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um, even RAW files are only 12 bit, jpeg is 8bit. what camera are you using that you need 32bit?
if you need 16bit to accommodate the extra bits from your RAW files there is CinePaint (AKA filmGIMP).
CinePaint handles up to 32bit colour spaces.
http://www.cinepaint.org/

I agree that there is nothing like PS, but for most people gimp works as well as PS.
I recently mad the move from GIMP to PS Elements 4.0 (MAC) strictly for the RAW import so I understand where you are coming from, but that doesn't change that there are other packages that support higher bit colour spaces. Having never done a RAW conversion on a Linux machine I have no idea what you would use to import RAW files into CinePaint.

I wish I had the dough to buy CS2 (or CS3 when it's available) but Elements is all I can afford right now. I still use GIMP a lot because there are some things I'm used to in GIMP that I can't figure out how to do or even if they area possible in Elements. (layer mask for example)

Take a look at cinepaint it's running 8, 16 and 32 bit color channels and Kodak Cineon CIN, Digital Picture Exchange DPX and OpenEXR, EXR files formats

I tried it too (1.5 though, I am not going to pull kde libs from Debian unstable). It feels so slow and non-responsive! Set of tools on the toolbar seems "mspaint-ish" (rectangle, star, zigzag...). In addition, layer blending is not working for me.

So, GIMP stays for most of the tasks, for 16+ bit and HDR color I use Cinepaint.

P.S. I don't like some of the GIMP UI features, e.g. huge crop dialog, which closes significant part of my laptop screen and stays on top of the image. New window placement is not very convenient. New windows often open just over the toolbar (I think GIMP should suggest WM where to open windows). Toolbars do not "pop-up" as I switch to image window. However, GIMP seems to be more capable and polished than Krita at this moment.

Yes, it did. For the longest time The Gimp was bound by "that'll be in 2.0, using Gegl". Gegl languihed for YEARS, before recently resurfacing but still not done - not even close. This is one reason the project was forked into Film Gimp, now CinePaint.

Personally, The Gimp's interface gave me fits and I found it very hard to work in. Since I on't use it every day, it isn't something I was willing to put a huge effort into learning. Krita is much more "natural" to me and had a much shallower learning curve.

KDE integration is more than just a theme and a K-name. That would have been almost impossible with The Gimp.

Finally, there is the name "Gimp". It means "lame" or "handicapped", which was a totally stupid thing to call a program. Yes, I know it is an acronym, but ut was a stupid idea none-the-less.

There's rawstudio or cinepaint. Ufraw I guess too which can act as a stand-alone editor and also has a gimp plugin. If you don't mind closed-source then there is Bibble too.

Rawstudio is looking quite promising for such an early bit of software.

Most of my 2D animation has been done either with Flash or Adobe After Effects.

After Effects is an industry standard package, and it costs about the same as Flash, last I checked. One of it's most powerful features is the scripting language. It helps to create procedural animations which can be difficult to do by hand.

You also might want to consider doing 2D animation with a 3D package. Most of my time 3D time was spent learning Maya. The strength that 3D animation packages have, is that they get used more often for character animation than the 2D packages, therefore they have a lot more tools forcharacter animators such as bone structures and deformations. A lot of them have physics packages that can help automate certain types of animation. Most 3D packages also come with built in scripting languages for procedural animation.

The down side to 3D packages is the intense learning curve. At last count, I heard that Maya had over 80,000 commands. These are huge and complex software packages. The proprietary ones also tend to cost quite a bit, although Blender is free as well as open source.

A lot of what software to use depends on what kind of animation you want to do. Are you doing short character animations? Are you doing experimental stuff? Are you Rotoscoping? If you tell us a bit more about the type of animation you want to do, we could be a bit more specific in recommending specific packages.

Other thoughts:
--I know that Photoshop and ImageReady can be used to animate between layers ( but involves a bit of hackery to get it to work well).
--The integration between Photoshop and After Effects is really nice. It's one of the reasons AFX is used so much in television.
--FilmGimp/Cinepaint has been used for wire removal and image clean up for a while in the FX industry, I have no experience with it.
--I know that there are also some animation plugins for the Gimp that have been written. Again, I have no experience with these.

Regardless of the tools, there is always a steep learning curve, and there's always seems to be a lot of work coaxing the software program to do what you want it to do. If it's not coming easily, it's because we still have a lot of work to do in developing great animation software.

Good luck, and have fun.

No there is not a unix version of Photoshop. Photoshop is a carbon app not a cocoa app. Adobe is pretty not happy about the rewrite coming to make it work on intel Macs because there are no Carbon APi's for Intel OS X.

and Havning had to use Filmgimp now Cinepaint http://www.cinepaint.org/ (lol and the status of that link should tell you something. I can tell you that having used photoshop since version 2.0 that gimp sucks to use. I mean jesus there is not even a keyboard short cut to change the brush size. (maybe now but in 2003 I couldn't find it nor was one listed in the docs.) I mean come on how basic a thing is that? OK mark me a troll.

No there is not a unix version of Photoshop. Photoshop is a carbon app not a cocoa app. Adobe is pretty not happy about the rewrite coming to make it work on intel Macs because there are no Carbon APi's for Intel OS X. and Havning had to use Filmgimp now Cinepaint http://www.cinepaint.org/ (lol and the status of that link should tell you something. I can tell you that having used photoshop since version 2.0 that gimp sucks to use. I mean jesus there is not even a keyboard short cut to change the brush size. (maybe now but in 2003 I couldn't find it nor was one listed in the docs.) I mean come on how basic a thing is that? OK mark me a troll.

www.CinePaint.org

Robin

You're an idiot. If VFX studios could use free programs, they would. The less they spend on software, the more they can increase their profit margins.

In some cases, this has already happened. VFX studios are dropping SGI hardware and IRIX in favor of PCs running Linux like crazy. The free image sequence touch-up program CinePaint is used at several major studios.

But where the non-free software is superior, they will continue to use it. It makes no sense for them to cripple their artists' productivity by making the artists suffer through Blender's wretched interface.

And when it comes to The GIMP, just about everything is superior, at least interface-wise. It's interface rivals Blender in terms of how much work has to be done just to accomplish simple tasks, and that's simply unacceptable for artists working on somebody else's schedule.

The GIMP is on the road for a 2.0 release that shall happen this year. Actually, this 1.3.21 release shall be the last one before the 2.0pre release series.

My understanding was that 2.0 is still a ways off and that this 1.3 development cycle is leading to a 1.4 stable release. This 1.3 devel cycle is meant to clean out all of the old cruft from 0.6->0.9->->1.0->1.2, in particular bringing the codebase in line with GTK+ 1.3/1.4. Remember, GTK+ is the Gimp ToolKit. It developed with The Gimp so there was a lot of old code in The Gimp from the days when GTK+ was a lot simpler. Anyway, Gimp 2.0 will use GEGL to handle multiple colour spaces (e.g HSV, CMY/CMYK, YCC, cieLab XYZ) and depths (e.g 48/64-bit RGB/RGBA, floating point, HDR). When 2.0 is released, the abomination that is currently CinePaint (personal opinion) should be largely unnecessary.

-- Jack