Santiance

Even as a self-declared FOSS fanboy, I’m tired of seeing other designers make their little sesnational posts about embracing GIMP. It’s a lie. The vast majority of existing users won’t really be using the primitive image editor any time soon, even with their vastly redesigned user interface in 2.8. If GIMP could do the deed, I’d be on ship, but this just isn’t the case.

I won’t spend much time spelling out the user interface problems, since it’s already clear they are being addressed and they’ve stepped away from their single window interface. In a perfect world where the Window Managers did their job, this may have worked. Stepping away from this interface model will give them better platform independence and wider acceptance.

Even if the user interface was perfect, there is one fundamental short-coming of GIMP: It lacks any useful dynamic effects. The best thing about Photoshop is that they’ve put a lot of work into optimizing the workflow for the most common graphic design elements. Making elements with gradients, strokes, drop shadows, and other common elements is easy to do in Photoshop and GIMP is quite capable itself. However, when it comes to making a tweak to those elements, GIMP falls apart. If you want to change how it looks, you’re going to have to repeat the process.

GIMP doesn’t have a simple macro system like Photoshop does. Anytime I need to automate something, I can easily record a macro, fiddle with the history manager, and repeat most processes. I’ve done this to automate complex cuts, layer exports, batch cropping/resizing, and a lot of other stuff. Most of the time automating something in GIMP takes more time than doing it by hand with most workloads.

The layers in GIMP are also awkward to work in a lot of ways. Even the simple task of moving a lot of layers at the same time doesn’t work. It also has no free transform tool, so doing a scale and rotate are completely separate operations, and unless you know exactly what you want to do you’ll be repeating the steps until you get the combined transformation you want. There also isn’t a layer group functionality in GIMP, so organization is a pain.

I don’t do a lot of raster graphics, but from what I can tell it doesn’t have a simple right-click popup for modifying brush size and other simple options.

Vectors in GIMP are a bad joke. This is another area lacking the dynamic element. Photoshop makes vectors powerful by allowing constructive geometry. This is a fancy way of saying you can combine simple elements to make more complex elements. A good example is making a crescent moon by subtracting one circle from another.

What GIMP does have is an open development model, which is something Adobe will never do with Photoshop. But, unless we start using it to do something useful, what good is that?