Ex-Gimp User here. The article does point out that most photographer workflows are in their raw editors. You get Non Destructive Editing with tools like Darktable in Linux. Non destructive editing helps to improve your productivity. It's similar to making code changes knowing you have a revision system behind and to when you don't. That being said non destructive doesn't make you a better retoucher, it's there to save your ass, which happens less often for the seasoned professional. Professionals were productive long before non destructive editing. Gimp is used professionally, even though we hear little about that. Krita and Blender have all been used on big budget movies as well. Gimps biggest problem IMHO ( and strictly from my experience) is usability. This post isn't going to turn into a typical gimp ui rant even though gimp does makes my head hurt; a lot but I don't think I'll be going back to gimp unless I really have to. I have used since it since 2001 and seeing it lag behind other open source editors makes me sometimes wonder why usability is an after thought.

Another huge problem is that if I'm working with a "real" designer its exceedingly unlikely that they are going to have GIMP or be willing to learn it, and without pixel perfect rendering of PSDs (which it doesn't have) if I need to make buttons, etc I have to use Photoshop.

"Usability" never seems to mean anything specific, but rather whatever the speaker has in mind as a personal taste. In this case, my best guess is that you mean "UI works exactly like Photoshop"

I use Gimp professionally for UI and web work, and it does have some UI difficulties. The biggest for me is the haphazard arrangement of tool icons. It sometimes takes me ages to find the right icon because they aren't categorized and don't have a coherent style.

In Windows:

  Edit -> Preferences -> Toolbox -> Tools Configuration

Order the icons as you like. Hide the ones you don't need.

And also learn key shortcuts.

It's not just the default ordering that's the issue, it's the lack of grouping. And as a Vim user, I'm no stranger to keyboard accelerators. Unfortunately I don't use GIMP frequently enough for all of the keyboard shortcuts to stick (were some of them assigned from nouns in a language other than English?).

Thanks for the reordering tip, though.

I'm not trying to deny that GIMP has technical deficits compared to current versions of Photoshop - I'm certainly not enough of a Photoshop power-user to say that. I am annoyed about the amount of time wasted in making GIMP look like Photoshop rather than attacking the feature deficits. (Of course, those developers are just scratching their own itch, and we should all be grateful to them for it, and if I care about it so much, I should be coding it.)

If I were a Photoshop user, and GIMP looked just like Photoshop but worked differently, it would leave a really sour taste in my mouth. Additionally, Photoshop can change interface elements at a whim, so it's a moving target of dubious benefit.

>GIMP is basically just an enhanced version of MS Paint

GIMP is 10000x the tools that people used to do wonderful graphic work over the history of photography. If you're willing to pay thousands in order not to devise a workflow that doesn't need "real non-destructive editing features," the GIMP is currently not for you.

> If you're willing to pay thousands

Photoshop CS6 is $700. If you are doing professional work that is a trivial amount of money.

I don't think you can just buy photoshop anymore.

You have to subscribe to it for a monthly fee

You can still get CS6, but CC, which was equivalent to CS6 when it started, is coming up on a year old, and you pay 20 dollars a month to have access to it. CC will continue to get updates. When you stop paying your 20 dollars, you stop having Photoshop at the end of the month.

There was actually a $10/month offer for Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC (expires 31st March) - I got bought it for my other half. At $120/year it's cheaper than buying Lightroom in full here in Australia.

The frustrating part is that you can't pay for the full year up-front for most Creative Cloud plans.

> Non-destructive editing is not a "nice to have" feature. It's quite literally a fundamental shift in methodology - and one that apparently the GIMP devs seem to be ignoring.

It's on the http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Roadmap , UI designer Peter Sikkings has written a lot about how one might do it http://blog.mmiworks.net/search/label/GIMP%20redux and one of the main selling points of the move to GEGL is non-destructive editing. And all the focus now is on the move to GEGL.

Perhaps off subject but I think there is a need for a non-destructive, functional script-based image editor. I find, as a programmer, I prefer using ImageMagick when I can. Wouldn't it be nice to have the intuition of a UI backed by scripting? Imagine that at each step in your function, you can tweak it using traditional ui tools and the "tweaks" are automatically reflected in the script. To get the final export, you simply use the original image as the argument of your function.

Or perhaps such a thing already exists. If so, I'd like to see it.

One can script both photoshop and gimp. I spent a year and a half writing scripts against Photoshop and gimp has a batch mode in a CLI.

One used to be able to record a macro in Photoshop and export it to a script that one could call from a visual studio project. The code it produced was barely human readable but it was helpful for discovery.

I'm totally ignorant in this field.

If you're worried about messing up a file, why not just make a copy of it before you edit it?

It's not about a fear of losing the original, but losing each step in the process (which may be thousands of steps), having flexibility, and maintaining pixel information/quality throughout multiple edits.

Another way to think about it (in terms of programming) would be editing some code in an existing project, compiling it, and then losing the source code for your edits. Sure, you could keep patching the compiled version (not very easy) or use some kind of instrumentation to wrap/modify existing behavior, but if you can't easily modify the source of your past work (or just a single revision along the way), then all you're doing is piling more patches (in compiled form) on top of old work - not very efficient, and you lose flexibility.

In a non-destructive workflow, you may (for example) adjust the color balance of a single object in the scene, keep working, and then realize that the color adjustments are out of place. Since that adjustment is preserved and editable at any time independently of all other edits, then it only requires an adjustment of the parameters - and you don't lose any information.

If you were to do that kind of edit directly to the pixels (even if they're on a separate layer for the object in question), then each time you adjust color/levels/etc, you're losing information that was originally there. Similar to resizing an image very small and then trying to enlarge it to original size, destructive color edits will start producing nasty artifacts like color banding (you'll start seeing a "combing" effect in the histogram when adjusting color even after a single previous color adjustment).

Well, you're right. That sounds awesome.

Is there a good reason gimp doesn't support that? You make it sound like common sense.

over 9000 files names like myfile.backup.old.xcf myfile.other_edit.xcf myfile.tried-some-filter-10.xcf

Never used version control on your code?

>> and one that apparently the GIMP devs seem to be ignoring

If you can code then contribute the feature, if not then hire someone to write it and contribute it and if neither then at least file a bug/feature request.

Non-destructive editing has been on the list of GIMP feature requests and roadmaps for many years. I may be wrong, but it sounds like the problem is more a misalignment of project goals with target user requirements rather than a sheer lack of development resources at this point (since so many other features have been implemented in the meantime).

I could be wrong too however we are both just stating opinions and mine is proven to work eventually so why am I being downvoted?

Because "code it if you know how or pay someone to code it" is not an answer when talking about software and lack of features, even if it's OSS.

OSS software is built by its community of developers, not by its community of users (even if those overlap a little, the second is many orders of magnitude bigger). So when someone criticizes it that it lacks feature X, telling them to "code it" themselves is not really helpful. They already know they have this option. If they had the knowledge, inclination, interest and time, they would have done it already. Not to mention that even if they tried, community politics and roadmaps might be against their wanted feature.

Can we accept that someone is free to criticize a piece of OSS software without being obliged to fix it himself?

But these kind of critics about known problems don't add any value.

Or, in the real world, where people just need to get shit done and do not know how to program, I'll just buy photoshop. Why in the world would I spend more, in time or dollars, to add a feature to Gimp which already exists in Photoshop?

Did you read my suggestion as dictation? It was just a suggestion, nothing more, if you prefer PS, go for it, no worries.

I am saying that yours is a poor and unrealistic suggestion.

Shouldn't you know what you want to to, if you're a professional?

If you don't know what you want to accomplish, you need to experiment. This is when those non-destructive features come in handy, but if you know the goal and how to achieve it, they aren't necessary.

This post is a really poignant (if unintentional) example of how a lot of programmers/non-arty types have a fundamental misunderstanding about how graphic design works.

"Just do it right the first time" is such a maligned attitude when directed towards coders ("No, boss. I need to make revisions!"). Interesting that the perspective isn't being applied equally.

Shouldn't you know what you want to do, if you're a professional? If you don't know what you want to do, then you need git or other version control. If you know what you want to do, why do you need version control or patches?

Andrew Clarke talks a bit about this: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/03/25/a-modern-designer...

Non-destructive editing isn't about knowing or not knowing what you want.

If you're a professional coder, shouldn't you know exactly what you want to accomplish without needing to experiment? Why not then write the final version of your code all at once? Why use revision control?

No, you shouldn't. That's spoken like someone who has never worked in graphic design.

For one, professional graphic design is still an art. An applied art, but an art nonetheless. And as in all art, experimentation and happy accidents are essential. (And of course Photoshop/GIMP are also used by digital artists, not just graphic designers).

Second, (and I feel like I'm stating something beyond obvious), people make mistakes and people change their minds, even if they are professionals. Here, non-desctructive saves many hours.

Third, you obviously forgot that clients also change their minds, and can demand this or that change. Again, here, non-desctructive saves many hours.

Fourth, it's not different than say, the ability to revert a repo to a known state, that a SCM system gives, something that professional programmers consider essential.

What you say basically amounts to: who needs SCM and good prototyping features like a REPL. A professional should just start coding and already know his goal and how to achieve it (rolls eyes).

"Shit's Easy Syndrome": http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...

I'm not saying this stuff is easy.

I'm saying professionals (people who are skilled in non-easy stuff) know what they want and just do it.

Probably there are just many people out there who using PS and aren't professionals, which is okay...

I note that it has taken you - so far - two attempts to make your point ;)

zing!

You should know what you want to do, of course, but you are not usually the client unless you're a hobbyist (or a fine-art type, who is essentially a hobbyist who takes money in applause). Non-destructive editing is not optional. (A photographic file might typically have several tens of layers, and that's at the low end of the scale. Hundreds is not uncommon.)