The Gimp 2.0

Wednesday, April 7th, 2004

Apparentely, The Gimp 2.0 had been available in Debian Sid for some time already before I found out. When I did (thanks to Michiel) I apt-getted it at once and started to play with it. I already tried to find a good article somewhere on the internet which discussed the new features in The Gimp 2.0 in depth, but couldn’t find one. Better write one myself then, no?

Foreword
(Better cover myself). I’m no Gimp expert, though I’ve used it for quite a while. In this little article I’ll discuss some of the things I found in the new Gimp, but that doesn’t mean that I’m right about any of my assumptions. Some features, for instance, might already have been present in the old Gimp 1.2. Don’t bust my balls if I’m wrong about something okay? Feedback is always welcome of course.

New stuff
To my disappointment, there isn’t really a lot of new stuff in the Gimp 2.0. There are, however, a lot of subtle changes and improvements:

• User interface
  One of the most noteworthy new things in the Gimp 2.0 is the interface. It’s changed a lot since the old version but it’s still recognisable. Gimp veterans will have no trouble finding the old stuff, and can be thrilled about the new user interface. Everything feels much more polished and easier. Frequently used options are moved to better reachable places and everything is just less obscure.

• Docks
  Where in the old gimp you had to wrestle six or more dialogs with all kinds of options, in the new Gimp everything is dockable. Just drag and drop a dialog to a docking handler in one of the docks, and it will automatically dock there. Clicking the dashed undock handlebar will undock the window (surprise suprise!). It works great, although the number of docking handlers could have been more. Now they are only present at the top and bottom of the dock and sometimes you’ll have to fiddle around a bit with the various docked dialogs in order to get them just the way you want.

• More dialogs
  There are some new dialogs like a seperate color dialog (yes, I know you could already do this in the Gimp 1.2, but this still feels new somehow. At least now it’s really useable). A font dialog shows all the fonts that can be picked easily. There’s also a selection editor in which you can quite easily modify selections so you won’t have to use the Rightclick->selection menu anymore. The navigation dialog is also quite nice, but I believe this was already present in some form or another in the old Gimp.

  Remember that all these dialogs can be docked so they won’t ever get in your way.

• Dialog improvements
  Some dialogs had big improvements. For one, most dialogs now remember their size when you resize them and reappear at that size next time you open them.

  Next to that it’s now possible to save your tool option preferences so you can reload them later on.

  Color dialogs now show colored previews in the slider so you’ll now to what color you’ll be changing if you move the sliders. It also remembers the last 20-something colors you’ve picked so you’ll won’t be needing that color droplet that much anymore.

• QuickMask
  Something I’ve been wanting for a long time is more preferences for the QuickMask. The QuickMask is that small little rectangle in the lower left corner of an open image which, if you press it, will show you the current selection you’ve made as a mask. You can then proceed to use normal drawing tools on the mask to change the selection. Really neat, except for one thing: it wasn’t possible to change the mask color. It would always be red. This fact rendered it useless (for me at least). It would get impossible to see the difference between mask and non-mask. (perhaps I’m a bit colorblind or something?). This however has been fixed. You can now select the color for the mask, and even set it’s opacity. yay!

• Templates
  A completely new feature in the Gimp are templates. You can save an image as a template and then base other images on that template. Quite a nice feature if it only saved the image and not just the dimensions of the image. All it seems to do is remember the height and width, nothing more. Perhaps I’m not using it correctly ’cause it seems like a pretty useless feature like it is now.

• Text
  Text is always dynamic now. Not much else has changed. Oh yeah, the text properties are now easier settable from the tool options.

• Faster
  Loading and Saving images seems somehow faster. Taking a screenshot of a 1600×1200 screen also seems faster. But that might have something to do with me upgrading the RAM in my system. (Sidenote: after about 20 minutes, things went pretty sour.. check below)

Not everthing’s great.
Even though the new features are excellent, I’ve still got some gripes with the new Gimp. Some of these are old issues which I had hoped they would have fixed. Others are just missing in the new version while they were present in the old..

• Docking anchors
  As I already mentions somewhere else in this article, there aren’t enough docking anchors. Check out the image and notice the dock at the left side? There are only dock anchors just below the toolbox and at the bottom of the window. Why are there none in the middle?

• Transform constraints
  While most of the things in this list I can live with, there is one thing I with which I can’t: Transformations on selections, like scaling and shearing, don’t have the proper Ctrl/Shift/Alt constraints! This means I can’t maintain the aspect ratio of the oroginal section, and that bites. Am i doing something wrong here? I just can’t imagine that they would leave out something that important.

• Still no advanced text transformations
  Advanced text transformations like laying out a text according to a path is still missing. I really hoped they would add some options to make this easier to do. Right now it’s also possible, but involves the use of quite a lot of different effects and/or scripts. I want it in the text tool itself. How’s Joe NonGeek going to find out hwo to do text transformation?

• Bugzz
  While I only used the new gimp to create the image accompanying this article, I already found a couple of bugs. Most where harmless and can be avoided quite easily. But one is quite annoying: When I wanted to fill a selection with a gradient I couldn’t find the foreground to background option. Turns out it’s now positioned in the gradient-pick-button at the top. It’s colored black to white, while my foreground and background color where neither. But that’s not the bug.. that’s just ugly. The bug is: The second time I wanted to perform a gradient fill, the FG to BG and BG to FG options where gone in the dropdown menu. *slap* Bad gimp programmers! (good job on the rest though).

• Hotkeys
  Another thing I noticed is that it isn’t possible anymore to change the hotkey for an option by typing in the hotkey while hovering over the menu option anymore. This is annoying, since they made the ‘+’ char the new hotkey for zooming instead of ‘=’. This means that whenever you want to zoom using the keyboard, you’ll have to press shift. Blegh. And I can’t find any other way to change the hotkeys. Anybody out there that does: Please mail me :)

  Update: I found out how to enable them again. In the new Gimp, you’ll first have to turn on the ‘Dynamic Keyboard Shortcuts’ in the preferences dialog before you will be able to change the keybindings like before. Thanks to the Gimp Tips (be sure to read them all)

• Rounding selections
  Rounding selections is still obscurely put away in some script-fu->pluging->selections->Bla bla bla->round selection menu. Move it to the main interface instead, it’s a commonly used feature (by me at least)

• And the worst thing yet!
  The absolutely most horrible, bad, wicked, terrible worst thing about the new gimp is …. slowness. While I just upgraded my machine from 128 mb to 1.5 GIGABYTE.. the new Gimp is about 4 times slower in painting on the screen than the old one. Okay, okay, I am using a AMD K6-2 3D @ 500 mHz, but still is no reason for the new Gimp to be so slow. The weird thing is.. it only became slow after I was using it for about 20 minutes. Before that it had even felt faster than the old Gimp. After 20 minutes, when things started to become slow, it would take my system a WHOLE MINUTE to paint the QuickMask over a 1600×1200 image. That’s just not do-able. Really.

Conclusion
So.. in conclusion.. The new interface simply rocks. It can be improved here or there, but overall it’s simply supurb. I expected some more new features and was a bit disappointed when there weren’t many. There’s still some bugs in the new gimp, but that’s to be expected.

I’ve also got the feeling that I missed a lot of the new features. I do know that everything I used to do in the gimp proved to be no problem in the new Gimp. This fact shows that they did a really great job in improving the interface without having to alienate the old users. A job well done, Gimp programmers. Kudo’s to you!

/me is a happy little gimper.