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A rant about Gimp

With the exception of cropping, any time I try to do anything with this program I cannot figure out how to do it. So like everyone else I google for answers. And I'll find lots of them because I'm not the first person trying to do whatever it is. Then begins the long march as instructions will differ in the various web pages from each other, corresponding items in my menus will be randomly non-existent or grayed out, and there will be lots of alternate ways of doing the same thing. (My guesses on how to do things don't even intersect with what the various pages say.) I rarely actually manage to achieve what I was trying to do.

Experts seem to love Gimp and the pages indicate that all the functionality is actually there. This is a classic case of a user interface design for experts and completely ignoring the perpetual intermediates.

Gimp is free software (as in freedom and cost) and they don't owe me anything, and you can easily argue the onus is on me to learn. But it is so frustrating knowing that they have all the pieces there - a dash of interaction design will go a long way. "Make the normal things easy and the hard things possible" as the saying goes, but Gimp seem to have done it the other way around.

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