GIMP 2.8: Preview

This is <i>excellent</i>! Not only does single-window mode look much cleaner and more organized (to me), but we'll finally be getting support for high color depth images. That's one of the biggest reasons many photographers have stuck with Photoshop. These are probably two of the largest, most significant changes to Gimp to come about in a long time. I'm surprised the version number wasn't bumped to 3.0.<p><i>edit:</i> Is the GEGL backend port only partially complete? If so, how long until it's in place?<p>Other tweaks are nice and cosmetic: tooltip progress indicators for transforms, on-image text editing instead of awkwardly doing it in a separate window, etc.<p>Layer groups are another important organizational touch.<p>I'm very much looking forward to this. Great work, Gimp team!

The article is a little bit out of date. The 16bit colors will already be available in the next release (2.10). Michael Natterer and Øyvind Kolås had three-week hackathon and now 90% of the work is done.<p>source: <a href="http://gimpfoo.de/2012/04/17/goat-invasion-in-gimp/" rel="nofollow">http://gimpfoo.de/2012/04/17/goat-invasion-in-gimp/</a><p>This is also on the official GIMP, but you cannot link to individual news items there. :(

In 1997, me and my beige box PC spent about a day building the GIMP alpha, excited for a Photoshop killer. Now it's 2012, fifteen years later, and we're high-fiving GIMP for the single window interface.

Single window mode is definitely the step in the right direction towards what I think GIMP should be doing: ripping off Photoshop wholesale. Perhaps GIMP has some features that are arguably better than Photoshop, but the problem is that a huge number of people are very used to Photoshop's interface. Just about everyone has messed about with Photoshop at some point either professionally or just for fun (be it legally or illegally) and Photoshop's interface (for better or worse) has become second nature. I would actually argue that the lack of a familiar Photoshop alternative is holding back mainstream adoption of Linux. Open Office or Libre Office are good enough replacements for most people (and they have obviously gone for the wholesale rip off tactic) but GIMP just does not suffice - the main thing being the interface, not lack of features.<p>There are really simple things that could be done like making the toolbar the same as photoshop's. I mean it's great that you can resize however you like, but having it unresizable makes it easy to remember the button layout and instinctively grab for a tool. The fact that completely different symbols are used for the same actions does not help. eg: knife is crop in GIMP and slice in photoshop.<p>Once Linux/GIMP has achieved good market share over mac/photoshop then it's time to start thinking about improving the photo/vector publishing paradigm and boy is there much remove for improvement. Adobe has pretty much had the monopoly on 2D graphic design tools for the last couple of decades. With almost no competitors - what incentive is there to truly innovate? I mean compare the sophistication of something like 3D studio max or Maya compared to illustrator. (3D being an area where stiff competition still remains) Why is Photoshop and Illustrator even two completely separate pieces of software? because they can sell two things separately for a combined total price greater than one?

I'm depressed that so many of the comments here focus on the single window mode, instead of being thrilled about GEGL/Cairo. Those are the killer features that will underpin the GIMP's next few years of awesome features.<p>Also, layer groups ftw

OK I haven't read the article yet, but I was pretty disappointed the main picture was large shot of cleavage. What is this, Business Insider?

We don't really need anything new in this space, though.<p>We need a free/open Photoshop clone. We need a direct, one-to-one monkey copy of Adobe's product.<p>We don't need flights of fancy, we don't need to retrain existing users of image manipulation programs, we don't need to experiment. Adobe already has all the legwork done for us--the answer looks a hell of a lot like Photoshop and its interface.<p>There is zero--ZERO--reason to try to come up with a new interface when there is a perfectly good one in existence that just happens to be poorly distributed.<p>The place where GIMP has screwed up (and Blender and the like along with them) is in not parroting exactly the common tools in the ecosystem.<p>There are weird programs (Wings 3D, Paint.NET, etc.) that are able to significantly depart from conventions, mostly because they have very narrowly-defined functionality (something I don't believe anyone would ever accuse the GIMP of).<p>The GIMP developers should either focus on making a monkey copy (and ignoring everything else until feature/UX parity is achieved), or stop working on the project entirely so they can do something else for a while. Once the monkey copy is done, then innovate. Until then, stop wasting time with things nobody cares about.<p>I used the GIMP as my primary art asset creation tool for several years. It was miserable. The filters and procedural image generation stuff was awesome, but everything else was at best hard to use. Eventually I switched to Photoshop because it was a (comparatively) clean, tight tool with all the bullshit removed.

For those who haven't used GIMP, the big fix of single window mode is probably one of the most important steps they're taking. I have occasionally used the fact that I can stack the windows atop each other for hiding purposes, but much more often I'm saying, "dammit, where the hell is my layer bar? Where the hell is my toolbar now? augh! switching to my reference picture in the browser has upset my window order" and so on.<p>On-canvas text editing and cage transforms might be useful; we'll see.

Layer groups! This makes loading those PSDs the graphic designers send around much more bearable. At least I assume that the PSD import can map the PSD Layers to Gimp Layers.

This needs to come out soon so I can start the wait for 2.10 :)<p>Seriously though, this is a great step in the right direction, I can't wait till post 2.10 when the geglfication is complete, then some really interesting features should be possible.

I'm undecided about save/export in applications that support multiple formats. I think users should certainly be warned if they're making a lossy save, but perhaps they should all be in the same dialog.

Hopefully these new changes will make Gimp nicer to use. At the moment, the way it handles fonts (or doesn't) is probably my biggest annoyance.

GIMP is some high quality software. I love it. An amazing achievement.

One thing I don't like about GIMP is the dragging and dropping of selections. Doesn't feel intuitive compared to other packages.

Name it Gimp 3.0 please<p>Just a stupid number but with enough magnetism to attract new users (like me) curious about this 'new point oh' version.