These people who hate GIMP didn’t really practice with it all that much. I use for my day job, editing photos and making content for marketplaces. It works very well. The workflow may be different to PS, yes, but that does not make GIMP bad. Also, for those who hate the UI, two things. First, why don’t you help the dev team? And second, we’ll have GTK3 support soon (finally).
I tried. I really tried to like GIMP. The main reason I don’t like it is because it’s trying so hard to be a professional picture editor and the UI.
Why can’t I deselect things? Why does something need to be selected at all times? Let me just click a button and remove the selection outline and deselect things.
No. I won’t help the dev team because I can’t code to save my ass. I turn wrenchs and fix things for a living.
I use other, simpler pic editors. Why should I learn to fly a Boeing 747 when a Cessna 172 will get me where I need to go? I’m making a shit post once every three months, not professional art.
You can deselect all with CTRL + SHIFT + A and deselect a specific part by changing the selection mode from replace or additive to subtract.
imagine locking deselection behind a keybind nobody will know about
It’s literally at the top of the select menu
Everyone just confirming aliteral’s point.
interesting, i guess i just never checked.
i always just left clicked outside of the selection box to deselect
When I was learning about GIMP key shortcuts I was like “Ctrl+A selects everything, Ctrl+Shift+A deselects everything. Makes sense.”
And then I went to most of the other apps. “Ctrl+D? Well it’s one less keypress, but… WHY?”
To be fair, I get it now, I’ve used plenty of image editors and I remember the keybinds wherever I am. Just that I sometimes find it annoying that The Other Software hasn’t adopted logical keybindings.
(I find it particularly annoying that a lot of image editors try to be fancy and sophisticated and Photoshop-compatible and think it’s at all appropriate to use Ctrl+NumpadPlus and Ctrl+NumpadMinus for zooming. Just use what GIMP uses! NumpadPlus and NumpadMinus. It’s not hard! What are you using the plain plus and minus for, anyway? Absolutely nothing! I just checked, I need to use Ctrl in Affinity Photo. Plain plus and minus are useless. I see you. …oh I can just rebind these. Done.)
I just change certain keybinds to be GIMP-like whenever I switch drawing programs.
N is the pencil, CTRL-SHIFT-A is deselect. There’s something else, but I can’t remember right now.
Do you know of any good video tutorials? There are so many I don’t know where to start. I tried one and it seemed too fast paced and not that helpful.
GIMP is bad. If the problem was simply that it was “different to PS” then other apps like Krita and Affinity Photo would have the same reputation.
If a user goes looking for a tool or feature and it’s not in the first place they look, that’s a problem of “didn’t really practice that much”. If experienced people need to look up how to do basic operations and their reaction is “that’s fucking stupid”, then the software is bad.
To then say “well why don’t you help the Dev team then” is insane. I’m not spending hundreds of hours digging GIMP out of bad design decisions when I could just use better software and I haven’t seen any evidence that my PR would even be accepted.
Nobody needs excuses and apologism, they need Blender for image editing and GIMP just isn’t that.
I mean, I’ve been using GIMP as my primary photo editor for…over a decade. When I use other programs, nothing is where I expect it to be and I think “well, that’s fucking stupid”
Have you thought about applying for a job at Adobe and fixing it?
Getting a job at Adobe is not helping GIMP
No, but “fix it yourself” is apparently a completely acceptable response if someone criticizes GIMP.
Anyway, I don’t care how bad the tools you use are, but it’s time to stop acting shocked when industry professionals have no interest in GIMP and don’t take anyone who advocates it as a Photoshop alternative seriously.
Nobody is acting shocked. Least the people who learned to use GIMP.
The problem is people like you who are outraged, when asking for a free Photoshop alternative, that the next best thing is not to their likening.
And yes “consider fixing it yourself” is absolutely a valid response for GIMP issues because GIMP is made by volunteers For Photoshop it a bullshit response because it’s made by a billion dollar company which charges you for the development and use.
Nobody is acting shocked. Least the people who learned to use GIMP.
So the people who learn GIMP are fully aware why it gets zero industry use? Thanks, that was my point.
The problem is people like you who are outraged, when asking for a free Photoshop alternative, that the next best thing is not to their likening.
I’m not outraged in the slightest, nor am I asking for a free Photoshop alternative. But I’ve seen people claiming GIMP is a viable alternative to Photoshop for 20 years and for anything past the most basic use cases, it isn’t. You may as well be telling people to use Nano instead of Visual Studio and when they complain about the experience, tell them to code the features themselves.
GIMP has had literally decades of development and even with Photoshop in the worst state it’s ever been in, it isn’t competitive. There are clearly systemic issues with the project and I’m certain this “head in the sand” mentality is at least partly to blame.
So you open any other image editor, click the rectangle select button, draw a rectangle, then select a move button beside the rectangle select tool, then it moves the rectangle you just selected and you think “That’s fucking stupid, it should’ve moved the entire image, not the rectangle I just selected!”
Really?
Yes, really. If my move tool is set to layer move, dont change it just because I used the select tool for something completely unrelated. That is the typical dumbed down big colorful button approach that I hate in modern corporate software.
I feel like my tools should work together instead of having their parameters set individually. If I select something, it’s because I want to do stuff with it. Imagine hitting play on a video and then also having to hit play on the audio.
Look, that you’re used to the garbage UI doesn’t change that it’s garbage and in dire need of a fundamental revamp. If almost everyone here (and everywhere else) says that it sucks or is intransparent, then YOU may be the odd one out here ;)
Imagine hating usable software you don’t need a PhD for. It’s kinda pathetic to make this your point of pride.
I’ve been using GIMP since the very dawn, I use plenty of other image editors for variety of reasons (Affinity Photo, DxO PhotoLab, ArtRage, Clip Studio), and I have no problems with the UIs in any of them.
Yet every time I use Adobe software I’m like “why is it doing this? Why is it designed this way? Who thought that was a good idea? This is stupid.”
‘help the dev team’ is a lunatics response. I use Linux but fuck the users man.
It’s a bit lunatic, but it’s arguably the only way forward. GIMP doesn’t have a multi billion dollar company behind - only volunteers.
Expecting the developers to have the capacity and skill to emulate the features and looks of Photoshop (and quickly, please) - in their free time - is even more lunatic.
I’m not expecting anything. But if your response to genuine criticism is “fix it urself in the code lol” then fuck off
Ok
I think what burns people the most is that after Photoshop 5 or so, GIMP stopped keeping up with all the improvements in the later Photoshop versions. People making the jump from 2024 Photoshop to 1996 Photoshop UI/UX are gonna have a bad time.
Edit: as a software developer I can say that I’ve never seen a user more frustrated, sometimes even irrationally so, when they are forced to re-learn muscle memory to perform a familiar task. I’ve also seen people practically riot at the mere suggestion that this will happen. If you wish to curry favor with your userbase, never ever, remove keyboard accelerators, move toolbars around, break workflow, etc.
I’m just glad they added non destructive editing in the latest version. I’ve tried to rotate/resize something in gimp before and it was a chore to keep quality acceptable.
That is great indeed. And it’s nearing 3.0!
Had to learn Gimp in 4th or 6th grade, not sire which one it was, pretty comfortable with it, though I admit, it can be frustrating sometimes.
I know it’s a consequence of open source development, but I just absolutely despise the file picker. Everything else is dreamy.
Everything else is dreamy.
Gimp spolied me. Now every time I’m forced to use a GUI app with lots of dropdown menu items, I get irrationally angry that I can’t just hit
/to search through them like I can in gimp lol.Blender changed it to just start typing one or two minor versions ago. There’s certainly stuff I have no idea how to find in the menus because F3 is way more convenient than remembering things (just be aware that you still need to be in the right mode for stuff to show up).
Why? Genuinely curious about what is wrong with it.
Maybe they dislike the filepicker because it doesn’t support icon view, only list view (just like the standard gtk filepicker)? I remember a while back lots of people were getting their panties in a twist over it, it was a huge meme in the gnome hater community.
GIMP could fix that today if they just used the filepicker portal. Otherwise once they get to GTK4.
Honestly filepickers are kinda cringe, no matter what display mode it uses. I just have a shortcut that basically does
find ~ | dmenu | xargs dragon-drop(well, the script itself is a little more complicated, but that’s the gist of it) so I can just search for files and drop them into the filepicker directly. Hopefully once everything switches to xdg-portal, someone can make a “filepicker” implementation that just does something like that directly.
help the dev team
And we wonder why people don’t like using Linux or FOSS software.
That’s their prerogative. FLOSS is a communal effort of equals. Users are not customers; not entitled to anything as it’s donated freely. If you want to be bannied and not contribute, there’s proprietary software out there but they’ll exact a price (currently more than just financial).
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Please teach to how draw good circles and eclipse And how to resize sollection by corner
good circles and eclipse
I assume “eclipse” is a typo of ellipse? Anyway, just use the ellipse select tool (keybind:
e) to make a selection in the shape that you want, then fill it in with the bucket tool (b). Hold shift while using the bucket tool to fill in the entire selection, ignoring anything that’s drawn inside it. If you want to draw a ring rather than a completely filled circle, use the “border” command from the “select” dropdown menu to replace the ellipse/circle selection with its border.how to resize selection by corner
I’m curious, what is your usecase for this? I’ve never had to do it myself. But if I had to, here’s how I would do it: first, convert the seleciton to a path. Make sure the path is visible from the “Paths” dialog (you have to explicitly show the paths dialog using the “window > dockable dialogs” option. From then on, you can use any of the usual transform tools (perspective, resize, roate, etc) on the path. You just have to select the path icon under "Transform: " in the “tool properties” dialog to make sure you’re transforming the path, not a pixel layer. Once you’ve transformed the path to your liking, you can turn it back to a selection, fill it with color, or stroke it with a brush by right-clicking on it in the “layers” dialog.
Also, bonus tip: never use the dropdown menus, it’s a huge waste of time. Just press
/to pull up for the command palette and search for the tool you need.Not op, but if I’m trying to rectangle select something, I sometimes get it close on the first try but not exactly right, so instead of trying to redraw the selection or use additive/subtractive selections, it is more intuitive to me to try and resize the selection box.
I had to use PS for school recently and it’s nice that it supports this use case, although I did have to search for a guide to learn how to do it.
You learn this by messing around or did you follow some guide?
Combination of both I guess? Like for the second one I found out that you can convert between selections and paths a long time ago just by stumbling upon the menu entry for it, but I had to look up how to apply transformations to paths
Use the select tool to create an ellipse selection and go to Edit->Fill with foreground colour
Nice
I have used Gimp for years and I actually do not understand this meme. Like, do you not understand how image selection and/or layers work? What tf did you think would happen except for exactly what happens?
maybe its because of the thing where you select something and try moving it and it moves the whole layer? thats the only thing ive ever had a problem with in gimp
Ooohh, okay, I get how that could be unintuitive. Thank you.
It’s better to separate it to another layer so I do it without realizing. If you have trouble with outlines forming then use copy instead of cut.
apparently the post was actually about deselecting everything and how its not intuitive for people that come from apps that dont use ctrl+shift+A
I’ve just encountered this yesterday. Need to change the target of the moving tool in the toolbox or Toolbar or whatever it is called .
oh cool i just discovered this is possible… i dont even use gimp anymore
Well, in GIMP you need to do the “float selection” before you can manipulate what you’ve selected properly. In Clip Studio Paint, for example, you select, press ctrl, and just drag whatever you clicked on to move. Way more intuitive (until you do it expecting to interact with active layer and instead move something in the overlay or behind).
I do love how GIMP allows you to work with transparency though.
I have no idea how selection works anywhere else, since I only ever used gimp.
For me, I don’t understand this meme, selection seems to work very intuitively, it seems to do what I expect it to do.
work very intuitively
I only ever used gimp
Lol, all these GIMP haters who don’t seem to understand the goal was being on par with Photoshop when it was a desktop application. It works exactly like Photoshop always did. And I agree, selection makes sense. There were many apps that worked the same… Paint Shop Pro as well.
I guess the kids have all grown up with some other tools and would rather call things they don’t understand stupid than try to grasp where the tool came from.
I’m not sure how Krita is different but then again I haven’t used it. I installed it, saw it looked like a fork of GIMP, and stuck with what I knew. Which is probably what anyone who hates GIMP should do.
It works exactly like Photoshop always did.
Unequivocally false (source: been a PS user since version 7)
I haven’t used Photoshop since version 4 so we can’t really compare notes here. I dropped Windows during the Blaster Worm attack in the early 2000s
I was using Mac OS 9 at the time! But PS 7’s workflow was already pretty similar to what it is today, and far more intuitive than GIMP which I tried for the first time in 2006-ish.
Interesting. I remember trying a copy of newer Photoshop a few years and being genuinely confused by how layers worked as they’ve always been part of my flow.
The old versions of photoshop and paint shop pro were heavily layer based and selections were automatically a mask of the current layer as in GIMP so GIMP was easy for me to transfer too at the time.
I also find that intuitive is a relative term. Relative based on your own experience.
I also find that intuitive is a relative term. Relative based on your own experience.
That’s a very good point. As a counterpoint though, pretty much every other app (Affinity Photo, Photopea, even Krita to a certain extent) emulates the PS workflow, which makes GIMP feel even more odd. Its paradigm was probably OK in the early 00s but the world has moved on.
Relative to what? You admitted you only ever tried GIMP fucking lmao.
I’ve used other stuff almost daily and I still don’t understand this meme.
Don’t try to draw a circle either
why don’t people use krita? Gimp may be the most famous photoshop alternative, but I almost never hear anyone talk about others that may potentially be better.
Krita is better for some things but I find Gimp’s workflow easier for me in a lot of things
Krita’s Wacom tablet support, though, was way smoother and easier to get working with Krita, which is the main reason I even tried it out
Taking the time to learn gimp is worthwhile. Its really powerful once you know how to use it IMO
counterpoint, learn nondestructive editing and you can use any image tool you want that supports it. IMO this is a far nore useful skill than investing time into one app that can’t even do nondestructive🥲
Holy cow, it’s finally here. Not only that, I really like the way it looks in the layers panel. I thought they would just copy Krita filter layers, but this implementation seems smarter.
Yeah the wheels of change turn slowly for the GIMP =) I’m still a fan, thou
Yo! TIL, cool
I’m confused. Just tried the selection tool in GIMP and Krita on my PC and sketchbook on my tablet. Works the same way as far as I can tell. Just select, draw in there, copy/paste, ctrl-shift-a to unselect. Moving is more convenient in Krita and Sketchbook, true, but like that can’t be it right? I’m at a loss.
That’s because you know that “select none” is the correct tool to use in gimp most of the time. For lots of new users, “select all” seems like the more obvious option as opposed to “select none”. The reasoning is something like “I want to be able to edit the entire picture, so I should select all”. It doesn’t help that “select all” has the simpler keyboard shortcut of the two. So they press “select all”, then use a transformation tool like Scale or Rotate, and instead of simply transforming the layer like they would expect, it funnels them into the lovecraftian abomination of confusing UI design that is Floating Selection.
GIMP’s layer system is definitely unique, sadly it hasn’t much in common with the selection tool. In that sense, yes, it is unintuitive when migrating from other apps. I’d argue it’s not that complicated, as gimp even highlights the buttons you should be pressing like a mobile game, but it is a complete non sequitur so back on topic…
If you use “select all” in any program to cancel selections, I don’t know what to tell you. Like ok, GIMP is the jankiest of em all if you do that, no contest, but the rest doesn’t behave correctly either if your expectation is that it’ll work just like it did before you did any selecting. The flashing selection line around the whole page should be a pretty strong indicator of something being different.
Honestly, many GUI program, doesn’t even have to be a raster art program; vector art like illustrator, 3D modeling like maya, some music programs, our custom spreadsheet stuff at work, even many file explorers, as far as I remember they all have the ctrl-shift-a shortcut and all would behave quite differently if you used ctrl-a excepting the same result. I’m genuinely at a loss where you’d get the idea to use ctrl-a to cancel a selection. Like I understand the intuition you proposed, but at what point do you just forget everything else you ever did on your computer?
Doesn’t Ctrl + A deselect?
yeah, that’s the point of the joke. You’d think that the “default state” should be “select all” – I want to edit the entire layer, so I should select all of it. But no, “select all” has a bunch of weird obscure behaviour, “select none” is what you want most of the time, even though it gets the shortcut with more keys.
Wait… what does select all and select none do?
Selections are ways to restrict yourself from editing parts of the image. For example, if your select a rectangle, you will only be able to draw on that rectangle, nowhere else. “Select all” and “select none” both allow you to draw on the entire layer. The difference is how some tools such as as Scale, Rotate, Perspective Transform, etc. work.
So, for example, if you Select None, and then use the scale tool to make the layer twice as big, it will scale the pixels contained in the layer, and grow the layer boundaries to accommodate the new pixels. This is what you want most of the time.
If, on the other hand, you Select All, and then use the scale tool, it will cut out all of the pixels into a new Floating Selection, leaving the original layer empty and with the same size. This is a very confusing behavior. Actually, pretty much anything that involves Floating Selection is confusing.
Yes, people are handicapped and entrapped by using Adobe products.
My man GIMP is the only software I’ve ever seen that doesn’t use CTRL+D for deselect
Blender uses Alt+A.
Ctrl+D to deselect is stupid.
Lol
you guys dont just get the selection tool and click outside of the selection?
Vim?
krita?
Bash? quits
Calculator?
You don’t use much software, huh?
I dont really know photo editing, could someone explain?
It takes a while to figure out how selections in Gimp work.
It whenever you select you have created a mask and when you combine it with layers it can get very confusing.
If you accidentally select a small bit you cannot edit anything else. I think that is what OP is referring to.
There is a tool that shows you what you have selected that can help.
IMO Gimp isn’t very well documented so you can get stuck for a while before you understand what is going on.
Oooh, wait, that isn’t how it works in other programs? I really like that behaviour in GIMP to be perfectly honest, have used it in editing stuff deliberately.
It’s a common scenario in software. We think some things like ui designs and workflows are “natural”, but they’re quire arbitrary, and people just got used to them. Then people who are used to it will feel lost with any different workflow, and people who first learned the different ones may feel at home.
A nice example is the windows ui, that a lot of people who grew up to it feel like the most straightforward way to use a computer, but people who grew up with smartphones usually struggle with it ad find something like the gnome ui more straightforward.
Same… I think Photoshop would probably feel difficult to me to get my head around at this point since Gimp’s workflow is the one I’ve known and used for over a decade and a half now
It is annoying not to have a button on the UI, but once you learn the hotkey this becomes a non-issue unless I’m missing something? I suppose this is an issue, but for a piece of free software like this it sort of feels like making a mountain out of a molehill.
You are correct. My comment did not correctly convey my attitude that I appreciate Gimp even though it has taken me quite a while to figure it out.
That’s what I thought you meant, I was just trying to confirm, as I sometimes feel a step behind in tech conversions.
Thanks!
Meanwhile me using Corel draw:
I know, its so hard to press F1 and change the keys to be whatever you want; even copying adobe’s keybindings. It takes a whole 15 minutes of setup, the horror.
In an alternate timeline Fireworks MX went open source and people might use one or the other but everyone’s happy. Lol
I had to fight my old company to purchase Fireworks since it had the absolute best jpeg compression engine. I still miss the “export selection” tool…
Crtl shift a it’s so obvious right… Right?!
I never knew about it until now and I’ve used GIMP often enough, but if I was going to assign a keyboard shortcut, that makes sense. Ctrl +A select all. Ctrl + Shift + A select none.
Shift is the oppositer (reverser?). Tab goes to next field, Shift + Tab goes in reverse order. Ctrl + T open new tab in browser, Ctrl + Shift + T reopen last closed tab - OK that’s not exactly opposite but close enough.
Customizable keyboard binding is a major and widely overlooked aspect of accessibility For example checkout this thread on mozilla forums about keybinding customization in firefox
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/customizable-hotkeys/idi-p/4979
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/hotkeys-yes-please/m-p/59929/
This along with modifiable context menus and the ability to share control schemes would greatly improve most software for multiple tasks.
Key bindings and a good GUI aren’t mutually exclusive.
Key bindings are great for people that use the app a lot and want to be more efficient at the tasks they do most often in it. But most people aren’t going to be learning keyboard shortcuts the first time they use an app. And if someone uses an app a few times and find it frustrating to use, they never use it enough to want to learn keyboard shortcuts to improve their efficiency with the app.
i always just left clicked far away from the selection
No
try photogimp
