Yup. The interface doesn't resemble CS very closely, but it's certainly usable. It has gotten a lot more CS-like recently, but the program was originally designed with the idea that you'd have the content pane in the whole window or screen, and access everything via right mouse click. It's got levels, it's got curves, it's got alpha channels, layers 'til you're blue in the face, fully adjustable brushes, grab an image and use it as a brush; gradients, feathered selections, script-fu with all kinds of nonsense. I think it's great; it's open source so you can donate with money, pay for it with code, or use it for free.
LOL! I do find it annoying that the floating dialog and the tool settings don't seem to talk to each other and that setting changes don't take effect unless the text within the layer is selected, but these things aren't so bad as to make me quit GIMP for Paint. I'm guessing your move tool isn't set to "Move the selected layer" (I forget the exact wording of the other option, but it selects whatever layer it considers visible under the cursor when you put down the LMB - I cussed that one out because of how often it and I disagreed on which layer I was clicking on. Changing that might fix most of your problem, if you don't mind the inconvenience of having to hit Ctrl-Z and finding the layer you thought you had selected from the Layers list every now and then.) However, if I'm doing only a text, maybe a comic bubble, crop or 2^int resize, I just use Paint. These are actually easier to do in Paint than faffing around with selections and paths - 'cus as powerful as GIMP is, it lacks simple tools for doing simple things and using the powerful tools to do the simple things is often a pain in the ass. If you look at my images at https://thedonald.win/u/featherwinglove/?type=post and find any that don't have a semi-transparent feature, it was never opened in GIMP (I checked and if the main thing I need GIMP for is tiling multiple images, but I add text and consistently use semi-transparent text boxes. That said, I did find an exception in my saved files just now, so that probably won't be true for my TD.W posts forever. It was also obvious that tiling images was the main thing in that image. Wait, I think it's on Reddit, brb... https://redd.it/i5dt5m )
Yup. The interface doesn't resemble CS very closely, but it's certainly usable. It has gotten a lot more CS-like recently, but the program was originally designed with the idea that you'd have the content pane in the whole window or screen, and access everything via right mouse click. It's got levels, it's got curves, it's got alpha channels, layers 'til you're blue in the face, fully adjustable brushes, grab an image and use it as a brush; gradients, feathered selections, script-fu with all kinds of nonsense. I think it's great; it's open source so you can donate with money, pay for it with code, or use it for free.
LOL! I do find it annoying that the floating dialog and the tool settings don't seem to talk to each other and that setting changes don't take effect unless the text within the layer is selected, but these things aren't so bad as to make me quit GIMP for Paint. I'm guessing your move tool isn't set to "Move the selected layer" (I forget the exact wording of the other option, but it selects whatever layer it considers visible under the cursor when you put down the LMB - I cussed that one out because of how often it and I disagreed on which layer I was clicking on. Changing that might fix most of your problem, if you don't mind the inconvenience of having to hit Ctrl-Z and finding the layer you thought you had selected from the Layers list every now and then.) However, if I'm doing only a text, maybe a comic bubble, crop or 2^int resize, I just use Paint. These are actually easier to do in Paint than faffing around with selections and paths - 'cus as powerful as GIMP is, it lacks simple tools for doing simple things and using the powerful tools to do the simple things is often a pain in the ass. If you look at my images at https://thedonald.win/u/featherwinglove/?type=post and find any that don't have a semi-transparent feature, it was never opened in GIMP (I checked and if the main thing I need GIMP for is tiling multiple images, but I add text and consistently use semi-transparent text boxes. That said, I did find an exception in my saved files just now, so that probably won't be true for my TD.W posts forever. It was also obvious that tiling images was the main thing in that image. Wait, I think it's on Reddit, brb... https://redd.it/i5dt5m )