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GIMP Vs. Photoshop

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GIMP Vs. Photoshop Asif Lodhi 30 Aug 01:46
  GIMP Vs. Photoshop Tom Williams 30 Aug 02:53
   GIMP Vs. Photoshop Asif Lodhi 30 Aug 04:48
    GIMP Vs. Photoshop Tom Williams 30 Aug 05:50
   GIMP Vs. Photoshop Alan Horkan 30 Aug 15:59
  GIMP Vs. Photoshop Alan Bailward 30 Aug 07:07
   GIMP Vs. Photoshop Milan Knizek 30 Aug 15:46
   GIMP Vs. Photoshop Alan Horkan 30 Aug 16:14
    GIMP Vs. Photoshop Alan Horkan 30 Aug 16:16
   GIMP Vs. Photoshop Sven Neumann 30 Aug 16:22
    GIMP Vs. Photoshop Alexander Rabtchevich 30 Aug 16:35
     GIMP Vs. Photoshop Sven Neumann 30 Aug 16:43
      GIMP Vs. Photoshop Alexander Rabtchevich 30 Aug 17:02
       GIMP Vs. Photoshop Sven Neumann 30 Aug 17:53
  GIMP Vs. Photoshop Alan Horkan 30 Aug 15:59
   GIMP Vs. Photoshop Sven Neumann 30 Aug 16:37
    GIMP Vs. Photoshop Alan Horkan 30 Aug 16:59
     GIMP Vs. Photoshop Sven Neumann 30 Aug 17:44
      GIMP Vs. Photoshop Alan Horkan 30 Aug 18:15
Asif Lodhi
2004-08-30 01:46:09 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

Hi All

I always read posts regarding GIMP vs. Photoshop.

As far as I have explored PS, there are lots of great quick-and-easy filters available and lots of tutorials to match on the Internet - however, many filters are missing the parameteric touch that GIMP does have - you get the same result out of a PS filter and if you want the result to be different, you start looking for another filter. In PS, it seems that for everything, there is a filter while GIMP gives you the basic building blocks that help you achieve the results through application of a combination of those building blocks.

I am reading Carey Bunks' excellent book "Grokking the Gimp" and recommend it to all new GIMP users as well as PS users because many fine aspects of computer graphics have been covered in sufficient depth here. Particularly, the section on Color Spaces (or models) such as RGB, CMYK, HSV and Blending Modes is really excellent and I haven't yet seen that kind of quality PS stuff elsewhere. Yes, lots of good tutorials illustrating lots of 3rd party & built-in filters and good techniques but no technical tutorial about blending modes, color theory and the like illustrating why a particular mode or a color model functions in a particular way, for example. In fact, this gives you great insight into the color theory and helps you a great deal in developing solid effects or filters.

Further, a couple of days ago, I happened to use PS (7) and I couldn't find a Selection/Shrink command/function in PS though a Selection/Grow was there (may be there is a key combination for shrink - I don't know!). The point is: GIMP's menu structure and placement of functions is very intuitive and easy plus, though, it doesn't offer lots of quick-and-easy filters, it does give you a feel of being in the know of what exactly you are doing (if you have gone through good references such as GIMP's online reference and Carey Bunks' book) and helps you produce the results through application of various available facilities - filters, curves, modes, etc - you can automate and create your own plugins if you can. In addition, though minor things like key assignments seem to have changed from previous versions, core functionality has been greatly improved and somehow one can make do through user lists, online references and other resources.

In my humble opinion, references to PS functionality or filters can serve as new functional specifications that voluntary developers might implement in future releases (if they do find that kind of time, of course). Further, such references can serve as marketing tools for GIMP if the same results/effects can be achieved in GIMP in a different fashion using a combination of GIMP facilities that educate the PS user a lot about computer graphics. In addition, there is enough material available on the Internet that very clearly positions the GIMP amongst other re-touching tools - GIMP has its own niche.

I hope this long post is not considered as spam.

My apologies in advance!

Best regards

Asif

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Tom Williams
2004-08-30 02:53:41 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

Asif Lodhi wrote:

Hi All

I always read posts regarding GIMP vs. Photoshop.

Wow! Interesting comments! How do you feel about comments comparing GIMP and PhotoShop like this:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/30/217225&tid=92&tid=152&tid=8

Peace...

Tom

Asif Lodhi
2004-08-30 04:48:14 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

:)

You have to weigh in a number of factors - cost/benefit ratio, availability on a number of platforms, number of free plug-ins/filters, labor of love regarding creating one's own pattern/effect vs. getting one churned out of a filter, etc :)

Though I am not fighting tool wars here ;), I would certainly like to present my humble replies to the honorary views presented by the poster on Slashdot.

First off, one has to use a tool sufficiently enough before presenting conclusions as to its standard/non-standard GUI, non-/intuitive interface, etc. I think Gimp's interface is not very much different from PS - very intuitive, on the contrary. Besides, you can't afford developing different GUIs for different platforms to cater to the needs of a few users.

According to the GIMP stuff/books I have read so far, Gimp is not very good with large files. However, if you do want to work with large files, you, probably, should go for CinePaint (filmGimp) as it does have support for higher bit-depth images and movie-grade re-touching capabilities (I am going to use it).

Gimp tools/filters are the core building blocks in the right hands - you have to play with and understand various parameters of various tools - no one-touch results here - albeit good customized effects after wielding some tool parameters. It also matters whether you drive satisfactions out of understanding and learning about those parameters. Such posters should visit GUG, GimpGuru, etc. to learn how to use various filters/tools to yield the desired effect.

I think, text quality is very much dependent on the font quality and Gimp is simply not the tool for drawing lines and shapes - though you can draw lines/shapes using Path/GFig/Selections, etc. One should use a vector tool for high-quality line art. As to the support aspect, I have continuously been witnessing (and receiving, of course) the free support on this user list - coming from so many Gimp users. May be questions related to very rare scenarios are not answered here or the persons volunteering don't find enough time for those support queries because of the magnitude of efforts involved in experimenting, testing, etc.

CinePaint is popular for its high-end features - it is just a good guess but may be it has full 16-bit (or higher) channel support - I don't know, anyway!

I think Gimp's Crop, Rotate and other transformation tools are very good and am very comfortable with all of what is available. I, frankly, haven't used any of PS.

It also matters what media you are targeting - online/web or print? Use PS if CMYK support is required! Not available in Gimp presently.

Frankly speaking, both Gimp and PS have their own niches and merits/de-merits and a good computer artist would use both of them for their particular features. I, for one, am more inclined towards using Gimp as the core tool as trying out combinations of different parameters, filters, plug-ins to create my own effects gives me work satisfaction and enhances my understanding of the color model/mode/filter usage - labor of love :).

I _think_ I have answered most, if not all, of the points mentioned in the post you referred me to - in the interest of helping people understand Gimp better.

I think new users must go through "Grokking the Gimp" - and the online manual - no matter how much they refrain from reading books cover to cover.

I close here now.

No tool wars :)

Best regards

Asif

--- Tom Williams wrote:

Asif Lodhi wrote:

Hi All

I always read posts regarding GIMP vs. Photoshop.

Wow! Interesting comments! How do you feel about comments comparing
GIMP and PhotoShop like this:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/30/217225&tid=92&tid=152&tid=8

Peace...

Tom

Tom Williams
2004-08-30 05:50:26 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

Asif Lodhi wrote:

Though I am not fighting tool wars here ;), I would certainly like to present my humble replies to the honorary views presented by the poster on Slashdot.

Thanks for the commentary! :)

Peace...

Tom

Alan Bailward
2004-08-30 07:07:30 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

On Sun, 29 Aug 2004 16:46:09 -0700 (PDT), Asif Lodhi wrote:

Hi All

I always read posts regarding GIMP vs. Photoshop.

Just a couple of comments here, from slightly on the other side. First of all, I'm a linux user and linux lover and have been a gimp user since the pre-1.0 days, heck, from back when you had to either have motif or mootif (free version) because GTK didn't exist yet.

Anyway, I used to say that the gimp was just as good as photoshop and had everything it had, and laughed at the users who didn't even have an 'undo' command (back in the ps5 or 6 days when the history dialoge was just a sparkle in some Adobe developers eyes). Well, lately I've found I'm wrong. I recently got into digital photography and because at the time I didn't know that dcraw existed to read my Pentax RAW files, started using photoshop to do importing and manipulation of the images. Later on I borrowed a color spyder to match up my monitor colors to image colors so that I knew that what I saw on my screen was as close as possible to the "right" colors. I also purchased "photoshop CS for photographers" (an excellent book btw).

Anyway, the point of this is that as I went along I started to learn more about photoshop, which I didn't really know much about before, compared to the gimp. Because I was actually *using* it, instead of jumping in and out I began learning some of the locations of tools, shortcut keys, etc, and found that they were superior to the GIMP in many ways.

Sorry, but it's true. I was disturbed by this as well actually :) It's of course MHO, but let me justify it and bring this all back around.

Like Asif and others said, the gimp provides building blocks, which is great, but what PS does, among other things, is refine the tools to make the VERY user friendly and helpful. Just a couple of examples, both pretty easy to do in the GIMP, but just haven't been done yet.

- crop tool greys out cropped areas, giving you a bit of a better idea of what the finished image would look like - a shortcut for 'fit in view', meaning I can hit ctrl-0 and have my image resized so it fits fully on the screen, instead of hitting '-' and '+' until it fit as well as it could - the zoom key has a shortcut (this is missing in the latest version of gimp 2.1.x that I have)
- LAB color, which allows some nifty stuff with luminesence layers to allow some cool black and white conversion stuff - effects and manipulation layers, which means that you can adjust colors, layers, levels, and just about everything in a layer, so that the original image is untouched.
- no auto thumbnailing of images
- the filter menu structure is better (IMHO) than the GIMPs in some ways. IE: no separate menus for script-fu, perl-fu, python-fu, and filters; unsharp mask is in filter->sharpen which makes more sense than filter->enhance

That's just a few. Of course the GIMP is a mostly volunteer effort, and a lot of the PS features have limited appeal to people outside printing press users (CMYK type stuff). However, my point is that while the gimp is awsome, it can definately learn from PS (as you noted).

Actually, I have yet to find one "perfect" image tool. Even Microsoft's "picture it" has a feature that I have yet to find as easy to use as the 'straighten picture' function. You click on one point (on the horizon say) and then draw a line that is a straight line on the image. The program then automatically rotates and crops the image to those specifications. Of course you can do this using the transform tool in corrective mode, and crop by hand, but it's making the boring jobs non-existant to the user which makes a tool powerful.

Not sure why I got off on a long rant, but I just wanted to give some perspective from the other side. BTW, this too is not a flame, honest!

alan

Milan Knizek
2004-08-30 15:46:05 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

Alan Bailward wrote:

On Sun, 29 Aug 2004 16:46:09 -0700 (PDT), Asif Lodhi wrote:

Hi All

I always read posts regarding GIMP vs. Photoshop.

Just a couple of comments here, from slightly on the other side. First of all, I'm a linux user and linux lover and have been a gimp user since the pre-1.0 days, heck, from back when you had to either have motif or mootif (free version) because GTK didn't exist yet.

To confirm your view - I went the other way - I used Photoshop 6.0 under windows and then decided to give linux a try. (My primary use of computer at home is film scanning / photo editing / printing / archiving).

After two years I can say than even that I lost some important functionality (color management) and spent a lot of time by learning, I feel happy about the decision to move to open source evironment.

Yes, Photoshop does not have a full equivalent in open source now, but unless one has professional requirements one can live without Mac/Win and its proprietary commercial software. And the times are getting better under open source (e.g. implementation of color management to Scribus - a dtp application).

Milan

Alan Horkan
2004-08-30 15:59:36 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

On Sun, 29 Aug 2004, Asif Lodhi wrote:

Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2004 16:46:09 -0700 (PDT) From: Asif Lodhi
To: gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu Subject: [Gimp-user] GIMP Vs. Photoshop

Hi All

I always read posts regarding GIMP vs. Photoshop.

As far as I have explored PS, there are lots of great quick-and-easy filters available and lots of tutorials to match on the Internet - however, many filters are missing the parameteric touch that GIMP does have - you get the same result out of a PS filter and if you want the result to be different, you start looking for another filter.

In PS, it seems that for everything, there is a filter

that is easier for beginners

while GIMP gives you the basic
building blocks that help you achieve the results

that is more flexible

for 'developer' type minds that want very precise control I understand why this is attractive, and they can take pleasure in putting the pieces together.

I've actually created one or two wrapper scripts to give me more immediate results because most of the time I dont want or need the options (but it is still nice to have them). Too many options can be very distracting.

I am reading Carey Bunks' excellent book "Grokking the

...

excellent and I haven't yet seen that kind of quality PS stuff elsewhere. Yes, lots of good tutorials

Not for free, but I'd be extremely surprised if you couldn't find a good photoshop book if you were looking for one. (recently I have seen photoshop tutorial books on the magazine racks for about a E 10).

Further, a couple of days ago, I happened to use PS (7) and I couldn't find a Selection/Shrink command/function in PS though a Selection/Grow was there (may be there is a key combination for shrink - I don't know!). The point is: GIMP's menu structure

Select: Modify: Contract

I quickly found an answer I searched google using the terms photoshop selection shrink

The feature is not exactly hidden or poorly labelled.

and placement of functions is very intuitive and easy plus, though, it doesn't offer lots of quick-and-easy

Intuitive and easy.
Maybe but they could definately be much better organised.

Xtns. was it immediately obvious the first time you saw it that Xtns was an abbreviatoin of Extensions?
'Edit, Fill with FG Colour' another abbreviation, intuative, and immediately obvious?
'Utils'?

Gfig, GIMPressionist, ... fine names but they do not immediately tell you that the tools are for Vector Drawing and Pattern Making. Sure once you look at them you will probably know what they are but that is not intuative.

Script-Fu, Python-Fu, Perl-Fu ... all describe how they are implemented not what they do for you.
they could all be categorized by what they do and be put into the Filters menu (mostly, a few might go in the other menus) and possibly a Scripts menu would be a better way to organise them.

I think Carol recently did some reorganisation of the scripts in the Xnts menu so that they are grouped by functionality.

Would anyone argue that context menus are easy for beginners? The Mac is designed in such a way that users need never realise that context menus exist.
Before the menubar there was no choice but to use the context menu in the gimp so perhaps gimp users are more accustomed to right clicking everywhere to find more functionality but how is it intuitive to have a feature like "Merge Down" hidden in the context menu of the Layers dialog? How is it intuitive that it is not beside the other Merge features?

facilities - filters, curves, modes, etc - you can automate and create your own plugins if you can. In

while i like the scripting functionality in the gimp and it is so far ahead of most most applications out there but Adobe Photoshop is so much further again. At first I thought Adobe Photoshop Actions was just a gloriefied 'undo history', a simple enough macro recorder, which of itself is very useful, much easier than writing and testing scripts but it is really very flexible.

In my humble opinion, references to PS functionality or filters can serve as new functional specifications that voluntary developers might implement in future releases (if they do find that kind of time, of course). Further, such references can serve as

The gimp is more than enough for my graphics needs and with it I could not even justify $99 for photoshop elements, but I agree there is a lot that can be learned from photoshop and used to improve the gimp.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/proj/Inkscape/
http://advogato.org/proj/OpenClipArt.org/

Alan Horkan
2004-08-30 15:59:39 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

On Sun, 29 Aug 2004, Tom Williams wrote:

Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2004 17:53:41 -0700 From: Tom Williams
Cc: gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu Subject: Re: [Gimp-user] GIMP Vs. Photoshop

Asif Lodhi wrote:

Hi All

I always read posts regarding GIMP vs. Photoshop.

Wow! Interesting comments! How do you feel about comments comparing GIMP and PhotoShop like this:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/30/217225&tid=92&tid=152&tid=8

To be fair the article in question refers to a comercially repackaged version of the gimp for Mac OS. The user paid for it and did not get a good level of service (or any service). He probably would have had less to complain about if he had asked here and been directed to a freely availabe version.

The reviewer was already familiar with Adobe Photoshop so even reasonable differences were likely to cause problems and unfair criticism. If you want to get some graphics work done the gimp is great. However if you want to try and replace Adobe Photoshop it is going to dissappoint everytime it doesn't not match feature for feature, even commercial offerings like Corel Painter deliberately find a different niche and try to avoid raising unrealistic expectations by head to head comparisons with photoshop.

He had problems with larger files which is a known issue but i believe differnt memory settings can help improve things.

Mac users are particularly critical about applications that do not fit in with the rest of the system.

The general slashdot comments are too long to go into, and a significant chunk of them are comments based on gimp 1.2 so I wont comment on them specifically.

I should have mentioned in my previous comments that antagonistic comparisons of gimp Versus photoshop are unhelpful because there is nothing stopping Photoshop users from using the gimp too.

- Alan

Alan Horkan
2004-08-30 16:14:30 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

On Sun, 29 Aug 2004, Alan Bailward wrote:

Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2004 22:07:30 -0700 From: Alan Bailward
To: Asif Lodhi
Cc: gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu Subject: Re: [Gimp-user] GIMP Vs. Photoshop

On Sun, 29 Aug 2004 16:46:09 -0700 (PDT), Asif Lodhi wrote:

Hi All

I always read posts regarding GIMP vs. Photoshop.

Just a couple of comments here, from slightly on the other side. First of all, I'm a linux user and linux lover and have been a gimp user since the pre-1.0 days, heck, from back when you had to either have motif or mootif (free version) because GTK didn't exist yet.

Anyway, I used to say that the gimp was just as good as photoshop and

The Gimp is "Good Enough" TM (C) for most things :P

was just a sparkle in some Adobe developers eyes). Well, lately I've found I'm wrong. I recently got into digital photography and because

Anyway, the point of this is that as I went along I started to learn more about photoshop, which I didn't really know much about before, compared to the gimp. Because I was actually *using* it, instead of jumping in and out I began learning some of the locations of tools, shortcut keys, etc, and found that they were superior to the GIMP in many ways.

I particularly love "New Layer from Copy" and "New Layer from Cut", it does in one step what it would take many steps to do in the gimp. (and how do you shrink a layer to the size of the opaque bits?)

Presumably the other Alan has a wishlist of his own of the features he likes best, there are many reports in bugzilla listing features people are looking for that exist in photoshop (the ability to lock layers for example, the ability to group layers, etc).

Sorry, but it's true. I was disturbed by this as well actually :) It's of course MHO, but let me justify it and bring this all back around.

Like Asif and others said, the gimp provides building blocks, which is great, but what PS does, among other things, is refine the tools to make the VERY user friendly and helpful. Just a couple of examples, both pretty easy to do in the GIMP, but just haven't been done yet.

- a shortcut for 'fit in view', meaning I can hit ctrl-0 and have my image resized so it fits fully on the screen, instead of hitting '-' and '+' until it fit as well as it could

Zoom to fit Window Ctrl+Shift+E
and
Shrink Warp Ctrl+E

not exactly the same but very close.

(i dont disagree but I'm not going to address all of your points)

- the filter menu structure is better (IMHO) than the GIMPs in some ways. IE: no separate menus for script-fu, perl-fu, python-fu, and filters; unsharp mask is in filter->sharpen which makes more sense than filter->enhance

That's just a few. Of course the GIMP is a mostly volunteer effort, and a lot of the PS features have limited appeal to people outside printing press users (CMYK type stuff). However, my point is that while the gimp is awsome, it can definately learn from PS (as you noted).

agreed.

Actually, I have yet to find one "perfect" image tool. Even Microsoft's "picture it" has a feature that I have yet to find as easy to use as the 'straighten picture' function. You click on one point (on the horizon say) and then draw a line that is a straight line on the image. The program then automatically rotates and crops the image

Jasc Paint shop pro has that too, the call it Correct Perspective I think. It is sweet.

to those specifications. Of course you can do this using the transform tool in corrective mode, and crop by hand, but it's making the boring jobs non-existant to the user which makes a tool powerful.

Not sure why I got off on a long rant, but I just wanted to give some perspective from the other side. BTW, this too is not a flame, honest!

sounds pretty fair to me, photoshop has changed a lot in the past 4-5 years so people might be basing their critism on old versions just as people still criticise the gimp 1.2

alan

(please consider also using your surname or something, people might think I'm commmenting twice as much and replying to myself:)

Sincerely

Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/proj/Inkscape/
http://advogato.org/proj/OpenClipArt.org/

Alan Horkan
2004-08-30 16:16:23 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

(i dont disagree but I'm not going to address all of your points)

- the filter menu structure is better (IMHO) than the GIMPs in some ways. IE: no separate menus for script-fu, perl-fu, python-fu, and filters; unsharp mask is in filter->sharpen which makes more sense than filter->enhance

forgot to mention this
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=116145

there are more ideas about how to improve the menu structure here too http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/GimpMenuReorganization

- Alan

Sven Neumann
2004-08-30 16:22:22 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

Hi,

Alan Bailward writes:

- a shortcut for 'fit in view', meaning I can hit ctrl-0 and have my image resized so it fits fully on the screen, instead of hitting '-' and '+' until it fit as well as it could

GIMP 2.1 has this functionality. If you want a shortcut key, you are free to assign one.

- the zoom key has a shortcut (this is missing in the latest version of gimp 2.1.x that I have)

Huh? There are default shortcuts for zooming. Anyway, if you are missing a shortcut somewhere, they are all configurable.

- no auto thumbnailing of images

Will be in 2.2 but it's already pretty easy to generate thumbnails for all files in a directory.

- the filter menu structure is better (IMHO) than the GIMPs in some ways. IE: no separate menus for script-fu, perl-fu, python-fu, and filters; unsharp mask is in filter->sharpen which makes more sense than filter->enhance

GIMP 2.1 allows you to easily redefine the menu structure to your needs. Of course a good default setup is important and that's why we keep asking for a proposal for a menu redesign. So far noone has raised his hand so 2.2 will most probably come with pretty much the same menu structure as GIMP 2.0.

Not sure why I got off on a long rant, but I just wanted to give some perspective from the other side. BTW, this too is not a flame, honest!

Well, you could have used your time and energy for some constructive criticism. Contributing to GIMP is easy, no coding skills required.

Sven

Alexander Rabtchevich
2004-08-30 16:35:44 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

It would be nice to be able to load/save menu settings. Especialy loading default settings (maybe 2 sets - the one from 2.0 for the people who have used to and the second one - new improved set) may be convenient.

Sven Neumann wrote:

GIMP 2.1 allows you to easily redefine the menu structure to your needs. Of course a good default setup is important and that's why we keep asking for a proposal for a menu redesign. So far noone has raised his hand so 2.2 will most probably come with pretty much the same menu structure as GIMP 2.0.

Sven Neumann
2004-08-30 16:37:10 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

Hi,

Alan Horkan writes:

'Edit, Fill with FG Colour' another abbreviation, intuative, and immediately obvious?

It has the foreground color next to the menu item. That's pretty intuitive if you ask me. Anyway, you are free to suggest better names and a even better menu hierarchy.

'Utils'?

Where are we using the term 'Utils' ?

I think Carol recently did some reorganisation of the scripts in the Xnts menu so that they are grouped by functionality.

You know more than I do then.

Sven

Sven Neumann
2004-08-30 16:43:45 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

Hi,

Alexander Rabtchevich writes:

It would be nice to be able to load/save menu settings. Especialy loading default settings (maybe 2 sets - the one from 2.0 for the people who have used to and the second one - new improved set) may be convenient.

Would that really be useful? I doubt it. If everyone was using a different menu setup you wouldn't be able to follow tutorials any longer and we couldn't write a useful user manual.

Sven

Alan Horkan
2004-08-30 16:59:35 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Sven Neumann wrote:

Date: 30 Aug 2004 16:37:10 +0200
From: Sven Neumann
To: Alan Horkan
Cc: gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu Subject: Re: [Gimp-user] GIMP Vs. Photoshop

Hi,

Alan Horkan writes:

'Edit, Fill with FG Colour' another abbreviation, intuative, and immediately obvious?

It has the foreground color next to the menu item. That's pretty intuitive if you ask me. Anyway, you are free to suggest better names and a even better menu hierarchy.

Try to look at it the other way around. What is wrong with the word Foreground?

'Utils'?

Where are we using the term 'Utils' ?

What is wrong with the word Utilities? (Actually it is a bit vague, Utilities could describe all sorts of tools)

People are and will be using the gimp in English who do not have English as their native language. Abbreviations are less immediately obvious, and forces a little delay to expand them and if you are really stuck you wont necessarily be able to find them in the dictionary.

Abbreviations should be avoided, there is no reason to have them. You might save space in one language but there is no point because the widgets have to be designed to work in many languages, German always seems to have longer much more descriptive words for everything.

I think Carol recently did some reorganisation of the scripts in the Xnts menu so that they are grouped by functionality.

Here is the proposal she made:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145507

The scripts were all grouped together, the menus for Script-fu, Python-Fu, Perl-Fu contain the Browser, Console and Server.

- Alan

Alexander Rabtchevich
2004-08-30 17:02:28 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

I mean if an user has the ability to change the menu he should have the ability to restore the default settings. And the default setting coincide with tutorials on each user's GIMP installation. And another one wish: is it possible to create the configurable panel (like tools panel) with some items from menu? There is a set of actions one uses most of the time, eg when editing a plenty of photos (resizing, scaling, levels, USM and so on). If I only could put them together... It's not always convenient to remember all these shortcuts ;).

Sven Neumann wrote:

It would be nice to be able to load/save menu settings. Especialy loading default settings (maybe 2 sets - the one from 2.0 for the people who have used to and the second one - new improved set) may be convenient.

Would that really be useful? I doubt it. If everyone was using a different menu setup you wouldn't be able to follow tutorials any longer and we couldn't write a useful user manual.

Sven Neumann
2004-08-30 17:44:28 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

Hi,

Alan Horkan writes:

'Edit, Fill with FG Colour' another abbreviation, intuative, and immediately obvious?

It has the foreground color next to the menu item. That's pretty intuitive if you ask me. Anyway, you are free to suggest better names and a even better menu hierarchy.

Try to look at it the other way around. What is wrong with the word Foreground?

It is very long and we feel that "Fill with Foreground Color" would make the menu too wide.

'Utils'?

Where are we using the term 'Utils' ?

What is wrong with the word Utilities?

Nothing is wrong with it which is why I am asking where we are using the term "Utils". If you could point me to it, I could easily fix it.

Here is the proposal she made:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145507

The scripts were all grouped together, the menus for Script-fu, Python-Fu, Perl-Fu contain the Browser, Console and Server.

Yes, but there are issues with this proposal which haven't been addressed yet. As soon as that has happened and a patch exists, I don't see a problem for this change to go into CVS. The point is however that this needs to happen very soon now since we need to enter string freeze for 2.2 very soon now. We are already way behind our schedule.

Sven

Sven Neumann
2004-08-30 17:53:55 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

Hi,

Alexander Rabtchevich writes:

I mean if an user has the ability to change the menu he should have the ability to restore the default settings. And the default setting coincide with tutorials on each user's GIMP installation.

The user doesn't really have the ability to change the menu. He would have to edit XML files in the system-wide GIMP directories. The idea is not to make it possible for each and every user to change the menu layout but to allow users to experiment with the menu hierarchy so that they can propose a better default setup. I think it would be a bad idea to make the menus dynamic for everyone. This is a feature for people who want to help improving GIMP but are afraid of touching the code. Of course it also allows experienced users to customize GIMP to their needs.

And another one wish: is it possible to create the configurable panel (like tools panel) with some items from menu?

No, but given the action based framework in GIMP 2.1 it would be very easy to add such a feature.

What you can do already with GIMP 2.1 is to attach a MIDI keyboard to your computer and bind whatever menu functions (and also stuff that doesn't appear in the menus by default) to the clavier.

Sven

Alan Horkan
2004-08-30 18:15:46 UTC (over 19 years ago)

GIMP Vs. Photoshop

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Sven Neumann wrote:

Alan Horkan writes:

'Edit, Fill with FG Colour' another abbreviation, intuative, and immediately obvious?

It has the foreground color next to the menu item. That's pretty intuitive if you ask me. Anyway, you are free to suggest better names and a even better menu hierarchy.

Try to look at it the other way around. What is wrong with the word Foreground?

It is very long and we feel that "Fill with Foreground Color" would make the menu too wide.

the word colour could be dropped and be taken as implicit that it is Foreground Colour. Alterntativel the lables could be changed to something else even shorter like 'Foreground Fill' and 'Background Fill'. I admit it is not a great example.

photoshop has a single item for Fill and a Fill dialog with many more options which is actually more in line with flexibility one expects from the gimp, rather than three menu items but I expect that evolved because people wanted to be able to assign keyboard shortcuts for fill.

'Utils'?

Where are we using the term 'Utils' ?

What is wrong with the word Utilities?

Nothing is wrong with it which is why I am asking where we are using the term "Utils". If you could point me to it, I could easily fix it.

sorry, I misread your comment.

It is under "Script-Fu, Utils". right above it is another abbreviation 'Stencil Ops', rather than expanding Ops to Operations it could just as easily be 'Stencil'.

I'll provide a patch if it would be any help.

Here is the proposal she made:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145507

The scripts were all grouped together, the menus for Script-fu, Python-Fu, Perl-Fu contain the Browser, Console and Server.

Yes, but there are issues with this proposal which haven't been addressed yet. As soon as that has happened and a patch exists, I don't see a problem for this change to go into CVS. The point is however that this needs to happen very soon now since we need to enter string freeze for 2.2 very soon now. We are already way behind our schedule.

Now that we are discussing it what do you think of merging

Script-Fu, Perl-Fu, Python-Fu, into a single Scripts/ ???

It is not ideal and obviously more organsiation post 2.2 would also need to happen but I think it would be a reasonable start and it is something that could be changed fairly quickly using a little scripting.

- Alan