Being able to scale an image without losing quality is going to be handy. I always found it odd that scaling down an image now and then scaling it back to its original size 2 seconds later with the same tool resulted in a loss of quality and having to delete the layer, then re-import the image to get the original quality back.
It's because each transform was "destructive" (like filters use to be by default). What link & vector layers do instead is store a transform matrix, so each transform just updates the matrix instead of actually re-rasterizing the layer each time.
We were hoping to expand that feature to all layer types for 3.2, but we ran out of time to properly test it for release. It'll like be finished for the next minor release.
Many years ago I tested a native OS/2 image editor with this feature. It also made it possible to undo an individual transform or effect in the current stack while leaving the rest untouched. Will that be possible in Gimp as well?
> I always found it odd that scaling down an image now and then scaling it back to its original size 2 seconds later with the same tool resulted in a loss of quality
Maybe it's because I grew up with Paint Shop Pro 6 and such, but that seems completely normal and expected to me
I was using Photoshop, I don't remember when exactly but it's probably in the 15-20 year range when non-destructive scaling was available. I don't remember not having it. Glad to see GIMP is moving in this direction.
> I always found it odd that scaling down an image now and then scaling it back to its original size 2 seconds later with the same tool resulted in a loss of quality
I'm honestly baffled at your surprise... say, if you crop an image, and 2 seconds later you enlarge it to its original size; do you expect to get the inital image back? Or a uniform color padding around your crop?
Scaling is just cropping in the frequency domain. Behaviour should be the same.
From a developer perspective you're obviously correct, but from a user perspective it doesn't make sense that the tool discards information, especially when competing tools don't do that.
Of course as a developer that makes it all the more impressive - kudos to the team for making such big progress, I can't wait to play around with all the new improvements!
Does anyone else find non-destructive editing kinda unintuitive?
I get the practical benefits of it, but it feels shoehorned in to an interface for doing destructive edits. Chained edits frequently interact in ways that confuse/surprise me.
I think I'd rather do non-destructive edits via some sort of node-editor interface. (And to be honest most of the things I use GIMP for don't need non-destructive editing in the first place)
The current non-destructive UI is a bit of a compromise - we can't really mix layers with NDE filters in the layer dock until GTK4 (from what I understand), so the pop-up menu is what we had to work with.
You can check "Merge filter" at the bottom of the filter dialogue though, and it will automatically merge the filter like in 2.10 (and the setting is remembered going forward)
This is one of those things I'd think geeks would geek out about, as nondestructive edits mean the steps to construct an image are stored, not just the final image—kinda like a monad in FP.
"When I was a kid, when we shrunk a 200x200 image down to 100x100 we lost information forever, and we liked it that way. It was a simple time. A predictable time."
Can I finally Ctrl+s jpeg image? And no, export is not enough because first time it will ask for for path and compression level which it already knows. I just want to Ctrl+s and be done.
Almost all programs treat the “Save” operation as something used with the native format, in this case XCF files. These preserve things like layers, etc. JPG and other formats are exports because after you close the file you can’t get all that stuff back when you reopen it.
I get it, and when Photoshop changed this default, GIMP followed with changing this workflow. It used to be different in older versions of Photoshop and Gimp.
Advanced user usually know exactly what they're doing, and opening a PNG or JPEG file, changing a few pixels, and saving it, should require as few key presses as possible.
I don't want the UI to get in my way when I open->edit->save.
This is not true with common applications people are familiar with. Excel and Word will happily "save" a PDF, and it behaves like exporting and doesn't change the document being edited.
It seems like you can assign this action to Ctrl + S, yes. See here:
Edit → Keyboard Shortcuts → file → Overwrite […]
I think this would be awful default behaviour, but I guess it’s nice to have the option if you really want it, and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to find after reading your comment.
It used to be even simpler, though I am sure it caused all sorts of problems: for any Gtk+ program, if you hovered over a menu and pressed a new key combination, it would reassign the shortcut for that menu to what you just pressed. You still had to turn it on, and it was an amazing feature, but you'd occasionally reassign something you did not want to :)
File - Overwrite file, that's been there for a while. It can be turned into a hotkey, it's unmapped by default, and I don't think that'd change nor should it change, given how user hostile that'd be, the long history of how it works in editors like that, and with how they lean towards non-destructiveness of it all. Also, that just sounds like perhaps a simpler editor would be a better fit, like Paint.
Love GIMP. Always capable of doing anything I need done with raster images or even PDFs. Lately I've been opening PDFs and lightening the pages so that they can be printed without wasting a bunch of toner on backgrounds that are meant to be white but were scanned in as a light grey.
Sorry, I don't have to do it in sufficient quantity of frequency to encourage scripting. And while doing it manually, I notice that the required tweaking of levels changes depending on the content of the page and how poor the scan is. I'm not sure an automated solution would provide satisfactory results consistently.
Do you suggest using manual brushes instead of content-aware fill, or am I supposed to not want to retouch the images in the way that GenAI makes so quickly and easily? My argument is that applications probably should provide useful tools for solving practical problems, regardless of their implementation details.
I use Gimp pretty sporadically but the latest UI refresh (I’m guessing introduced in 3.0?) completely baffles me.
It might just be that it’s better tailored for graphic designers, which I’m clearly not. But now I can’t even figure out how to draw a square on screen. Let along anything clever.
Hi! What was the last version of GIMP that you used before 3.0?
We get an equal amount of "GIMP's UI never changes!" and "You changed too much of the UI in the latest version", so it's difficult sometimes to figure out the specific issues.
I’ve been using it for at least a decade, likely longer.
Albeit I might only use it, at most, for a few hours every few months. So I’m definitely not a seasoned expert despite that length of time. But I always considered myself reasonably competent.
I usually indifferent about UI changes, I’m not someone who tends to complain either for nor against. So this isn’t a complaint about Gimp changing thing (if that’s what happened). The issue here is really more about how I now cannot figure out the simple things any more. And that might just be on me rather than Gimp.
I don’t see that option. Maybe the issue is my installation has broken in some odd way. I’ll try completely removing it and all preferences, then reinstalling.
Comments like yours miss the point. In fact worse, they just serve to stagnate FOSS because it pushes the assumption that the software is always right and users are idiots, without taking any time to understand what those users are actually trying to do.
There are hundreds of good reasons why someone might want to overlay a vector shape on a bitmap image. The desire to draw shapes on bitmap isn’t something weird that I’ve just invented for HN. It’s been a staple feature such graphics packages since the inception of bitmap graphics editing. And it’s been a staple feature of Gimp since I first switched to Linux in the 90s.
But that’s all moot because I was just making an arbitrary example.
And as an aside, I do use vector drawing software too. So I’m fully aware of their existence.
If you mean the color icons, you can easily switch back to those in the Welcome Dialog that appears when you first open GIMP (look in the Personalize tab). It's the first thing I do when I install GIMP on a new machine. :)
oh wow, i never realized that this is there, in such a convenient location too. and you can't just change the icon style, but also disable the tool groups which was the most annoying change i found because it makes finding the right tool harder. (i'd love tool groups where the tools are grouped but not folded, or in a way where i can expand certain groups that i use often)
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This plugin https://github.com/LinuxBeaver/Gimp_Layer_Effects_Text_Style... also makes adding text effects with GIMP pretty good. This is unrelated to 3.2 but turned out to be a necessity for me.
We were hoping to expand that feature to all layer types for 3.2, but we ran out of time to properly test it for release. It'll like be finished for the next minor release.
Maybe it's because I grew up with Paint Shop Pro 6 and such, but that seems completely normal and expected to me
I'm honestly baffled at your surprise... say, if you crop an image, and 2 seconds later you enlarge it to its original size; do you expect to get the inital image back? Or a uniform color padding around your crop?
Scaling is just cropping in the frequency domain. Behaviour should be the same.
Of course as a developer that makes it all the more impressive - kudos to the team for making such big progress, I can't wait to play around with all the new improvements!
I get the practical benefits of it, but it feels shoehorned in to an interface for doing destructive edits. Chained edits frequently interact in ways that confuse/surprise me.
I think I'd rather do non-destructive edits via some sort of node-editor interface. (And to be honest most of the things I use GIMP for don't need non-destructive editing in the first place)
You can check "Merge filter" at the bottom of the filter dialogue though, and it will automatically merge the filter like in 2.10 (and the setting is remembered going forward)
I get it, and when Photoshop changed this default, GIMP followed with changing this workflow. It used to be different in older versions of Photoshop and Gimp.
Advanced user usually know exactly what they're doing, and opening a PNG or JPEG file, changing a few pixels, and saving it, should require as few key presses as possible.
I don't want the UI to get in my way when I open->edit->save.
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It might just be that it’s better tailored for graphic designers, which I’m clearly not. But now I can’t even figure out how to draw a square on screen. Let along anything clever.
We get an equal amount of "GIMP's UI never changes!" and "You changed too much of the UI in the latest version", so it's difficult sometimes to figure out the specific issues.
Albeit I might only use it, at most, for a few hours every few months. So I’m definitely not a seasoned expert despite that length of time. But I always considered myself reasonably competent.
I usually indifferent about UI changes, I’m not someone who tends to complain either for nor against. So this isn’t a complaint about Gimp changing thing (if that’s what happened). The issue here is really more about how I now cannot figure out the simple things any more. And that might just be on me rather than Gimp.
I agree it's a bit counter-intuitive, but afaik it's always worked like that.
There are hundreds of good reasons why someone might want to overlay a vector shape on a bitmap image. The desire to draw shapes on bitmap isn’t something weird that I’ve just invented for HN. It’s been a staple feature such graphics packages since the inception of bitmap graphics editing. And it’s been a staple feature of Gimp since I first switched to Linux in the 90s.
But that’s all moot because I was just making an arbitrary example.
And as an aside, I do use vector drawing software too. So I’m fully aware of their existence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2pV02dTVE8
https://i.imgur.com/nVyMQBt.png
Also small world, floating point JPEG person here.