Hack turns GIMP into Photoshop Look-alike

Mr_Silver writes "One of the many complaints about the GIMP is that of its user interface and how it should be more like Photoshop. If you feel that this is true then Scott Moschella has hacked together GimpShop which turns GIMP's user interface into something more akin to Photoshop for OSX. However, if you're not running that operating system, fret not, because there is a version for Linux too."

I am happy for this

[bogaboga]

I am happy for this, but for sure, his site is gonna get the [slashdot] effect. The native GIMP interface was no good in my opinion. I pay no penny for the previledge to use it so I do not complain. I hope he's got enough bandwidth and backed up by a nicely configured Linux System.

download link at MacGIMP.org

[ubiquitin]

The MacGIMP [macgimp.org] web site has the download link for the MacOSX disk image here [macgimp.org].

Gimp is no Photoshop -- a photographer

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but too bad that The Gimp does not support 16bpp (no, CinePaint does not do what I want) and it doesn't support "Crop and Rotate" the way Photoshop does (very convenient trick to implement both in a single keystroke). These two features are what keeping me back from using Gimp for my photography.

Until that day comes, Photoshop it is.

HIG conformance

[codergeek42]

If it (the PS-lookalike code) was contributed back upstream (which it doesn't have to be, but the code itself must still be available to those who download the binary in order to comply with the GPL) I do not think the GIMP developers would accept it since it then would no longer conform as it does to GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines [gnome.org].

Re:Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, GIMP is open source (GPL)

The project has to accept the changes, my guess is they didn't want to have a photoshop clone interface. But that doesn't mean you cannot release a patch yourself, which is what happened here.

Re:Does...

[jon3k]

Yes - they do share a lot of the features.

But take it from someone who's been using photoshop since around version 4.0 (which begat 5, then 5.5, then 6, then 7, and now CS, just FYI), it is still drastically different.

I personally can't use it, because I use so many keyboard shortcuts, within a matter of about 15 seconds of using the gimp, I'm so violently frustrated I want to punch a hole in my monitor.

So, with that said - I need to give this a try :)

from the urban dictionary

[Anonymous Coward]

i thought you was joking till i read it at urbandictionary [urbandictionary.com]

1. gimp
(1) a derrogatory term for someone that is disabled or has a medicial problem that results in physical impairment.

(2) An insult implying that someone is incompetent, stupid, etc. Can also be used to imply that the person is uncool or can't/won't do what everyone else is doing.

(3) A sex slave or submissive, usually male, as popularlized by the movie Pulp Fiction.
Look at that gimp in the wheelchair

Dude, quit being a gimp and take a hit!

Bring out the gimp!

-----

Product branding never was FOSS'es strong point, you would think some nerds talk to marketing people or at least ask them for advice

Re:Impressive

[Compenguin]

Hub of abiword fame is workign on an X-less Gtk+ for MacOS. [figuiere.net]

Re:Does...

[timeOday]

The most common complaint I've heard is that Gimp is limited to 24 bpp RGB colorspace.

Does that matter? Well, it does to some.

A bigger factor I think is the interface. I doubt one user in 10 could figure out how to draw a line in the Gimp without looking it up. (Anti-Hint: there's no line tool!)

However I think the single biggest boon to Gimp would be if Adobe found a way to stop PhotoShop piracy, and chose to do so.

Mirror for Screenshots

[winkydink]

Here [igtc.com]

Re:the only gimp upgrade i want

[Anonymous Coward]

Stopgap Measure. [blackfiveservices.co.uk]

Re:Prepare for a look..

[Klivian]

at today's date in three, two , one......

Mirror

[LogicX]

Feel free to snag the files from me (can handle a few hundred GBs)

GIMPshop.dmg.tbz [logicx.net]
GIMPshop-source-2.2.4.tbz [logicx.net]

Re:the only gimp upgrade i want

[snuf23]

Pantone is not a color model like CMYK. Pantone is a method of insuring consistency in color.
There is a Pantone Process series which IS CMYK based (CMYK are process color inks vs. spot color inks). There is a conversion between Pantone spot colors and Pantone process. So that if your company logo uses a particular spot (custom mixed ink) color, you can find the closest approximate to use in a process (4 color CMYK) print job (i.e. a magazine ad).

Re:Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't have to accept any changes. The only thing they have to do is allow this guy to use the source within the bounds of the liscense.

If he's willing to keep releasing patches, and keep distributing the binaries, all the more power to him.

Re:Does...

[arodland]

Depends what you're doing with it. If you're doing amateur photography and graphics work, GIMP has everything you need, and at least a few nifty things that photoshop doesn't. If you're looking into doing something a bit more professional, there are still reasons to stick with Photoshop. As any slashdotter would be glad to tell you, GIMP's colorspace support is between weak and nonexistent, and GIMP proper doesn't support 16 bits per channel.

Re:Does...

[Mr. Underbridge]

A bigger factor I think is the interface. I doubt one user in 10 could figure out how to draw a line in the Gimp without looking it up. (Anti-Hint: there's no line tool!)

What do you mean there's no line tool? You click on the little thing that looks like a "pencil." Then you "draw" with it.

If you want your line straight, hold down Shift while you do the above.

Admittedly, the gimp interface isn't simple. I'd complain more about drawing an empty rectangle: select "region" tool, select a rectangular region, then "Edit->Stroke". Not easy to figure out the first time.

Re:Does...

[TheMMaster]

you might want to check here [freeshell.org]
have fun!! :)

Dwuh? 24bpp = 8 bits per channel

[Anonymous Coward]

8 bits per channel
3 channels per pixel

= 24 bits per pixel

Re:Gimp - GTK

[gnugnugnu]

Excuse my ignorance, but was GTK developed for and consquently off of GIMP?

Wikipedia article on GTK [wikipedia.org]

"Initially created for the graphics program the GIMP, the GIMP Toolkit."

Re:the only gimp upgrade i want

[soupdevil]

No graphic designers here. Small company, and we all cover many tasks. I personally am the IT department, inhouse sales, PR hack, and general office lackey. Occasionally they even let me in the warehouse, but I'm not allowed on the forklift. So none of us are 18-hour-a-day Photoshop worshippers.

Re:GUI Design for Dummies

[Electroly]

This is generally not correct. Not only is it faster to recognize a distinctive icon, but placing the icons in the menubar also reinforces the meaning of the toolbar button that shares the same icon.

Re:Prepare for a call...

[shoolz]

While funny... it could happen. Adobe has not sat still when it comes to protecting their patents. Adobe and Macromedia were feuding in 2000 over:

Adobe sues Macromedia over customizable tabbed palettes. [adobe.com]
Macromedia retaliates, sues Adobe over changing blended elements and automatic re-blending of elements. [internetnews.com]

Search Google with Adobe Macromedia Lawsuit [google.ca] for a nice looooong list of articles about this fued.

Wish granted

[leonbrooks]

Sven Neumann AKA neo [advogato.org] is working on [gnome.org] real Colour Management as one of the many, many plates he has in the air. Expect to see it surface before GIMP 2.4.

Arbitrary colour channel depths is something of an elephant in the room at the moment. It was supposed to be inherent in a particular supporting library, but development on that library seems ot have petered out.

The people who are actually doing stuff do have this in mind, though, and regularly get asked about it, so it will happen, even if only to stop the whining.

8 bits for red, green, blue, and ALPHA

[Anonymous Coward]

makes 32 bits per pixel. If you ahve 4 channels, that's only 6 bits per pixel.

Not really.

[ta bu shi da yu]

Doesn't have proper colour management. One of the best things about Photoship is the CM, and softproofing is pretty cool really. Being able to use a proper colour management workflow with ICC profiles in Photoshop gives it a BIG advantage over the Gimp.

Re:As a photoshop user...

[barfy]

Yeah I understand hating a piece of software that makes you more money than it costs. That does things that no other piece of software does...

But anyways. Under the Edit menu you can change your keyboard shortcuts to whatever the "F" you want. And you could always change the keyboard shortcuts if you put as much research into it as you do into bitching about it.

And oh yeah, there was that whole Illustrator/Indesign rationalization for making the same type of keyboard shortcuts the same in all of the apps. So that the learning impaired would only have to learn them one last time.

So young to not be able to learn... Maybe we should start a foundation...

Re:As a photoshop user...

[cei]

Repeat after me:

1. Open Adobe Photoshop CS
2. Select "Keyboard Shortcuts" from the Edit menu
3. Shut the fuck up about not being able to change keybindings

If you're still using Photoshop 5.5 on a Mac OS X box, no wonder you're not happy.

Re:My biggest complaint

[arose]

Middle mouse button.

Re:Finally...

[nathanm]

Which exposes the elitist behavior of (some? many? nearly all?) linux programmers.

As opposed to the non-elitist behavior of commercial software developers? If someone asked Adobe to change their interface to match some other software, they'd have a similar response. At least the GIMP source code is available so this was possible.

I think it's a shame that it took a Mac user to make Gimp REALLY popular.

What? The GIMP was already popular. It might win a few converts from existing Photoshop users who don't want to pay for future upgrades (or people using pirated copies), but I doubt it will popularize the GIMP much more than it already is. GIMPshop was only released yesterday, so only time will tell what kind of an impact it'll have.

Something to ponder on: "Works for me" is NOT a good attitude. There's always room for improvement.

What's wrong with that attitude? If it works for one person and they release it, it'll probably work for other people. Software can always be improved, but at some point there must be a feature freeze and debugging or it'll never be released. One of the best aspects of free/open source software is that people can add to it or change it if they want, unlike proprietary software.

Now, I haven't RTFA (/.'ed), but I wonder if the GIMPShop can fully be turned into a cross-platform app by using WxWidgets... how much it would take to modify it?

The GIMP was already cross-platform! You can download binaries for Windows, MacOS, and several kinds of Unix and Linux; or download the source code and compile it yourself. I'm assuming GIMPshop is still just as portable. The Linux version was released by somebody else later the same day. It probably just needs to be compiled for other platforms.

Debian Packages Here

[tskisner]

I made some "drop-in replacement" gimp packages for debian sid (i386 and amd64). I just built this modified source using the package rules from the "real" debian gimp. Because I didn't change the name, if you install these and then apt-get upgrade in the future, they will be replaced by the stock debian packages. You can get them here:

http://cmb.phys.cwru.edu/kisner/gimpshop/ [cwru.edu]

Anyway, at least it is an easy way to install and check it out.

-Ted

Re:bittorrent

[night tilda]

GIMPshop torrent at:
http://pipe.cs.dartmouth.edu/torrents/ [dartmouth.edu]

Re:For better or worse

[rebelcool]

um no, gimp doesnt even have adjustment layers. Even the most basic of PS books will have the user working in those. The mantra of anyone who does photoshop is non-destructive editting because of the immense time savings and workflow ease...

The problem with gimp isnt that its controls don't match photoshop. The problem with gimp is that its functionally inferior for anything but the most basic (and I do mean basic... no adjustment layers, cmon) of editting.

Re:For better or worse

[rebelcool]

For 99% of people working with images professionally, the Gimp does everything they need.

You obviously don't work with images professionally.

Theres not even icc profiling available, which is an absolute must have. No adjustment layers makes it laughable as a professional editting tool. To say that 99% of professionals could use gimp and not lose anything compared to photoshop is just ridiculous. Why would you even suggest that.

Not being rude, true.

[ta bu shi da yu]

I was more responding to the original poster who seemed to think it was his God given right to have a port done for Windows. My response is that people who run Windows should do the port, not people who don't even run that operating system!

C'mon already. If a Linux user said that to a person who solely compiles an OSS app in Visual C++, what sort of answer do you think they would give them? Personally, I think it's pretty good that they have stuff already.

I can't understand the argument that people who write free software (free as in beer and free as in speech) should HAVE to do a port to Windows! They don't get paid for it, they don't have a responsibility to any of you! It's a priviledge, not a right to have this stuff.

Hence my sheesh.

Re:Indeed.

[BigSven]

GIMP does have SOMETHING for quite a while already. There's a display filter (available under View->Display Filter) that allows you to do soft-proofing using ICC color profiles. There's also the separate plug-in that converts to CMYK based on profiles.

This is something that will improve with GIMP 2.4. There is already some code in CVS to improve integration of color management into the workflow.

Re:a 'personalities' / themes plug-in for GIMP?

[BigSven]

No problem. Menus, keybindings, icons and the like are all themable. I actually don't understand why the author (*sigh*) of this GIMP ripoff claims that he edited hundreds of files. The menu hierarchies are defined in a handful of XML files; all strings are translatable and can be changed by adding a new language ("en_PS" ?!). Unfortunately the "author" doesn't provide a diff of the changes. I am afraid that he did actually change the strings in the code. This will make it very difficult to keep up with upstream changes and it renders all translations invalid (GIMPs UI is translated into more than 40 languages). Anyway, this guy refused to even try to work with the GIMP development team. I asked him to join the GIMP menu reorganization [gimp.org] effort but got no response whatsoever.

diff

[sbszine]

Unfortunately the "author" doesn't provide a diff of the changes.

Hey Sven, I found a diff of the changes [esa.int] -- hope it helps. I would love to see a cleaned up version of this rolled into the GIMP as an option to help Photoshop users migrate.

Keep up the good work : )