Photo GIMP – A Patch for GIMP 3 for Photoshop Users

by SockThief • 2 months ago

198 205 2 months ago

I am glad someone is putting in this effort. Many years ago, there was another project called GIMPshop to make GIMP's interface more accessible to Photoshop users.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop

They taught Photoshop at school, so I found it easier to use GIMPshop than regular GIMP.

nticompass• 2 months ago

That's actually what I thought this submission was. Didn't remember what it was called, so I didn't realize PhotoGIMP wasn't GIMPshop.

account42• 2 months ago

It's funny that both of these kept GIMP in the name when the name itself has spawend a different fork.

wilburx3• 2 months ago

Looks like the last release was from over a year ago and the issues indicated it no longer works with the latest GIMP release.

seltzered_• 2 months ago

There was also an effort called Glimpse around 2019 to be a UX / accessibility overhaul of GIMP along with a name change to be less offensive, see:

- https://github.com/joshgiesbrecht/Glimpse

- https://web.archive.org/web/20190829115212/https://getglimps...

DeathArrow• 2 months ago

People use Photoshop for sheer capability, not for the layout, naming conventions and shortcuts.

dotancohen• 2 months ago

Although that is true, moving to a different application with different layout, naming conventions, and shortcuts is difficult. That is the use case this project addresses.

lukaslalinsky• 2 months ago

The disadvantage is that then you never learn how GIMP works and will forever frustrated it's not Photoshop. Sometimes it's better to take the hard way.

fredley2• 2 months ago

Some people do. I know my way around Photoshop very well, but do not use any advanced features. I tried using GIMP once and bounced off immediately, trying to do what I knew how to do in Photoshop was very hard, the learning curve felt very steep.

These days I use Photopea which meets my needs perfectly (but is not free software).

lukasbm• 2 months ago

I'm pretty sure 95% of photoshop users only use a feature subset thats also available in GIMP (except for maybe the latest generative infill)

w4rh4wk5• 2 months ago

I highly doubt that. Photoshop, even for 95% of users, is pretty heavy on non-destructive editing. GIMP did not have that for a very long time and is no where near feature parity today AFAIK.

Don't get me wrong, Photoshop sucks hard, Adobe as a company even more, but on a technical level most Photoshop users cannot transition to GIMP.

Edit: Although, I have to highlight that GIMP has made noticeable progress within the last years. I can now, finally, group two layers together and apply a drop shadow effect to the group, which correctly applies to all layers within the group. It's been quite a while...

Mashimo5• 2 months ago

I don't know the current status, but at least last time I checked you could not have strokes/outline on text, and afterwards change the text :(

It's such a little thing that makes gimp annoying to use. And it affects a broad audience. Wedding cards or youtube title thumbnails.

Maybe it works now. I hope.

Non destructive layer resize works now, right?

MiddleEndian• 2 months ago

I'm pretty sure 95% of photoshop users only use a feature subset thats also available in GIMP (except for maybe the latest generative infill)

It's been a few years since I tried GIMP but the last time I did, I couldn't rotate text and then edit it without losing my rotations. Rotating text isn't some obscure feature. This wasn't only shockingly behind Photoshop, it was behind Microsoft Word or even Clarisworks. A quick Google search suggests this remained unsolved as recently as 2024: https://old.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/19ckuo4/text_layers_a...

This isn't blind hatred of OSS or learning new things. I've gotten annoyed with Photoshop now that they decided to replace their UI with web components, and so far Krita has been quite pleasant to use despite not also being identical to Photoshop.

whywhywhywhy• 2 months ago

Considering their own bugtracker had them 14 years ago claiming adjustment layers were not useful and it's taken them over a decade to get that absolutely essential feature in only recently in a very weird way I don't think anywhere near 95% of the features are there.

notwhereyouare• 2 months ago

But if you don't have the money for a photoshop license, learned photoshop, and don't want to pirate, this is a good middle ground.

Photopea is also a good solution

NetMageSCW3• 2 months ago

Photoshop is available for $20 a month on the annual Photography plan.

Gualdrapo• 2 months ago

Time to bring back again the (true) story of when I was working at uni and they were looking for another graphic designer to join our team. Boss told us one of the candidates refused to do the test because the computer didn't have Photoshop installed. All they needed to do with an image editor was to crop an image.

I really think most people use Photoshop for the same reason they use Windows - they don't really know/they don't want to learn anything else.

actionfromafar• 2 months ago

I maybe like this candidate - the "company" failed the test and the candidate moved on. :-)

ibejoeb2• 2 months ago

I don't think it's contentious to say that the user interface is a huge part of using a program.

detritus2• 2 months ago

er.. no - I've been a daily user of Photoshop since '98 or so, but after getting annoyed with Adobe's subscription model a few years back I bought Affinity Photo and looked to move over entirely to that, yet I ended up back in Photoshop purely because of literal decades of muscle memory meant that every interaction that I had with Affinity's offering came with an undesirable cognitive speedbump.

I'm not a fan of Gimp (haven't given it a shot in over a decade, to be fair) but if it covers the basic capabilities of PS and provides for an almost straight swap for users looking to change, then it is literally the layout and shortcuts that will be the decider for them.

pessimizer2• 2 months ago

Seems like you're actually agreeing. What you're attached to is all the work you put into learning Photoshop, not the particular UI of Photoshop. Learning GIMP is throwing hundreds or thousands of hours of work into the trash. IMO, learning GIMP is going to be a lot easier, though, because it's logically organized - it's easy to guess where things will be.

That's always going to be a problem with switching from anything to anything other than a clone. I can't play superior, I'm still clinging to MATE for goodness's sake, but at least I know I'm being dumb and have plans to move.

ho_schi• 2 months ago

I see usually two options:

    a) Solution X does it generally better than Y and their solution is *ported*.
    b) Adapt to solution Y. The end.

Most of the time it is b. Because Vim shall not be Emacs. Linux shall not be Windows. And macOS shall not be Windows either.

Do you remember that foolish Windows-Themes on Linux? Luckily GNOME has killed custom theming. And Apple also. Custom theming is a horrible mess aside from areas where it is intentionally (e.g. Vim color schemes).

But it is also possible that Gimp moves to option A. At some point and they are interested in user-interface improvements. Most people just want to use Single-Window-Mode which shall be default for many years.

nananana9• 2 months ago

c) There's a sane, standard way of doing things that everybody is familiar with, but you do decide to actively go against it for decades because you like doing things your way, and if anyone has anything to say about it they're "free to fork" and you "don't owe anyone anything", but despite that, everyone should use your thing because it's free and you're the good guy, and otherwise they're supporting the empire of evil.

This is why Krita is sweeping the floor with gimp - sane UI that's way closer to Photoshop. You need to rebind 5 things and you can use it.

Luckily GNOME has killed custom theming

Same deal. What do you care what I do with my computer? GNOME is hanging on by nature of being the default, but very few people pick it when they have the choice. It will be dead in 10 years.

Antibabelic2• 2 months ago

This is a lot of very confident assertions.

you do decide to actively go against it for decades because you like doing things your way

Perhaps there's a good reason why a developer or a group of developers decide to do things a certain way.

This is why Krita is sweeping the floor with gimp

Aside from the fact that these programs are intended for pretty different things, the impression I have is that GIMP has a much larger install-base than Krita and more people are aware of it. Far from "sweeping the floor".

GNOME is hanging on by nature of being the default

Or perhaps some people (and enterprises) want a polished OOTB desktop experience without having to deal with KDE's bugs and Windows-like design language. There are plenty of GNOME installs on Arch Linux for example, where you can't speak of any "defaults" with regards to desktop environments.[0]

[0] https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun/Desktop%20Environments/cur...

squigz• 2 months ago

Custom themes for DEs and the like are fairly important for accessibility.

IdiotSavage2• 2 months ago

Do you remember that foolish Windows-Themes on Linux? Luckily GNOME has killed custom theming.

In what way has GNOME killed theming? There are lots of themes available on [1] and some of the most downloaded ones are consistently imitations of the latest macOS or Windows style.

[1] https://www.gnome-look.org/browse?cat=135&ord=rating

neuralkoi• 2 months ago

GIMP gets the work done. I've never had an issue I couldn't address with its tools, but it's clear the UI was crafted by coders. I'm glad for this approach.

reaperducer• 2 months ago

I completely agree.

Every few years I give GIMP a shot, and every time I give up because it's completely inscrutable. Adobe is evil, and Pixelmator lacks features, but at least you can figure out how to use them in short order.

Shared404• 2 months ago

Check out Krita, it's a much easier lift for someone used to photoshop ime.

At least, if you're doing digital art. Not as full featured for editing of photo's.

olavgg• 2 months ago

Every time I give Photoshop a chance I give completely up, the thing doesn't even start on neither Fedora or Ubuntu and I have no interest in configuring Wine for this. GIMP is the least painful way to get the job done. I have been using it for over 20 years, and it has been a pain-free experience. That GIMP is bad is just as wrong as the people who say Java is bad.

But you know what's even worse, people that use Illustrator to create SVG's for the web. Inkscape creates proper readable SVG's at 5KB, compared to 50MB SVG's I get from Illustrator experts.

Induane• 2 months ago

I actually find the opposite. I don't actually think either of us are wrong, it probably comes down to what we got started with. I love that in Gimp layers can have totally different canvas sizes, and I prefer it's foreground select tool.

But most of all, any comparison is going to be silly. Photoshop has lots of amazing features and in sure is better in a technical comparison to Gimp in many ways.

A lot of times the best tool for the job is the one that works great for you.

cspeterson• 2 months ago

And I'm glad to see such a simple approach to making it usable. Not a fork creating whole new problems to worry about, just reconfiguring the UI and now Bob's your uncle.

Now if GIMP would just stop rewriting the file on each run, making it difficult to keep in revision control....

echelon• 2 months ago

1. GIMP needs a total UX overhaul

2. GIMP needs RAW support, precision support, and a better data backbone

3. GIMP needs a rename. It's both a sex kink term [1] (not to yuck anyone's yums) and a slur term for disabled people [2]

4. Gen AI will probably disrupt all of this anyway.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I8S3ZHQ

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gimp

867-5309• 2 months ago

and what do you propose for the Great Internet Mersenne Prime search?

mghackerlady5• 2 months ago

1. I don't disagree

2. GIMP isn't a raw editor, use darktable or rawtherapee

3. Poor naming decisions do not warrant a change this late, people know GIMP

4. Keep dreaming

enthdegree• 2 months ago

Your point number 3 is very irritating to read.

Asooka2• 2 months ago

Eh, every term for disabled people becomes a slur. Moron->idiot->retard (the latter being so unacceptable in modern speech it is labelled by the kids as "the hard r"). But you are right, we should simply not use terms for disabled people in software names. I propose "Thirty Years and Still Cannot Draw a Circle" or the hip short name :no-entry-sign: emoji.

tokai2• 2 months ago

This comment should just be automatically posted in every GIMP thread. Then nobody else needs to post these trite points again and again and again and again.

jrm411• 2 months ago

Again, it's about 20 years too late, but the rename thing is absolutely correct and I continue to be gobsmacked by the amount of people here who don't get this, especially as I've seen this place slowly move from actually being about "hacking" to being about "tech and business."

Perception matters; Y'all are so wild for this.

firebot• 2 months ago

3. They should rename it LIMP. Linux ....

duskdozer2• 2 months ago

it's clear the UI was crafted by coders

Is it? Why? Looking at the screenshot on this, it just seems like a few items were moved around a bit, presumably because that's where Photoshop has them.

hnlmorg• 2 months ago

They were talking about GIMPs default UI.

zobzu• 2 months ago

i really don't mind the GIMP UI but then again I used it for a very long time, so perhaps that's why (same for PS, I'm a 1.0 user).

On the flip side, I'd love a darktable that is closer the lightroom's UI, for similar reasons. Somehow, i find it more difficult to get the same speed and flow with darktable.

lthi7472• 2 months ago

GIMP is the only program that I miss when switched from linux to mac. And GIMP 2.2 was just a perfect for my needs back then

ibejoeb2• 2 months ago

There's a mac build for GIMP: https://download.gimp.org/gimp/v3.2/macos/gimp-3.2.4-arm64.d...

faangguyindia• 2 months ago

Wait what? i've been using gimp on mac without issues.

lthi7472• 2 months ago

Yes there are but is just not the same, controls are quite non intuitive, I often got glitches on rendering, so overall UX for me is pretty bad

Mashimo5• 2 months ago

so overall UX for me is pretty bad

That's just normal gimp

lynndotpy17• 2 months ago

You might be happy to learn that GIMP is a lot better on Mac with the 3.0 release than it was before. When I started using a Mac in 2022 I was a bit heartbroken at broken bits of the UI. I started using Affinity as a compromise, but its UX was just too janky and slow for me compared to GIMP.

Some things are wonky though (ctrl+ keybindings instead of cmd+ keybindings) but it's much better. I use it every day now.

Joel_Mckay• 2 months ago

Krita is also available on MacOS, but unsure if pen pressure sensitivity works on the platform. =3

https://krita.org/en/download/

drzaiusx112• 2 months ago

How do we get this into mainline GIMP? As a GIMP user since it existed, I can say that the default interface "works" but the ux isn't great. This looks like a marked improvement and would give me something more like Inkscapes UI but for raster images instead of vector...

broodbucket• 2 months ago

If they were going to mimic a more Photoshop-like UI by default, they would've done it. GIMPshop was around over two decades ago

drzaiusx112• 2 months ago

I thought they were already heading in that direction with the single window mode merging. But ok sure I guess they'll never change anything because a sister project existed 2 decades ago or whatever.

cmyk_student8• 2 months ago

Possibly as part of our in-progress extension platform. The extension infrastructure is already built (e.g. you could package the theme as .gex file and have GIMP recognize it), and we have a GSoC student working on some aspects of it (at the moment, the submission workflow for an online repo of extensions). Once it's ready, we could reach out to the developers of PhotoGIMP and see if they'd be willing to have it included as part of the initial extensions repo - then you could pull it into GIMP directly.

jrm411• 2 months ago

I'll continue to say it; this software does not get taken seriously in a useful way to lots of people until it changes the silly name.

And to summarize and perhaps avert other discussion; it's not so much about being "non-offensive" as it is simply about being professional.

croes3• 2 months ago

Who takes people seriously who judge something by its name instead if it’s functions?

voidUpdate• 2 months ago

People who work for the judgers, when the judgers pay their salary

jrm411• 2 months ago

The entirety of the capitalist business world, unfortunately.

lynndotpy17• 2 months ago

"Names don't matter" is obviously a silly stance. Pre-emptively dismissing people who disagree as "not serious" when you're taking a stance like this does not make an argument in favor of your stance.

Names are something that clearly matter to people, and that impacts anyone working with people.

TeddyDD• 2 months ago

Good thing then that the most popular version control system on the planet does not have silly, unprofessional name...

jrm411• 2 months ago

I hear that objection and it's a decent one, but that one just isn't as well known. Even as an American, I'm not thrilled that "offensive in America" matters more, but it does.

lynndotpy17• 2 months ago

The difference is that git was among the best-in-class and developed and used by the people behind Linux, and that the word 'git' wasn't as offensive as 'gimp'.

If GIMP had feature-parity with Photoshop, and had been adopted by Condé Nast or ILM, and had a less-offensive name like "Dumm" or "Silly Image Editor", then this would be more comparable.

chiffre01• 2 months ago

I've never understood GIMP's approach to copy paste either. They've made a decision that copy and paste must require as many un-intuitive steps as possible.

Most graphics programs let you select a region, copy it and then move the copy around to where you want it, the end. You can usually paste into new layer if needed.

But not in GIMP for some reason you have to copy something and 'anchor it' or convert it to a new layer before you ever see it.

This kind of thing just makes me use other software.

criddell• 2 months ago

That's how Procreate works as well. When you paste, it pastes into a new layer and then you can decide if you want to merge it down or not.

mixmastamyk15• 2 months ago

Not sure what you’re seeing, but if you choose the move (four arrow button) tool after pasting, it will move the selection. Then you can create a layer or merge down etc if you wish but not required.

Izkata2• 2 months ago

Slightly beyond that, pasting creates a temporary new layer you can manipulate like normal layers before anchoring it or converting it to a normal layer. It's visible in the Layers window as a separate layer from the one you were working on.

Sophira• 2 months ago

I've memorised the keyboard shortcuts that I need in order to do this extremely common thing.

1. Select region with mouse.

2. Ctrl-C: Copy the region.

3. Ctrl-V: Paste (with the selection still active, so that it pastes in the same place).

4. Ctrl-Shift-N: Makes the resulting "temporary layer" into a permanent new layer.

5. Use the new layer.

I wish I could skip step 4. It's usually not necessary, and if I need to place the temporary layer into the same layer that I was already using, I can just merge the two myself.

Of course, sometimes you do need the ability to directly paste into the same thing, such as if you're editing a layer mask rather than the actual layer itself...

F3nd09• 2 months ago

But not in GIMP for some reason you have to copy something and 'anchor it' or convert it to a new layer before you ever see it.

I select something, copy it, paste it, and I can see and move it right away. Is that not working for you? I’m on GIMP 3.2.2.

cmyk_student8• 2 months ago

Copy & Paste default behavior was changed in GIMP 3.0 (I was one of the people who worked on the change). GIMP 2.10 and earlier creating floating selections as described earlier.

I've gotten equal parts praise and complaints for working on that - some people think it makes GIMP much more intuitive, while others find it interfers with their workflow of quickly copying, editing, and merging back down pieces of a layer.

iLoveOncall2• 2 months ago

Gimp is shit. It has always been shit and likely will always be shit. The UI is made by Satan himself and it is much closer to Paint than to Photoshop in terms of feature coverage.

There's absolutely no reason to use Gimp when https://www.photopea.com/ exists.

hootz4• 2 months ago

There's no reason to use GIMP when a closed-source ad ridden web app with premium AI features exists?

iLoveOncall2• 2 months ago

Open-source is not a selling point and I'm amazed that some people still consider it as such in 2026.

I have absolutely no ads on Photopea.

Gimp doesn't have any AI feature, and you're free to not use any of the Photopea AI features, so not sure why it's relevant?

Yes, we indeed don't need Gimp when we have a free Photoshop equivalent.

RankingMember• 2 months ago

I prefer Pixlr.com myself (basically because it's Adobe Photoshop without the Adobe aspect).

leephillips• 2 months ago

I probably won’t bother to try this because I think it’s unlikely that it fixes whatever is broken in Gimp that prevents me from using it. I use DWM. Gimp simply doesn’t work with that window manager. I won’t bore you with details, but other users of DWM or, possibly, similar WMs know what I mean.

It’s not DWM’s fault. It works fine with programs that support X11 properly. Krita, for example, works perfectly with DWM.

pessimizer2• 2 months ago

I really hate [edit: the necessity for something like] this. I deeply disagree that Photoshop has better UI than GIMP, it's just that GIMP is no professional's daily driver, you were paid to learn Photoshop; and whenever you learned any technique, you learned it in Photoshop. Clinging to Photoshop UI (which is completely arbitrary and bizarre) just supports Photoshop - you're taking a vacation instead of making a move.

That being said, the comfort that millions of people have with the Photoshop interface is in itself an institution, and has to be respected as such (imagine the collective number of man-hours put into learning it.) I don't know what the answer is. But the worst possible outcome is the Firefox outcome, where GIMP ends up chasing Photoshop rather than remaining its own thing.

Just, please, try to get out of your head that GIMP's UI is bad. It's not, it's just different. Don't think of it as a knock-off Photoshop. Deal with it on its own terms. Use these Photoshop skins as a transition rather than a destination.

That means I might have a problem with this approach, just because it doesn't allow for a easy switch between classic and Photoshop UI. It's actually annoying to switch back and forth. If it catches on and brings more users to GIMP, it will become the interface, and leave GIMP vulnerable to IP attacks.

gedy• 2 months ago

It's different not in an apples to oranges way, it's like apples to dried squid. GIMP is/was very much an acquired taste and pretty tough to learn compared to modern UI standards. Photoshop is not perfect or easy, but it's "normal".

koiueo• 2 months ago

That's a lot of hand waving. Any specific examples?

jfindley• 2 months ago

The problem is not that GIMP has a different UI to photoshop. That's not a problem. Premier and Final Cut Pro have different UIs, and while there's some friendly banter about which is better most people agree that either work.

The GIMP community has utterly failed to understand that the problem with their UI is not that it's different from one particular competitor, it's that it breaks all user expectations about how GUI software should behave. A simple copy/paste operation between layers requires googling before a new user is able to do it - and all to save utterly trivial amounts of RAM. That's not "just different", that's objectively terrible.

KnuthIsGod• 2 months ago

Krita is so much more accessible than GIMP.

Only Gimp devs would love Gimps interface.

Just the existence of Gimp seems like so much effort flushed down the toilet because of someone's bad, bad taste and incredibly poor user interface design

mghackerlady5• 2 months ago

I think the biggest problem is they shoved it all into one window when it was designed to be a multi-window editor

hootz4• 2 months ago

But how good is Krita with photo manipulation and composites? I don't want to paint, I want to edit images.

Jach• 2 months ago

Krita is not very good for photo manipulation. Even basic stuff like rectangle select and selection manipulation is painful. But on a project I used Krita, Gimp, and Inkscape all at the same time, and it was fine. Different tools for different purposes. Though with Gimp 3 having better font/text behavior, and overall allowing to build a pipeline of effects instead of immediately applying them (aka non-destructive editing), I could probably drop Inkscape now.

mghackerlady5• 2 months ago

How long will this one last? Just learn the GIMP interface, it's not great but not being photoshop isn't a bug

thisislife2• 2 months ago

The argument over the UI in GIMP and Photoshop is actually based on the kind of "false" premise that Photoshop has a "superior" UI.

It reminds of my first experience using macOS, as a long time Windows user. The first few months on macOS was a totally frustrating and negative experience for me - "What the ...? why does the ENTER key not open files or folders? Why is it going to 'rename' mode? Why doesn't double-clicking the title bar on a window maximise the window? Why are some windows maximised and others take their own custom width? Why is the Maximise button making apps full screen!?" - and so on.

The point is that I had become so familiar with the Windows UI, that every other OS UI suddenly seemed alien - "This is not how a UI should work on an OS". (This was also the reason that I hated Ubuntu's DE, as it tried to imitate the macOS UI I was then unfamiliar with). Familiarity means when you face a new UI, you have to spend effort to re-learn your way of thinking around a UI, which can be a frustrating experience (especially as you grow older). That effort / stress also unconsciously creates a negative impression in your mind about the UI. Both Apple and Microsoft know this and that is why they deliberately make their UI distinct and different from each other - whether it is Windows vs macOS or Windows Phone vs ios. Recently someone (a non-geek) asked me if they should buy a Macbook as they had an iPhone too. As they were a Windows user, I warned them that the macOS UI would be frustrating and to try macOS before committing to it. They did, and ultimately decided against it and chose to stick to Windows (buying a Surface Tablet).

As a former graphic designer, and an experienced Photoshop user, I only considered GIMP as a replacement when Adobe decided to make it a subscription. And just as with Windows to macOS, re-learning to use the GIMP UI was a frustrating experience because I was always thinking of "this is how it is done in Photoshop". Once you let go of that "familiarity", and are willing to actually test if the "GIMP way" is maybe better, it becomes a less frustrating experience. (All that said, while I have got used to using the GIMP tools the GIMP way, the overall GIMP layout does have a cluttered feeling and I do recommend installing Photo GIMP - it won't really make GIMP a Photoshop clone, but it will make it more "familiar" and thus easier to "re-learn" how to use it).

ndiddy• 2 months ago

I grew up using Paint Shop Pro, so I'm not familiar with either. I've recently had to start using both Photoshop and GIMP (Photoshop because the best tool for descreening printed documents is the Sattva Descreen Photoshop plugin, GIMP because I've largely switched to Linux). GIMP is not like most software. With Photoshop, there's tons of functionality but I can usually figure out what to do by poking around in the menus and hovering at the icons in the toolbar. With GIMP, I have to keep looking online for how to do basic things, and the program keeps behaving in unusual ways.

For example, let's say I added a text block to an image. I then select the text layer, there's a box drawn around the text, and I try moving the text around with the move tool. In every other image editor I've used, this will move the text around, but in GIMP this will move the background layer around unless you specifically click on the text and not just inside the box (which can be difficult depending on the font you used). Every aspect of using GIMP works like this. Everything is implemented in a counterintuitive manner. The closest analogue I can think of is it's like figuring out how to play old versions of Dwarf Fortress from before they overhauled the UI for the Steam release.

Izkata2• 2 months ago

That's an option on the Move tool, whether to move the current layer or the thing you clicked on.

As someone who has never used Photoshop, I've always found Gimp to be pretty intuitive, and reading some of the complaints on here I expect I'd find Photoshop strange and unintuitive. For example, one of the comparisons above is about copy/paste, but from their description the Gimp version is much closer to how copy/paste works in general, where you have to paste to create the new copy before you can manipulate it.

Mashimo5• 2 months ago

I never used Photoshop, it was easy to use other advanced tools such as Davinci Resolve, Darktable etc. But Gimp is just horrible. Even when you don't compare it to Photoshop.

iamcalledrob• 2 months ago

The micro-interactions and hotkeys in GIMP are just so poor though.

For example, basic stuff like zoom in and zoom out are bound differently to literally any other app on any platform. This catches me out every single time I try to use it, and I'll never learn the GIMP way.

Spoiler for anyone unfamiliar: it's not Ctrl+/Ctrl-.

mixmastamyk15• 2 months ago

Tried it, apparently ctrl is not needed. I usually use ctrl-scroll so hadn’t noticed. Maybe we can get them added.

mghackerlady5• 2 months ago

I feel like people saying that they're too used to photoshops UI/UX to switch is more of a dig on adobe than GIMP. Your entire skillset being non-transferable simply because of how hard photoshop is to learn and unlearn must mean adobe is in deep UX hell

yborg• 2 months ago

I don't think it's that PS has a better UI it's that so many people spent years in it because it became the de facto standard in graphic design work. Given the choice between doing work and learning a totally different interface so you can do work is choice many people won't make.

regus• 2 months ago

I tried using gimp on Mac to do some extremely basic stuff. I just wanted multiple layers to make a little mock up at work. Gimp’s mental model is unintuitive to me, I got so frustrated trying get anything done. I gave up and bought acorn for Mac to make my basic little image.

f055• 2 months ago

So I guess that yesterday's questions "Where is vibecoded Photoshop?" just got answered with a vibecoded Gimp UI that looks like Photoshop ;) but seriously, nice work!

figmert• 2 months ago

Pretty sure there has been various efforts to do this, but they all eventually stall due to being unable to keep up with the GIMP source. I hope this time they're taking an approach that will allow them to keep up with the maintenance.

jdlyga• 2 months ago

GIMP should take a lesson from Blender. Blender used to be the most clunky, unintuitive pieces of open source software. But after a decade and a half of UI development, it's one of the smoothest interfaces you'll ever use.

3form• 2 months ago

Blender also had a comparatively large amount of money backing these changes, if I remember correctly, which I expect GIMP does not. I suppose a lesson in that area would be required first. However, the others like Krita might be better positioned for this.

elevation2• 2 months ago

GIMP should take a lesson from Blender. Blender used to be the most clunky, unintuitive pieces of open source software. But after a decade and a half of UI development, it's one of the smoothest interfaces you'll ever use

Agreed. I'm already willing to use GIMP in its current state. But though I've used it since I was a child, I have to re-google for things I know it can do.

I had a photo of a barn. I was going to construct it in miniature, so to get scale measurements I wanted an isometric perspective from a photo that had been taken at an angle. I had done this in GIMP before so I was hesitant to start googling for answers but in 25 minutes of playing with it, no combination of inputs would do what I wanted. I had to find some youtube tutorials.

Even simple tasks aren't simple. Annotating a photograph with a couple red arrows is a multi step challenge involving paths, stroking, selections, layers, and maybe some other stuff I'm forgetting. These UI concepts were impenetrable without tutorials -- I never would have figured this out on my own.

GIMP has helped me but it's never been pleasant to use.

mixmastamyk15• 2 months ago

You can draw arrows with the pencil or paintbrush.

cmyk_student8• 2 months ago

For what it's worth, there is a built-in arrow brush in GIMP 3.2 (we updated the MyPaint brushes engine and got it for free as a result).

elevation2• 2 months ago

Another lesson GIMP could take from Blender is the importance of a python REPL that updates with the analog commands to the menu items you're clicking. GIMP allows scripting from some kind of lisp, but in many hours of attempt I've never gotten it to do what I know it can do. But I was effective in blender within seconds because it allowed me to directly translate my actions to code.

cmyk_student8• 2 months ago

GIMP has a Python console, and several built-in plug-ins are written in Python: https://docs.gimp.org/3.2/en/gimp-filters-python-fu.html

We want to make macros simpler (some of the work I helped out with for GIMP 3.0 was to lay the groundwork for automated/recordable operations), but as with all the things on our roadmap it takes time and developers.

Palomides• 2 months ago

the only possible lesson from blender I see is "receive millions of dollars a year from corporations"

rorylaitila• 2 months ago

I tried GIMP out again after a decade, and I have to say I'm presently surprised with v3. I avoided it for a long time because I remember it being a super confusing interface. Every UX idiom seemed backward to me then. But today I need to do some significant compositing, repainting and correction sporadically, and I'm tired of the Adobe tax. Maybe coupled with AI research, I've been quickly able to figure out everything I need to do.

cosmic_cheese• 2 months ago

Does this fix the layers palette? Last I knew, in stock GIMP the way it operates is utterly bizarre, supporting none of the multi-select interactions that have been stock in scrolling list views across platforms since the 90s.

mattkevan5• 2 months ago

Photoshop's interface is getting worse [1] and everyone hates Adobe, so there's a great opportunity for a tool like GIMP to step up and become the default alternative. It's got a lot of features, it's been around for a long time and has reasonable name recognition (for better or worse).

However, unless they do a Blender and make a sustained effort to improve the UI, understand what people want and how it fits into professional workflows, it's never going to happen.

The attitude seems to be: If you don't like it, fuck you. I think they're genuinely happy with how things are. The inscrutable UI and off-putting name are features not bugs, keeping away the sort of people they don't want.

[1] https://unsung.aresluna.org/photoshops-challenges-with-focus...

mixmastamyk15• 2 months ago

Gimp has nothing like the interface deviations Blender did, like right click selection, etc. So there isn’t anything of that scale to fix.

cmyk_student8• 2 months ago

Far from it - we even have a dedicated design site where we ask for UX-specific bug reports and improvement requests from users: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work_it...

We then discuss and test with the reporter and volunteer designers, and try to implement once some consensus has been reached. We welcome feedback from more users, so feel free to contribute your thoughts and design/workflow issues!

mattkevan5• 2 months ago

Ah design by committee, that well known route to design excellence!

Matl2• 2 months ago

While all the comments about GIMP needing a total UX overhaul etc. are likely valid, it's worth noting that there's something like 2 people working on the bulk of GIMP at the moment.

It's not a startup that has just raised a series A and opened a flashy San Francisco office.

All that is to say that I don't think the problem is the GIMP devs not knowing what the problems are and needing them explained over and over again.

The problem is a shortage of developers to address them.

So if you can, contribute.

herbst• 2 months ago

I guess i am not the only one who actually likes that Gimp is the same software I got used to many years ago just a lot better.

No need to relearn anytime I have to edit something.

jwagenet• 2 months ago

I think there is room for both approaches. Like it or not, photoshop/adobe is the defacto standard everything else is measured from. A compatibility layer like Inkscape does for illustrator has for PS-like behavior is welcome to bring “industry” users in the fold.

My primary use case for gimp is using path and selection tools for removing backgrounds and the UI and shortcuts in gimp are painful coming from a decade of adobe use.

shevy-java2• 2 months ago

The problem is a shortage of developers to address them.
So if you can, contribute.

Well, that requires knowledge of C. That already excludes like 98% of the user base or so, or perhaps 90%.

Also, even aside from this, if a majority wants feature xyz but you don't like that, what can you do? It is a constant time investment to convince a majority that what they want may not be great.

You make it sound as if the only bottleneck is lack of developers. I think there are many more bottlenecks than merely lack of developers.

Fogest• 2 months ago

Agreed, I think the bottlenecks are often the gate keepers already in the community. In fact one of the other replies to the parent indicates that mentality. Where they are happy that GIMP has remained unchanged and are happy with the UI. This is exactly the kind of sentiment that often makes progress become stagnant. The small vocal community gets used to things like poor UI, and then turns into a NIMBY about any changes that would benefit the masses (but require them learning new things).

Unfortunately I think this is why most of the time you don't see progress in applications like this until there is a fork or a whole new application. Especially with AI based development now, I think the problem is often not the lacking people to make code, but lacking people that allow the code to be contributed in the first place.

ex1fm3ta• 2 months ago

like the ffmpeg teams said "Send Patches"

IdiotSavage2• 2 months ago

As an outsider, trying to make some UI/UX changes in old open source projects is often extremely energy consuming and difficult. You have to convince all the old hands, who feel it's their project (maybe rightfully so) that the changes are good for new users. Old users will mostly fight any change (don't want to relearn). Many discussions end with "maybe let's make this a setting?". This leads to crappy software with bad defaults, way too many options and nobody will ever use the new settings.

Even though I have a background in UX design, I'm not cut out for this kind of open source work. I've tried.

tonmoy• 2 months ago

Another outsider, but Krita seem to be doing really well keeping their UX up to date. To the point where I often use it for a lot of stuff meant to be done by GIMP

greazy• 2 months ago

LibreOffice did a great job of transitioning to an alternative UX and went further to implement not just ribbons but different combinations classic menu with ribbons.

That's the answer IMO, yeah now there's two UX to maintain but it's a step forward.

NetMageSCW3• 2 months ago

After the attitude displayed by those developers towards e.g. opening jpegs and saving GIMP format files, I don’t think I’m interested in contributing and have replaced using GIMP with Paint.Net and Corel.

Matl2• 2 months ago

I feel like people working on things for free can be cut a little bit of slack and not always be policed about any random person not linking their 'attitude' for some comment on a PR they made or whatnot.

But I guess it's easier to come up with reasons for not contributing than actually contributing.

otikik• 2 months ago

Why is this not called Pimp?

F3nd09• 2 months ago

Because PNNU’s Not Not Unix.

shevy-java2• 2 months ago

Could be useful. GIMP never had a, to me, useful interface.

Back when they added "export as" in addition to "save as", I told them to please don't do this. Their response was that they want to appeal more to professional designers. I just want a simpler user interface. It is kind of strange that we, as users, depend on upstream developers dictating down UI choices onto us, even more so when things change between versions. I want to be able to choose the UI at all times on my own. Yes, I can patch the source code, but I mean something integrated into the toolkit, as-is. GTK2 had that to a limited extend, you could easily re-assign key combinations, such as in the old bluefish editor. Then GTK3 changed this. I feel that these toolkits are constantly getting worse rather than better over time. One day we need to free ourselves from upstream developers dictating whatever they like to. So, from this point of view, best of luck to the photogimp folks - not sure how well it works, but they make a point with this that I totally understand. (I also have to admit that I often just stick to the default, even though it annoys me, but keeping up with more and more microchanges on my own, also adds to my own burden and time investment. But I really wish I could stop having to accept whatever upstream dictates downstream.)

KronisLV• 2 months ago

It's cool that you can customize GIMP like that!

I never really had an issue with the program UI, though. Maybe because I also never went through the trouble of pirating/buying Photoshop to get used to it. Their new effects system (where they have to be applied and sit on top of the layer until then) was pretty bugged on release on Windows, though.

I'm sure it's a bit like for people who are used to Blender, whereas others find their interface... unique as well.

nogbit2• 2 months ago

Thank you so so much!

I cant stand Gimp UI, so not intuitive. And over 25 years of Photoshop use has me locked into a way that image editing should work. This is fantastic and timely.

F3nd09• 2 months ago

After 25 years of Photoshop, is it really intuition, or is it just habit?

nogbit2• 2 months ago

Habit, shortcut memory and more. But, it’s not 100% that, gimp over complicates itself.

jaffa22• 2 months ago

Is there any long form articles on the GIMP UI? I see it time and time again people complaining about Gimps UI. Personally I've used Gimp on and off for like 25 years but i find it hella clunky and I often need to google how to do basic stuff. Also been using photoshop since v3 and I know it well enough to get by.

I see some discussion on the copy paste. Funnily enough i was copy pasting stuff yesterday in Gimp and yeah there is something funky that I couldn't put my finger on. It makes the app feel really janky clicking here and ther doesn't work, renaming the pasted layer. do i click once ? double click? hit enter? I coudln't work it out as the behaviour seemed inconsistent. I also couldn't work out how to get a pasted layer to align to top left. I had to align it manually every time. sigh.

anyway is ther any decent articles that discuss this anywhere that someone could link me?

pbalau• 2 months ago

Gimp will never be able to pull a Blender because they are operating on hugely different conditions.

Blender never had to play catch up with a proprietary file format. In Blender's world, fbx and any of the video formats are the way to interop with other studios.

In the Photoshop/Gimp world, the interop format is psd. Under full control of Adobe.

There is also the matter of price. Maya and 3dStudioMax are eye watering expensive, while Photoshop is dirt cheap. As a professional photographer, I can get the 300 GBP it costs me to have Lightroom and Photoshop for one year, in an afternoon.

dragochat• 2 months ago

...before any of this matters though:

- is non-destructive editing implemented yet in GIMP?

- is stability finally improved, can I running without a never ending crashfest on both ubuntu and macos?

bc tbh the UI was never the issue for GIMP, it just wasn't good enough software.

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