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As relevant now as it was 10 years ago
Oh so this is not a photoediting class I thought. So I launched Krita. And everyone laughed when they realized Photoshop was the wrong tool for the job.
We had icecream.
It’s among the next 3 things on the list. You can expect it in gimp 3.1.0 in 2056
400 years from now, we will have interstellar ships but we still won’t have a shape tool for GIMP :(
“Can you isolate the alien from the background?”
“No”
Non-destructive editing was way, way more important. Shapes can be done differently anyway.
Typical “we know this feature is asked many times, but it not on our priority/ it is not planned”
I’m not criticizing open source itself, but I think this highlights a common issue in open source software, one that distinguishes widely adopted projects like Blender from others. Successful open source software tends to reach users beyond just those within the open source movement.
I know some might disagree, saying that these developers work for free, but that’s not the point here. Software is created for users, and if a developer declines to implement a feature requested by the user base, many will simply return to proprietary alternatives—like Adobe Photoshop or Photo Pea, in this case. This leaves these open source projects feeling like “second-class citizens” because they lack the specific features users need.
Agree. Similar example is Matrix Element multi-account request. It’s the most requested but we still don’t know it’s roadmap.
don’t even dream about it. I remember reading on their issue tracker one if them saying that such a feature needs to be accounted for from the beginning of planning an app. if you think about it, it makes sense. but I doubt anything has been done about it
That one is infuriating. Having a good client is so key to adoption… And Element is still really, really bad. Yes, it has almost all the features, but refusing multi-account is so so so annoying, and being Electron garbage is horrible. They have so much funding it’s ridiculous.
XMPP is another case where adoption has mostly failed exactly because there are no “flagship” clients that do it all.
That’s why DeltaChat looks so good. The official clients work great everywhere, and they can do it all!
Tbf this is not exclusive to open source software. iOS famously didn’t have “copy and paste” until version 3, for instance. The zealots were the ones that insisted that it was unnecessary until Apple rolled it out.
Plex constantly has requests for obvious features that are stated to not be on their roadmap.
Yes it is frustrating, but it isn’t exclusive to open source development.
Very true. You can find many cases of that though. Just the other day I was trying to get crypto quotes and accounting inside Gnucash, which has been supported by the backend API’s since forever ago, but the interface essentially doesn’t allow for it because the developers don’t consider crypto as currency, and don’t want to support custom currencies or even just using the existing data source API for anything but stocks, derivatives and fiat currencies.
This is literally on the road map for GIMP, right up top. (Status: no just means it hasn’t been started yet and isn’t planned for 3.2, not that it isn’t planned) https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/
blender is good because they changed course and made a more industry standard ui as requested by its users.
gimp devs wanna do things their own way period. 3.0 is a step in the right direction, coming a decade too late.
The reason shape tools don’t exist yet is because they would require the implementation of non-destructive vector layers, and a fundamental overhaul of the vector back-end. More: https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#development-focus
Its on the roadmap. AFAIK it requires vector layers before it can be worked on.
Wrong tool for the job anyway.
GIMP and photoshop have always been photo editing tools first and foremost, which means they are meant for working with bitmap graphics, not vector.
Want to work with vector graphics? Use Inkscape.
Would you look at that: Inkscape already has very robust shape tools
Yeah but sometimes you want a circle in a bitmap.
Wrong.
“GIMP is a cross-platform image editor … Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done.” - gimp.org
Also, shape tools is a universal basic tool for any software that handle some sort of image creation or addition.
Photo editing, general image editing, painting software, page layout design, vector design, PDF editor, all of them have one.
Microsoft Paint, Clip Studio Paint, Krita, Photoshop, Photopea, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo, … all of them have shape tools.
Heck, even Microsoft Excel and Word even have one.
You’re not wrong. But also, people would love shape tools in GIMP. It still feels like a really weird thing to exclude.
Why does a shape tool have to mean vectors are involved?
Why can’t I just draw some bitmaps in different shapes?
Like krita does?
Maybe? The person I was responding to was making a direct comparison that GIMP is bitmap only and insinuated that shapes are only vectors.
Nonono, you got it all wrong. Photoshop is the one and only graphics tool, just as Word is the tool for anything text. Like layout - and wherever Word fails layouting you use Photoshop for the job. It has even more different fonts and u can use them all in one document!! Every single letter a different color and a different filter. Everything else is just not proffesional. Hahah. lolrotfl. Can your Gump do that? Thought so!
Except Word has a shape tool.
Murdered in just 6 words
GIMP and photoshop have always been photo editing tools first and foremost
I mean, GIMP literally means “General Image Manipulation Program”.
Excusing the lack of proper shape drawing tools as “it’s a task for vector software” while at the same time having things like the ability to define vector masks is complete nonsense.
I mean, GIMP literally means “General Image Manipulation Program”.
… It stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program and has done for 28 years now.
It means GNU Image Manipulation Program.
They could call it SIMP, for specialized image manipulation program.
Where do you get that idea from? Tht G stands for GNU
But what does the G in GNU stand for?
gTerry Pratchett, I think.
GIMP’s not Unix
This comment has such a “Wanted to do X for a laugh? We had a tool for that, it’s called Y” energy, and I think that’s hilarious.
It’s so tiring…
Use the circle selection tool, mark an area, fill it with a solid colour/gradient/texture or morph it further or stroke the path to create a hollow circle
So many options that amount to more than just a shape tool.
Unintuitive.
I heard of photoshop when I was 13 and I installed a pirated version, just started clicking around and I always found what I wanted in a minute.
10 Years later, I switch 100% to Linux, I have to do some light design work, I open gimp - I CLICK AROUND FOR HALF AN HOUR FOR SOMETHING SIMPLE - can’t find it to save my life. Give up and google it, it gives me a reply like yours “just go to a completely unrelated menu to conjure a hack out of your ass that barely resembles what you originally intended to do”.
Fuck that UX man. I am so glad pirated photoshop works well in wine nowadays and I have a VM with a legit Adobe suite if I ever need to actually whip up my license for some reason (fuck adobe as well btw.)
I pray that one day there is a real competitor that works natively on Linux. I pay, take my hard earned money every month, whatever it takes, just make it intuitive and reach near feature parity with PS.
If anybody is still reading, sorry for venting, GIMPs always trigger me, have a nice day.
Try krita it has such things :D
yeah. actualy is there anything in gimp you can’t do in krita?
Cry about a missing shape tool?
If you want something intuitive, use Paint or pen and paper.
that’s dumb. you should just draw on the wall of the cave
So many options that amount to more than just a shape tool.
If I wanted to learn some arcane bullshit to draw a circle Id just learn C++.
Sorry best I can do is a programmable turtle that moves around as a pen.
Same energy as “so tired of idiots who want right click>new file on gnome, are you too stupid to open the terminal, cd 20 times and use the shittiest text editor ever to create a new file and save it and then open nautilus and navigate to the same directory, or something?”
Comparable to driving from washington to argentina instead of taking a plane (for those who don’t know, there are no roads connecting north to south america). This is literally the attitude why there will never be year of the linux.
Spoiler: most people don’t care about “year of the linux desktop”. Linux works for me and those losers on windows be damned. Why should we cater to them? Especially since they won’t put any effort into learning linux.
I wouldn’t have switched personally if Linux ui was still shit. I put the effort into learning because the initial experience was good enough to warrent delving deeper into it.
Good UX benefits everyone.
Wouldn’t that simply create a bitmap circle, though? The advantage of shapes in Photoshop is that they are vectors.
Select circle -> save selection as path. There’s your vector. I’d, however, use some vector app for vector graphics, independent of the OS I’m using.
Well it’s still a good idea to have shapes saved as vectors in a bitmap program. So resizing doesn’t affect the shape.
Vectors in a bitmap program
I just let this stand on it’s own.
In case you don’t understand why your post needs to stand on it’s own, vectors in bitmap program are vectors until exported as bitmaps. They are very useful.
That’s several more steps than it ought to take. Including the step of having to look this up, because you’d never intuitively figure this out on your own.
Man there’s a lot of really stupid shit in here.
Yes having a simple to use shape tool is nice. And it’s on the roadmap so no, it doesn’t go against some weird vaguely defined “core value” of gimp.
i just want pressure sensitivity that actually works, GIMP used to be my go to for art stuff in the past, its a shame to see that it hasn’t really improved much over the past decade. I’ve switched completely to Krita, better overall software
I cant switch to something else because ii am so used to transparency layers
Photoshop and gimp are both bad painting software since they are not meant for that. They just do it in a pinch. Used to main ps until I bought clip studio and discovered how damn good it is. Then I went to linux and discovered how damn good krita is.
PHOTOPEAAAAAA
Admittedly, I just make the occasional meme for friends, but Photopea has been a 1:1 replacement for Photoshop for me.
I keep hearing about this thing. Does it really do all the photoshop things? adjustment layers, masks, dodge+burn, all that stuff? and I guess, does it do it well, with big files?
He does a lot of things, in particular layer positioning/whatever this is called. I can’t really compare with PS though, since I don’t have it, but to open and do basic stuff on complex psd files that other software do not handle well, it’s ok.
No idea how large you can get with it though.
I use GIMP only for the simple pixel stuff, and I hope they did not make basic operations even more complicated. I always struggle to get some basic things done just because there are myriads of for me useless and arcane settings.
lol ; silley
I think I’m just not familiar enough with image manipulation software, but GIMP feels way too complex to even get started with…
just start trying to do sonething with it and you’ll get used to it
Gimp 3.0.0 is fucking awesome, haters gonna hate.
There is already a killer plugin for Gimp 3.0.0 called “Batcher” that lets you batch edit and convert images (including pdfs) either with a GUI interface or from the command line. There are already plenty of tools that can do this from the command line, or that are commercial paid software… but this is a pretty damn powerful utility to have attached to a fully featured free and open source image editor that you could teach someone who is uncomfortable with scripting how to make a bunch of edits across a large amount of image files with.
https://github.com/kamilburda/batcher
