Why GIMP isn't as bad as people say

This post is in response to an article written on "Piestar"

http://piestar.net/2009/03/01/gimp-sucks/#comment-15138

Gimp is modular, extensible, extendible, portable, lightweight, easy on memory, has a powerful batch processing system, tons of features, regular patches and bug fixes, is free of cost, open source, and has a helpful user-base.

I think the responses to this article would be a lot more interesting if every photoshop user who didn’t pay for their software was pruned from the wall. If Photoshop was priced at $50 – $100, I’d be inclined to agree with this article. However, it’s not. Photoshop CS5 costs 5 to 10 times said quote.

It’s not just about price. Despite the fact that Photoshop CS5 is US$699 and the Gimp is free of charge, there is something to be said about the fact that it is free (as in freedom) software. It’s far more modular and portable than photoshop. In its current stage, I believe it is lagging behind its competitors (photoshop, illustrator, et al). However, I anticipate GIMP becoming far more usable as the need for editing graphics becomes greater in the open source community. For now, they’re still trying to get x11 up to par…

There’s a difference between saying a program suffers with respect to usability and a program being garbage. Likewise, a program with a good UI does not imply it is _not_ garbage. A program can look great but segfault constantly and be susceptible to buggy behaviour. From an implementation perspective, the Gimp is pretty decent software. It’s reasonable on memory, robust, modular and extensible, has a plethora of features, and allows easy interfacing with a variety of file formats. And not that the average end-user cares, but the algorithmic implementations of many of the GIMP’s features are pretty elaborate (especially when compared to other day-to-day programs such as text processors). Admittedly, from a usability perspective, the program does suffer from a poorly designed interface with completely unintuitive (and bizarrely implemented) controls, panels, canvas, and tools. That said, should one invest some time learning how to use GIMP correctly (less than $699 worth of time, I’d wager), then the software is more than adequate for the average user performing the average task (which I consider to be minor photo editing, resizing, changing hue and saturation, etc).

Also, many problems mentioned in this review have been noted by the designers and are under development, such as the new, “new non-destructive image processing core”.

I, for one, look forward to see how the GIMP will improve over the next few years. Until then, I suppose I’ll just have to stick to my CLI and avoid starting X all together…