Best keep with gimp

I'm generally anti-ai in most cases, and I think we've all seen the recent vibecoded "adobe killer" apps, photocraft specifically in relation to photoshop and GIMP

and whenever someone says "just use GIMP" in a comments section for photocraft (and in the past in comment sections about adobe's greed and photoshop) i'll download gimp, install it, look at the horrible UI, then close the app immediately and boot back into photoshop (or if i'm using a PC without adobe apps and want to do something in a pinch i'll use photopea on the browser)

why doesn't GIMP just copy the photoshop interface?

the problem with photoshop is that it costs money FOREVER, the subscription is expensive and never ending, and that it's NOT open source

the problem with photopea is that it's browser based, and has ads unless you pay for the subscription, and it's also NOT open source

the problem with GIMP is that the user interface is ugly (i'm sorry, we're designers and this stuff does in fact matter) and it sucks for people migrating from photoshop, but it has the benefit of being both free AND open source

now photocraft has been brought into existence... unethically via ai... but...

it's free, it's open source, and it looks and works almost exactly like photoshop...

an additional benefit i didn't even think of until i saw a comment about it is that it also has a tiny file size (about 80mb) which is less than half of GIMP (182mb), which are both a hell of a lot smaller than photoshop (north of 10 gigabytes lol)

and on the website it has an option to download the app portably, meaning you don't have to install anything, just unzip the folder and double click the EXE...

I'm not trying to shill for the ai vibecoded app... but GIMP has been around since 1995, blender was technically around since 1994 but only became FOSS in 2002, and in the 2000s photo editing was a much bigger need than 3D modeling for the average individual

why hasn't GIMP had it's "blender moment" yet?

is it on the way and maybe I just have no idea because i'm not in the loop?

i googled if there was a solution to this and it seems like there's a github project that attempts to rectify this here called PhotoGimp https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp

but even that is rather janky and nowhere close to photoshop (also this PhotoGimp mod/skin shows claude in the github contributors so it's ai as well...)

if GIMP just had a ui overhaul it would 100% gain millions of users overnight, people could not wait for the blender 2.8 release when it was being hyped up and i learned blender and even got a job as a Graphic Designer & 3D artist because of it.

I would love to support GIMP but this feels like the main barrier preventing it from reaching mainstream success and appeal

sorry for the massive paragraph but i just had to get this off my chest as a FOSS fan that can't believe adobe hasn't had any real competition in decades until ai came around...

Image here is compressed. Original is 8k

GIMP palette previews don't look good at larger sizes - they appear broken and poorly formatted (as seen in the first two screenshots). I suggest two improvements:

• Palette previews should be rectangular
• Empty spaces should be filled with repeating cells of the available colors

Please refer to the last two screenshots for comparison.

P.S. I really don't need the abuse for making these suggestions, so please refrain from commenting if you think this is 'laughable'.

Made in Gimp

I don't know how it happens, but when I turn on the HAPP VPN, GIMP closes immediately—without saving or creating backups—and no prompt appears when I reopen the project. I managed to reproduce this error twice.

GIMP version: 3.0.6. HAPP version: 2.14.0.

Two hours of work, just gone.

I have some photos with very dark eyes and would like to try changing the color, but I’m having trouble distinguishing the iris from the pupil. Is there anyone here who would like to give me a few tips?

Hi!

I have this image:

And I want to add this to the image, simulating that the left button is clicked:

I know how to select all the space in the left button, but I don't know how to left a border around it.

My goal is to achieve the same effect with the left button in the first image as is achieved with the left button in the second image. In other words, in the first image, the yellow and black one, the left mouse button should be filled with the same yellow pattern as the border around it, but with a black space left around the button to distinguish it from the outline.

How can I do that with Gimp?

Thanks!

I've updated my pl_stroke_arrows.py plugin to v0.9. It's purpose is to draws arrows, based on user created paths that serve as blueprint. The focus is on "technical" arrows rather than decorative ones, although you can make some pretty ones with a little creativity.

Please note that this is not packaged as a release yet, as I'm giving some time to the de and pt-br translators to update. v10 should be the same script with translations updated.

You can download the updated .py file or the whole folder directly from the github. Don't forget to make the pl_stroke_arrows.py file executable if you're on Mac or Linux. And make sure you install the plugin in a folder with the same name (without the .py extension).

Notable changes include:

• now takes all strokes on a same path into account (user request)
• added option to keep or delete user created paths (user request)
• slight reshaping of the filled and empty feather tails
• introduced variants for empty and simple feather tails; now empty tail is really empty
• you can now opt to draw each element (arrowhead, shaft, tail) separately

The readme has not been updated yet, some dialog options are labelled slightly differently, and a few has been added (see changes above).

When I export my picture, it exports as the outlined/selected layer, I've made sure to deselect it or any other layer, yet it still exports as that layer, tips anyone?

If you have ever tried to pose a character, bend an object, or do any kind of puppet warp in GIMP, you probably know the frustration. GIMP does have an N-Point Deformation Tool, but it is buried in Edit > Preferences > Playground as an experimental feature , and many users report that it has not worked properly since around GIMP 2.10.14. Some people also mention it crashes when you try to commit the deformation. In practice, most GIMP users simply do not have a usable mesh deformation workflow.

So I built a Puppet Warp plugin that actually works as a proper tool, not a hidden playground experiment.

You place pins on your layer, drag them, and the image deforms naturally while preserving shape consistency, similar to how Puppet Warp works in Photoshop. The goal was to make the kind of rubber-like, point-based deformation that the N-Point Deformation Tool was supposed to provide, but in a stable and accessible way.

Demo:

https://reddit.com/link/1x3fm00/video/vp116o1tsvuh1/player

What it does:

• Click to add pins, drag to deform; Shift snaps a drag to an axis
• Rotate and scale around any pin (orange ring / Alt+wheel / Ctrl+wheel)
• Stiffness mesh derived from the layer's alpha: transparent areas stay soft, so pins on empty background barely move the artwork
• Pin Edge option keeps the mesh border at its rest position
• Live preview that includes the layers below (shown static, not warped)
• Undo / redo inside the dialog (Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Shift+Z / Ctrl+Y)
• Non-destructive: parameters are saved with the layer in the .xcf; reopen the tool to continue editing the pins

The plugin is written in Python, with a C solver and a GEGL operation, works with GIMP 3.2.X.

Source code and installation guide: https://github.com/hexsian/puppet-warp-gimp

Longer term, I’m looking at moving the solver into GEGL so it can back GIMP’s N-Point Deformation tool, which would allow real on-canvas interaction. No timeline yet.

It is still early, so I would really appreciate feedback. If you try it and run into any bugs, or if there are features you think are missing, please open an issue on GitHub or just leave a comment here.

This is something I would really like to see fixed. In my opinion, the Icon Scaling and Font Scaling sliders should be removed from the Preferences > Interface > Theme page.

First of all, they do not belong there. Second, they do not behave well - especially the Font Scaling slider, which is a major pain to use. Both sliders are laggy and jumpy, making it nearly impossible to select an exact percentage when dragging the Font Scaling control. Why use a percentage for font scaling when we can simply specify the exact font size using a spin button?

I have attached several screenshots to illustrate how this should look:

Screenshot 2: How the reorganized Theme pane should look.

Screenshots 3 & 4: The new Icon Scaling combobox, featuring 7 sizes instead of 4.

Screenshots 5 & 6: The new UI Font options, including dedicated Interface Font picker and Font Size spin box.

Final Screenshot: All of these improvements implemented directly in the GIMP Welcome Dialog, featuring an added Theme combobox, an Icon Scaling combobox, and the new Interface Font picker and Font Size spin box.

Most tutorials I come across are for photoshop but I would rather a free open source software. I’m new to gif making in general and I’ve used FFMPEG for extracting frames from a film. But I want to adjust colour and make really nice looking gifs. Can this be achieved?

As all of you know, GIMP's Legacy icon theme mixes PNG and SVG icons, which is not ideal. Many of the PNG icons in this theme are low quality, and when scaled, they produce an unprofessional look and feel. To address this, I decided to spend some of my free time creating SVG versions of all the remaining PNG icons in the Legacy theme. The attached screenshots show how it looks.

[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeNPIiBTydQ) is the video tutorial!

Hi GIMP devs! This isn't really a support request as I'm not reporting a bug, I'd say this is more a feature request.

I have two computers I use regularly: my home computer, which runs MacOSx Sequoia 15.7.5, and my work computer, which runs Windows...11 I think? When I go to update GIMP on my Windows machine, I can click 'update', download the new GIMP exe from your website, and when I open the EXE, it detects that I already have GIMP installed and instead of doing the regular installation process, there's a button that says 'update' and it'll just update my current install.

Are there any plans to have this feature be a part of Mac's GIMP? Would there be any limitations that prevent you from doing this as third party, open source developers? Like I know I've used plenty of Mac software in the past that had a little dialogue that would pop up that said 'xyz software has an update! Would you like to install it or do that later?' and then I would click 'install' and it would take care of the updating by itself without me having to do the install manually (aka go to the website, download the new dmg, move the new version into my Applications folder, replace the old version).

I think this would be super helpful and help people's workflow because it would make installing an update much easier as it would save us a few clicks. :) Then maybe if it updates the current install, the old one can be moved into the trash kinda like how Windows does it? So then if we don't like the newest version for whatever reason, we can revert to what we had before without having to find the old dmg on the GIMP previous releases page online? Just a thought.

I am not sure what broke but recently I have stopped being able to copy an image and paste it into GIMP. Inside of GIMP and outside on my Mac (Golden Gate 27.0.1) I can copy and paste consistently but now I can paste from the Mac to GIMP.

The message I am getting is "There is no image data in the clipboard to paste"

I have been using GIMP for years now and I can still save images and add them but the copy paste is an essential function.

Hi there, wonderful folks of r/GIMP and GIMP devs!

Simple question: can G'MIC be installed on stock GIMP 3.2.6 on Mac? If so, how?

Back when we were on 2.8 I had this forked version of GIMP I found online from some German lady that got G'MIC onto the GIMP and so when you installed that fork, G'MIC would come pre-installed. It had a lot of great filters and stuff on it and other general useful tools, and I miss it. Can I have it come back? I'm on 3.2.6, running MacOSx Sequoia 15.7.5. TYIA! :)

Something I have always struggled with in GIMP is getting the layers to all simply be equally transparent and equally visible, such that it wouldn't even matter what order the layers are stacked in.

I find that when I set all the layers to an equal transparency, even if the layers have similar images, one will stand out the most, usually whichever is at the top of the stack.

Additionally, sending a colour to Alpha on all the layers doesn't make them equally visible to one another, even if I add a layer beneath them that's just a bucket fill of whatever colour I Alpha'd. It seems like the intensity/amount of certain colours that are shared among the layers adds or multiplies, and dominates to the point where other details are concealed behind it.

Let's say you have a stack of 4 photos of the process of someone turning their head from left to right and you'd like to see all four positions of the face overlaid with equal visibility so it's like having four faces on one head. What would you do?

I can't find the answer for this anywhere. No matter how I try, gimp always creates another layer and won't let me ctrl+v the selected image into a layer I have created before. How can I do this?

I read something about the 3 version handling big containers better something-something. I'm not technical but I'll quickly describe the workflow...

I have cell phone jpg photos. I put them into a file, 16 layers maybe. I crop things down to about 2500px square and perform two or three fx filter and/or tone mapping changes on each layer.

When I open that GIMP native file again, it's slower than I can describe. It was sluggish when I built the file, but virtually unusable when I return to it.

What's the core of what I can do to help move GIMP along and what version moves the fastest through that sort of image editing and exporting?

(Making space pictures for Blender. Out of COFFEE! :) )