I've been a GIMP user for several years.<p>It's not as friendly as Photoshop, but it gets the job done and it is extremely flexible. I got so used to it that I can't switch back to Photoshop, even though I tried.<p>One major pain point for me though has been the 8 bits limit, which was the reason why I wanted to switch to Photoshop. I'm glad that they've worked on solving it.<p>This is an awesome release.
I decided to give gimp a real go recently. Shifting my UI production from photoshop to GIMP, and not giving in to temptation, regardless of how quickly I knew I could do a certain task in PS.<p>There were a few headaches. For instance the half an hour spent in frustration when trying to move a layer, only to find that the tool panel had an "Affect: " followed by a small icon for the selection. I consider this expected pains, and there certainly were a few of those in photoshop as well.<p>One thing that I just consider lousy implementation was when trying to create a pattern and applying it to an image. I couldn't find a way to do this besides creating the pattern as an image, and saving it to the ~/.gimp/patterns/, refreshing the pattern dialogue, and applying the pattern.<p>Also, the destructive workflow in applying effects is archaic... even photoshop's linear (albeit dynamic) stack of adjustment layers feels old and restrictive.<p>I'll keep sticking with Gimp for a while longer... it can only get better, right? Still, at the moment I'd say it is far inferior to Photoshop regarding my productivity.
I first ran in to Gimp in what would have had to been the late 90's or early 00's, and ever since it's always befuddled me completely. I've always turned back to Photoshop, if slightly begrudgingly, because the productivity enhancements of a tool you really know far outweigh the price of it. These UI improvements seem to be a step in the right direction though.<p>I'd love to hear if anybody's done the Journey PS -> Gimp (for UI stuff, not photography), and if so how long it took and if it was worth it in the end?
They are going to have to support "Filter Layers" (Photoshop's Adjustment Layers) before they get __any__ traction in the serious photo editing community. Non-destructive editing with masked adjustment layers is a basic best practice for photographers since the early 2000s.
dream: could a UI/UX genius and open-source hacker ever make an Inkscape+GIMP hybrid that will have the straight forward, intuitive and productive UI of Adobe Fireworks? (without the weird ireproductible "bugs" and "WTF?!" moments that Fw sometimes throws in face of the user, making me dread to think of the decade old can-of-worms closed-source code of this otherwise superb application)
Single window, ok cool. But after ages, still no tool to draw some boxes and circles? This is proof that Gimp's goal is not designer's productivity. Pass.
Actual link to gimp website... <a href="http://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.8.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.8.html</a>
Today GIMP made my day because I discovered it reads xwd format so my screen capture is now as simple as I like it (xwd > ~/foo).<p>Thank you dev team, it's worth it really.<p>Cheers