It was a dive, then I forgot the first rule.
I use to shit my one co-worker out all the time about this when the Gov decides we don't deserve power or shit just happens you will lose all your work. This dumb fuck use to have about 10 projects open all named "Untitled" then when things crash he had a mini heart attack. I am sure that is why he got diabetes so late in life.
For my first full foray into using GIMP with the idealistic goal of removing my Photoshop shackles, I decided the best thing is to just do a good 'ol fashioned composition.
Having brought all the images together and painstakingly masking them because I don't think GIMP selection tools are going to magically remove my clouds or would even be able to have removed that tower from what is a high contrast area. Then again I don't even trust photoshop to do it properly. Always remember those examples they show on the web to sell that kind of stuff is a lie.
Anyway, just as I got the octopus and cut it out to add to the image, I lost it all. So instead you get a rant and some basic bullshit.
In gimp they now have non-destructive editing. So far I don't see it to the extent of adjustments like hue-saturation or levels but then again I did not go digging. The big thing is that it is such a scattered program with 10 filters that do essentially the same thing.
Once you get used to some of the terminology then a few things make more sense but essentially when it comes to GIMP you will be creating new layers for everything with the only real non-destructive thing being masking.
If you look at the layers panel on the left that is the black and white images next to the full image. Black means hide and white means show. The way that I had to create a layer for every change I wanted using either the base image or the main colour to affect the parts below is a tedious process and actually expensive operation.
If I wanted to change from magenta I would have to update all layers that generate magenta. That means duplicating and changing them which if I wanted multiple versions increases to file size and with GIMP already not being the fastest thing slows down everything when processing effects.
It is the good 'ol photoshop before maybe cs5 workflow.
Now every software is going to have its quirks and that is fair enough. A person also needs to consider that GIMP is 100% free and opensource which means they don't exactly get fancy corporate funding and can have teams working fulltime on the software.
Like Blender 3D, GIMP is still competitive and you can have the same results as you would Maya or Photoshop. It might just take you a few more steps.
Mainly things that irk me are things I have grown accustomed to by using Photoshop, the unnecessary workaround for adjustment layers is not the biggest. The biggest thing that trips me up is:
Sure there are ways around it but for a program that still heavily relies on duplicate layers to achieve a simple goal multi selecting things to move or even assign to a group should be as simple as clicking.
The way I go about that is to extensively group things. I group anything that shares position and or alter the image.
It makes life simpler that way you can turn off entire sections, duplicate them and update the layers with maybe the new colours you want to test. I don't like destroying things and work in steps which by default creates massive documents but I do get to rollback easily without relying on some shit history state.
Which is useless even in photoshop. My document is my history. That might just be me though.
Masks are great but they they do rely on selection. Whether you brush the selection after the fact or whether you create them from a selection. Masks themselves are just fancy selections that register pixel values from visible to transparent.
So when you are on your creating layers for everything you want to change rampage, like a light layer, shadow layer, colour adjustments etc. They will end up using the same mask many times over. One way is to like I said, group these kinds of things that way you can add the mask to the group and affect all layers inside to show and hide only parts.
However many times that is not the case, and one light layer needs to be right at the top far away from the other layers which share the mask you want. You would think it is a case of select and copy the mask but it is far less intuitive than that.
GIMP is python-based, and I think a lot of the click and shit happens thinking comes from Photoshop. I have noticed in these Python GUI's they don't really respond to context actions like if you click the thumbnail of the mask the context is to create a selection.
As you can see in the image there is a single badly worded "Selection" option when creating a mask and that means it will create a mask from a selection. If you were to right-click the mask you wanted to copy you will get a "Selection from mask" option. That is how you then copy a mask to a new layer.
The thing that will trip you up? Well try brushing that mask and notice you can't change it beyond the original mask. This is because it created a selection which is a boundary and you can't go beyond that boundary. In windows, you need to deselect or more specifically select none. Fortunately there is a menu item for it in the Selections dropdown but the shortcut is CTRL+SHIFT+A
You won't always know if something is even possible until you click things, and even then some of the things are based on steps which complicate figuring it out on your own even more. Googling GIMP is also not a sure way of finding an answer as much of it is still for older versions or just plain unreliable due to linking some insane workaround.
For everyday fuckery GIMP is great and maybe with further use, I would not mind how slow it is or many of the rigid behaviour it has due to not always having live previews or a quick way to accomplish simple changes.
As for my second dip in GIMP after my previous attempt at sailing has been wrecked:
Now to go figure out all the fucking errors it pops up when starting. I bet it is fucking Pythons fault.
