@unixwitch I think krita is very nice (I wish you could customize the mouse bindings more, and overall I wish it was more mouse friendly instead of assuming tablet) but it's really really geared to drawing not simple photo manipulation.
@mcc
That's true, I am biased, I own 2 tablets and do my very basic photo manipulation in either #digikam (e.g. cropping) or #darktable (like reduce wrinkles in old faces).
(Unluckily you can't do darktable very good with a tablet only, it really requires a scroll mouse thingie).
blender is in fact already a 2D paint program in addition to the other 10,000 things it is. it could stand to be a lot better but there is already pretty solid groundwork there
@mcc if you want feature parity with the Imp, you will need to make "export" refuse to export your editor's native format and "save" refuse to save anything but the native format. They should also have separate destination directory settings and a systemwide shared temp dir, so any export that involves tempfiles will be blocked if another user on the same computer is using the editor. #ImNotGrumpy
@mcc
I am generally unhappy with expanding programms too much in all directions, it's most of the time the beginning of the end by way of a convoluted and more and more unusable Moloch..
Unless you'd like to have a separate one that's like Blender (but not included in it) I am not happy with the idea.
@mcc If you told me that Blender already had a fully featured 2D image editing suite in it I would believe it without question and simply assume I had not yet clicked on the right menu option to discover it.
@tojiro From what my replies are telling me Blender does in fact have 75% of a fully featured 2D image editing suite and neither of us have yet clicked on the right menu option to discover it. Unfortunately, it appears it's limited to 75%, and not the most convenient 75%.
@mcc It would be poetic justice to replace the application that spawned the GIMP ToolKit with one written with a toolkit extracted from another pro media application
@mcc
That program with the bad name was really made for editing photos, not drawing. Yes, it is bad at drawing. People really shouldn't recommend it for that and recommend other projects like Krita instead.
@mcc I still use Glimpse, which is an abandoned project which was literally just a fork of its namesake with a different name. The UI is a little weird, but it's free and has excellent controls for doing weird channel manipulations (e.g. "turn the red channel into the alpha channel") and various tone mappings that I need to do surprisingly frequently.
@mcc yeah there's this kinda weird pattern where software for creative professionals always winds up having to do substantial portions of the GUI toolkit for itself because window management for complex tasks that involve many panes, toolbars etc is just kinda horrible everywhere
someday it would be nice to have a toolkit that solves those hard problems and gets used for, like, more than one thing
@irenes @mcc
Wasnt this supposed to be what stuff like qt was for before it ballooned into being its own OS pretty much? Or did y'all have smth even cooler in mind
@jonny@mccsigh probably. we don't have the stomach to dig into qt's build system and play with it as a toolkit. they just do not seem to particularly care about languages other than C++. or maybe we're already out of date on that, it's been a while since we've tried
@jonny@irenes I think Irenes point is that pro quality media programs have very specific needs which diverge from those of a general purpose toolkit like Qt
@mcc@jonny that was indeed our point, and thank you very much for the help clarifying. we just aren't sufficiently familiar with the history of Qt to speak to whether it was trying to be more than a general purpose toolkit.
@irenes @mcc
Ok my bad! That was basically my question, whether yall were thinking of something more tailored to context or a general multi-window programming environment.
@irenes@mcc@jonny
I don’t know how general purpose Qt is or is not trying to be. I believe the Vienna Symphonic Library uses Qt and it’s a powerhouse music creation package with some significant GUI features that only it needs. https://www.vsl.co.at/en/Vienna_Software_Package/Vienna_Ensemble_Pro#
I wish Vienna SL would open up their library. I love the usability of their stuff
@rosabelini @irenes@mcc
The other thing I know of for audio is JUCE https://juce.com/
which eg. Some neuroscience tools like https://open-ephys.org/gui
Use because its good for realtime-ish, multi-window/panel guis. Different than image/3d/etc. Editing but now y'all got me wondering what that would look like n what existing things could be modified to fit
@brouhaha@mcc yeah but it like, doesn't have features for that kind of thing though. it's more of a general-purpose widget set than something that addresses the complex scenarios that come up in professional creative software.
@irenes@mcc I used GTK+2 for Nonpareil (microcode-level HP calculator simulation), but even though it was cross-platform, in practice I had a lot of problems on Windows and even more on MacOS. In recent years I've benn happier with Qt, and am rewriting Nonpareil to use Qt6.
@irenes@mcc They seem to have moved to make, but I still don't like their build system. I use SCons, which unfortunately does not have Qt5 or Qt6 support built in. Someone hacked their Qt tool for Qt5, and I further hacked it for Qt6 and for cross-compilation for Windows.
@brouhaha@irenes Yeah I sincerely love Qt, as an API, but building or deploying it is kind of a nightmare. Great if you're entirely in the open source ecosystem and/or don't distribute your code to anyone else, but is that a real use case? :/
@mcc They just need to rename that thing to GNUtotshop or something. Anything would be better, I don't care if it's stupid.
Though, and I'm probably saying more about myself than I should, but I always visualize Gimp mask when I see the name, rather than interpreting the name as ableist, but that's not really an argument for keeping the name...
@mcc I'd like to see it replaced first. The actual user count isn't known, but it is estimated to be in the millions, so I really don't see that project being retired without an alternative available. There aren't any other real FOSS Photoshop alternatives out there.
Though it is unfortunate how few improvements have been made to it over the past decade. It's basically already abandonware, even if it is "maintained".
@asmodai Krita does something slightly different! If there's a workflow that Feels Like Photoshop I haven't worked it out yet.
Pinta seems nice, thank you. I think someone told me about it before but then I installed Linux and couldn't remember what the recommendations I'd got before were.
What I really need (and don't specifically have on Linux right now) is like the very simple crop/resize/convert file format primitives with low friction. Blender probably already has file format handling so might be able to reach this level quickly. "Add text and draw arrows" would be great to have on top.
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