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if you don`t have the equivalent of gimp resynthesizer you are in the stone age of photo retouching, and PS had nothing of the kind in `96.

Resynthesizer, a plug-in for GIMP. The author also has details of the algorithm used published in his thesis paper.

Resynthesizer, a plug-in for GIMP. The author also has details of the algorithm used published in his thesis paper.

8/10/2009: I haven't really been keeping up with API changes in the GIMP, or with emails people send me. If you emailed me and I haven't replied, I'm sorry. If you want to take over as maintainer of this project, email me. Other emails will probably continue to sit unread in my inbox.

That would be as of August last year...

It always amazes me that the websites for wonderful FOSS projects can be so damn ugly.

The Resynthesizer website is a great example. It's not so much the site itself I find ugly, but the logo.
They make a Gimp plug-in for crying out loud, they should be able to whip up something more appealing.

I get that programmers just don't care about their website or logo, only about coding the actual software.
But that kind of attitude is keeping some FOSS projects from becoming popular with the general population.

At first glance Resynthesizer wouldn't strike me as a serious competitor for anything that a behemoth like Adobe makes, although TFA shows me that it is.
Maybe that makes me a narrow-sighted idiot, but I'm sure I'm not the only one.

I don't know which website you are referring to, but at http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer there's a link that says "Download" that allows you to download it. It also allows downloading a pre-compiled Windows version, for the Windows people.

I don't use arch linux, but in Debian and Ubuntu it's available as a package that you can install through whatever package manager you use. It's called (unsurprisingly) gimp-resynthesizer. I expect other distros to have similar packages.

The barrier of entry is just as high as the distro you are using.

That content-aware feature has been all the rage with the general Internet population lately. I can agree how awesome it is, I've been enjoying it a lot with the Resynthesizer plugin for GIMP for over a year now!

They're just ripping off the Gimp, again (from the Fedora 4 era).

http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer/removal

There I just saved you $700.

That capability has been available for a while in the Gimp as part of the Resynth plugin:

http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer

It lets you resynthesize a texture, fill in a selection with surrounding content, and synthesize images "in the theme" of another image.

So, what about Resynthesizer?

Get the resynth plugin:

http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer

It can also take one image and repaint it in the style of another image, so you can take a black and white photo and a pencil sketch as inputs and end up with your photo rendered using parts of the pencil image which are similar in form.

Another trick it can pull is creating tileable textures from any image. Sometimes the results are a little surprising if you start off with a picture of people at a party but they are totally seamless.

It comes as a GIMP plugin and is easy to use if you are used to the GIMP.

Schneier described the same thing in his Street Performer Protocol paper. There are variations proposed by others, and wikipedia mentions some current implementations.

Yes, there are some missing dead-tree output features. But honestly, you know why Photoshop gurus don't like the GIMP?

It's the same reason I'd be pissed if you took all my POSIX utilities away. Or replaced emacs with Visual Slickedit.

The user has spent a very large amount of time learning to use the incumbent software package very, very well. *Any* deviation in UI or featureset means that (a) he has to blow a lot of time relearning a tool and (b) he immediately notices missing features that he depends on, but it takes him a while to discover the things that the challenger can do, but the incumbent can't.

The article mentions the relearning time, but I'd say that 90% of the problem has to be right there.

User knowledge is the nicest of the forms of lock-in that I can think of (from a user standpoint). It's straightforward, it's comparatively easy to assess (the user knows how long it took him to learn a tool), you can't really hide it from a customer, and it never *can't* be overcome if absolutely necessary.

When I was a 2nd year student we weren't this sort of stuff, makes me wish I went to Stanford.

You really don't need to go to some high-ranked CS university to do cool projects. I hear a lot of people on Slashdot griping about how they couldn't go to MIT/CMU/Stanford/CalTech/whatever. Okay, maybe you get some good lectures and have some bright people handy to work with, but that's really a drop in the bucket compared to what you choose to do yourself. If you read about the things you're interested in, work on some projects, you *will* know far more than the people that went to Ivy League U and didn't do anything themselves -- just went to class and read enough content to get their grades. You have powerful, inexpensive computers easily available. You have free high-quality development software (if you don't have Valgrind and gcc on your computer, you're really missing out). You have an Internet's worth of excellent resources available, along with research papers on every neat thing you can think of free for the downloading. You don't need a professor or a boss to say "okay, write me a Foobar" to write a Foobar -- as a matter of fact, if you're writing a Foobar for yourself, it's probably going to be a better Foobar than if you're writing it because someone else is making you do so. Same goes for reading an algorithms book or a research paper.

Plus, if you don't want to tackle a whole game, choose something that you *do* like doing -- AI, graphics, sound engine, networking -- and pick a random existing open-source project and put your ideas into it. Then you have a nice end result that you can show off to people ("That game you're playing? Yeah, I'm one of the authors"), you have encouragement to keep going (because it isn't just a lone you -- you get feedback when you do something cool), and if you want a good practical excuse, you have a resume item that shows that not only do you have the ability to work with people to produce neat things -- but you've done so simply because you like making neat things. Also, it's *fun* to add a new feature to a game and then play using said feature with the rest of the dev team.

Remember that Woz never got his college degree (well, until a few years ago, when he decided to go back and get it). He built cool things because he liked making cool things, not because someone in a suit told him to make something cool. The same's true of an awful lot of techie folks out there -- school is a convenient tool, but it's much less important than going out and actively learning about things, and the fact that your uni has "State" in its name doesn't have a heck of a lot to do with what you learn. Sure, your professor will assign a bunch of books to read, but you can write that final paper without learning all that much, and certainly with big gaps in what you know. On the other hand, you can read all you want about just about anything I can think of on that Internet-connected computer in front of you.

Universities enforce a lower bound on your knowledge at graduation. They have nothing to do with setting a ceiling.

"No, because they're not bloody stupid. If you hand it around, that's less income for the authors and publishers, who are the people enforcing these rules."

"But a file? It costs nothing to upload/download, so why pay for it unless you have to?"

The major things I've seen that Photoshop has that GIMP doesn't are:

* No neat duotone tool. I like duotones.

* No non indexed/RGB color model support. Very, very bad if you're doing output for professional printing.

* Not sure, but I suspect Photoshop has better color matching support.

* Photoshop has a nicer warping interface.

* There are more plugins available for Photoshop. They're often quite pricy, but if you're a professional designer (the sort of person that would care about four color work and hence want to use Photoshop instead of GIMP), you're probably going to make back the cost pretty quickly.

There are only a few things that I know of that GIMP can do that Photoshop can't. Among these are:

* Better support for many languages to write plugins in.

* Some researchy plugins that go well beyond what Photoshop can do; Resynthesizer is one.