GIMP and I have never gotten on well. I’d tried it many times over the years, but it always felt sort’ve off. Unpleasant, even. Things got better when the Single Window Mode came out years ago, but still, I would choose something else to edit images if I could, which usually ended up being Krita, even if it was forcing it into a role it wasn’t originally intended for.
With the release of GIMP 3, I was hopeful things would be better and maybe even have its Blender 2.8 glow-up moment.
3.0 on its own, while nice (and setting the stage for more rapid improvement), didn’t turn out to be the revolution I was mildly hoping it would be.
But I’d heard of an outside attempt to improve the UI called PhotoGIMP, and was pleased to find that it’d already been updated for GIMP 3.0. Installation was as simple as could be. And by Jove, it really does what it says on the tin.
For the first time, using GIMP felt good. When you get right down to it it’s not a monumental change, just a reorganization of windows and some better shortcuts, but damn if it isn’t just what the doctor ordered.
This positive experience warranted further investigation of the merits of GIMP, and if it could be pushed further with community efforts. That’s when I discovered Resynthesizer, a plugin that replicates most of the functionality of Photoshop’s Context Aware Fill.
That installed even easier thanks to being available as a flatpak, and after quickly learning how to use it, I was off to races, content filling all of the areas to my heart’s content (and I assure you, it was thoroughly contented, and I haven’t even tried G’Mic yet!)
In all seriousness, GIMP with these modifications was a revelation for me on how good GIMP can actually be when you spend a minute giving it a bit of polish. If you’d written it off in the past as I did, I hope this post encourages you to follow in my footsteps and give it another go as well. You might find that you can get along with it after all.
I haven’t touched Photoshop since like CS2 I think, so really can’t compare the two, but I will say that GIMP 3 was a huge enancenent to GIMP. It now has non-destructive editing. For my common uses, this is giant. Not having to redo 8 steps because I decided step 1 wasn’t right is so nice.
Of course Photoshop has done that for ages. My only point was that previous perceptions might be a little dated. And with the 3 update came with huge backend changes that will hopefully accelerate other feature development. Of course I’m sell on hope, but I’m excited for the future of GIMP. Also, now that 3 is out, they have been hinting that that are open to talk about a name change, which I think would be healthy if they want increased usage.