I really reeeally want to like GIMP, but I’ve never been able to get past the UI / learning curve. There are a number or patterns and interaction models that are significantly different than those adopted by the rest of the creative industry.

I’m surprised that, after 25 years, none of the projects to redo the UX have really stuck and gained significant momentum.

Designers are famously broke. Especially graphic designers. A raster graphics tool, with a half way decent UI, would easily gain traction.

I wonder if it’s because the project just doesn’t have UX designers contributing to design and users testing. A lot of the UX feels like a random idea that someone had. Not something that was actually tested with real humans.

[–] fartsparkles@lemmy.world 24 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (2 children)

Manually adding alpha channels to layers… I’ve seen so many people knock their heads against GIMP because, for whatever reason, they didn’t just add the channel by default. (Okay, sure it’s probably the default if you’re starting with a blank file but the background layer doesn’t have one and if you start by opening a jpg, then subsequent layers won’t have alpha because… reasons…)

I don’t think it’s because they don’t have UX designers, it’s because they only solicit feedback from existing users rather than researching new user experience and watching how a new user gets on with the program.

I also think very few Adobe or Affinity power users get stuck into GIMP etc because they bounce off it so quickly. So they never get feedback from the very users they want to convince to move over.

[–] Moss_the_TeXie@rheinneckar.social 8 points 13 hours ago

@fartsparkles
Being a very occasional Affinity (and former Adobe) user, I wholeheartedly agree with the last paragraph. GIMP’s UI is simply repulsive. Well, most surfaces of *nix GUI software are (ahem) idiosyncratic, but this is in a category of its own.

@simplejack

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Because JPEG images don't have alpha transparency

Of course, my problem is that I am familiar with too many technical details

[–] fartsparkles@lemmy.world 11 points 13 hours ago

Oh, I know (I am a greying wizard), but why should the editor care? In theory, it should assume XCF, with the opened JPEG as the first layer.

Instead, it’s gotchas and RTFM. Which is sadly a very poor approach when developing a tool used by creatives who are vastly less likely to RTFM than the engineers making the tool.

[–] Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

There is a "photoshop UI" GIMP plugin that you could use if you prefer the layout/have muscle memory, but admittedly that's not a perfect solution. It is cheaper tho.

[–] simplejack@lemmy.world 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, but that project isn’t really getting the attention it deserves. Part of me wants to contribute, but I’m totally swamped with a million side things.

[–] vogi@piefed.social 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Also, at least for something like this feels like hack more than anything. Maybe its not, i did not look inside the code. But just from outside I would assume that would break with every GIMP release and even if not it would never feel "right".

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 4 points 9 hours ago

If you mean PhotoGimp, it's just a config file thst rebinds keybinds and sets up UI layout, like location of tools and windows, to be similar to photoshop.