GIMP is not bad



  • So I was scribbling something on the whiteboard and wanted to include it with project docs. Took a cellphone pic, copied to the shared folder on Windows, then on shared folder on Linux VM and from there into the project/docs directory.

    It was then when I realized I forgot to do any kind of processing and was dealing with huge, wrongly rotated JPEGs of a poorly illuminated whiteboard. And I really didn't feel like going back to Windows, firing up stupid Photoshop and trying to find my way among its hundreds of options. I remember trying something like that a few months ago and giving up after an hour of fruitless twiddling.

    "Fuck it, who cares. I'll just rotate/resize them and call it a day, no one reads the docs anyway. Now how do I do that on Linux..."

    "'Gnu Image Manipulation Program'? What the fuck is that? Couldn't they figure out a better name for it?"
    ...
    "Oh, it's GIMP. Whatever."

    I vaguely remember seeing GIMP around, but I don't think I ever used it seriously before.

    Right away it detects photos are wrongly rotated and offers to correct them.

    "Hmm... OK, not bad. This brings me half-way to the goal"

    Once I switch to single-window mode, the interface is actually pretty intuitive. So, why not see if I can make the pics at least a little bit better. I start digging through the Colors menu. It seems to have exactly the options I would need to fix the yellowish overtone.

    Like in Photoshop, most filters are useless due to the lighting gradient. But I do appreciate that, unlike Photoshop, each one has a nice tooltip quickly explaining what it does.

    And then I stumble upon the Filter Pack utility.

    I know similar thing exists for Photoshop, but I never really found it too useful. This one, I found VERY useful in helping me remove some of the gradients from the image. A quick Brightness/Contrast later, and I have something that looks pretty good.

    I also appreciated the infinite undo/redo options (none of that history shit) and nice selection resize handlers. Overall, a surprisingly pleasant experience.

    Now I know Photoshop experts will say all this exist and is better in PS, and whatever, they are probably right. I'm just saying, for someone who doesn't need to do this all too often, I found GIMP a more pleasant experience than Photoshop.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @cartman82 said:

    Now I know Photoshop experts will say all this exist and is better in PS, and whatever, they are probably right. I'm just saying, for someone who doesn't need to do this all too often, I found GIMP a more pleasant experience than Photoshop.

    But you're supposed to put up with the pain of Photoshop! It's more professional.

    Filed under: I don't manipulate photographs more than once every few years, does it blend show?



  • Why would you be using Photoshop for something like this? WTF! Maybe Photoshop Elements. But it's no wonder you're having issues, sheesh.

    And people hate GIMP for the retarded way it manages windows, which makes no goddamned sense ever, (and, on Windows, the atrociously awful port) not because of its features.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    the retarded way it manages windows

    That's pretty much gone with the single window mode (which they added after 8 years of users complaining)



  • I have it installed on my Windows 8 desktop right now, and it still manages windows like a retard. So I'm calling bullshit on you.

    It's also still completely incapable of, for example, opening a OS standard file selector. Or rendering any native OS controls. Or working with any accessibility features, or etc etc.

    The sad thing is Photoshop's UI has been going to shit since like CS2, and yet it's still better than anything GIMP does.

    BUT PHOTOSHOP WASN'T DESIGNED TO ADJUST THE FUCKING CONTRAST ON WHITEBOARDS, YOU IDIOTS so it's not a shock that it's bad at that.


  • 🚽 Regular

    @blakeyrat said:

    And people hate GIMP for the retarded way it manages windows, which makes no goddamned sense ever, (and, on Windows, the atrociously awful port) not because of its features.

    Not since they've implemented single-window mode.

    Now I hate it because the default brushes are huge and resizing them to decent sizes sucks.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    BUT PHOTOSHOP WASN'T DESIGNED TO ADJUST THE FUCKING CONTRAST ON WHITEBOARDS, YOU IDIOTS so it's not a shock that it's bad at that.

    What exactly was it designed for, then? I've never seen Photoshop do *anything* intuitively.


  • 🚽 Regular

    @blakeyrat said:

    It's also still completely incapable of, for example, opening a OS standard file selector.

    That wouldn't be much of a problem if the file selector they have wasn't GTK's. Or if GTK's file selector was any good.

    But reality sucks.



  • The brush-resizing control is so hilariously terrible.

    It goes from 0 pixels to 1000 pixels. It shows you the size with two decimals, because I just love to draw lines 12.36 pixels wide. There are two ways to adjust it: if you click on the upper half you change it to the absolute value on that point, which is 100% useless because again the bar goes up to 1000 pixels so anything under 50 is impossible to click. If you click and drag on the lower half you get "relative adjusting" which is better but you still end up with decimal numbers.

    So if you want to set the value to some weird value like, say, "5", you usually end up having to click the text box and type it in. Or you can use the up and down arrows, they seem to work as expected now, but I remember when clicking them just changed the value by 0.01.



  • If you want to change a slider to a specific value, isn't typing the value the best way to do it anyway?



  • @Zecc said:

    That wouldn't be much of a problem if the file selector they have wasn't GTK's. Or if GTK's file selector was any good.

    No. The file selector belongs to the OS. You do not implement your own. That is ALWAYS the wrong thing to do.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Why would you be using Photoshop for something like this? WTF! Maybe Photoshop Elements. But it's no wonder you're having issues, sheesh.

    Photoshop is used for everything. And obviously, that's what I have installed on Windows. Duh.

    @blakeyrat said:

    I have it installed on my Windows 8 desktop right now, and it still manages windows like a retard. So I'm calling bullshit on you.

    Also file selector is not native, but seems functional enough on Windows. No worse than JAVA selector.



  • So what you're trying to say using your caveman-like linguistic skills is GIMP has a mode where it doesn't arrange windows like a fucking idiot, but it's turned off by default!?

    That's too stupid even for an open source developer...

    *Starts up GIMP*

    WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!!!@!#Q@&*$#2846523w85642365a8fdy

    "Hey guyz, you know that open source image editor with the really shitty GUI everybody complains about?"
    "Yeah."
    "How about we fix the GUI but not set the fix as the default? And also not provide any tooltips or anything during our roughly 46-minute-long splashscreen."
    "Well I fucking hate that we have any users at all, fucking users, so that sounds like a good idea. Is there some way we can also make our software kick the user in the groin after it's launched?"
    "Sadly that technology does not yet exist."



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I have it installed on my Windows 8 desktop right now, and it still manages windows like a retard. So I'm calling bullshit on you.

    Window -> Single-window mode

    @blakeyrat said:

    No. The file selector belongs to the OS. You do not implement your own. That is ALWAYS the wrong thing to do.
    None of the GIMP developers use Windows (and last time I checked, there was a single GTK+ developer that cared about the Windows port), so implementing OS-native file dialogs is not high on the list (it's also much harder than rolling their own - in their own toolkit when you want to make it easy for the programs to extend these dialogs).



  • @blakeyrat said:

    So what you're trying to say using your caveman-like linguistic skills is GIMP has a mode where it doesn't arrange windows like a fucking idiot, but it's turned off by default!?

    That's too stupid even for an open source developer...

    Starts up GIMP

    WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!!!@!#Q@&*$#2846523w85642365a8fdy

    It's legacy. Probably draws roots from when that kind of interface was the latest thing. So now they probably have tons of old-timers who would post H1 WTF-s if they suddenly changed it.



  • @ender said:

    (it's also much harder than rolling their own - in their own toolkit when you want to make it easy for the programs to extend these dialogs).

    It's easy to extend them in Windows, you just have to give a fucking shit and not hate your users.

    EDIT: wait a minute, if they don't have any developers who give a shit about the Windows port, why does the Windows port exist? Is the open source philosophy specifically designed to produce awful shitty software everybody is guaranteed to hate?!



  • @cartman82 said:

    It's legacy.

    Hey here's an idea: if your legacy is ASS, maybe MOVE AWAY FROM YOUR ASS LEGACY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!

    @cartman82 said:

    So now they probably have tons of old-timers who would post H1 WTF-s if they suddenly changed it.

    Those people should be lined-up against a wall and shot.

    EDIT: also at the time they were writing their shit interface, paint programs like SuperPaint 3 already had the "tool dialogs docked in main window" interface perfected. But that would have required a single GIMP developer to make get off his fat ass and do a survey of competitive products...



  • @blakeyrat said:

    It's easy to extend them in Windows, you just have to give a fucking shit and not hate your users.

    It's also impossible to extend them when you don't program on Windows (like the GIMP developers).
    @blakeyrat said:
    EDIT: wait a minute, if they don't have any developers who give a shit about the Windows port, why does the Windows port exist? Is the open source philosophy specifically designed to produce awful shitty software everybody is guaranteed to hate?!

    Because 15 years ago some guy wanted to use his scanner with GIMP, and there wasn't a Linux driver available, so he ported GTK+ and GIMP to Windows instead. He left the project years ago, but GTK+ kept Windows support, and GIMP doesn't do anything that'd prevent it from working on Windows, so here you are.



  • @ender said:

    Because 15 years ago some guy wanted to use his scanner with GIMP, and there wasn't a Windows driver available, so he ported GTK+ and GIMP to Windows instead. He left the project years ago, but GTK+ kept Windows support, and GIMP doesn't do anything that'd prevent it from working on Windows, so here you are.

    And they just don't give a shit that everybody thinks they're the worst software development team on Earth as a result? Reputation means absolutely nothing to these fucking idiots?

    This story is a great little microcosm of everything that's wrong with the open source community. What a bunch of fucking clowns. I wouldn't hire a GIMP developer to fucking hose-off my driveway, God knows how he'd find to fuck that up.

    EDIT: Goddamned I'm not asking for much, just take a TINY IOTA of pride in your fucking work. Why the fuck is that so hard?

    EDIT EDIT: And of course it's not just THEIR reputation but the reputation of software developers everywhere. Somewhere at the New York Times, some journalist is penning an article about how all software developers are shit and his number one example is going to be GIMP.

    EDIT EDIT EDIT: Now I know how fucking chiropractors who have medical degrees from fine, long-established, schools feel when someone pens an article about how all chiropractic is a scam because there's one idiot in a million who claims it can cure cancer.



  • @ender said:

    Because 15 years ago some guy wanted to use his scanner with GIMP, and there wasn't a Windows driver available, so he ported GTK+ and GIMP to Windows instead. He left the project years ago, but GTK+ kept Windows support, and GIMP doesn't do anything that'd prevent it from working on Windows, so here you are.

    Are you sure about that?

    I just downloaded gimp for Windows. I've seen neglected windows ports and this didn't seem like one.

    You instantly get a nice Windows installer download, everything quick and easy. Startup time is crap the first time around (building some caches), but afterwards it feels pretty native.



  • @cartman82 said:

    Are you sure about that?

    I'm exaggerating a bit, but I'm not kidding when I say that none of the developers use Windows. I'm the one that builds the installer, but I don't touch the core code (IIRC, there's exactly two contributions of mine outside the install scripts).



  • Oh hey, you work on the GIMP project, you're instantly on every single fucking employer's address book as "this fucking idiot has no clue what the fuck he's doing, except he endeavors to be as hostile to users as possible at every stage". Congratulations, you're fucking unemployable.

    At least you would be if there were any justice in this world.


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    [size=7]BUT PHOTOSHOP WASN'T DESIGNED TO ADJUST THE FUCKING CONTRAST ON WHITEBOARDS, YOU IDIOTS so it's not a shock that it's bad at that.[/size]

    Funny, I thought he was adjusting the fucking contrast of an image. Unless the issue is he was adjusting the fucking contrast, when he should have been adjusting the contrast that wasn't fucking.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Congratulations, you're fucking unemployable.

    I'm a sysadmin - I wouldn't take a programming job if it paid 10x what I make now. And when dealing with clients, being associated with GIMP (installer) seems to have only benefited me.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @cartman82 said:

    I've seen neglected windows ports and this didn't seem like one.



  • @ender said:

    I'm exaggerating a bit, but I'm not kidding when I say that none of the developers use Windows. I'm the one that builds the installer, but I don't touch the core code (IIRC, there's exactly two contributions of mine outside the install scripts).

    Well good work on the installer then, it was pretty nice.

    @Yamikuronue said:

    GIMP does not see Windows fonts

    It WAS building some kind of font cache the first time I ran it. I guess you need to tinker with that every time you add fonts. Messy.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Oh hey, you work on the GIMP project, you're instantly on every single fucking employer's address book as "this fucking idiot has no clue what the fuck he's doing, except he endeavors to be as hostile to users as possible at every stage". Congratulations, you're fucking unemployable.

    At least you would be if there were any justice in this world.



  • I am going to start an open source project an alternative for gimp that will only work on Linux.
    I am going to call it:

    "Linux Image manipulation program"

    Or for short: LIMP.



  • Make sure it has systemd as dependency.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    you're instantly on every single fucking employer's address book as "this fucking idiot has no clue what the fuck he's doing

    Trust blakey to insult the one person who isn't doing something idiotic.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @cartman82 said:

    And I really didn't feel like going back to Windows, firing up stupid Photoshop and trying to find my way among its hundreds of options. I remember trying something like that a few months ago and giving up after an hour of fruitless twiddling.

    Hmm.. Paint.NET?

    And about GIMP, does anyone know how to open raw RGB file in it (on Windows)?
    There was a plugin for that, but it stopped working ages ago.


  • Banned

    Okay guys, let me get this straight. Does @blakeyrat claim that GIMP is the worst of the worst piece of software ever made, because... it has fugly open dialog? And undockable toolbars (which you can disable)? That's very low even for him. When he rants about CLIs, he at least tries to be half-relevant with his critique. But this?



  • That's @blakeyrat for you.
    GUI design has to be centered around him and every Program that has the letters G, P and L anywhere near it needs to be nitpicked on as much as humanly possible.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gaska said:

    That's very low even for him.

    I was trying to come up with a graphics-related "he's just phoning it in" joke, but couldn't, but that's what's going on here.



  • @cartman82 said:

    It WAS building some kind of font cache the first time I ran it. I guess you need to tinker with that every time you add fonts. Messy.

    That shouldn't happen - fonts are scanned every time GIMP starts, and the cache should be updated then (you can notice it doing this when DST changes, because it thinks all fonts have changed, and it does the slow full cache rebuild due to a quirk in how stat works in msvcrt).

    @MrL said:

    And about GIMP, does anyone know how to open raw RGB file in it (on Windows)?
    If you mean raw as headerless stream of pixels, click the [+] at the bottom-left of the Open dialog, and choose RAW from the list before selecting a file (don't confuse it with the file-type drop-down on the right, which just filters which files are shown in the dialog).
    If you mean raw as in whatever format the cameras write when you tell them to save "raw" data, I've got a compiled version of UFRaw here, but it's a bit broken (don't try moving it's window, because it freezes for some reason).



  • @Gaska said:

    Does @blakeyrat claim that GIMP is the worst of the worst piece of software ever made, because... it has fugly open dialog?

    Obviously not. Did I type that anywhere? Jesus, people, stop receiving instructions from the planet Uranus and actually read the text on the screen for once.

    @Gaska said:

    And undockable toolbars (which you can disable)? That's very low even for him. When he rants about CLIs, he at least tries to be half-relevant with his critique. But this?

    This is relevant. GIMP is a shitty product on pretty much every level. Even its name. Nobody should be proud of attaching their name to that piece of crap. I don't care if you only make the installer. I don't care if you only made the font used in their logo once in 2001, you should be ashamed.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @ender said:

    fonts are scanned every time GIMP starts, and the cache should be updated then

    Yes. Except when it's not, which is any time I install fonts. So then you have to go delete the cache to force it to re-build. This I learned after spending an hour or more poking around menus for a "re-build font cache" option. So I go look up where the cache is. The only instructions I can find point me to a folder that Does Not Exist, and has not existed since Windows fucking XP. So I posted on SuperUser and someone managed to figure out where it lives now.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @ender said:

    If you mean raw as headerless stream of pixels, click the [+] at the bottom-left of the Open dialog, and choose RAW from the list before selecting a file (don't confuse it with the file-type drop-down on the right, which just filters which files are shown in the dialog).

    Yeah, I mean a stream of RBG byte triplets with no header and unknown dimensions of resulting image. The plugin for some old GIMP version I mentioned opened a dialog with a preview and it was possible to adjust width/height before fully opening the file. It had options for different order of RGB or greyscale, if I remember correctly.

    I'll try that [+] button, thanks.


  • Banned

    @blakeyrat said:

    Obviously not. Did I type that anywhere?

    Worst of the worst piece of software? You emphasize this in each and every post in this topic. Fugly open dialog? #5 and #11. And also that previous GIMP topic back on CS where it was main selling point of your rant. You didn't write it exactly like I did, yes, but you definitely meant the same.

    @blakeyrat said:

    GIMP is a shitty product on pretty much every level.

    And you decided to focus on its least important part to prove your point. Two least important parts, even (default interface is goddamnawful, but usable - unless you have CDO and don't ever let windows overlap). Seriously, there are so much things wrong with it (for example, I can't find anywhere the option for making 16-bit monochromatic bitmap despite knowing such option exists, or I still have trouble with remembering what you have to do to turn white background into transparent one because the procedure is much too complicated for this simple task), and you decided to nitpick on the floating windows (WHICH YOU CAN TURN OFF AS POINTED OUT BY FIVE PEOPLE HERE).


    Filed under: worst of the worst is an exaggeration, obviously, trolling blakey by using figurative speech



  • @Yamikuronue said:

    Yes. Except when it's not, which is any time I install fonts.

    Weird, I can't reproduce that (just installed a font, restarted GIMP, and it did a full rescan of the cache). Can you check the timestamp of the C:\Program Files\GIMP 2\bin\libfontconfig-1.dll library?

    @Gaska said:

    for example, I can't find anywhere the option for making 16-bit monochromatic bitmap despite knowing such option exists
    No such option in stable version. You'll need to wait for 2.10 to get it.


  • Banned

    @ender said:

    No such option in stable version. You'll need to wait for 2.10 to get it

    I must have been seeing things then.



  • @Gaska said:

    I must have been seeing things then.

    Maybe you were using a 2.9 snapshot? A few people make them available.




  • FoxDev

    Nice shop....



  • Thanks :) can you say shop if I actually gimped


  • FoxDev

    i believe the verb form is properly platform agnostic.

    i've used it for things i did in paint.net anyway. ;-)



  • on the internet you learn something new every day.


  • FoxDev

    even if what you learn is wrong. ;-)



  • even if it is wrong you can simply add an entry to wikipedia to make it a fact.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Monarch said:

    add an entry to wikipedia

    As long as you're not trying to disagree with the Received WisdomTM, of course.

    Wikipedia's full of lies-if you believe it, the Bolsheviks were the majority party of the Russian Revolution. Not so, they called themselves that in a nice bit of Orwellian theatre.


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