I’d really love if somebody would give GIMP the Blender treatment. It’s very good software but some of the UI paradigms are quite outdated. All their floating windows and dialogs do not work well on multiple screens.
From the update:
One area we want to focus on after 3.0 is improving our UI/UX design process. We have set up a separate UX repository to report and discuss issues related to design. We are looking to build a team of designers to discuss and create design improvements to GIMP that also respect existing user’s workflows. Denis Rangelov has taken a strong interest in this area and has already done great work in identifying, categorizing, and moving design issues from the code repository to the dedicated design section. Some design improvements have already been implemented for 3.0, and we look forward to working with community designers to give people a better experience!
It’ll take some time, but it seems like improvments may be coming.
That’s pretty neat. I do hope they do some solid UI/UX research on it, and figure out their own way of smoothing things out without simply “making it like Photoshop” like the grouchy masses are clamoring for. :p
Blender had some odd ideas at first, but I really appreciate their unique approach that, IMHO, makes an Autodesk product feel heavy and kludgy by comparison.
It’s already been done
I was already aware of this fork. I haven’t tried it, but does it really fix most of the UX issues of GIMP?
https://graphite.rs looks like it might replace gimp at some point
Maybe? It looks like it’s tuned towards generative use cases. Sometimes you need to just edit a photo really quickly and setting up a bunch of nondestructive nodes seems like more of a hassle than help.
But hopefully I’m wrong! This is the first I’ve heard of the project.
It’s ugly for sure, but I think the biggest barrier to entry is the shortcut keys. Blender’s Industry Standard mode makes it a lot easier for Maya users to switch. Something similar for Photoshop users would kill.
