GIMP is Now a Self-Contained Native App for Mac OS X

http://www.petapixel.com/2012/08/29/gimp-is-now-a-self-contained-native-app-for-mac-os-x/

by maciej • 14 years ago

376 178 14 years ago

petapixel.com

armored_mammal6• 14 years ago

Since it's 2.8 series it should have single-window mode, no?

dguaraglia• 14 years ago

Yep, it does Windows->Single-Window Mode.

So. Much. Better.

armored_mammal6• 14 years ago

Yeah, the multi-window thing only ever made sense for tiling window managers. And even with that it was a bit of a stretch.

That said, I don't think there's a more under-estimated or misunderstood program around.

pippy• 14 years ago

I'm still bewildered why this isn't the default.

kapilkale• 14 years ago

Thank you. There's some buggy behavior about windows staying on top despite switching applications, and this fixes it.

jfaucett• 14 years ago

I love it! GIMP is one of those tools that's "almost" a photohop killer, not quite yet, but this is a big step in the right direction. Good job GIMP team! As an asside, I think the plugin API and scheme joice is great and a blast to develope with I'd just like to see others jump on board.

EDIT: I thought I'd add this since there seems to be a large discussion below as to the type of user for which GIMP is applicable. I'm a software dev, in the past couple of years though mainly web apps where I've had to at times do graphics, for this GIMP worked fine for me (that's my pitch in the discussion). I think GIMP shines (as well as the traditional imagemagick) for batch processing, the scripting is easy, clean, fast - and lispy :) Some links for those interested: http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Basic_Batch/ http://www.squidoo.com/gimp-how-to-write-a-script-fu-macro

rcgs2• 14 years ago

As someone who uses Photoshop almost every day, it's nowhere near a "photoshop killer". The workflow is still one of the worst I have stumbled across.

DanBC2• 14 years ago

For people who need to put some text on an image[1] or who need to tweak some minor stuff gimp is a "photoshop killer" - and it's nice to push people to legally free software rather than a pirate download of Photoshop.

[1] But see this gimp document - the first returned hit in a search for [gimp drop shadow text] - which appears to be weirdly complex.

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/The_Basics/

colmvp• 14 years ago

CS6 is the first Photoshop update in years where I'd say it has fixed a TON of problems that irked long-time Photoshop users.

ajross• 14 years ago

My experience (which is a little stale) of watching "photoshop experts" is that this is a familiarity effect. Photoshop workflows are uniformly bizarre and awful, in my experience. Serious practitioners are like voodoo priests, pulling tools out that have no sane relevance to the problem at hand and making them work.

But it works, because you know it really well and have spent (literally, in most cases) years perfecting your art. You haven't done that wiht GIMP, so of course it sucks. But the suckage isn't inherent, it's because the problem is inherently sucky, and you've simply trained your eyes not to see it.

w1ntermute3• 14 years ago

As someone who uses GIMP on a regular basis, I find my experience to be exactly the opposite - Photoshop's workflow is very irritating. I think it's just a matter of what you're used to.

drats• 14 years ago

For anyone who's not doing graphics as their main job description it is a photoshop killer. Asides from integration with other Adobe products, print colour management and a few higher level features it has everything a person might need who's main job is not image processing. That's most of the "market" in terms of general home users and web designers who need to process photos and do logos etc. So while I imagine photoshop can keep a lead, and an inertia, with professional graphic designers, people working for magazines and photographers the only reason the GIMP is behind in raw numbers is that people pirate photoshop. In effect it's free competing with free; piracy is functioning as shareware, market-shareware.

adgar2• 14 years ago

The users you describe typically pirate Photoshop in my experience.

runako2• 14 years ago

Disclaimer: I haven't used the most recent version of GIMP yet. Also, I'm not a designer and that colors my position.

What I've found to be the case in prior versions is that it's not sufficient for many minor edits, because it's not 100.0% compatible with the PSD file formats. Even 99% isn't enough in some cases, unfortunately. Since I'm typically editing a file created by a designer in Photoshop, and since I might need the designer to build on my changes, I don't trust anything less than 100.0% compatibility.

mikeryan• 14 years ago

For anyone who's not doing graphics as their main job description it is a photoshop killer.

Doing Graphics is not my main job description, far from it (somewhere between damage control and janitor is more like it), but I still do a lot of front end development, at my job I prefer to do all the graphics production work myself for the apps I'm building and have tried using GIMP a crap ton of times over the years - I've never found it to be a suitable replacement. Maybe its familiarity but I've honestly tried to use gimp in this role and just getting around has always been a complete nightmare compared to Photoshop. It may be able to do the job that Photoshop does, but nowhere near as easily.

Having our Devs at our shop use Photoshop is an expense, but like good chairs and big ass monitors, at the end of the day a few hundred bucks every few years isn't really that much and if its that much easier to use then its an expense we'll eat and happily. This also means from our devs perspective the choice between PS and Gimp is not a financial one, and once you take money out of the picture most folks are going to choose PS. So anyway, no I don't think this is a Photoshop Killer.

armored_mammal6• 14 years ago

In general open source creative tools have come a long way - with Scribus, Gimp, Inkscape, Darktable, Ardour, Blender, etc. all being quite functional, I think there is a pretty strong argument for the 'open source creative suite' being more than capable enough for all but the most stringent professionals.

Nicole0604• 14 years ago

I don't know about the others, because I mainly do photo stuff ( Darktable seems decent though, and it has a been a long time since I've run linux on my desktop computer so I don't know how far it went ), but the GIMP is NOT functional in any way for a professional and a professional who is not willing to spend some dollars to get something that triples his productivity is NOT a professional.

The GIMP doesn't even support something like Adjustment Layers and that's a feature that was added to Photoshop 4.0 in 1996. Get real. Those who make that kind of argument for the GIMP, even pretending it could be used as a professional tool, have no idea what they're talking about.

Even the all-public, cheap edition of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, that you can get for $60, has features like Adjustment Layers.

The GIMP has been working on that stuff for a long time and they're still not done yet. They put off all features related to non-destructive editing until they finally fully switch to the GEGL engine.

dantheta2• 14 years ago

I'm not sure about photoshop killer ... although I do suspect that outside of the professional class of photoshop user (webdevs, print designers etc), a great many people who have a less-than-legitimate copy of photoshop and dramatically under-utilize its features could do worse than try out Gimp. These are the users for whom an entire copy of photoshop is massive overkill and a terrible waste - the absence of some professional-level features from Gimp won't be a problem.

eropple• 14 years ago

I would gently suggest that Photoshop Elements or Pixelmator are probably more likely to be of value to such people. Pixelmator is something like $20 and vastly more user-friendly than Gimp.

stan_rogers2• 14 years ago

The real missing piece is 8BF (Photoshop plugin) compatibility. There is an entire ecosystem of productivity enhancement out there that's missing from the GIMP, at least from the professional photographer's point of view, that, absent a coding pro photographer scratching his own itch, probably isn't going to be filled. Selling a $200 plugin for a $600 program to reduce image turn-around times by an hour apiece works in the pro world; selling a $200 plugin for a free program to people who have essentially all of the time in the world to do things the hard way is a fool's game. That's a sort of chicken-and-egg problem—until there is sufficient pro adoption of the GIMP, the tools won't be there; and until the tools are there, there won't be a large-scale pro adoption of the GIMP. (A wedding photographer, for instance, may have 200–300 images from a wedding that "make the cut" for the album and slideshow, and need editing. Spending even ten minutes per image on skin is a week's work somebody has to do and somebody has to pay for. A plugin that takes that down to two minutes is the difference between profit and failure, even if the big prints still need manual work to look right.)

271828182842• 14 years ago

I've never met a 9-5 Photoshop user that thinks Gimp is anywhere near the quality of Photoshop. Perhaps more importantly, _none_ seem to think that it will ever, ever, be able to catch up let alone surpass PS.

adamt• 14 years ago

A few years ago oracle DBAs used to (and some still so) dismiss MySQL and PostgreSQL saying they were toys that didn't scale. 10-15 years ago 'real men used Solaris' and Linux was a toy for hackers.

Any time any with any technology those that have mastered the 'premier' product, especially those that are paid because of their knowledge of it, will always think it superior.

cageface2• 14 years ago

Both the Gimp and Photoshop are actually pretty lousy for UI/web development. Fireworks is much better but Adobe seems to be neglecting it. I don't really see much hope for a free alternative to displace PS any time soon but an app that was designed from the ground up to make designing interfaces easier might find a niche.

calinet6• 14 years ago

Honestly, the improvements in HTML5/CSS3 (including font-face) make translating graphical mockups into coded web designs much easier. There's a lot less image slicing and a lot more logical markup.

I love Fireworks, but I find myself using it less and less often. Usually I can look at a design straight from a designer who went wild in Photoshop and Illustrator, and make it look extremely close using nothing but HTML and CSS and images only where you'd expect image content.

As much as we like to complain, the web landscape has improved considerably.

viraj_shah• 14 years ago

The interface looks significantly better, at least from the last time I messed around with it (which was a while ago).

jaytaylor• 14 years ago

Agreed. This is a huge step forward for Gimp!

wtallis6• 14 years ago

So, is this an app that bundles it's own X11, or is it using a Quartz/Cocoa backend for GTK?

EDIT: I downloaded it, and the app bundle doesn't seem to have an X11, so that's nice. However, upon firing it up, it throws up a splash screen in front of all other applications. Who still thinks that's acceptable behavior on a multitasking operating system? Also, the app quits when the last window is closed, which isn't how OS X apps are supposed to behave.

sliverstorm3• 14 years ago

Who still thinks that's acceptable behavior

Adobe still does, and of all apps, GIMP is going to be one of the most likely to emulate them.

MikeCapone2• 14 years ago

Photoshop's splash screen doesn't stay on top of all other windows and steal focus, at least not in the version that I have.

If anyone from GIMP is reading this, I strongly recommend that you fix that or at least allow us to disable the splash screen. Thank you.

atopuzov• 14 years ago

It uses GTK with Quartz support, which has it's quirks :(, and the GTK engine they are using looks nice (murrine + theme zukitwo). I been using Wireshark with GTK-Quartz in that mode for a few years (compiling on my own) but they have managed to integrate GTK menus to the Mac menubar.

forgotusername• 14 years ago

I'm confused. You double clicked an application icon, and the application opened? You seem to be conflating the popular hate for focus being stolen due to some non-consensual event, and the consensual starting of an app. If GIMP didn't have a splash screen, there'd be no indication it was loading at all (and it's one big fat app.. several generations of code including a huge chunk of Python loaded at boot).

reitzensteinm• 14 years ago

Splash screens are fine, splash screens that are set to always on top are not. Important distinction.

DigitalJack• 14 years ago

The icon bounces when an app is starting in osx. I am sure there are probably a couple, but normally Mac apps do not do splash screens.

wtallis6• 14 years ago

OS X app icons bounce in the dock while the app is loading. If it takes a really long time, a splash screen is ok, but a splash screen that sticks around for a full minute and thwarts every attempt to raise a window above it is just insulting.

adgar2• 14 years ago

It sounds like your parent poster is saying it shows the splash screen over all applications and there's nothing you can do about it. Which is needlessly inconsiderate.

naz• 14 years ago

> Also, the app quits when the last window is closed, which isn't how OS X apps are supposed to behave.

If anything, they're ahead of the curve. Most Apple apps are beginning to follow this behavior: App Store, Calculator, Contacts, Dictionary, DVD Player, FaceTime, Font Book, Game Center, Garage Band, Image Capture, iPhoto, and so on.

cmelbye• 14 years ago

Notice how most (all?) of those are single window applications.

ken• 14 years ago

Apple's OS X Human Interface Guidelines[1]: "In general, quit when users close the last open window in your app."

[1] http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserExp...

poblano• 14 years ago

Like iTunes.

flatline3• 14 years ago

"In apps that are not document-based ..."

GIMP is document-based.

mbell• 14 years ago

What i find annoying in OS X is flipping over to a desktop, telling an app to start (with the hope that it starts in that desktop), then flipping over to another desktop to keep doing stuff while it loads, only to find that the app has decided to start on your current desktop, not the one you launched it in.

gosub• 14 years ago

This also happens to me in GNOME (v 2.30.11, Debian 6.0.5).

btn2• 14 years ago

> Also, the app quits when the last window is closed, which isn't how OS X apps are supposed to behave.

This is almost consistent with Apple's HIG: "In general, quit when users close the last open window in your app. [...] If users close the last remaining document window in a document-based app and switch to another app, it’s appropriate to quit the app" (emphasis added). [1]

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserEx...

nsxwolf• 14 years ago

That's odd. I don't think I've ever seen this behavior. I just tried it with Pages and the application remained open.

protolif3• 14 years ago

Do you guys remember how unusable the previous version was? I mean, this feels like splitting hairs compared to that.

grannyg00se• 14 years ago

Doesn't behave typically on Windows 7 either. Clicking the window close button doesn't close the app, it closes the currently open document. Also, ALT+F4 doesn't close the app either, just the current document. This is in single-window mode where closing the window should close the app.

Fortunately CTRL-Q does what it's supposed to.

Oh, and great job GIMP folks. I love GIMP and recommend it often. I've even tried to convince some folks to stop using illegal Photoshop copies and switch to GIMP instead (so far I have a 0% conversion rate).

hnriot• 14 years ago

so far I have a 0% conversion rate

that's not surprising given that the GIMP pales by comparison to photoshop. There's just no comparison. I think the high price of Adobe Creative suite has always been there because any professional uses it and buys it, but Adobe knows there are many illegal copies used by students and they just assume they one day will get jobs and then they will be paid users, meanwhile the illegal use is subsidized by the industry who doesn't care how much it costs because it gets the job done. By comparison GIMP is a toy. I know its a pet of the open source community, but commercial software with real designers and focus groups and product managers sometimes get it right.

fuzionmonkey• 14 years ago

Does it have Retina display support? I'd download this in a heartbeat.

It's frustrating how long it is taken Adobe to update their software for Hi-DPI.

llimllib• 14 years ago

No: http://i.imgur.com/5AMU4.jpg

(Edit: that's Gimp and Acorn in the screenshot, respectively, in case you weren't clear what was going on.)

toyg• 14 years ago

We don't know how much warning Apple gave them. To be fair, two months to update such beastly products is really nothing, especially when you have to change core functionality (like on-screen rendering in an image-creation tool...). I'd say 4 to 6 months would be an acceptable turnaround time for the most important products.

Compare with Microsoft, which simply won't support retina "for the time being"...

bigfrakkinghero• 14 years ago

This is awesome! One of my biggest gripes with using OSX was how terrible the GIMP experience was.

crazygringo• 14 years ago

This is a great move.

Serious question: how did this not happen 5 years ago? Is there some technical reason? It's so hard for me to understand why the creators wouldn't have always had this as the #1 feature improvement to make ASAP.

armored_mammal6• 14 years ago

I doubt most GIMP developers care(d?) about Mac. Or had Macs. Open source stuff tends to live in a special universe where everyone uses Linux.

(In fact, based on another post, it sounds like the windowing toolkit picked up Mac support, rather than Gimp doing anything super special.)

fosap• 14 years ago

Also GIMP is in desperate need of manpower.

wlesieutre• 14 years ago

There was Seashore, which was a simpler image editor based on GIMP, but native integration never seemed to be a priority for GIMP. I think there's a commonly held view on open source projects that they're all doing you a service, and if you don't like the tool they wrote you can fix it yourself or use something else. I can't say there's anything particularly wrong with that view, but it doesn't always lead to the greatest user experience.

I can only assume that someone (or several someones) with the time and knowhow to get this done finally came along and decided it was worth investing their time in. I doubt it's as exciting as working on the image editing features.

Camillo• 14 years ago

A "native" version of GTK had been in the works for years, mainly supported by people who wanted to run other programs with it (CinePaint, I think). It seems that nobody had the interest in getting Gimp working with it, the skills to accomplish that, the time to dedicate to it, and the spirit of sacrifice needed to work on a GTK 2 port when GTK 3 is already out. But somehow, in the end, the stars aligned.

tcc619• 14 years ago

This feature along with the single window view makes GIMP very usable on the mac.

MikeCapone2• 14 years ago

Slightly off-topic (but I know very savvy people are here, so I can't help but ask):

Anyone knows where I could find a JPEG-2000 plug-in for GIMP that works on this Mac version, along with instructions on how to install it?

jon6• 14 years ago

OT but is this an official signed application that can work with gatekeeper on 10.8? I recently discovered that my open source project won't work by default on osx 10.8 without me paying $99 to get an apple certificate, which I'm not very interested in doing.

What are open source/free projects supposed to do about gatekeeper?

callahad• 14 years ago

> What are open source/free projects supposed to do about gatekeeper?

They're supposed to pay up.

The signing Developer Certificate Utility at https://developer.apple.com/certificates/ rejects accounts that are not paid members of the Mac Developer Program, and a footnote at https://developer.apple.com/resources/developer-id/ states that "Mac Developer Program membership is required to access the tools and resources for distributing Mac applications."

plorkyeran• 14 years ago

Tell users how to turn it off. I've never seen a user object to doing so, possibly because they don't understand what it's doing in the first place.

stephen_g• 14 years ago

You don't have to turn it off. Just Command click the application and click open the first time. It's automatically added to a whitelist.

pnathan• 14 years ago

I disabled Gatekeeper's hollering on 10.8. I suspect most power users will do the same, but I have no data for that suspicion.

msbarnett• 14 years ago

"Power Users" can have the best of both worlds by simply right-clicking and selecting "Open" to whitelist specific non-signed apps that they want to trust.

I'd mostly expect people who turn it off entirely to fit the "don't really know what they're doing but like to do whatever a forum post tells them to do" archetype.

devindotcom• 14 years ago

Thank god, maybe I can finally leave behind Pixelmator.

jamesu• 14 years ago

I have to say, i'm impressed. One of the biggest reasons I never really used GIMP on OSX was that the X11 version never really felt right.

This version in comparison feels a lot better, though there are still a few annoying things about it, such as the image editing itself seems a bit laggy.

Still, a good step in the right direction IMO!

Cyranix• 14 years ago

The primary download link is getting hammered at the moment; check for a mirror that has an OSX directory for fast access.

Kilimanjaro• 14 years ago

I've been using the outdated Seashore for my basic crop/resize needs. Will try asap.

captaincrowbar• 14 years ago

Now if only Inkscape would follow suit. There are plenty of good bitmap image editors for the Mac, but I could really use a good vector editor.

Flow• 14 years ago

I like Sketch, it's cheap, very good and is aware of pixels.

http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/

scoofy2• 14 years ago

Why can't i move a selection within a layer? This has to be the most persistent problem in the mac version that hasn't been fixed. With every new GIMP version i curse this bug.

armored_mammal6• 14 years ago

It's a GIMP thing, unless I'm misunderstanding you: http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-using-selections.html

scoofy2• 14 years ago

>>hold down Ctrl+Alt keys and click-and-drag the selection. This makes the original place empty. A floating selection is created. The required key commands may differ on your system, look in the status bar to see if another combination is specified; for example, Shift+Ctrl+Alt.

This does not function on mac as far as i know. You cannot even manually do it in the selection options.

city41• 14 years ago

There is also McGimp, which is a fully OSX native version of Gimp: http://www.partha.com/

nimrody• 14 years ago

Can you summarize the main advantages/disadvantages?

DenisM• 14 years ago

Any thoughts on this new GIMP vis-a-vis Photoshop Elements?

I don't mind paying <$100 for a decent graphics editor. My primary use case is tweaking screenshots, app icons, buttons, and the like for my iOS apps and the web site. I want to get in and out as quick as possible, so I can get back to my other work.

kellishaver• 14 years ago

I haven't tried GIMP in ages, but have a look at Pixelmator. It's a great little app. http://www.pixelmator.com/ It has a lot of features for not a lot of money, and a very Photoshop-like interface.

microtonal• 14 years ago

Photoshop Elements is a light-weight blend of Photoshop and Lightroom. It's more for managing photo collections, tweaking things like exposure and contrast, removing red eyes, etc.

If you want a sub-$100 Photoshop replacement, I'd go for Pixelmator. It's really affordable, and provides the functionality that most users need.

zyb09• 14 years ago

GIMP, tried out a lot of image editors and imho it goes like this: Photoshop > GIMP > Elements > Pixelmator. Pixelmator has a really nice UI, but it's lacking features left and right. Photoshop is still the nicest, especially for coders, who don't know what they are doing (real artist only need a canvas and a brush anyway).

bazzargh• 14 years ago

I'm a gimp user. My mum (who has a mac, but isnt a confident computer user) asked for 'photoshop' for christmas after seeing what I'd done fixing up family photos.

I knew if I just gave her Gimp (or Photoshop for that matter) she'd just get stuck - they aren't very user friendly. I had a look at all the image editors I could - Acorn, Seashore, Pixelmator, etc and came to the conclusion that Photoshop Elements beat them all for ease of use.

Specific things that help are the guided actions (in the panel on the right) that act like wizards for performing common actions, but also teach you how to do these things; and the selection & healing tools are miles better than those in the other tools. Take a look at the demo on the top left here: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-elements/features.ht...

... it's talking about the smart brush, which I don't bother with, but what you're looking at is how well it manages to select within a picture.

I still prefer using Gimp, but for quick photo edits, I tend to use PE now. However, I tend to work with photos not eg icons as you do - not sure if PE is any use for that.

larrywright• 14 years ago

The excellent Pixelmator is only $14.99 in the Mac App Store. I'm not sure how much use their is for Gimp on OS X any more.

niels_olson• 14 years ago

I like using GIMP because it's what I use on Ubuntu and Suse and I use a lot of different machines (two XP boxes on different networks at work, several OSes at home, and I change jobs every couple of years). Photoshop isn't cross-platform, and the licensing would be prohibitive for my needs. For my brother, a professional artist with his own studio, Photoshop is the only way to go. For my daughter on a Cr-48, GIMP is great.

joejohnson• 14 years ago

I wish it were available from the App Store.

d0ugal• 14 years ago

Why?

jyap2• 14 years ago

GIMP would most likely reach a larger audience of users.

Simple app updates that are integrated at the OS level.

mmphosis• 14 years ago

GIMP Crashes on launching 32bit CPU

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=682913

  $ file GIMP.app/Contents/MacOS/GIMP-bin
  GIMP.app/Contents/MacOS/GIMP-bin: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64

delackner• 14 years ago

Some day in the distant future perhaps there will actually be a non-photoshop 100% psd compatible editor. I thought I could just tell my designer to do File -> Export Layers as PNG, but that command in Photoshop is intentionally broken, churning for several minutes before producing even the first of many output files. In the meantime, while I like seeing how far Gimp has come, it just isn't an option for me.

akldfgj2• 14 years ago

Doesn't come with decent-looking fonts included, though.

unwind• 14 years ago

There was some confusion about whether this release (which wasn't done by the "ordinary" Mac OS X package maintainer) meant that the role had been appointed to someone else: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer-list/2012-Aug....

I hope that is getting resolved, it's always painful to see large projects like GIMP suffer from "people problems" and developers become disgruntled as a result.

jyap2• 14 years ago

TIP:

I've been a long time GIMP for Mac OS X user (being a former laptop Linux users).

New GIMP crashed in me on the first run. It then hung on start up on the 2nd run.

I just deleted my old GIMP configuration directories and it started up fine:

rm -fr ~/Library/Application\ Support/Gimp/

calgaryeng• 14 years ago

Is there a way to permanently dock the toolbar in the Mac version? I had this in the old version.... Now I get floating docks over top of other applications even when Gimp is in the background!

GIMP is Now a Self-Contained Native App for Mac OS X

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