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Simple drawing tools?Simple drawing tools?Posted May 8, 2012 3:51 UTC (Tue) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093)Parent article: GIMP 2.8 released
Gimp is great for expert use, but still makes some of the simple things harder than they need to be. For example, consider editing photograph which I wish to mark with a big red arrow pointing to something. At the moment, I have to draw the arrow on by hand, and it usually looks terrible. Personally, I'd love to see some hybrid of the features of Libreoffice Draw, Xfig, Gimp.
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Simple drawing tools? Posted May 8, 2012 3:59 UTC (Tue) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link]
It seems there is a way, using a plugin...
http://maketecheasier.com/draw-arrows-in-gimp/2010/12/25
This proves both my points:
Simple drawing tools? Posted May 8, 2012 10:50 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] How is "Drawing an arrow" a "basic feature"? In all the images I've manipulated in the gimp I can, off hand, only think of one where I wanted an arrow. Going to a plugin for something specific like that seems perfectly reasonable.
Simple drawing tools? Posted May 8, 2012 16:35 UTC (Tue) by andrel (subscriber, #5166) [Link]
For a scientist adding an arrow is a basic feature, frequently used when one publishes an image.
Simple drawing tools? Posted May 8, 2012 16:55 UTC (Tue) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] Yes, exactly. My major use for GIMP was to annotate images to prepare figures for illustrating scientific papers (arrows, labels, brackets, cropping, compositing). However, Inkscape is now a much better tool for this purpose.
Simple drawing tools? Posted May 24, 2012 17:35 UTC (Thu) by dashesy (subscriber, #74652) [Link]
Maybe some plug-ins should be prepackaged, to draw simple shapes, circles and arrows. Inkscape is great but is an overkill for a simple editing job.
Simple drawing tools? Posted May 8, 2012 9:17 UTC (Tue) by prokoudine (guest, #41788) [Link]
You are not editing photographs, you are annotating them :)
Just use Shutter.
Simple drawing tools? Posted May 9, 2012 0:39 UTC (Wed) by wertigon (guest, #42963) [Link]
You have simple drawing tools available to you, you just don't know it yet.
To draw a straight line, click once anywhere in the image, hold ctrl.
To draw a circle, choose the round selection tool, right-click, choose "borders" and specify the size of the border. Same thing with a rectangle and whatever else you can draw with the selection tools.
Personally, I think GIMP could use simplifications in interface for some things; for instance, there's one tool to draw with soft edges, one tool to draw with hard edges, one tool for spraying, etc - These work in a very similar fashion, so why not combine all these tools to a single one with a few extra (visible) options instead? Things like, "scatter randomly", "blur edges" etc. Same thing with selection tools - is there any difference between round and square selection apart from the shape of the selection?
The biggest problem with the GIMP UI is that most features are hidden by default. I think Mark Shuttleworth is on to something when he wants to end the right click context menus, because quite frankly, they suck.
Simple drawing tools? Posted May 9, 2012 21:41 UTC (Wed) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link]
Thanks. I never knew that!
As for context menus, I'd refine your statement to "right click context menus suck when they are the only way to discover a feature". They're a great timesaver when they replicate common options for quick access.
Simple drawing tools? Posted May 10, 2012 4:55 UTC (Thu) by ewen (subscriber, #4772) [Link]
FTR, according to the tool tip (which I only noticed thanks to your comment) it's hold *shift* for a straight line (click, release, hold shift, move somewhere else, click again); holding *ctrl* seems to allow picking a colour out of the image you're working on (another equally useful feature that I'd not noticed before).
Thanks for the hints. I do tend to agree that most of the features being "hidden by default" is a significant issue. Certainly the ones I use most generally seem to be well nested into context menu (and generally I only found them by doing a depth-first search of the menus for a feature that "must exist").
Ewen
Simple drawing tools? Posted May 15, 2012 14:54 UTC (Tue) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]
GIMP's tip-of-the-day is pretty useful for learning things like this.
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