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This might be useful to you to put all windows together in one grand window?

I agree. It was annoying as hell until I found this plug in.

Isn't that a bit of overkill for an entity-relationship diagram? Have you considered something like Graphviz?

As for batch processing with GIMP, I'm pretty sure it's supported. If you don't like that, you can always use ImageMagick. If you're complaining that GIMP's batch mode won't execute a script against X number of images, have you considered a tiny shell script? Something like:
FILES=`find . -type f -name "image[0-9][0-9].gif"`; for FILE in $FILES; do ...; done

I've done it once in my life, a few years ago. Do you still remember how to have sex with a woman? Anyway, here ya go: How to make a straight line.

Not at the moment, but according to GIMP's Summer of Code page, it will hopefully have one by the end of the summer. I actually considered signing up for that project, but other opportunities came about.

While I can buy the notion that The GIMP is suitable for many tasks that programmers might require, does anyone on here who considers him/herself first and foremost a designer use

Really? I tried to create myself a simple test image in GIMP and needed 5 tutorials to do anything. Sure I can do "burn marks" with a single button, but drawing a straight line requires a tutorial. It may be powerful, but it is so unintuitive, and made me long for MSpaint.

I think you may want to look into Script-Fu. It's The GIMP's scripting language. As I recall, it's LISP-ish (I'm not great with all those parens, personally) but is farily powerful and can control all (or most) of the features in The GIMP

A program like photoshop with lug-ins and image processing / manipulation capabilities may do the job.

Install NoScript to prevent Google from tracking which sites you visit and use Gimp.

Look for Google alternative. Say NO to Google Spyware.

P.S. Don't think it's important? Just wait until Google gets really squeezed on earnings. Then you'll see what evil means.

I've already started to give them the message by uninstalling Adobe reader and installing the FoxIt PDF Reader. It's a small download, doesn't come bundled with anything, doesn't ask you to update EVERY time you open it, and has no splash screen. It just opens a PDF and displays it - really, really fast. I'm surprised no one else has linked to it in these comments yet.

So now, with Foxit, PDF Creator, and GIMP, I'm now pretty much Adobe free, so I don't have to worry about these stupid bundled apps and constant updates. Any OS alternatives to Shockwave?

I discovered last.fm a few days ago and love it so far. First thing I did though was look for an alternative to their player and I found this little gem. It's a bunch of python scripts that acts as a streamer on your pc so you can then open it with anything that supports a streaming mp". Works great for me in Winamp, get the titles and everything.

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.

If you think TIFF is better for lossless compression than PNG, you're misguided. Not that TIFF is a bad format, just that its best lossless compression, deflate (which is essentially LZ77 + Huffman encoding), is EXACTLY the same compression algorithm used in PNG.

    Some of the compressions supported by TIFF, like LZW (based on LZ78 - our favorite now mostly* expired patent) and packbits work best on images containing lots of similar data. CCITT fax 3 and 4 are really only useful on black and white images, so I've never actually used them.

Most photo editing software programs support JPEG compression on TIFFs, even - GIMP:
Launch GIMP. Create an image. File->Save. Name the file image.tif. Click Save. Notice
your compression options are:
O None
O LZW
O Pack Bits
O Deflate
O JPEG

JPEG actually works quite differently than the non-lossy algorithms. It divides the image up in a quadtree like manner (maybe it is a quadtree - I forget) and achives better compression by reducing the aspects of the image the eye doesn't notice as much, like saturation. The advantage of a quadtree structure is that similar colors are usually next to other similar colors in all directions, not just linearly, which is valuable when trying to decide what data to lose during compression.

* - IBM still has a patent on LZW that expires August 11, 2006, but the earlier Unisys patent would likely invalidate it if they tried to enforce it - see the footnote http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html

The fact you have "no idea" what my rant was about proves my point exactly. If you were listening to your users and not just being an elite coder you would know exactly what I'm talking about. Go ahead keep coding unusable crap, gimp, http://gimp.org/ ring a bell? I would really like to use to use mainly FSF software, truly I would, but I'm NOT going to become a coder to do it, there are too many OTHER (see previous post) important things in my life to do. So I guess I'll just keep plugging away on my ibook. Have fun re-writing config files to get your sound card working properly. Hint it's not just me, even hard core open source coders like Mozilla programmer Jamie Zawinski gave up on Linux as being too frustrating for every day use and switched to a Mac:

http://jwz.livejournal.com/494040.html

Until FSF advocates wake up to the hard reality of just how difficult much OSS software is to use you will always be a niche player, which IS sad because I actually agree with you that freedom for programmers would make for a better world. But an unusable better world helps NO ONE, except the couple thousand people who think hand coding a config file is a fun and useful way to spend a weekend.

I think that operations in GIMP are added through plugins, most of the time. In stead of whining, browse over to gimp.org. It took me all of two clicks to find this.

• Photoshop: The GIMP - how many times does this need to be said, the interface is slightly different but the gimp has most of the features of photoshop plus a few of its own.
  Why don't I do the rest of the main Adobe stuff while I'm at it:
  
  • Pagemaker: Scribus
  • Illustrator: Inkscape
  
  
• Games: Cedega - but maybe you'd be better off using a console (not as in bash you blockhead) as they're cheap and while piracy for them is a bit harder its doable if you're commited.
• Autocad: a quick search reveals two commercial solutions LinuxCAD and VariCAD and a guide to getting AutoDesk's Autocad running under wine
• Dreamweaver: NVU, Amaya, hell even fckEditor or, if you're hardcore then vi(e)macs.

Why not try the Gimp? That runs on both platforms.

Like all Linux desktops, Ubuntu has limitations. It lacks applications such as Photoshop, Framemaker, Pagemaker, Visio, Access, Quickbooks, a PDF converter, legal DVD players and most importantly income tax preparation software. Without those applications ported directly to Linux, Ubuntu remains a mid-level desktop.

• The GIMP satisfy virtually all "photoshop" needs (maybe not some small part in some graphics shops, but otherwise you're bitching without real knowledge).
• I don't do much in the area of Framemaker or Pagemaker, but most desktops will do fine with the functionality present in OpenOffice.org Draw
• Visio has some nice features, but I've lived for years with Dia managing a network of almost 200 equipments in a variety of multi-level networks
• Access is b0rked by design. PostgreSQL and MySQL are on Enterprise level, and they're at your feet on most GNU/Linux distributions
• PDF Converters? Have you tried printing? Go there. Notice the Create a PDF Document option...
• Legal DVD players? Write your congressmang, senator, whatever favorite politic of choice and influence and tell them how wrong DMCA is.

I'm not a scientist, but a geek interested in computer graphics and 3D modeling and just thought of share this tip with you guys hoping it may be useful.

When you design 3D graphics, you need a software tool to design your artwork in 3D and render it to get the final output. The Blender is one of the best open source 3D modeling and rendering tool. See the 'Art Gallery' section in the Blender home page to understand what you can do with it.

Another very useful 2D vector graphic design tool is Inkscape, this is similar to Adobe Illustrator, and again its open source.

The Gimp is similar to Adobe Photoshop and again this too open source.

Latest versions of these software are included into Tomahawk Desktop, this is a very useful multimedia Linux OS.

I'm sticking to GPL projects because I don't know about other ones as well. This is not meant to diss the BSD crowd.

• ALSA everyone welcome to submit a driver for their card. I might add that most Linux Kernel drivers and most drivers for a number of other projects (X, CUPS, gcc backends, etc.) are fairly open and you can jump right in.
• gentoo packages you might not get into the main distribution right away, but the community is very open and will try out pretty much anything you have to contribute. Like drivers, above.
• GIMP and GTK at least, pre-2000. Now there are a lot more developers, so jumping in isn't quite as easy.
• kino has a very flat hierarchy. linux1394 is the same. Like drivers, above.
• MediaWiki

Okay, but I also think that cataloging open source projects is kind of fruitless, since there are so many. The internet connects people with common interests. They develop projects. Some are more open than others. Still, if the project gets too rigidly hierarchical, someone will fork the code and head off in a different direction. Example: the different flavors of BSD.

Have you ever tried clicking on goat's ass? Its not only difficult, it also poses various problems not normally faced by somebody using GIMP. Among many, one such problem is getting the goat's excrement sprayed all over your face.

As for GIMP interface, try using Windows Gimp Deweirdifyer. Might help.

Now wipe off that goat shit from your face.

And this is precisely why I asked about an open source replacement. It's one thing to pay for a product if you're going to use it to make money. It's a far different thing to expect to pay the same money for a product only to use it for hobby work.

I design gadgets for the Commodore 64/128, and a quick estimate shows that at the prices I've seen around the web in the last few days, I would spend more on the software alone than I would spend on making one production-ready unit of every board I've designed since I started fiddling with this stuff (that's only about 10 unique designs), and if I tried to sell, there's no way I'd ever break even. Several years ago there was a slim chance, but today, forget about it. Today, all of the stuff I write or design is free and open source, and stuff I have written in the past I have since declared free also (where the source code still exists). I think that fits anyone's definition of "giving back." I must stress - I do not program for Linux, just Commodore.

Oh, and to the other gentlemen who have mentioned auto-routing and other high-end features as being too much to ask of FOSS, let me see..

• PCB, the very PCB editor I started with years ago, is a nice board editor with autorouter (which I have yet to use) and some other nice features, but that's only half of the needed setup.
• KiCAD has a decent schematic editor, 3D viewer, and some other stuff, but it just has problems on my box (apparently poor integration, very slow board editor, crashy).
• gEDA attempts to integrate PCB with schematic capture and other tools, but it's buggy on my setup (missing config files in Ubuntu, schematic doesn't get translated over to the board properly, no component-onto-board auto-place function to go with the schematic capture)
• gschem2xpcb looks like it would fill in well to convert those gEDA/gSchem schematics over to PCB in a way similar to Eagle's autoplace feature, but this is just a stand-alone command-line program with only the one function, and the author seems have a major aversion to the GPL. *shrug*
• The GIMP of course has tons of features and a really nice UI, and in particular it has vector graphics capabilities and multiple layers, but of course it's not adapted for PCB/schematic work.
• Eagle, for this particular list, has wonderful parts libraries (for which utilities exist to convert these to other formats) and good integration between schematic and board, but it has some serious screen refresh bugs, plus the aforementioned 4x3 inch board size limit.

Along with these, every other open source program I've looked into has at least one of the features I need. I was just hoping for a program that combines all of these already-existing, already written features into one Eagle-killing FOSS program.

already slashdotted.

Maybe this will work.

But really, the programs suggested have reasonable alternates that I know of (minus autoCAD, since I haven't used that since college).

Photoshop -- gimp
itunes -- there are multiple, but i'm still content with xmms
flash -- HTML web pages. i'm not the only one browsing with flashblock on, for good reason
dreamweaver -- vi & emacs -- nuf said

Note: the GNOME 2.12 components are still experimental on Win32. I think gtk+ 2.8 which GNOME 2.12 depends on is not stable yet.

gtk+ 2.4 and gtk+ 2.6 is considered stable on win32 though.

http://www.gimp.org/win32/

You can have a desktop linux NOW. Fetch a modern commercial distro (http://www.ubuntu.com/>Ubuntu, Mandrake, etc) or any of the free ones and you'll have an excellent desktop with little issues, if any.

    The people that bitch about the "linux desktop" haven't normally ever tried Linux and want something that feels like their WinXP desktop. If you're looking for that, yes, there's nothing like it now and probably won't be for a while. If you want an useable Unix desktop, there's a lot of excellent ones arround.
    You have a wide choice of desktops and window and managers, and there's a lot of excellent software for them. A linux desktop is useable today, and by anyone - i had Ubuntu on a desktop for a while and my mother, who's 'computer-imparied' had zero issues using it. Besides being unable to find the blue E icon ;)

Speaking of spamming: for about the 1,000,000th time, Here's the CMYK plug-ins for Gimp. Yeah, one of those non-existant plug-ins the ignorant jackass in the TFA asserts do not exist for Gimp.

Looks like you, too, could stand to have some misconceptions cleared away about the Gimp. Scroll down for the Gimp Info center halfway down on the left. Is this the LAB stuff you're talking about?

Like with any of these plug-ins? By the way, perhaps next time we should be careful taking the word about FOSS from a site with Microsoft ads all over it.

Could somebody, anybody, anybody at all, explain how this absolutely insane misconception got started? Gimp has plug-ins. It has always had plug-ins. You can write more of your own plug-ins using the Scheme-like script-fu language. SEE?

The Gimpshop page clearly shows that most people seem to want a familiar interface when having used photoshop earlier. The other reason maybe the host of available plugins to photoshop (Kai's powertools and a few others that they already own) for the digital image manipulation business. But as Gimpshop clearly shows, Gimp can be hacked and made to look like photoshop for the average photoshop user. I am not sure this is possible with Adobe's photoshop itself. So Opensource and its flexibility from which GIMP is born far outweighs photoshop. IMO, GIMP is already better than photoshop thanks to flexibility. For those who haven't been able to hack it themselves, they just need to ask a group of hackers to help them with a Photoshop look and feel, compatibility with photoshop plugins if they are already used to the other application. No need to look for Photoshop killers here, Photoshop has been in use (like MS Windows) and has been quite a well written product. The GIMP has reached a far more flexible state matching features in a shorter period of time due to a large user base. With a few more hacks, usability, look and feel options and plugin support for third party plugins, for the GIMP it is only a matter of time before Adobe will need to rethink their Photoshop strategy.

Last.fm used to offer you direct access through any mp3 player and, as such, it was easily rippable too. To use the service you now have to download their player, but Vidar Madsen, a GIMP developer, created a nice proxy that makes listening through regular players possible again. It is called lastfmproxy, and you might be able to rip streams from the URL it gives you too.

You are missing LastFMProxy:

http://vidar.gimp.org/lastfmproxy/

It's a python script that redirects the stream into a player of your choice.

Together with InDesign and Illustrator, this would round out a complete Linux publishing solution that any professional could sit down at and get productive. I have prayed for this for most of the years I was working in graphic arts.

But if they don't come to the party - that's OK: We'll just keep polishing GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape etc until they start seriously eating into Adobe's monopoly (same way M$ lost the server market). Your move, Adobe!

GIMP has had great colour support for many years now, you don't need colour profiles if you're working on real true colour images, so be careful because some desktops are only 16 bit not 24 bit, meaning you will need to use colour profiles, but that's not a fault of the gimp that's a fault of some desktops.

If you want more information then the gimp user mailing list is the best place for it, and they'll tell you what you want to hear.

I dare you to use GIMP for a month without using photoshop. Almost everyone who does stays with GIMP.

Do you REALLY need the patented cruft Adobe adds to their apps? You probably don't.

http://gimp.org/
The only Shop you'll ever need. And it's free too.

upgrade to faster connection, switch to kubuntu (free AND secure), or anything else equally secure.

If you need (unsecure) windows for anything, use vmware player (free), or wine (free), or if you need to play games with 3D acceleration then cedega (nonfree).

Remember about http://www.openoffice.org/ for office work, http://www.gimp.org/ for drawing, http://www.k3b.org/ for burning DVDs... and the list goes on and on.

ps: I've got some karma to burn, so here I'm whoring ;)

Go here and select Photoshop Restoration & Retouching, 2nd edition. I've found it quite helpful in learning how to touch up photos.

OBdisc: I've no relation to the author, publisher, Adobe, etc. In fact, I'm switching to Gimp because it seems to have the same power, but is free. I don't see how Adobe can keep up with the pace of Gimp development. The techniques in Eisman's book apply to Gimp as well, but obviously the specific commands are going to differ.

• Wikipedia
  
• Firefox
  
• OpenOffice
  
• BitTorrent
  
• MediaWiki
  
• Xvid
  
• phpBB
  
• Outfoxed
  
• Dyne:bolic
  
• GIMP
  
• Apache
  
• SourceForge
  

If the dot com bubble taught us anything, it's that "If it's free on the internet, it's unreliable and fully controlled by somebody who will run it into the ground".

I would hope not. Otherwise the GIMP, that universe-in-a-box Celestia (which I do admit was held back a bit when main man Chris Laurel took a long break; it has a lot less bugs on Windows now that he's back) and newly-ad-and-cost-free Opera wouldn't be on my PC anymore.

All quite reliable to me (on Windows, mind you, so something was done right)--oh, and GMail. Amazing. Don't like text ads? Get a bigger screen. ;)

The key is looking at sites, blogs, forum comments, and the like, and reading what works for some and what just sucks. Good friends help, too.

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Simple_Animations/ Gimp also has layers. Must we continue to perpetuate the mythology by implying that it's a Photoshop-only feature?

It's a good thing they didn't pick the one cursed by sudden and inevitable impalement.

For one, even on Windows, it uses multiple windows for the same app. That doesn't make ANY sense from a UI perspective, and means that I often have to click more than four times in order to bring GIMP back up to focus when it's behind other Windows.

Well, you could try this ... haven't used it myself, but it sounds like the sort of thing you're after. However, your comment seemed more like a troll than anything else. Either that, or you've forgotten that not every graphic application has to be a direct clone of the hideous MDI interface of photoshop ...

Oh, and straight lines? Use the shift key. How do you do it in photoshop??

Don't blame the program, blame the "Artists", if you can call them that.. It's actually *not* par for the course..

There have actually been some decent examples of GIMP art as splash screens over time.

http://gimp.org/about/splash/splash-images/gimp1_1 _splash.1.17.png
http://gimp.org/about/splash/splash-images/gimp_sp lash.1.11.png
http://gimp.org/about/splash/splash-images/gimp_sp lashpng.1.16.png
http://gimp.org/about/splash/splash-images/gimp-sp lash-1.4.png

Don't blame the program, blame the "Artists", if you can call them that.. It's actually *not* par for the course..

There have actually been some decent examples of GIMP art as splash screens over time.

http://gimp.org/about/splash/splash-images/gimp1_1 _splash.1.17.png
http://gimp.org/about/splash/splash-images/gimp_sp lash.1.11.png
http://gimp.org/about/splash/splash-images/gimp_sp lashpng.1.16.png
http://gimp.org/about/splash/splash-images/gimp-sp lash-1.4.png

Don't blame the program, blame the "Artists", if you can call them that.. It's actually *not* par for the course..

There have actually been some decent examples of GIMP art as splash screens over time.

http://gimp.org/about/splash/splash-images/gimp1_1 _splash.1.17.png
http://gimp.org/about/splash/splash-images/gimp_sp lash.1.11.png
http://gimp.org/about/splash/splash-images/gimp_sp lashpng.1.16.png
http://gimp.org/about/splash/splash-images/gimp-sp lash-1.4.png

Don't blame the program, blame the "Artists", if you can call them that.. It's actually *not* par for the course..

There have actually been some decent examples of GIMP art as splash screens over time.

http://gimp.org/about/splash/splash-images/gimp1_1 _splash.1.17.png
http://gimp.org/about/splash/splash-images/gimp_sp lash.1.11.png
http://gimp.org/about/splash/splash-images/gimp_sp lashpng.1.16.png
http://gimp.org/about/splash/splash-images/gimp-sp lash-1.4.png

It's a GIF from the GIMP website from the days when GIFs were our friends..

http://web.archive.org/web/19980216075725/gimp.org /the_gimp.html

Color Enhance
        Help me, what exactly does this do? Obviously it makes some things more saturated.

"I hope that you browsed through these pages before making your assertion."

I'm sure he did, and those are all terrible too. But then what do you expect from a program named after a deviant from Pulp Fiction? I use GIMP myself and certainly appreciate the work of the people who make this excellent, FOSS software. But the fact is GIMP has an image problem preventing it from making inroads among people who can't see past its name and bad logos.

You know, I'm sure crosses make NO SENSE AT ALL to Islams. The multiple windows thing makes perfect sense in a GNU/Linux desktop, where there's no reason to have more than one program open on a desktop at a time, because you can have HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS of desktops and switch between them with a keypress. This feature has been built into Unix even before Richard Stallman's time...even the console level can have multiple logins and shell sessions. It's not GNU/Linux's fault that Microsoft refuses to give it's users the same convenience.

Where's the one step photo fix? Um, the whole "Filters" menu is single-step fixes.

Colour balancing? Filters>Color>Map>[any of the dozen or so entries here]

How do I even draw a straight line? Hold down the shift key while you move the mouse. With a drawing tool, of course.

doesn't have any simple steps in order to do so.

I don't know how foolproof we have to make this; how good a fool are you? I found Gimp to be the easiest program I've ever used. The first thing I did was right-click on the canvas, and a whole menu popped up with every single function in it. I explored the menu entries one by one and experimented with everything.

For me, it is nothing more than a curiosity at the moment that I cannot use for any real work, and that's kinda sad, as I'd love to have a good open source program for that sort of stuff.

Your problems are SOLVED! HERE is the magic link: http://developer.gimp.org/ where you can go sign up for the Gimp development team and become one of the fine developers shaping the future destiny of the Gimp! I have arranged this exciting opportunity for you because I knew how it meant so much to you. I took the liberty of notifying them that they should do nothing else until you reported for duty, because you're the posse that's going to ride over the hill and save their ass. Don't thank me. Just get busy and PUT THOSE GREAT IDEAS INTO PRACTICE!!!