Discussion

Highlights¶

tejohnso: 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.

Jabrov: The lack of GenAI integration is actually refreshing

nickjj: 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.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.

vunderba: Nice - all actions performed on a layer should retain a hidden "raw original" so we get non-destructive transforms.

tartoran: I assume you don’t do this manually and you’re doing some kind of scripting, can you describe your process?

hnlmorg: 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.

nirv: 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.

peter-m80: Nice, is it now possible to draw a circle?

masfuerte: Select a rectangle. Stroke or fill the selection.I agree it's a bit counter-intuitive, but afaik it's always worked like that.

cyberjunkie: There are other applications with that implemented, with GenAI too.

Findecanor: Use the ellipse selection tool and hold Shift to make it a circle. Hold Ctrl to pull from origo. Then use Stroke Selection or Fill Selection.Although, I miss being able to create a selection from a point on the ellipse/circle instead of just origin or bounding box corner, and to be able to stroke a width only on the inside or outside of a selection.

Retr0id: 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)

stringfood: "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."

Retr0id: That is generally my intention when downscaling an image.

cmyk_student: 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.

__mharrison__: It sounds like you are a gimp developer. Curious about the use of AI to work on it. Do the gimp devs use AI to write code?

locusofself: I see you are getting downvoted but I don't blame you for this question. I've been curious about what developers of established products are doing with LLM assisted coding myself.

Alupis: Like most of us, they're certainly using ai-assisted auto-complete and chat for thinking deep. I highly doubt they're vibe coding, which is how I interpret the parent's question and probably why they are being down voted.

cmyk_student: 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.

cmyk_student: There's always the GFig filter, which has existed in GIMP for a long time. :)GIMP 3.2 actually adds vector layers, which are the basis for a shape tool (it was my "big project" for this release). We have a GSoC project idea for doing the last bit of work to make a dedicated shape tool: https://developer.gimp.org/core/internship/ideas/#implement-...

necovek: Instead of trying to get at the same origin point, I usually just keep the selection active and then go to "Selection" menu and choose either "Shrink" or "Expand" options (or similar language: I use a localized version).

kernc: Let everyone be reminded how joyful GIMP 2.10 used to look ...https://i.imgur.com/nVyMQBt.png

AbuAssar: Is it possible to train a model on all gimp features that will eventually let us prompt whatever edits we want and it’ll automate gimp to achieve it?

cmyk_student: I can't speak for all of us, but generally no (in terms of GenAI at least). There are concerns about generated code not being compatible with GPL, and honestly a lot of the drive-by GenAI coded merge requests tend to not work.

bitwize: 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.

Retr0id: nondestructive edits are great, it's the interface that's weird