I love the GIMP, use it all the time, find it super-intuitive, and last time I had to use Photoshop I felt like a fresh vim user who couldnt wait to figure out how to get the hell out of there.
I suspect if you surveyed 1000 art professionals, you'd get very few who like or use GIMP. You're going to get a very different result with something like Blender and 3D designers though, which really should make the GIMP devs pause and think what it is that Blender does well that GIMP doesn't.
But I have found Gimp to be wildly inconsistent in the UI. I never remember how to draw a circle, for example, when I just want to add something to a screenshot because you have to use the circle cut tool and then choose a different option which I never remember because it is unintuitive. Yet its easy to have a paintbrush that draws one of those texture patterns that I can't imagine anyone ever using.
As such I then don't use it.
There just isn't a task that Gimp fits.
Most people don’t even think about photoshop UI. Same with Microsoft paint: users can get in and start figuring out what they want to do just by clicking around.
There's hundreds of thousands downloads every month. I'm sure you have better facts at your disposal and will share them easily.
I'm afraid you are dismissing quite a lot of work to improve the UX/UI.
Could more be done? Absolutely! Was there zero attempt? Not really, no.
It’s like: if you’re a large manufacturer, would you prefer investing in a city where government officials pocket the cash and roads don’t exist but with handwavy excuses that something might improve with a little more cash, or invest literally anywhere else where the roads improve every year and things are getting cleaner?
Gimp seems to be spinning its tires for infinity. I’ve tried it once a year or so for 15 years. It hasn’t changed much. It’s incredible. Almost no company is going to throw them cash and it’s obvious why.
The right kind of an analogy would be an investor stumbling upon a tiny community of developers that has been serving hundreds of thousands of users for the past 25+ years without pay.
IMO, one of the core reasons why UI/UX in open source applications (that aren't backed or actively contributed by dedicated staff in big companies that keeps them on a salary for the sole purpose of contributing) is because it's more widely accepted for programmers to contribute to open source than UI/UX designers.
In this case the best one can do is design mockups, but then who implements it? Who even has to be convinced that the mockup is a step forward or backwards, the moment every design decision is treated as having the same value as the next one, on the grounds of "it's just an opinion"?
My point is, we don't lack programmers/developers we lack UI/UX people willing to contribute, and we also lack the former to actually listen to what they have these people to say instead of dismissing their suggestions as "not data driven enough", "too opinionated" etc.
It’s why as a UX designer I don’t contribute to open source projects any more as the fight just isn’t worth it.
GIMP is peak that attitude. It could be a top-quality mainstream open source image editor if they wanted it to, but they don’t.
Photopea is the work of one guy, Affinity Photo was made by a small team, so it’s clear it’s not manpower but attitude.
They’ve got things just how they like it and the last thing they want is to make things easier and have a bunch of n00bs running around and spoiling things, thank you very much.
Except the GIMP team worked with a UX architect for several years. That's how you got single-window mode, convenient rectangular/ellipse selection and cropping tool, polygonal selection tool built into lasso, the unified transform tool, and more.
And even after Peter (the UX guy) departed, the team still made a bunch of UX improvements (and continues making them, time-permitting).
> Affinity Photo was made by a small team, so it’s clear it’s not manpower but attitude.
Serif Ltd. is 200 to 500 employees. They have paid developers working full time. They had the funds to start from scratch and build on their previous experience creating similar applications.
In case of GIMP, the existing team is already stretched thin and has to deal with too many reports and requests to handle. In the past 4 years, the amount of reports in the issue tracker more than doubled, but the team hasn't grown accordingly. I don't think it's realistic to expect that the team would be able to maintain the current code base while starting anew. If the current progress is already commonly referred to as glacial, what do you think will happen if they start reimplementing GIMP from scratch?
And I get it why you are referring to Photopea here. I think Photopea is a formidable effort. But it's been under development for 10 years already. That's quite a long time. And Ivan didn't have another image editor to maintain while working on that project. AFAIK, he originally intended the write a web app to merely open and show a PSD file in the browser. That's a quite different development trajectory.
There’s perfectly good software out there. I’d rather get work done and use that, than spend forever trying to make sense of some mess of an ancient project’s code and trying to fix it. There are even free projects with usable UI that would be a better use of time if I were to want to contribute to something. Krita’s been mentioned here a few times and it seems to have a brighter future.
For what it's worth, GIMP does indeed have about a million dollars sitting in their donation account. So money isn't their issue, project management is.
Infact I find the MDI interface to be quite ergonomic.
Also i think Photoshop is intuitive mainly because everybody is so used to it. Gimp just has very bad ux because they cant colectivelly agree and unify the ux. If the ux was very different but very good it might be even advantage but now its lot worse PS.
This happened because Adobe sued Macromedia over palettes.
Annoyingly enough, the interface has not substantially changed in the intervening years despite Adobe eating MM.
I guess they are only intuitive if you use a graphics tablet?
Blender has made some big UI gains. I used it a long time ago, and the hidden menus and backwards control scheme made it unusable for anyone with basic computing knowledge (right click was select? Insanity) and doubly so for anyone with 3D knowledge. They revamped it a few years back and it’s usable now. I went from a blender hater to happily dropping paid 3D software and preaching about how good blender is.
Companies could throw money at gimp. But that doesn’t mean it’ll ever have a control scheme that’s usable to the 99.9% of people with prior digital art experience who go in expecting something similar to 99.999% of other software, only to find it’s completely backwards.
Literally just putting aside all other development plans and going all in for a year on making the UI usable would launch the project to success.
And comments like this always get a “well, it’s open source so you could fix it yourself if it’s that bad!” I could and so could others. But there’s usable software out there, and instead of dedicating loads of time to trying to fix a decades-old mess, we’d all rather just use a better product even if it costs money and get to work, or make something different from the ground up.