loading . . . Interview with LiamĂÂ Quin //_ TODO: Introduction _//
This interview took place over April 21 - 23, 2017. In addition to **Jehan** and **Liam** , **Simon Budig** , **Aryeom Han** , and **Americo Gobbo** were also involved and asked questions.
**IMAGE SUGGESTION: Head shot/profile picture of Liam**
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_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? Iâve been using GIMP for over 300 years, since 1997 or 1998. Iâm not sure â â98 I think.
_Jehan [laughing]: Not very good with mathematics._
**Liam** : Not very good with mathematics, numbers, no - Iâve heard of them. Computer science, got that â donât need to be very good at maths to get a degree in computer science. Although I should have specialized in maths â and digital typography is my background, and I think my first love.
I work today for the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C, where Iâve 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.
_Jehan: Okay, so what has been your involvement with GIMP?_
**Liam** : Iâm 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 youâll see me there. I just met the people at a GNOME GUADEC conference years ago, and decided they were really good people.
Iâve 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 Iâve even made some patches, although not very many.
_Jehan: Maybe you can tell us what you like about GIMP, what you donât like about GIMP?_
**Liam** : What I like least about GIMP is the name, because I work in accessibility. So for example, I canât wear the GIMP shirt at work because there will be people who are upset.
_[Editorâs note: More information about the name and where things currently stand]_
But 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 canât. That it runs on free platforms, such as GNU/Linux systems. I like that itâs in a language I can read. I particularly like that itâs 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, âScan this image and clean it up for meâ, but weâre 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 Iâve used both commercial and other free software â free in both senses. Iâve found that GIMP has features that are really good for cleaning up scanned images.
**IMAGE SUGGESTION: Picture of Liam in GIMP shirt or with GIMP banner?**
_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 donât even have to do `File` â `New`, itâs 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, thereâs people who are very precise, work with numerical angles, will write a little programming script to create a particular effect â and thereâs other people who will want to do lots of experiments and choose the one that works best.
I think what weâve been seeing is that the user interface of GIMP has been changing. Thereâs 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 â as I see it â more than just sitting down and painting. Thatâs 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 shouldnât 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 â um, people have this left-brain, right-brain categorization which turns out to not have much basis in reality, our brains donât actually work that way â but GIMP is more âleft-brainâ than âright-brainâ. Not as extreme as Inkscape or Illustrator for example, where you canât even do a brush stroke, you do an outline really, unless you fight the tool.
So thereâs people doing fabulous, professional artwork - really good quality artwork with GIMP. It doesnât suit everyone, but if it does suit you, itâs absolutely awesome. Itâs got lots of features. I donât 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 youâve got to figure out which tools youâre 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. Theyâre called masters because theyâve mastered the technique, and they think about what they want to do, and the technique becomes â as far as the observer is concerned, watching them work â theyâre 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 doesnât 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. Itâs a strong one, but it doesnât 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 hasnât been implemented the same way the programs, itâs already pretty useful. But there have been other overlaps such as color management and compositing, for example.
**IMAGE SUGGESTION: Image of Liam at W3C?**
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 Iâve 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 weâre doing at W3C certainly relates to the GNU project, the GNOME project, the GIMP project â both technically, legally, socially. So thereâs links in that kind of way. But I donât 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 itâs assimilated â like the famous Borg â itâs 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 â 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, thereâs TortoiseCVS and friends, but I wouldnât 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 â Iâd be out of business. And in fact, almost all of those document management companies have gone out of business. I think thereâs two left of the ones that was at that show, and one of them has been bought by AutoCAD. So, I think weâre going to be replaced â 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 theyâre around when it happens.
_Jehan: And so GIMP would run remotely on some server?_
**Liam** : Itâll run in your web browser.
_Jehan: So still locally, but on your web browser?_
**Liam** : Yeah, I think so.
_Simon: So this is my question. When you say Web page or Web browser, youâre not talking about_ _Software as a Service._
**Liam** : No, Iâm 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 doesnât necessarily have to realize itâs doing this, right?_
**Liam** : No, correct. Theyâd look identical for all we know, because every GIMP window would just be a browser window.
_Jehan: Itâs funny because Mitch had basically a question about this. Did you read Mitchâs 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** : Iâm expecting gegl.js to happen, letâs put it that way.
_Simon: In some ways I think itâs 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 browserâs 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 doesnât happen, what will happen is someone will write â people are already writing â 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 thereâs so much work thatâs 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 donât know for sure. I mean Iâm not sure I like it. Iâm not saying drop everything and do this now, but I am saying âkeep your sword at your side, for you know not when the hour will comeâ. Thatâs a Biblical quote â theyâre 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 youâre 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 â not saying youâd do it this way â 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 didnât do this. You canât actually implement it like that inside GIMP, but thatâs a way of thinking about how it might look.
**IMAGE SUGGESTION: Image from Liamâs stock image website?**
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 canât sell a blurry image, but I canât sell one thatâs 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 didnât 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 thatâs 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 âYes, great, that was the right number!â.
So the non-destructive editing will be a big plus for me.
_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 theyâre editing a 20,000 by 15,000 pixel image in RGB mode and itâs 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 youâre a small company, youâve got to have an advantage over the big companies. The big companies have millions of mediocre images and Iâve got thousands of really good ones, so people come to me. And it works.
**IMAGE SUGGESTION: Another example of Liamâs stock images?**
There are some issues with GIMP. I mean, 16 gigabytes of memory is a minimum. My laptopâs not really good enough for the larger images, it has 8 gigabytes. My desktop has 32 gigabytes and thatâs okay, as long as you donât 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 Iâve 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 donât have to wait at all.
The reason for that though is that theyâre doing the work in the background, and theyâre just showing me the preview image, what I can see on the screen, and then theyâre 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 itâs a trade-off.
_Jehan: So do you think itâs better what weâre doing, or do you thinkâŚ?_
**Liam** : I actually think in most cases itâs better to do the work in the background, because after Iâve 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 Iâm also aware that thereâs 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 Iâm not too worried about it right now. Itâs usable, there are places where itâs slow, and Iâm not too worried.
_Aryeom: I want to hear about your typography._
**Liam** : Yeah, I have a background in typography.
**IMAGE SUGGESTION: Example of Liamâs typography**
_Aryeom: And you have another art style._
**Liam** : I do, Iâve done other art, yes. I do calligraphy as well. But the calligraphy I do is done with pen and ink and gouache and paper. Thatâs partly because I donât have a tablet. So this week I actually got to try graphics tablets, thank you, although I discovered it didnât 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 â I wasnât sure before. And it would be quite interesting to do some calligraphy with a tablet. But with calligraphy Iâm 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 donât know.
The hardest thing Iâve found is that the tabletâs surface is too smooth. So the bite of the paper, as they call it, which slows you down when youâre 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 hadnât 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 itâs 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 thatâs quite nice. I had a calligraphy piece that was used on the front cover of Time magazine, so that was quite nice. I donât often get phone calls from the art director of Time magazine, so that was a surprise.
**IMAGE SUGGESTION: Cover of the Time Magazine with Liamâs work on it**
_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 youâre 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` â `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, âAll I want is something like a charcoal stick with undoâ. Or you have people who want things more like an engineering drawing. I occasionally do text-based art with GIMP. Iâm more likely to use Inkscape because it has slightly better typography. And these days Iâm more likely to use a web browser and CSS, because I can get the OpenType features which I canât in GIMP or Inkscape. If youâre 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 itâs 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 havenât found Single Window Mode. If youâre not someone who grew up with XWindows and applications having 25 windows, you might it really cluttered and difficult to manage. So then you get switched to Single Window Mode, which I use. Even though I used XWindows as early as 1988 I think.
_Simon: Itâs the default now, at least for 2.9._
**Liam** : Iâm glad itâs the default. Itâs not perfect, it was never finished, but itâs more approachable.
The other default that people often have to change is the tile cache size. If youâre 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 youâve 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 âgetâ GIMP by trial and error, and Iâm not_ _sure if this is the right approach to software as complex as GIMP. Iâve tried this with Paint Shop Pro_ _and also Photoshop, and I didnât get far either. I always have to turn to the manual._
**Liam** : I believe itâs deliberate that you canât in Photoshop. Paint Shop Pro I donât know about, itâs been years since I used it. But I suspected â donât know this for sure â I suspect that in Photoshop, what theyâre trying to do â you use to get this from the Debian community as well â the idea is to make something hard enough, itâs a trial by fire. You make something hard enough, that people have to put real emotional effort into learning it. And then theyâll stick with it through thick and thin. Because theyâve put so much emotional effort into learning something so hard.
Photoshop and Illustrator have an interface where thereâs 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. Thereâs no way you would discover something like that, right, itâs not discoverable. The way that you find it is the manual or a tutorial.
So for GIMP, probably the best of the books Iâve seen for learning GIMP is called âThe Artistâs Guide to GIMPâ, and I love that guyâs tutorials. He says things like, âTo start with, press `D` on the keyboard to get the black and white default colors. Now press `X` to exchange them. Now youâre drawing with white.â. And telling you things like that, mean that the tutorial will work regardless of your previous settings. Heâs teaching you a way of using GIMP where you donât mess yourself up, and if you donât mess yourself up, you have much more confidence to explore.
**IMAGE SUGGESTION: Cover of The Artistâs Guide to GIMP?**
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. Itâs really, really well done. So thatâs what I have suggested to people who want to learn GIMP, is that particular book. But other people prefer video tutorials. I donât have patience for video tutorials â 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** : Iâve done some tutorials that people didnât like, and some that they really did like. And the tutorials that people really did like are the ones where youâre teaching, and at the same time youâre not assuming. So you donât assume that people know jargon, you donât assume that people know special names. If you start off in a tutorial saying âThe first thing youâve got to do is add an alpha channel to your image, and then divide the hypotenuse by the cosine of the vertexâ, youâve lost three-quarters of your audience.
**IMAGE SUGGESTION: Screenshot from Liamâs teaching sessions, online or in-person?**
If instead you say, âWe 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`â, then what youâve done is youâve taught someone what alpha channel means and why they want to use it. So instead of just saying âDo this, do this, do thisâ, if you teach people a little while, youâre also writing a tutorial thatâs 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, âIf you canât find this, you can use the slash key to search for things in the new release. This is how you do thatâ. And then you might make a tutorial thatâs 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 doesnât work. So then they find a tutorial for some other image editor and they try to follow that and it doesnât 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, âWhy are you saying this?â and they say this tutorial doesnât work!
You canât write something thatâs going to be proof against future completely, but you can write something thatâs 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 youâll have fun.
_Aryeom: Thank you for the advice!_
**Liam** : Iâm hoping to do some tutorials this year for scanning images, working on scanning images from books, old books, published, printed books.
_Jehan: Thatâs good â for gimp.org?_
**Liam** : Yeah, I hope so. One of the things Iâm 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 itâs restricted to 8 bits per channel. My scanner can do 16 bits per channel, RGB, itâs 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 thatâs 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 canât see what page number itâs on, so I have to remember beforehand to write down the page name, so itâs a pain. So if Iâm 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 Iâve 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 thatâs three times the throughput that I get with other software.
**IMAGE SUGGESTION: Picture of Liamâs scanner setup?**
Iâve been to places where theyâre 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 â because that other proprietary software could only do one of those things at a time. Thatâs still true today.
So by using the plug-in I get much more throughput, so I can have the scanner going â 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 itâs a several gigabyte image going to a hard drive. So, itâs 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 Iâve used.
_Aryeom: I will translate it to Korean because Iâve seen someone on a Korean website asking how to_ _scan in GIMP like this._
**Liam** : Okay! Maybe theyâve already written a better tutorial than I will, weâll see. Iâve been doing it for more than ten years. 1999, I think, I started my website, fromoldbooks.org. So itâs going to be coming up to 20 years old before too long. Some of the books are 500 years old.
_Jehan: And youâve 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 wasnât 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. GIMPâs corrective mode is actually better because itâs 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 Iâve got, theyâre hand-made engravings, there isnât going to be a definite horizontal or vertical, because itâs an artistâs 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 â 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, âWell, that was just a bit too much, Iâll try reducing it just a bit and try againâ, and usually second go I get it right. And thatâs 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 â and then I think he wrote it even more. Looking at the code yesterday I discovered â itâs a year or two since I did the patch â I looked at the patch and discovered itâd 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.
**IMAGE SUGGESTION: Screenshot of GIMP workspace with undo history showing the angles?**
So thatâs 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 couldnât 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 âOhâ, 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, thatâs not unusual. In the âIâll make a support ticket with my vendorâ world, itâs not unheard of but itâs pretty rare. So thatâs been a real plus.
Sometimes the developers will say âNo, we canât make that faster becauseâŚâ, or âWe wonât, because weâre going to replace itâ. But thereâs been a few occasions when GIMP has been faster because Iâve gone into the IRC channel and said I profiled this, or hereâs a patch, or can someone fix that. So itâs been fabulous.
_Jehan: I think weâve asked most questions. Is there anything youâd like to say that we didnât 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. Itâs aimed at professional use, and people are using it professionally, successfully. Itâs not a second choice, itâs a first choice. Itâs not because I canât afford this other program, or because my principles say I donât eat meat, or I donât use programs beginning with P. Itâs a first choice â itâs actually better for what Iâm doing then any other program Iâve used, and Iâve 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. Weâre close to it, we see all the problems, we have visions that we know are not happening, and yet, we forget sometimes that weâve 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 donât 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 itâs no better. Itâs no better than any other food, or worse â alright, it may have too much sugar in it. Or itâs like the sausage maker who knows what goes in the sausage.
Weâre aware of all the problems, and weâre aware that we have visions of how GIMP could be in some other universe, and it isnât. But thatâs okay, itâs 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 âYeah, thatâd be fairly easy to fix but weâre busyâ. But we still have a better text tool than a lot of other programs, you know, even without making any other changes. Weâre too busy to go look at other programs â and perhaps worried too about intellectual property, about using someone elseâs design. But the truth is, GIMP is better than, in many ways â not perfect, not saying that â but itâs better in many ways than we realize.
**IMAGE SUGGESTION: Liamâs artwork**
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**Links** https://www.gimp.org/news/2026/07/12/liam-quin-interview-lgm2017/
