GIMP is Free and Libre Open Source Software, but none of it is possible without
the people who create with and contribute to it. Our project maintainer Jehan wanted to interview the volunteers
who make GIMP what it is, and share their stories so you can learn more about the awesome people behind GIMP!
After the first Wilber Week in 2017,
we published interviews with
Michael Natterer
and Michael Schumacher.
Many years later, the remaining interviews with Simon Budig
and Øyvind Kolås were unearthed and shared.
The second set of interviews were conducted in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil during the
2017 Libre Graphics Meeting. The first one shared was with Brazilian artist
and free software advocate Nara Oliveira.
The next subject of the LGM interviews was Liam Quin. Liam is a multi-talented individual whose impact is difficult
to sum up in a single sentence - but which includes their involvement with creating XML, their award-winning typography
work, and their efforts to improve accessibility and the text tool in GIMP!
This interview took place during April 21 - 23, 2017. In addition to Jehan and Liam, Simon Budig,
Aryeom Han, and Americo Gobbo were also involved and asked questions.
Liam Quin, CC-BY-SA
Jehan: Hello Liam!
Liam: Good evening.
Jehan: First of all, could you introduce yourself?
Liam: My name is Liam Quin. What do you want to know about me? I’ve been using GIMP for over 300 years,
since 1997 or 1998. I’m not sure – ‘98 I think.
Jehan [laughing]: Not very good with mathematics.
Liam: Not very good with mathematics, numbers, no - I’ve heard of them. Computer science, got that – don’t need
to be very good at maths to get a degree in computer science. Although I should have specialized in maths – and digital
typography is my background, and I think my first love.
I work today for the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C,
where I’ve been in charge of our XML work.
Now I do CSS and accessibility and some payment stuff and some SVG stuff, all sorts of things.
[Editor’s note: Since this interview, Liam has left W3C and founded Delightful Computing]
Jehan: Okay, so what has been your involvement with GIMP?
Liam: I’m just a hanger-on, a time-waster. I throw bricks from the side, I make suggestions.
For a while I was the
official spiritual advisor to the GNOME project, but I believe I had to give that
up when Bush was elected. I was, actually, if you look at the foundation page you’ll see me there.
I just met the people at a GNOME GUADEC conference years ago, and decided they were really good people.
I’ve been using GIMP professionally. I run a small stock image company
and the images, both photographs and scanned images from old books, I clean them up with GIMP and do
creative work with them and sell them. The GIMP team has been responsive when I needed changes or when
I wanted changes, and very occasionally I’ve even made some patches, although not very many.
Jehan: Maybe you can tell us what you like about GIMP, what you don’t like about GIMP?
Liam: What I like least about GIMP is the name, because I work in accessibility. So for example,
I can’t wear the GIMP shirt at work because there will be people who are upset.
[Editor’s note: More information about the name and where things currently stand]
But what I like most about it is that is Free Software. That I have a right to change the code, or to pay
someone else to change the code if I can’t. That it runs on free platforms, such as GNU/Linux systems.
I like that it’s in a language I can read. I particularly like that it’s got a lot of functions,
it does a lot. It does pretty much everything I need. I can imagine it doing more, I can imagine a
program that I would just say, “Scan this image and clean it up for me”, but we’re not there yet.
I actually have to do work, including creative work, to repair image. GIMP is actually the best program
I have used for that, and I’ve used both commercial and other free software – free in both senses.
I’ve found that GIMP has features that are really good for cleaning up scanned images.
The Haunted Chest of Drawers from La Vie Parisienne (1863), scanned and restored by Liam Quin, CC-BY-SA
Americo: What do you think about artists using GIMP?
Liam: I think artists, people approach art from all sorts of different angles and direction.
And some people want something very immediate, which you might find in
MyPaint for example, where you open MyPaint and you don’t even have
to do File → New, it’s just there, and you can start drawing.
And at the other extreme, there are people who plan a drawing for a long time, maybe draw careful
pencil sketches and build something up over a period of hours, days, months, even years. And within
those, there’s people who are very precise, work with numerical angles, will write a little programming
script to create a particular effect – and there’s other people who will want to do lots of experiments
and choose the one that works best.
I think what we’ve been seeing is that the user interface of GIMP has been changing. There’s been a move
towards supporting the spontaneity a lot more. The early GIMP was really aimed at the people who thought
about their art more than – as I see it – more than just sitting down and painting. That’s actually why I
think my husband would prefer MyPaint to GIMP. He said he hated GIMP, and part of that was because he was
taught Photoshop at university. Universities shouldn’t be teaching specific programs, they should be
teaching the underlying skills, they should teach image editing, not a particular version of a particular
program. But you spend so long learning one program that you get really tied to it.
But we also have the fact that GIMP has been more – um, people have this left-brain, right-brain
categorization which turns out to not have much basis in reality, our brains don’t actually work
that way – but GIMP is more “left-brain” than “right-brain”. Not as extreme as Inkscape or
Illustrator for example, where you can’t even do a brush stroke, you do an outline really,
unless you fight the tool.
[Editor’s note: While not quite the same as a raster tool, Inkscape has brush-like features such as the Calligraphy Tool, no fighting required!]
So there’s people doing fabulous, professional artwork - really good quality artwork with GIMP.
It doesn’t suit everyone, but if it does suit you, it’s absolutely awesome. It’s got lots of features.
I don’t know of any other art program where you can control the brush size with a MIDI keyboard, right.
That might sound really weird, and yet, I can imagine holding a MIDI device in one hand, or using one
foot to control a MIDI device, because it exists, a pedal for example, and wiring that to brush size
and that could be really interesting.
So yeah, GIMP is fine for doing professional art, but as an artist you’ve got to figure out which
tools you’re going to use. When you walk into a gallery and you see paintings by the old masters,
you look at them and they stand out. They’re called masters because they’ve mastered the technique,
and they think about what they want to do, and the technique becomes – as far as the observer is
concerned, watching them work – they’re not thinking about how to achieve the effect they want,
it just happens. In actual fact, some of them probably spent a long time thinking about the effect they want,
but it doesn’t seem that way.
Some people say it takes about 10,000 hours of work to become a master in something if you practice it.
I think you can become a master in digital painting, in multiple tools, and GIMP is one of them. It’s
a strong one, but it doesn’t have to be the end of it.
Jehan: Does your work in W3C have maybe any relationship or link with GIMP?
Liam: We have stronger links to Inkscape actually. The strongest link to
GIMP a long time ago was the PNG support, because the PNG image format was jointly developed with W3C
and IETF. The Inkscape work, SVG, is on-going, and even though it hasn’t been implemented the same way
in all programs, it’s already pretty useful. But there have been other overlaps such as color management
and compositing, for example.
Liam Quin (right) in costume at W3C conference, CC-BY-SA
At one point I reached out to someone from Adobe who was working on CSS compositing, and who knew about
the internals of Photoshop, and he came and joined the GIMP IRC channel and talked with people there about
color models and compositing. So in some ways I’ve tried to encourage communication. And I think the culture
of the web, the web has really done a lot for free and open source software. More people are using free
software now than ever before, because of free web browser and free web tools. So the work that we’re doing
at W3C certainly relates to the GNU project, the GNOME project, the GIMP project – both technically, legally,
socially. So there’s links in that kind of way. But I don’t think we have a whole lot of direct contact.
Jehan: What do you see in the future of GIMP?
Liam: I suspect that the long term future of GIMP is that these native toolkits are going to get replaced
with webpages and Javascript.
Jehan: So you mean GTK+?
Liam: I expect eventually there will be a Javascript to replace GTK. In ten years time, I think GIMP
will be running in a web browser as a web app in some way.
Jehan [laughing]: Seriously, or is that a joke?
Liam: No, I was completely serious. And the reason I think that is, what the web has done is it’s
assimilated – like the famous Borg – it’s taken over all sorts of things. Native clients for particular
applications have gone away whenever it was feasible to replace them with a web app. 25 years ago –
can that be right? In 1995, how long ago was that? 22 years ago… I was in a conference in Ottawa, for
document management systems. And these all had proprietary desktop clients that were basically GitHub.
That you loaded a proprietary client, and it had a button to check out a file, another one to check it
back in, open it in editor, show differences.
And there still are proprietary clients for git and CVS on Windows, for example, there’s
TortoiseCVS and friends, but I wouldn’t want to bet my
business on something like that today. Because someone else would come along and make a web-based one,
and it would work almost as well as mine, as best as I could do. And it would cost them a tenth a cost
to develop it. They could sell it for much less than I could sell mine, it would be easier to support –
I’d be out of business. And in fact, almost all of those document management companies have gone out of
business. I think there’s two left of the ones that was at that show, and one of them has been bought by
AutoCAD. So, I think we’re going to be replaced – the question is when, not whether.
Jehan: So we will be replaced, or GIMP will go to that format?
Liam: One way or another. That will depend on the people, whether the people are willing to do
that change, and they’re around when it happens.
Jehan: And so GIMP would run remotely on some server?
Liam: It’ll run in your web browser.
Jehan: So still locally, but on your web browser?
Liam: Yeah, I think so.
Serpentin-Tanzerin,
from Moderne Kunst in Meister-Holzschnitten Band XV (1901), scanned and restored by Liam Quin, CC-BY-SA
Simon: So this is my question. When you say Web page or Web browser, you’re not talking about
Software as a Service.
Liam: No, I’m actually talking about a program written in Javascript or something that compiles
into Javascript, more likely. What they call a transpiler these days.
Simon: But users doesn’t necessarily have to realize it’s doing this, right?
Liam: No, correct. They’d look identical for all we know, because every GIMP window would just
be a browser window.
Jehan: It’s funny because Mitch had basically a question about this. Did you read Mitch’s message?
Liam: Yes I did.
Jehan: He had a question about Javascript, and we kind of laughed about it.
Simon: Yeah, but this was a different Javascript approach.
Jehan: Javascript for the UI.
Simon: Yes, but not necessarily via a browser.
Liam: I’m expecting gegl.js to happen, let’s put it that way.
Simon: In some ways I think it’s even already happened.
Liam: It has already, because people have done the automatic translation. But what you really
want is something written to take advantage of the browser’s own image processing capabilities
whereever it can, so it actually goes fast.
Simon: And, for example, having a WebGL backend or something.
Liam: Yeah. I mean, things written in the browser, in Javascript, can actually be reasonably
performant now, they can go reasonably fast. I just think it will happen. If it doesn’t happen,
what will happen is someone will write – people are already writing – one of the many photo-editing
applications and art applications that are happening as web apps now, will take over. Because there
will be 20 million users of the one, and 5,000 users of the other, probably. But that would be sad
because there’s so much work that’s gone into GIMP. I would like to see it carry on, but I just
think that the future may be running in web browsers.
I don’t know for sure. I mean I’m not sure I like it. I’m not saying drop everything and do this
now, but I am saying
“keep your sword at your side, for you know not when the hour will come”.
That’s a Biblical quote – they’re actually referring to the end of the world [laughing].
Jehan: Is there something regarding your work with GIMP, for your stock image company - is there
anything in GIMP that you’re really looking forward to? A feature or planned change, to really
help your daily work?
Liam: Yeah, actually. I think that non-destructive editing when that happens will really help me.
Because the ability to go back and conceptually edit the graph, for example, to have a check box –
not saying you’d do it this way – but imagine having a checkbox by each entry in the undo history,
and being able to deselect one of them and see what the image would be like if I didn’t do this.
You can’t actually implement it like that inside GIMP, but that’s a way of thinking about how it
might look.
Because quite often I would do something like a 10, 15, 20 pixel radius blur to get rid of screening
artifacts, and then I have to do several other operations and scale the image down and sharpen
before I get an image I can sell. I can’t sell a blurry image, but I can’t sell one that’s made
up of lots of dots either. So I have to get rid of the dots and I do that either by blurring or
wavelet decompose or something like
that. And then I do other operations, and I discover some time later that I didn’t use the right radius
for my blur, because the challenge is to use the smallest radius that gets rid of all the dots. If I use
too big a radius, I get an image that’s too blurry to sell. If I use too small a radius, when I scale the
image down, the dots come back when I sharpen it. So I can imagine being able to go back and just change
that radius, and have GIMP show me the result of the scaled down image, and I can see “Yes, great, that
was the right number!”.
So the non-destructive editing will be a big plus for me.
[Editor’s note: Non-destructive editing was added in GIMP 2.99.18, and officially released in GIMP 3.0 in 2025!]
Image of
Grose: Antique Books, photographed by Liam Quin, CC-BY-SA
Jehan: You also have a very interesting use case, which is that you work on very, very big images.
Liam: I hear that a lot from GIMP people. I hear it a lot from photography people. I never hear
it from print people. People doing graphic design with print, are not surprised if an image says it
takes a gigabyte of memory for one layer.
[Audible gasp of shock from the audience]
We have people who come to the GIMP IRC channel, say they do work for print, and they’re editing
a 20,000 by 15,000 pixel image in RGB mode and it’s going a bit slowly, and what should they do
about this?
Jehan: Yes, of course you always have people who have bigger images, but what is a typical size for you?
Liam: Well, that is a typical size. I was editing one yesterday that was 3.6 gigabytes when I first
opened it, just one layer. And I scan in high resolution because people typically want a detail of an
image at large size, and also because I can produce higher quality images than most other people. And
if you’re a small company, you’ve got to have an advantage over the big companies. The big companies
have millions of mediocre images and I’ve got thousands of really good ones, so people come to me.
And it works.
There are some issues with GIMP. I mean, 16 gigabytes of memory is a minimum. My laptop’s not really
good enough for the larger images, it has 8 gigabytes. My desktop has 32 gigabytes and that’s okay,
as long as you don’t use multiple layers. You start using too many layers then you have to be careful.
Jehan: Do you think that GIMP handles the images well?
Liam: Pretty well. I understand that compared to two or three other image editors that I’ve use,
it seems very slow with these images. An example is if I do
Curves, after pressing Okay I might
have to wait 5 minutes, whereas in the other editors I don’t have to wait at all.
The reason for that though is that they’re doing the work in the background, and they’re just showing
me the preview image, what I can see on the screen, and then they’re applying curves in the background
to the full image. And every now and again you catch up and the program tells you to wait for no
obvious reason, so it’s a trade-off.
Jehan: So do you think it’s better what we’re doing, or do you think…?
Liam: I actually think in most cases it’s better to do the work in the background, because after
I’ve done Curves, I probably want to look at the image and think for a minute about what to do next,
and the program could make use of that time. But I’m also aware that there’s a lot of optimizations
that has not been done to GEGL yet, and it could well be that the bottlenecks could be improved a lot.
So I’m not too worried about it right now. It’s usable, there are places where it’s slow, and I’m not
too worried.
Aryeom: I want to hear about your typography.
Liam: Yeah, I have a background in typography.
Requiem by Liam Quin, CC-BY-SA
Aryeom: And you have another art style.
Liam: I do, I’ve done other art, yes. I do calligraphy as well. But the calligraphy I do is
done with pen and ink and gouache and paper. That’s partly because I don’t have a tablet. So
this week I actually got to try graphics tablets, thank you, although I discovered it didn’t
work with GIMP 2.9 properly, the preview version. It did work with 2.8, and I think I could
get use to drawing with a tablet. So that was quite interesting – I wasn’t sure before. And
it would be quite interesting to do some calligraphy with a tablet. But with calligraphy I’m
use to looking at the pen, positioning it between pencil lines and thinking about each stroke.
I think working with a tablet would be more like brush calligraphy than paint calligraphy, but
I don’t know.
The hardest thing I’ve found is that the tablet’s surface is too smooth. So the bite of the paper,
as they call it, which slows you down when you’re drawing, is an important part of calligraphy.
Jehan: Someone was telling me about Wacom tablets, and other tablets I think, where you can put
paper on the tablet and you actually draw on it. Have you seen that kind of stuff?
Liam: I see! I hadn’t thought of that, that would be really interesting. And the computer
would record the drawing while I made it.
Jehan: You can even do it while the tablet is unplugged, because it will record it and then
later you can plug it in.
Aryeom: Yes, but it’s vector.
Jehan: Maybe vector, yeah.
Aryeom: Can you send us your work?
Liam: Yes I can. I can send you some pictures, yeah. Some of it has been published so
that’s quite nice. I had a calligraphy piece that was used on the front cover of Time magazine,
so that was quite nice. I don’t often get phone calls from the art director of Time magazine,
so that was a surprise.
Front cover of
Time Magazine,
featuring calligraphy by Liam Quin
Americo: I have a question. Do you have any advice for users, artists, photographers who think
about or consider using GIMP? Do you have any advice on how we should approach it?
Liam: I suppose it depends on what you’re trying to achieve and your personality. So if
your personality is that you just like to go and do things quickly, as I said earlier. If you
want the MyPaint style where you just go and do, but you want more richness, which GIMP gives you.
For example, you might make a set of images which are blank or mostly blank, and basically use them
like templates. You just double-click on an image and GIMP comes up with that blank image, and then
you start. Which is much easier than doing File → New and
using a GIMP template. Then you can just
start painting.
I mean you could ask people who paint. We have people like Americo here, who is doing fabulous
stuff with making his own brushes from patterns in the clipboard and with paint dynamics, and
really spending a lot of thought into exploring the tool and what it can do.
And you have other people who say, “All I want is something like a charcoal stick with undo”.
Or you have people who want things more like an engineering drawing. I occasionally do text-based
art with GIMP. I’m more likely to use Inkscape because it has slightly better typography. And
these days I’m more likely to use a web browser and CSS, because I can get the OpenType features
which I can’t in GIMP or Inkscape. If you’re a typographer, being able to use the font properly
is important to you. GIMP is very, very limited at this time, it really is. But it has it, and
it’s the only thing you can go back and edit afterwards. So from that point of view… [laughing]
I think the biggest two problems I hear with people using GIMP, one of them is they haven’t found
Single Window Mode. If you’re not someone who grew up with the X Window System and applications
having 25 windows, you might find it really cluttered and difficult to manage. So then you get switched
to Single Window Mode, which I use. Even though I used the X Window System as early as 1988 I think.
Simon: It’s the default now, at least for 2.9.
Liam: I’m glad it’s the default. It’s not perfect, it was never finished, but it’s more approachable.
The other default that people often have to change is the
tile cache size. If you’re working with
print images especially, then you need to change the tile cache size to be three-quarters of your
physical memory or maybe more, depending on what else you’ve got running. You want as much in memory
as possible without crashing your system, and it can be a hard trade-off.
Americo: Something I often discover is that people try to “get” GIMP by trial and error, and I’m not
sure if this is the right approach to software as complex as GIMP. I’ve tried this with Paint Shop Pro
and also Photoshop, and I didn’t get far either. I always have to turn to the manual.
Liam: I believe it’s deliberate that you can’t in Photoshop. Paint Shop Pro I don’t know about,
it’s been years since I used it. But I suspected – don’t know this for sure – I suspect that in
Photoshop, what they’re trying to do – you use to get this from the Debian community as well –
the idea is to make something hard enough, it’s a trial by fire. You make something hard enough,
that people have to put real emotional effort into learning it. And then they’ll stick with it
through thick and thin. Because they’ve put so much emotional effort into learning something so hard.
Photoshop and Illustrator have an interface where there’s hidden buttons in the toolbox. You
hold down the mouse pointer over one of the little squares in the toolbox and eventually a
hidden secret drawer opens and more tools appear. There’s no way you would discover something
like that, right, it’s not discoverable. The way that you find it is the manual or a tutorial.
[Editor’s note: In GIMP 2.10, we ended up adding an option for these “hidden buttons”, known as tool groups]
So for GIMP, probably the best of the books I’ve seen for learning GIMP is called
“The Artist’s Guide to GIMP”,
and I love that guy’s tutorials. He says things like, “To start with, press D on the
keyboard to get the black and white default colors. Now press X to exchange them.
Now you’re drawing with white.”. And telling you things like that, mean that the tutorial will
work regardless of your previous settings. He’s teaching you a way of using GIMP where you
don’t mess yourself up, and if you don’t mess yourself up, you have much more confidence to explore.
Cover of ‘The Artist’s Guide to GIMP’, by Michael Hammel
So I really love his tutorials. He explains, he says how you can do things by clicking, or by
using the keystroke or by using the menu. It’s really, really well done. So that’s what I have
suggested to people who want to learn GIMP, is that particular book. But other people prefer
video tutorials. I don’t have patience for video tutorials – just tell me! But a lot of other
people like them.
Aryeom: If I want to make a tutorial, is there any advice on the best way?
Liam: I’ve done some tutorials that people didn’t like, and some that they really did like.
And the tutorials that people really did like are the ones where you’re teaching, and at the
same time you’re not assuming. So you don’t assume that people know jargon, you don’t assume
that people know special names. If you start off in a tutorial saying “The first thing you’ve
got to do is add an alpha channel to your image, and then divide the hypotenuse by the cosine
of the vertex”, you’ve lost three-quarters of your audience.
If instead you say, “We need our layer to be transparent so that we can see things in the
lower layers through it, and to do this, we have to use a menu item called Add Alpha Channel”,
then what you’ve done is you’ve taught someone what alpha channel means and why they want to use
it. So instead of just saying “Do this, do this, do this”, if you teach people a little while,
you’re also writing a tutorial that’s more robust. Because it might be that in a future version
of GIMP, the menu moves. So you can build in notes. You can do things like say, “If you can’t
find this, you can use the slash key to search for things in the new release. This is how you do
that”. And then you might make a tutorial that’s robust and that people follow. Because people get
really upset if they find a tutorial for GIMP version 1.2 and they try to follow it and it doesn’t
work. So then they find a tutorial for some other image editor and they try to follow that and it
doesn’t work, obviously. And they get angry and swear at us, and maybe they come to IRC and say
your program is full of worms and your mother was a raspberry tart! And we say, “Why are you saying this?”
and they say this tutorial doesn’t work!
You can’t write something that’s going to be proof against future completely, but you can write
something that’s going to be a little bit robust, and that teaches people and keeps the sense of
delight and fun. And if you do that, people will enjoy using your tutorial and learn from it,
and you’ll have fun.
Aryeom: Thank you for the advice!
Liam: I’m hoping to do some tutorials this year for scanning images, working on scanning
images from books, old books, published, printed books.
Jehan: That’s good – for gimp.org?
Liam: Yeah, I hope so. One of the things I’m really hoping for is the
XSane project makes a version of their
GIMP plug-in that works with the new release, with 2.9, to do high bit depth images. Right now it’s
restricted to 8 bits per channel. My scanner can do 16 bits per channel, RGB, it’s A4 or Tabloid size.
But in fact XSane crashes if I try to do that.
Jehan: So you scan with another software?
Liam: I scan with XSane, but I have to save it to a file and then I have to open the file in GIMP.
And that’s actually a pain for me, because the point at which I choose the file name, the book is still
on the scanner, and my file names are usually the page number in the book and the caption as the file name.
But if the book is on the scanner then I can’t see what page number it’s on, so I have to remember beforehand
to write down the page name, so it’s a pain. So if I’m scanning six images or something at once with the
plug-in, it arrives one after the other in GIMP. And a fabulous GIMP feature, not in any of the other
software I’ve used, is that I can be scanning one image with a progress bar going along, cleaning up
another one, and saving a third one, all at the same time. And that’s three times the throughput that I
get with other software.
Happy New Year
from Moderne Kunst in Meister-Holzschnitten Band XIII (1897), scanned and restored by Liam Quin
I’ve been to places where they’re scanning books professionally, and they have three, four, five computers
in a row, with multiple scanners. So you start scanning on one, then you move to the next one, start
scanning on that, go back to the first one, start cleaning it up, go to the next one, start that one
scanning, go this one, start saving the image – because that other proprietary software could only do
one of those things at a time. That’s still true today.
So by using the plug-in I get much more throughput, so I can have the scanner going – and it can take
up to 20 minutes to scan an image, and it can take up to 5 or 10 minutes to save an image. For GIMP to
export an image to PNG for example, can take 5 or 10 minutes if it’s a several gigabyte image going to
a hard drive. So, it’s really nice to be able to work effectively with multiple threads. I like that.
So I should write some tutorials because GIMP really is better than anything else I’ve used.
Aryeom: I will translate it to Korean because I’ve seen someone on a Korean website asking how to
scan in GIMP like this.
Liam: Okay! Maybe they’ve already written a better tutorial than I will, we’ll see. I’ve been doing it
for more than ten years. 1999, I think, I started my website,
fromoldbooks.org. So it’s going to be coming
up to 20 years old before too long. Some of the books are 500 years old.
Jehan: And you’ve been using GIMP since the beginning?
Liam: I used GIMP early on. I had a period when I was writing a book and the publisher required me to
use Microsoft Office, so I was on Windows. For a lot of that time I was using other software. I actually
end up using Paint Shop Pro because it had something like, what GIMP calls a corrective or reverse transformation.
Jehan: And GIMP did not have it?
Liam: GIMP had it, but GIMP wasn’t doing well on Windows at the time. And the other software I had,
Photoshop, did not have anything like a corrective mode that was as useful. GIMP’s corrective mode is
actually better because it’s a grid and not just a line. The Photoshop one, as I recall, you draw a line
on something that should be horizontal or vertical. But in most scanned images I’ve got, they’re
hand-made engravings, there isn’t going to be a definite horizontal or vertical, because it’s an
artist’s sketch. So I have to choose what looks best. I start out by getting the grid roughly right,
clicking rotate and seeing what happens. Flatten the image to get rid of the corner artifacts and
seeing what it looks like. And if it looks okay – with experience you can most of the time do it
first time.
One of my few patches to GIMP in fact, was to change the undo history to say what the angle was.
This way, I can do an undo, even half an hour later, I can see what the angle was and I can say,
“Well, that was just a bit too much, I’ll try reducing it just a bit and try again”, and usually
second go I get it right. And that’s an example of it being an open source free/libre software.
I was able to contribute a patch, which Mitch kindly rejected, and I was able to redo it, and
get it in the right format. And he incorporated it – and then I think he wrote it even more.
Looking at the code yesterday I discovered – it’s a year or two since I did the patch – I looked
at the patch and discovered it’d been rewritten even more, which is good. But that simple patch
has saved me, cumulatively, hours and hours of work, just knowing that information. Because I
might do two or three rotations in a sequence, then go back and undo them and do a single
rotation, because you degrade the image slightly when you rotate it. And if it takes 10, 15
minutes to do a rotate of a large image, then saving two or three attempts at rotation everyday
has saved me a lot of time, you know.
Screenshot of Undo History with Rotation Angles shown, from Liam’s patch
So that’s all part of why GIMP is so fabulous. That, and being able to come onto the IRC
channel and say a particular thing is really slow. The first time I did that, it was Sven
at the time years ago, he couldn’t believe it was taking me 20, 25 minutes to rotate an image.
He looked at the code, and he had me do some profiling, and then he said “Oh”, and made a one
line fix. And it went down from 20 minutes to 2 minutes the next time I recompiled GIMP, ten
minutes later. Same day! A fix on the same day. In the libre graphics world, in the free software
world, that’s not unusual. In the “I’ll make a support ticket with my vendor” world, it’s not
unheard of but it’s pretty rare. So that’s been a real plus.
Sometimes the developers will say “No, we can’t make that faster because…”, or “We won’t,
because we’re going to replace it”. But there’s been a few occasions when GIMP has been
faster because I’ve gone into the IRC channel and said I profiled this, or here’s a patch,
or can someone fix that. So it’s been fabulous.
Jehan: I think we’ve asked most questions. Is there anything you’d like to say that we didn’t ask you?
Liam: Yeah. The biggest thing I think we have to do, is get a message out to the world
that GIMP is perfectly suitable for professional use. It’s aimed at professional use, and
people are using it professionally, successfully. It’s not a second choice, it’s a first
choice. It’s not because I can’t afford this other program, or because my principles say
I don’t eat meat, or I don’t use programs beginning with P. It’s a first choice – it’s
actually better for what I’m doing then any other program I’ve used, and I’ve used a lot.
So we need to get that message out a lot more, and we need to have more confidence in
talking about GIMP. We’re close to it, we see all the problems, we have visions that
we know are not happening, and yet, we forget sometimes that we’ve got something really
really good there. And we need not be ashamed to say that.
Aryeom: Why do you think people are sometimes ashamed or don’t have confidence to use GIMP?
Liam: I knew a chemist once who worked in a jam factory, where they made marmalade and jam.
And he saw what the jam did to the steel containers where they mixed it. And they had huge steel
vats like the size of a small building, like a big mixing bowl. And the jam is highly acidic,
and it would eat the steel. And he said he would never eat jam again, after seeing how jam was
made. But you know, if you make jam at home it’s no better. It’s no better than any other food,
or worse – alright, it may have too much sugar in it. Or it’s like the sausage maker who knows
what goes in the sausage.
We’re aware of all the problems, and we’re aware that we have visions of how GIMP could be in
some other universe, and it isn’t. But that’s okay, it’s what it is. The fact we can say, the
text tool could be improved so that after you scale the image, text is still text for example.
We can look at that and say “Yeah, that’d be fairly easy to fix but we’re busy”. But we still
have a better text tool than a lot of other programs, you know, even without making any other
changes. We’re too busy to go look at other programs – and perhaps worried too about intellectual
property, about using someone else’s design. But the truth is, GIMP is better than, in many ways –
not perfect, not saying that – but it’s better in many ways than we realize.
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