Related to that, Jacob Boerema has implemented PSD Descriptor import support. Most of our current PSD support has been based on the the public Adobe specification. This document was last updated in 2019 however, and modern PSDs use a relatively undocumented text format called Descriptors to store many features.
The battle tested strategy of only providing old standards to others, like MS does.
Don’t use PSDs? I know people will say, “it’s not as simple as that, they’re industry standard”, but if you say you’ll only accept professional work in an open format, and you’re the client, you have the control to change things.
GIMP is all about letting people to open and edit any image files.
Whether it is a medical images format (DICOM), bitmap image only used on smart message, (Nokia’s Over The Air Bitmap), to open experimental niche format (Jeff’s Image Format).
Maybe that’s what it was. It doesn’t necessarily need to be that going forward, as project putlooks anf goals change with time.
Also editing is quite a lot of more work to support than mere viewing. As all tools and actions need to behave correctly - not jusbt the renderer.
And something proprietary can hadly be a “industry standard”. It can be “most common” or a “de facto standard”. But all “industry standards” are by definition open as any industry worth its weight doesn’t rely on or include a single point of failure anywhere within itself.
“It doesn’t necessarily need to be that going forward”
This part does not make any sense.
Making GIMP to be able to support any image format is a good thing. Especially for future file preservation.
If it was merely industry standard, if a software already good, people will just use the default format.
It already happen with various industries, like comic making in Asia using .CLIP (Clip Studio Paint) instead of .PSD
That’s nice to have. For both GIMP and the industry’s sake, priorities should be:
good UX
feature-wise competitiveness
in any (sensible) format
GIMP is an alternative to Photoshop. It isn’t a psd reader.
Being the format jack of all trades yet master of none isn’t too great of an idea. It’ll just exacerbate GIMP’s main current problem: an ancient UI Photoshop enthusiasts dread. A lot might consider switching if the bad GIMP UX was better than the also-bad Photoshop UX.
If I had to say what my main design gripe with gimp is, that’d be modularity. Seperate the ui (skins) from the tools, effects and rendering (formats). The UI is especially egregious in its hard-codedness while effects are pretty well-supported.
A few more apis would go a long way. Hell, even the closed Photoshop has open(ish) apis, since even Adobe know the value of an ecosystem and not just their internal r&d department!
The battle tested strategy of only providing old standards to others, like MS does.
Don’t use PSDs? I know people will say, “it’s not as simple as that, they’re industry standard”, but if you say you’ll only accept professional work in an open format, and you’re the client, you have the control to change things.
It’s not about not using PSD.
GIMP is all about letting people to open and edit any image files. Whether it is a medical images format (DICOM), bitmap image only used on smart message, (Nokia’s Over The Air Bitmap), to open experimental niche format (Jeff’s Image Format).
Maybe that’s what it was. It doesn’t necessarily need to be that going forward, as project putlooks anf goals change with time.
Also editing is quite a lot of more work to support than mere viewing. As all tools and actions need to behave correctly - not jusbt the renderer.
And something proprietary can hadly be a “industry standard”. It can be “most common” or a “de facto standard”. But all “industry standards” are by definition open as any industry worth its weight doesn’t rely on or include a single point of failure anywhere within itself.
“It doesn’t necessarily need to be that going forward”
This part does not make any sense. Making GIMP to be able to support any image format is a good thing. Especially for future file preservation.
If it was merely industry standard, if a software already good, people will just use the default format. It already happen with various industries, like comic making in Asia using .CLIP (Clip Studio Paint) instead of .PSD
That’s nice to have. For both GIMP and the industry’s sake, priorities should be:
GIMP is an alternative to Photoshop. It isn’t a psd reader.
Being the format jack of all trades yet master of none isn’t too great of an idea. It’ll just exacerbate GIMP’s main current problem: an ancient UI Photoshop enthusiasts dread. A lot might consider switching if the bad GIMP UX was better than the also-bad Photoshop UX.
If I had to say what my main design gripe with gimp is, that’d be modularity. Seperate the ui (skins) from the tools, effects and rendering (formats). The UI is especially egregious in its hard-codedness while effects are pretty well-supported.
A few more apis would go a long way. Hell, even the closed Photoshop has open(ish) apis, since even Adobe know the value of an ecosystem and not just their internal r&d department!
Case in point, the best office suite for both the old .doc file format and the previous (from 2013 and before) .docx file format is LibreOffice.