How is GIMP these days?

dzibarik

The last time I used it (about two years ago) it felt unintuitive and obtuse as the previous time I'd tried it in 2009 or something. Has it progressed? Did they make UI better?

Muzzoid

Not as good as Krita.

BagelHero

Last time I used it it was substantially worse that when I used it frequently, back in 2009-2010. But, I did not take much time to set it up so maybe I just didn't tick the "make this program/UI good" box.

+1 to Krita for anyone looking for something good + free.

Michael Knubben

Krita is much more focused on painting than photo manipulation, but I agree it's a much better option in the free realm if you're looking to paint.

kneedeepinthedoomed

Gimp can do most of the things Photoshop can do. It's got a single-window mode by now so floating window mess is history. Vanilla Gimp isn't terribly good for painting with a tablet, but there are smaller external programs that can take that role. I personally like Mypaint. Gimp and Mypaint share the .ora (open raster) image format so you can ferry images back and forth easily, with layers intact.

Krita is also good for painting, but neither Mypaint nor Krita have the extensive image editing functionality that Gimp has.

There is a mod for Gimp called "Gimp Paint Studio." It comes with all kinds of new brushes and options. This is targeted at digital painting more than vanilla Gimp is.

What might put people off about Gimp is, just like with Blender, the user interface. It's not like Photoshop, so you have to spend some time to get comfortable with it to know where everything is.

Edit: I've been using Gimp for years so if there was a Gimp users' thread on Polycount, I could offer my limited experience where it's needed.

OBS: Gimp's overlay mode is broken; this is important to know of course. You have to use Hard Light with the layers reversed to get the proper overlay result. AFAIK this isn't fixed yet because people got used to it...

michalczyk

I've been using Gimp for about a year now, after years of using Photoshop. I had no problems getting used to Gimp's user interface, and generally was able to learn it rather quickly. I have not done any 2D painting in it, just typical image editing and adding details to my 3D renders. Overall Gimp works well. It's more stable than Photoshop, though some of its functionality is a bit lacking. I'm impressed how fast it hos gotten when working with hires images (6k pixels wide). For many common editing operations and adding details it seems just as fast as Photoshop (this was not the case when I tried Gimp around 2004). Some of its filters are much slower compared to Photoshop. Especially blur. Scaling down hires images sometimes leaves slightly visible scaling artifacts especially visible in areas with angular shapes, so I use Krita for scaling. But when the image is scaled up/down during editing (through zooming in/out), there is no problem.