The GIMP's UI is quite unfortunate. Considering that it is the program whose name is forever sealed in GTK (GIMP ToolKit), it is a bit of a shame to see it looking dated while the toolkit grows without it. It is by no means a good showcase of the toolkit's abilities. It looks ugly, it ignores some of GTK's advanced features that it really should be using to improve its usability, and its mystery meat interface is impossible to navigate. (GTK is about accessibility, and somehow this program manages to dodge that principle).
I suppose one reason it bothers me is its icon set. Considering most Gnome desktops have moved on to Tango, it just looks dated. (If only we had Pencil and Rectangle stock widgets). I can't fault the program for that one, of course, since that's my distro's job!
The good news is that its problems are all interface; the program itself is pretty capable, especially combined with Scribus for printing with colour management. Maybe some day a kind soul will come along and bump that thing into the future :)
I'm not sure what kind of image work you are doing, but for lots of stuff, Inkscape (vector graphics editor) can be quite pleasing and yields excellent, scalable results after a bit of learning.
I suppose one reason it bothers me is its icon set. Considering most Gnome desktops have moved on to Tango, it just looks dated. (If only we had Pencil and Rectangle stock widgets). I can't fault the program for that one, of course, since that's my distro's job!
The good news is that its problems are all interface; the program itself is pretty capable, especially combined with Scribus for printing with colour management. Maybe some day a kind soul will come along and bump that thing into the future :)
I'm not sure what kind of image work you are doing, but for lots of stuff, Inkscape (vector graphics editor) can be quite pleasing and yields excellent, scalable results after a bit of learning.