The sharpen tool was updated at some point and I personally find it too subtle for most of the things I do, I am a very technical person (e.g. 8K points on SO) so I feel like it’s not just me lol (but it could be), I’ve been using Gimp since 2006. I almost think a new Simple Tools pull down menu could be created maybe with things like “Simple Sharpen” as an option.
I don’t know much about the code is written for GIMP, would it be hard to start creating simplied options that bolt on to current menu system to do things more simply? For example take say a “Simple Sharpen” tool that works as the following (lifted from another tool)
You select either Smart or Standard sharpen, Smart is more like an HDR and Standard is the old school sharpen. In addition you can use a brush to take it way in places in the image. Being able to do that on the fly can save a lot of time in not having to create a layer and erase tool to accomplish the same thing.
This is lifted from somewhere and it’s one of the easiest sharpen tools I’ve ever used.
Another option is to just have a list of HDR, Sharpen, Depth, Grain etc. with a way to control the amount. Also really easy to use.
This is an example from a mobile app but it works well, After selecting ‘Details’, you get these options ‘Structure’ is HDR like, Sharpen is more like traditional sharpem etc… All you get is an option to turn it up or down… like stated in my other comment a brush option to remove would be nice as well which isn’t available in this tool. This tool since it’s mobile allows you to kind of play with them all and it has a blue dot letting you know you’ve used that tool… A desktop tool probably doesn’t need that feature.
What is nice is you can quickly apply mulitple types of sharpen to achieve what you want.
I regularly edit photos, I’m talking 1000s per year for fun and I have found tools like this to really make the edits super quick and better than what I could do in GIMP a lot of times.
