Why GIMP Is NOT Inadequate

Troy Sobotka, who appears to be a very accomplished commercial artist working in video, illustration and photography, made a relatively brief list of problem areas for Gimp on his blog: http://troy-sobotka.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-gimp-is-inadequate.html

He makes some good points, but the last half of his post is a lot of alarmist speculation. The obvious answer to improving Gimp is to contribute to its development. Complaints about difficult developers sounds like a bunch of complaining. With any open source project you have to earn the respect of the senior developers through consistent work, usually the not-so-exciting kind. With any open source project there are more users than developers and certainly more users suggesting ideas than making any attempt to squash bugs, write documentation or provide objective and helpful feedback. Opinions and assholes.

Anyway, I left a LONG comment today and wanted to duplicate that comment here. The only thing I should have added is a need for Gimp to continue improving color management and that’s why I just said it. Anyway, here’s my comment:

I’m a professional graphic designer. I use Photoshop and Gimp at a very high level of proficiency. Just to point out where I’m coming from. I like Pshop and Gimp for their different strengths, but some of the above arguments are wrong. Gimp certainly has room for improvement, but anyone that actually used Photoshop in 1996 knows that Pshop itself has come a LONG way in 15 years.

I would like to point out something that needs to be understood about the importance of bit-depth. I am constantly working with hi-res jpegs from a wide variety of professional photographers every day. You know how many of those files use 32 bits/channel? None. You know how many of those files use 16 bits/channel? None. They are ALL in 8 bits/channel. It’s certainly great to have the higher bit-depth options, but the importance of that capability in terms of graphic design/manipulating images for press is greatly exaggerated.

Also, CMYK color space in Photoshop is misused by graphic designers because most of them know very little about color space and/or color management. Some of us know (I don’t mean to offend anyone) but the majority of designers I have worked with are completely oblivious. I’ve even seen creative directors explicitly instruct their designers to select “discard color profile” when confronted with the “What should I do?” dialog in Photoshop. The need for CMYK color space, though useful and great, is also greatly exaggerated.

I also think the complaints about the UX are very subjective and usually only illustrate how little effort the commenter put into learning about and using the Gimp.

Two things that would greatly improve Gimp and many people’s impressions of Gimp are:

  • better image scaling/anti-aliasing algorithms
  • layer groups and layer styles

Those two things are certainly complex, but if they were implemented, and it sounds like they will be soon, I would be extremely satisfied with Gimp’s capabilities.

I think it’s healthy to critique software, but the Gimp rarely receives praise for its remarkable capabilities.

4 thoughts on “Why GIMP Is NOT Inadequate”

  2. @prokoudine: Thanks for the links! I recognize your name from the Gimp mailing list, so I appreciate you taking the time to point me in the right direction.

  3. Thanks for dropping by the site and the kind words. It was absolutely shocking the amount of discussion that evolved as a result of the posting.

    I thought I would leave a direct comment here as it is infinitely more effective than trying to wade into a deluge of commentary that often misses the point.

    Two things I’d like to point out in the peaceful commentary here:
    “but the importance of that capability in terms of graphic design/manipulating images for press is greatly exaggerated”

    Exaggeration is difficult to measure in a quantifiable manner. It is a fact however, that limited bit depth processing yields graphical irregularities and degradation. Even though your source is 8bpc and your destination is 8bpc, the resulting rounding errors of limited bit depth will degrade the image in a visible manner, compounding over operations and time.

    Whether or not that is acceptable to someone performing the work is entirely subjective of course.

    I tried to tackle that confusion with a follow up post. It combines some of the amazing insight of a few developers into tackling that very issue.

    “I also think the complaints about the UX are very subjective and usually only illustrate how little effort the commenter put into learning about and using the Gimp”

    I feel a good deal of regret that I have written so absolutely poorly that you somehow read that in the piece. Unless of course “commenter” was intended as plural and referring to the comments section, of which there were countless references to the UI.

    Nowhere in the article did I deride GIMP’s user interface. In fact I _purposefully_ avoided the common complaint of user interface issues. I believe that is entirely tangential to the discussion, so much so that I highlighted the issue in a footnote.

    So, again, thank you for dropping by and taking the time to comment and engage the issue. We need more people discussing art and design within Libre software.

    Thank you again…

  4. @Troy Sobotka: Thanks for the direct response on my site.

    “It is a fact however, that limited bit depth processing yields graphical irregularities and degradation.”
    I understand that and it’s a valid point. I guess it would be interesting to know if Photoshop, regardless of the bit-depth setting on a given file, handles certain transformations/filters at an increased bit-depth for improved quality. It’s certainly a feature worth developing (see Prokoudine’s comments above), but the fact that 8 bit is all that I encounter in a professional working environment makes me wonder what work all of these people are doing that Gimp’s current 8 bit limitation makes it completely inadequate.

    “Nowhere in the article did I deride GIMP’s user interface.” Yeah, you’re right. I was definitely responding to some of the multitude of negative comments about Gimp’s user interface. Your points of concern in your article were technical and also psychological regarding the Gimp developers.

    Thanks for starting the “discussion” over on your site. It’s good to stir the pot! It certainly has got me thinking about finishing up some of my freelance projects and committing some consistent time to the Gimp project.

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