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Its often said that gimp is "an alternative" to photoshop. I say bullshit. Today I needed to draw a simple 100x100 unfilled square on a white background. To my surprise, gimp doesn't have simple tools for drawing basic shapes. After 20 minutes of googling I did find a way which involved around 7 steps. This, to me, epitomized the view that some times even the simplest tasks in free software are unacceptably difficult.

(To be fair, often these things are not our fault: for example, my friend couldn't get ACPI or wireless working on his toshiba (never buy toshiba laptops by the way, their linux compatibility is as bad as it can possibly get). I spent 3 hours hacking at the ACPI ASL to get battery life to show (i couldn't figure out sleep). Trivial task, extremely non-trivial solution.)

TankCatNinjaFish wrote:Its often said that gimp is "an alternative" to photoshop. I say bullshit. Today I needed to draw a simple 100x100 unfilled square on a white background. To my surprise, gimp doesn't have simple tools for drawing basic shapes.

It's no su[rise. Gimp is not an image creation tool - no is it billed as one. It's an image manipulation tool. Use xpaint or sodipodi to make them..

KDE has an office suite called KOffice, it has a program called Krita, which is much much much better designed than Gimp, it doesn't have as many features, but it's a lot more usable for me who really can't use any image editing tool.

Linc wrote:

TankCatNinjaFish wrote:Its often said that gimp is "an alternative" to photoshop. I say bullshit. Today I needed to draw a simple 100x100 unfilled square on a white background. To my surprise, gimp doesn't have simple tools for drawing basic shapes.

It's no su[rise. Gimp is not an image creation tool - no is it billed as one. It's an image manipulation tool. Use xpaint or sodipodi to make them..

So if I wanted to, say, add a rectangle to an existing image, that would not be manipulation?

I use GIMP all of the time.

Making a frame (rectangle or circle, etc) is really easy.

Use the selector tool(s) and draw the size of frame you want. Now fill in the box (or what ever) with the colour that you want to give your frame. Now right-mouse-click on the selected box you just made, choose Selection from the menu and then click on the Shrink option.

In the dialog box, shrink the selected area by the width you want to give your frame (if you want a frame 10 pixels thick, shrink by 10). Now, press CTRL-X to delete the remaining portion of the box that you don't need.

There you have it, a frame.

I don't know what the big deal is.

I've just gotten used to the Gimp, I guess. I started using it before Photoshop, so now prefer it, partly because it means I can use the same program at home and at work.

I would have followed the advice of Judland on the rectangle, or else, you could load the image into Inkscape and do some vector drawing there, and export it again. That would be a pain just to draw a rectangle, but I don't have any problem using the selection tools to shrink or grow a selection, or to select a border. I usually don't want to do any drawing when I'm working with pictures, I usually make use of color correction, brightening, blurring and contrast masking tools, so I've never been bothered by lack of drawing tools.

Maybe photoshop is a better program, I do imagine it's more powerful, but I don't have enough talent or time to make use of that power, and I've found the Gimp to always do what I want.

I feel your pain there. When I first started using the GIMP I was looking for a similar drawing type feature. What was available at the time was Gfig, found under the filters -> Render menu. But that is not as friendly as one would want.

As was pointed out, GIMP was created to manipulate photos; and while creating graphics on the photo can be considered manipulation; Gimp never really excelled in this area like Photoshop. Such image creation was left to xfig; sodipodi and inkscape.

As Judland pointed out there is way to do this; in fact there are a few different ways to do this. I will explain another.

About two years ago the Gimp instituted pathing in the non-development releases. If you want to create a rectangle it is quite simple.

Select the rectangle selection tool then look at the properties of the rectangle. By default it's set to free select. You can specify a height and width by changing the free select value to fixed size. Enter in your size values and then do a click short drag on the canvas to drop the selection. You can then grab the dotted line to position the selection where you want it.

Once the selection is placed you want to click on the paths tool. If it is not on your gimp tool window select dialog-> paths. At the bottom of the dialog box are a few options, choose selection to path. Then select stroke path. You can choose a width for the line and you are good to go.

Oh, before you stroke the path, make sure your foreground color is set to what you want the path to be.

After you stroke a path you can maniuplate the path using the create and edit paths tool. This takes some getting used to as you are maniupluating bezier curves. Kind of like drawing with Illustrator or Inkscape.

You can do the opposite too. Say you wanted a funky shaped selection on an image. You can use the path tool to create the shape over the image then select the path to selection option.

Hey, that's a great trick, Dann. I have some real uses for this one.

Thanks!

Judland wrote:Hey, that's a great trick, Dann. I have some real uses for this one.

Thanks!

No problem. I should have made a screenkast of this.

Judland wrote:I use GIMP all of the time.

Making a frame (rectangle or circle, etc) is really easy.

Use the selector tool(s) and draw the size of frame you want. Now fill in the box (or what ever) with the colour that you want to give your frame. Now right-mouse-click on the selected box you just made, choose Selection from the menu and then click on the Shrink option.

In the dialog box, shrink the selected area by the width you want to give your frame (if you want a frame 10 pixels thick, shrink by 10). Now, press CTRL-X to delete the remaining portion of the box that you don't need.

There you have it, a frame.

I don't know what the big deal is.

So you're saying the prefered way of drawing a rectangle is to draw a filled rectangle and deleting the inside? Would a simple "rectangle" drawing tool be too blasphemous? Dann's method seems more logical, but I can't imagine drawing more than a few shapes that way.

Yea, so I took people's advice and looked at the vector graphics tools, and thankfully inkscape and sodipodi both seem very user friendly. I think I'm going to use those for general image authoring and imagemagick for "manipulation". Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

Btw, to linc, from the gimp homepage: "GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring." The last two claims should be removed.

TankCatNinjaFish wrote:So you're saying the prefered way of drawing a rectangle is to draw a filled rectangle and deleting the inside? Would a simple "rectangle" drawing tool be too blasphemous?

Of course not. However, to call this process ureasonably difficult, as you did in your opening post:

This, to me, epitomized the view that some times even the simplest tasks in free software are unacceptably difficult.

is more of a cop out, in my opinion, than taking the time out to learn how to do something that's not the "Photoshop" way. I see no reason to consider my method of drawing a box as being "unacceptably difficult". As I said in my reply, I really don't see what the big deal is.

If you like Photoshop, then more power too you. Just don't expect people, like me, to agree with your bashing of free software just because it's free.

Personally, I feel that asking $649 for a photo editing suite is more unreasonable than having to learn a different way of drawing a box. Especially when you can do all of the same things with a product that is just as powerful, made available to everyone free of charge, AND is cross platform compatible.

But, hey, if you think that drawing a box is worth $649, then go for it man. I'm perfectly happy drawing boxes my way and NOT getting ripped off at the same time.

Judland wrote:

TankCatNinjaFish wrote:So you're saying the prefered way of drawing a rectangle is to draw a filled rectangle and deleting the inside? Would a simple "rectangle" drawing tool be too blasphemous?

Of course not. However, to call this process ureasonably difficult, as you did in your opening post:

This, to me, epitomized the view that some times even the simplest tasks in free software are unacceptably difficult.

is more of a cop out, in my opinion, than taking the time out to learn how to do something that's not the "Photoshop" way. I see no reason to consider my method of drawing a box as being "unacceptably difficult". As I said in my reply, I really don't see what the big deal is.

I never said once I use or like photoshop. My point is that it shouldn't take 7 steps to do something you can do 1 step in even the crappiest drawing program (MS paint, kpaint). I only referenced photoshop b/c the gimp is often heralded as the photoshop alternative.

If you like Photoshop, then more power too you. Just don't expect people, like me, to agree with your bashing of free software just because it's free.

Personally, I feel that asking $649 for a photo editing suite is more unreasonable than having to learn a different way of drawing a box. Especially when you can do all of the same things with a product that is just as powerful, made available to everyone free of charge, AND is cross platform compatible.

But, hey, if you think that drawing a box is worth $649, then go for it man. I'm perfectly happy drawing boxes my way and NOT getting ripped off at the same time.

Yea, who would ever consider paying for software? thats insane.

I never said once I use or like photoshop. My point is that it shouldn't take 7 steps to do something you can do 1 step in even the crappiest drawing program (MS paint, kpaint). I only referenced photoshop b/c the gimp is often heralded as the photoshop alternative.

Yea, who would ever consider paying for software? thats insane.

they say photoshop alternative so people know what it is that are coming over from windows. it doesn't mean that it is a one for one copy. I am sure the gimp developers would love to hear any ideas you would have on improving the program - they are just an email away.

we all pay for sofware - the only difference is the the open source folks use knowledge (GPL license) as currency - we share our changes and ideas to make programs better for everyone. I for one would rather pay that way than pay Bill Gates or Steve Jobs so they can add another yaht to their collection.

If you use a Free app and you like and use it a lot please consider donating some money to the project. I'm sure they can use any monetary assistance you can provide. The same goes if you use a Free distro. Please donate to them. I have.

jsusanka wrote:we all pay for sofware - the only difference is the the open source folks use knowledge (GPL license) as currency - we share our changes and ideas to make programs better for everyone. I for one would rather pay that way than pay Bill Gates or Steve Jobs so they can add another yaht to their collection.

Plus, when you pay Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, you are never even offered "the four essential freedoms" that Richard Stallman has been talking about for over two decades.

Patrick wrote:If you use a Free app and you like and use it a lot please consider donating some money to the project. I'm sure they can use any monetary assistance you can provide. The same goes if you use a Free distro. Please donate to them. I have.

I bought the CD-set of OpenBSD 3.9 to support them. As I've said before, I have absolutely no problem with paying for the software that I use, as long as it's free software.