I’d say the winner in this category is Krita.

Again with the competitions, haha. But I mean, yeah - in a scenario where you only have one shot to recommend a piece of free software to someone, and are trying to avoid their startled retreat back into the walled garden, I'd also give 'em Krita.

Nevertheless, both are wonderful pieces of software! I'm not a graphics pro but do find myself editing images quite regularly, and I usually reach for GIMP as it's more familiar to me. Krita on the other hand has a great brush engine, so if I feel like drawing something, I go for that.

Also, of course, whichever one has GMIC on that particular day! Some of the stuff in that plugin is absolutely wild. Usually that means Krita again, though iirc at some point it was broken there for some time, but I found it for GIMP...

Btw, anyone know if there's a Rebelle Mixbox-style color mixing feature for either of the two?

Does it have the same freature set as gimp? Genuine question because I have heard people saying Krita err much more to artistic creation side than photo editing capabilities that gimp does.

No, you can't print in Krita. Also, GIMP's transform tools are more powerful.

Krita still doesn't have a usable text tool or a way to change an image's color space.

What? Krita had proper color space handling and conversions for many years, probably a decade now.

GIMP is the one that's still missing proper colorspace handling, especially regarding CMYK.

And Krita has had vector layers with text support for quite a while as well.

I thought CMYK was part of the 3.0 release?

Partial CMYK support, yes. Comparable to e.g. Inkscape. That means it's actually doing RGB under the hood and converting to/from CMYK on the fly as needed.

But not proper native support for CMYK and spot colors as you might know from Adobe or Krita, where everything internally tracks CMYK data throughout.

If you're working with text in an image, you'll have a vastly better experience using Inkscape.

Krita and GIMP are not in the same category.

One is for digital painting and the other is, as it name says, an image manipulation program.

That might be the tagline but I've always found Krita better for doing both things.

> Krita and GIMP are not in the same category.

True. Usability, accessibility, and basic UI quality are all important focuses for the Krita devs.

Krita covers all image manipulation needs I have, so I thankfully don't have to suffer through GIMP anymore.

For photo editing Gimp is way ahead. It also has a lot more plugins. Krita is superior when it comes to drawing or painting.

Genuinely curious - in which specific ways is GIMP better than Krita at photo editing?

Krita is vastly better if you come to it from photoshop.

I doubt there is anything that couldn't be done in either and it is simply a matter of time spent in the UI and personal preference.

A lot more design oriented people are familiar with Photoshop or Photoshop inspired software so not optimizing for that is ignoring the vast majority of the expected target audience. And I doubt Gimp has the usability studies to prove their workflows are superior.

I tried Krita, but as difficult to use as Gimp can be, Gimp is still easier to use for me and has all the image tools I need.

I don't know if this is an artifact of what I grew up on (paint shop pro), but personally I found Krita vastly more intuitive than GIMP, to the extent that I no longer use GIMP, and instead use Krita even for tasks that are objectively more appropriate for GIMP.

I use both and I think they both have areas where they are better than the other

For many things Inkscape is better even though it is a vector drawing program, like making photo collages, and clipping photos against frame designs, etc.

It is much easier to make a photo collage in Inkscape than Gimp.

> Say what you will about the UI/UX but it remains top tier free software.

Just don't mention the name.

Call it GNU IMP if it bothers you

Some classic FOSShead contrariness on their part. They shoulda used the major release to officially rename it to GNU IMP, if you ask me. GNU could use the publicity and an "imp" is definitely cuter than a "gimp".

Imp isn't much better, especially south of the Bible Belt.

At some point they'll just have to grow up.

As much as do the people that get offended by the word "gimp", I guess.

How do they feel about unix daemons or the FreeBSD mascot?

My parents were quite tolerant of my devil worship[1], but they did tell me to hide my BSD Unix books when religious relatives visited.

[1] I think they knew Beastie was a harmless computer thing, but they also thought the moon was the size of a basketball.

And never mention chmod 666 or fsck...

Angry/hateful often enough to cause trouble.

They use Windows Server.

When I was a teenager I wanted to try FreeBSD but got turned away by the daemon mascot.

I didn't want my christian conservative parents to keep berating at me as if I turned in to the devil for choosing a OS that has a mascot that resembles one.

Shouldn't it expand to GIMP IMP? Or GIMP IMP IMP? Or GIMP IMP IMP IMP IMP? Maybe the fixed point is G...IMP?

GNU/Linux/IMP

I was actually a regular user of GIMP for years before I learned that the word had any other definition. While working at a summer camp as a teenager, I happened to install it on an office computer. One day I'm doing some work in the office, when all of a sudden I hear one of the camp directors in the other room laugh and ask why some perverted program called "gimp" was in the list of applications.

Or maybe they could all sit down for 5 minutes and think of a better name

But of course that won't happen

How do you get it to paste without popping a new layer into existence that you have to deal with and decide to anchor or tear off into its own thing?

What would you prefer it do? That "new layer" is how it asks whether you meant to paste the contents of your clipboard into an actual new layer or merge it into an existing one (anchor).

The relevant docs for the temporary floating layer that's created on paste are here: https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-selection-float.html

I'd prefer it to paste into the current layer. If I want to paste into a new layer, I can create a layer before pasting.

C-v C-h

Kudos! Am a huge proponent of learning the most useful hotkey combinations for any software one uses even semi-frequently. Such a massive time-saver.

The removal of hotkeys and icons from menus was an act of vandalism.

You used to be able to learn a program by simply running the mouse across the menus to see the hotkeys and icons too.

PSA: It's not vandalism when it's the people in power who are destroying the nice things - that's called design.

Excellent! How did you find that key combo?

By an ancient and forbidden science: I looked.

(Not sarcastic.)

What I mean is: looked where? It's not in the popup tooltip when you give the button in the UI.

You're right. I looked again and... it wasn't there. Turned out to be a real doozy:

You know how pasting creates this special "floating" layer? While in this mode, the "Layer->Merge Down" menu command is replaced by "Layer->Anchor Layer" - which has the keybind. "New Layer" also becomes "To New Layer".

While I can see how it makes sense on some level, it's also a whole new kind of counterintuitive.

Yeah, that's mostly my issue with it. IIUC it's no longer the default behavior in version 3, so good choice on the team's part.

The problem with it is that we've had a good UX understanding of how modal behavior works for ages, and if you're going to do something modal, you need to make clear to the user that the mode has changed (especially to the naive user, who has no reason to anticipate paste enters a novel mode). The indicators that mode has shifted are too subtle: one is the buttons going green on the layer panel (which I think can be hidden at that point? I'd have to check), and the other, I have now learned, is some menu options changed. No dialog box, color switch, or text indicator to say "PASTE MODE: choose how this pasted data should be added to the image."

And when it's so high on the critical path of using the software (how long does the average user use an image editor before they try to paste something?), it's a huge hit to the overall experience and makes the user feel like this tool is too complicated.

From the release note:

> Copying and pasting now creates a new layer by default rather than a “floating selection”, which many users found confusing. Floating layers can still be created with the “Paste as Floating Data” option for those who prefer that workflow.

so it's solved now.

Been a user since 0.48 running on a SGI Indy with IRIX 7.x because I needed something with a UI for my undergrads to mark up image. Amazing how far it has come along.

What I want to say about the UX is that it is so annoying to me that I don't like dealing with the program at all. If something is so clunky that it seems to get in the way more than enabling me as a user, then I will find alternatives that let me get things done more easily and with less frustration, and all the functions and features of the GIMP do nothing for me.

But then again, it's a free program and I'm not owed anything by its authors and contributors. It's just a little... sad, maybe, to have all their work UXed into relative obscurity, at least from my point of view, and probably that of a few other people who share my frustration. And even so, if this is the way they want to make the GIMP and they're happy with it, then more power to them - and less to me.

Full agree. Tried it for a while as a general image editor replacement but there were too many annoyances. Ex, this update introducing editing text after you place it in is pretty ridiculous. That's been a thing for 15 years at least with commercial editors.

> Ex, this update introducing editing text after you place it in is pretty ridiculous.

idk what you're referring to but gimp has also supported editing text after it's been placed. what's new is non-destructive filters and non destructive outlining of text (despite what some may claim you were able to draw an outline of a text even before gimp 3, by converting it to a vector path.)

Sometimes when I have the need to do something with images, I wonder whether I could use GIMP. I go look at a Youtube tutorial showing me how I can do what I need to do, using GIMP, and that usually cures me of any desire to use it.

Here's a funny one from my history, 12 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G13TXE9agYM

I did not know any other similar software, I learned Gimp first, so I have no previous bias. I use GIMP for simple things like fixing bad lighting in a picture, cropping or removing backgrounds. I think the most complicated thing I did was using the resinthesizer plugin to remove some objects in a photo.

Unpopular opinion, but I think the UI/UX works just fine? It never got in the way of what I wanted to do, and now I am familiar with where all the options are.

I agree with yah

It's genuinely not that bad

The reward for learning free and open source software is great value long term, while people addicted to Adobe ....

I definitely agree. I think this is something that is not so obvious at first glance, specially for software that is seen as less capable.

The fact something is a well known free software program ensures a few extra features: it’s more likely to still exist in 5 years, you will still have a license to use it in 5 years, you can have it available on all of your computers and it is likely just one package manager command away from being available.

I just saw the other day a coworker fighting up with an MS Excel that refused to open a .csv file because it could not find a license.

I asked him why not use LibreOffice in the meanwhile. He looked to me like I was crazy and asked if it had better features.

Well, yes, it does have more features than Excel without a license and yes, the .csv importer has more features and will help you select the limiters with a nice preview and organize the column width automatically after importing.