes it seem sane. You could have learned Thai in 10,000 hours, too.
The real weaknesses in GIMP have been in its lack of some necessary functionality, especially some that is necessary for print. The great thing about being GPL is that when the stuff is eventually added, you own it forever.
Photoshop's UX is poor, but everyone is used to it. GIMP's UX is even worse, and nobody is used to it. And based on those screenshots in the article, it has, if anything, got even weirder and less intuitive.
I'd probably try and power through if there was even close to feature parity, but it's only just now catching up with where Photoshop was in 1994.
> Also who thought putting stuff like "Cancel" and "OK" into the title bar was a good idea?!
That's one of the things I dislike more in GTK3. It seems dictated by the false belief that everyone is running software on a tablet screen in which windows don't need to be dragged around and open always at full screen, so the more space is used for widgets and input/output the better.
I hate this buttons-in-the-title-bar thing with a passion. It takes ages to find a safe place to click and drag a window around without accidentally causing something else to happen.
I use Gimp from time to time, and often get frustrated with its... unique UI. It's nice to see they're hearing feedback and working on it :D
A tip for others that feel the same: if you've used Photoshop before and are used to its UI, try the free Photopea website. It's a Photoshop "clone" that works really well in web (I believe it's a solo dev doing it too). It's replaced Gimp for me lately.
> Websites[...] can sneakily copy the files you are working with
You have made one of the most baffling logical errors that commonly crop up when people criticize browser-based apps.
Browser-based apps execute in a sandbox. They are more constrained in what they can do in comparison to a traditional program running on your machine. Any nefarious thing a browser-based app can do, a local program can do, too, and not just that, but they can do it in a way that's much harder to detect and/or counteract.
There are good reasons available if you want to criticize browser-based apps. This is not one of them.
There's habits sure, but GIMP also just has a lot of bad UI. For instance if you insert text, you have to click exactly on the black region of the character to select the text. This is really awkward because it means when you click on a letter to try and move some text, sometimes your click will go through the hole in the middle of the letter and select the thing behind the text. Also worth noting that this update is the one allowing people to edit rotated text and it took 20+ years. This is really bad UI/UX.
That's interesting. I have used and enjoyed a ton of software in different domains (from nothingreal shake to gnu ed) and so far gimp still wins the gold medals of triggering me. A rare feat.
Yes, even though I never use photoshop and used Gimp for over 15 years it's a frustrating UI. I dislike it. Non destructive editing is a big upgrade though.
I also use Photopea from time to time. Can recommend.
If only a mad man would make a Photopea/Photoshop clone open source, then everyone (who has the skills) would be able to not only use a decent open source image editor, but one that can be fully customized to your needs.
I find it a bit weird that Gimp does not use the latest GTK (i.e. GTK4, which was considered stable since 2020), even though GTK originates in the Gimp project itself. It actually seems to be quite a bit behind: This is now the first release of Gimp which started to use GTK3, i.e. before, it even still used GTK2 (reached end-of-life in 2020)?
Having had to migrate a very simple project from GTK2 to GTK3, I don't think it's all that weird. The migration was utterly difficult, in the areas that hit me seemingly no effort was made to give proper migration paths. Only with some later published documentation (+ help from chatgpt) was it possible to restore some functionality later, after the initial migration. Finally that even meant calling the xlib directly.
And note that the software used wxWidgets, so most of the changes were encapsulated there. Only a very small part of GDK/GTK was used directly, with wnck already used as a helper layer (but the functionality in question broke there as well).
So even if GTK came from GIMP, if the later development in GTK was not made specifically for and by the GIMP project, the migration must have been a nightmare. Especially in a project that had so many other things to worry about, non-destructive editing alone.
And to repeat such a migration now again for GTK4 will not be very enticing.
From what I've heard surrounding this, GTK3 to GTK4 isn't as big of a jump as GTK2 to GTK3 was. The GTK3 port was finished first because there was already work in place for that, but we can expect a GTK4 port to be faster.
That said, I haven't seen many apps that aren't specifically GNOME apps start using GTK4 in the first place, and as such I'm currently not using any GTK4 applications. I expect it to take a while before more things move to GTK4.
GTK stands for "Gnome first every other user literally does not matter break them hard, break them often, make them give up ToolKit" these days, and has for quite a while.
GTK4 removed a bunch of APIs for stupid reasons and GIMPs move to 3 started before 4 even existed. Had 4 at least tried to maintain some degree of compatibility then switching from 3 to 4 near the end would have been feasible. But that's not the case.
I feel this. I tried using GTK4 a little while ago and almost immediately switched library when I realised it's simply incapable of doing certain things I needed, usually because either Wayland can't do it or GNOME doesn't need it.
True but the leap from GTK2 to GTK3 is a lot bigger than from GTK3 to GTK4. I'm not sure when the "port" to GTK3 started, but if it was from before GTK4 was a thing, it makes sense that they wanted to finish the GTK3 stuff first.
Really looking forward to see more non-destructive editing. For me this has been one of the major reasons not to use GIMP in the past. The integration of GEGL is a huge milestone for GIMP imho.
How relevant is print these days ? Coming from that background it's depressing to see my former coworkers working in a shrinking market, and the only people in graphics I know that are making reasonable money are in digital.
Not to say that it's irrelevant just that at this point it feels like it kind of missed the boat in this space.
Still quite relevant, especially in some areas. Think about packaging and labeling, there's just not really a way around print in these areas.
Besides that, digital print is the future. Print also needs to become clever and data-driven, more personalized and tailored to the recipient, but that's hard work.
Example: Just last week I received a catalogue with the fall/winter collection of a larger clothing brand. I threw it away immediately. Lots of things in it that are not my size, or my style or whatnot. A personalized product would have helped. Pick articles similar to those I own (you got this data from my previous orders), only show articles that are available in XXL or larger (look at the sizes I kept and did not return) and that's it. "Hey Martin, these are _your_ pieces for the winter season, enjoy!" Maybe it's only 16 pages then instead of 50+ but it would have been a much better experience for me. Also cheaper to print and ship for the store but with a much higher value. But yeah, programmatic printing is hard(er) to do then order 100k catalogues from the cheapest shop you'll find.
The reason they didn't use GIMP is because they couldn't use GIMP. It simply didn't have necessary capability. When I was working in prepress, I would have done anything to use GIMP. That desperation to escape Photoshop is why Affinity took off.
If Inkscape could get a UI for precision positioning, something you could e.g. design an entry form in; and Scribus could polish up, I think a lot of people would move to a FOSS workflow.
I guess - of course it's a chicken-egg sort of a problem. No one's going to use it for print, before it has print-related capabilities - the same can be said for much of the UX, in general.
Professionals have no problem purchasing their work tools, and no reason to use subpar tools.
Edit: To the FOSS hackers who are down voting. You can buy state of the art professional image editing and design software for less than a hundred dollars. Deliver work to one client and you've paid for all your tools. Why would a professional waste their time with GIMP, when they can use all those hours working for clients with good tools and get paid?
It’s not the price, or even the fact that one has to pay. There are huge practical, security, and privacy reasons to never put closed-source software on your computer.
Does Gimp 3.0 still behave the same for GIF Animations and I use that feature extensively and the behavior for that needs to remain the same for cropping, scaling, and frame rates editing or I'll have remain on the older GIMP.
So there needs to be someone testing Gimp 3.0 against the previous version to see of any behaviors are not the same and sometimes that can affect workflows greatly!
I'm told it's taken them two decades to release this essential feature. What have they been doing for all this time? I think they need to talk to people who edit photos, and focus their efforts on the many low-hanging fruit which would drastically improve the UX of their app (much like Blender did). Perhaps they are doing this to a degree, I see mentions of UI changes, but I wonder why they only think of it now and if they're involving the right people.
I was about to leave this as a top-level comment, but it might be more appropriate as a response to your question.
"They" are a handful of maintainers doing relatively thankless work. This is not a well-paid full-time job for them.
Take Øyvind Kolås, the maintainer and lead developer of babl/GEGL, which is the technology underlying GIMP 3.0. He's barely being paid for this work. Nowadays he has a patreon, which also is directly linked from the gimp.org website, encouraging you to directly support him[0][1]. Right now those patreon donations add up to about... $1300 a month. And the number used to be much lower when I first started donating.
A lot of people here complain that we cannot directly give money to, say, the development Firefox. With GIMP you can directly support its core individual maintainer, and almost nobody does.
Would giving him more money improve the quality of his output? He also seems to not be in charge of the UI which is the major problem area. It's also worth noting that I could buy a subscription to Photoshop if we're talking about paying money to have software developed.
I fell for this before. Wasted a few weeks' free time adding thumbnails to the GTK file chooser, only to find out that the library itself has bugs which they refused to fix that make it difficult to do. Now I just have a patched version installed locally. The only way to improve these projects is to change how they're managed, which you can't do with a patch.
Unfortunately, they seem to have moved to a different vendor for payment processing in the past year or two and now I get "The product you selected is not available in your location." Lucky me I still have V1 from a few years back, it's a shame though.
The wording here is confusing, because it makes it sound like CMYK/CIELAB will only be applied at the very end of the image transformation pipeline. That would really limit the usefulness of adding these extra color spaces, since doing the manipulation in a different color space than RGB is often the point.
But the linked blog post on GIMP.org[0] words it a little differently:
> What it means for color correctness in particular is that we will now do color conversion only when needed (last-second conversion) and therefore won’t lose information when it could have been avoided. For instance, say you color-pick color from an image: if we were to convert to an intermediate format, before using it on a second image (which may or may not be in another color format), we’d do 2 conversions. Which means more possibility of precision loss. The issue is even more flagrant if the input and output formats are the same (i.e. no conversion should happen at all). And this will be even more a problem when we will have core CMYK backend (we really want to avoid doing a round-trip to an intermediate format with CMYK, which doesn’t have bijective conversion with most other color models, even when working unbounded and ignoring precision issues).
That sounds more like the information of the original color space will be kept as well, and transformations will be applied only when necessary, to avoid lossy roundtrips. Which is not quite the same.
[0] https://www.gimp.org/news/2024/02/21/gimp-2-99-18-released/#...
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