Slashdot Mirror
Photogenics 4.5 Beta For Linux Released
Vesuri writes "A couple of weeks ago the Amiga-originated graphics package
Photogenics caused some heated
discussion amongst Slashdot readers. Now there is a
Linux beta version out.
Grab the 363kb archive and judge for yourself. It may well be worth
it. " Check out the original story about its announcement as well.
Even this demo is great - while the GIMP may have a powerful engine, this package's User Interface is wonderful - hoepfully this will spur someone on to produce a decent UI for the GIMP. Or make a photogenics plugin that interfaces to the GIMP backend. I remember the original Photogenics on the Amiga - it was wonderful, for it's time.
Good to see it's an Amiga-esque file size too - £64Kbyte download - admittedly, this is with reduced functionality, but this reduced functionality subset is roughly equivalent to the original amiga version (which, like this demo, only had one layer)
The big difference with the Gimp is that this program is designed form the bottom up to *paint* with. It is not about doing web graphics, or tweaking scanned images, but it is first and foremost about creating original images. It has got an extremely clever user interface for doing this, and when you have worked with it for some time, you wonder who could have ever come up with the concept of selections and filters. Just painting with filters is so much more easy! And about the GPL issue... Don't forget that this is not some big company trying to get you to pay more than $1000 for their product. It's just *one* person eho has to pay his rent!
Well I for one like the Gimp UI. I find it both logical and intuitive. That's not to say it's perfect, but it's far from awful, IMHO. And before you ask, yes, I have tried other alternatives (currently, CorelDRAW is one of my favourite interfaces). Perhaps this is just another example of the differences between the hacker brain and the end user brain. While Gimp may be obvious to me, end users will think differently than I do, and hence may have problems that I can't see.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I and a lot of the others I know who do a lot of graphics don't use any one tool. I use Photoshop 5, Paint Shop Pro 6, GIMPWin32, and a couple of lesser known tools all together. In many cases, the benefits are small, but when you need that benefit it's there.
Case in point. In Photoshop, create a 100 x 100 circle selection. Now expand or contract it. First of all, it limits you to a small expansion or contraction. Secondly, fill the changed selection and see how smooth(not) the shape is. Photoshop, for some reason, has a hard time with this. Now try the same exercise in Paint Shop Pro. It works much better.
That isn't something you'd list on a "features list" or anything, and you'd only know it if you'd worked with both programs and needed to do that series of tasks. Choice is definitely not a bad thing. Use the best tool for the job. And NO, I repeat NO tool is the best tool for everything, even within a knowledge domain.
LetterJ
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
I use GIMP, and while it's real powerful, it's rather slow (or, on fast hardware it is 'not as fast as it should be'). Still, every chance I get I plug GIMP... especially to those morons using *unregistered* Paint Shop Pro. Yes, GIMP also runs on Windows. Consider that my obligatory " external link for +1 moderation whore" comment.. ;-)
Anyways, Photogenics is a real FAST, dead sexy app for Linux. If you DO buy software for Linux... give it a serious look. I bought this at Linux World NY, and the last emailed beta was like 500ish *KB* and ran real fast on my now-modest K62.
I talked to Paul at the show.. real humble guy. I never used this on the Amiga, but I do see this as evidence that even though the 80's are over, the LITTLE GUY can still come out with something cool and unique. You probably wont see this on the software aisles.. and that's my point. Store software generally sucks (gee want the latest shovelware from Metacreations or whatever).
The unadvertised bit is Pg's toolkit set... he wrote his own so he could do straight compiles from the AMiga codebase. It's a pretty good toolkit and he should consider licensing it for other Amiga ports, or just general Linux users (it's an in your face reminder just how bloated Qt and gtk are).
The effects? They's nice. I especially like the automatic masking when layering effects, and the lens flare utility is real nice.
I still cannot believe this thing fits on a FLOPPY...
round 1: costs
Photogenics is payware
The Gimp is free
Score: Photogenics 0, The Gimp 1
round 2: ease of use
Sorry guys, but the Gimp UI sucks. I like having a toolbar rather than hunting thru 42 levels of menus to find a function.
Score: Photogenics 1, The Gimp 1
round 3: eye-candy effects
Photogenics has more nifty effects than The Gimp 1.0.4, but the current devel versions have most of those features. (Gimpressionist, et al.) a point for each.
Score: Photogenics 2, The Gimp 2
round 4: drawing media
Photogenics: Airbrush, Chalk, Pencil, Sponge, Watercolour, Smudge and Smear.
The Gimp: Airbrush, Smudge, Smear (devel only)
Score: Photogenics 3, The Gimp 2
round 5: The Stallman Test
Photogenics: no source (commercial)
The Gimp: More source than you can shake a stick at. (GPL)
Score: Photogenics 3, The Gimp 3
round 6: annoying rabid zealot users
The Gimp: Linux.
Photogenics: Amiga AND Linux
-1 for Photogenics
Score: Photogenics 2, The Gimp 3
round 7: the Slashdot test
The Gimp: +1 insightful (pro-linux karma whore)
Photogenics: -1 troll (aM1g4 0wnZ0rZ j00r l4a3 4ss)
Final score counting only serious categories:
Photogenics: 3, The Gimp: 2
Final score: The Gimp: 4, Photogenics: 1
0 1 - just my two bits
The ethos of Unix is to have each program doing one thing, and for it to do that thing well. As the GIMP already does image manipulation perfectly well, there really is no demand for another graphics package
There is a big difference between each program doing one thing and only having one program available to do any one thing. The former is certainly the Unix philosophy, even if it is observed mostly in the breach. The latter is the Microsoft philosophy - one ring to rule them all - and I, for one, would hate to see it become the dominant philosophy in the Linux community (whatever that happens to be).
Choice is good for all concerned, even when the choice is between free, open source software and commercial, closed software. Let the community decide for itself what it wants.
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
Information is not Knowledge
I think I speak for the Linux community when I say that commercial closed-source software has no place on our operating system.
No, I don't think you speak for the Linux community. The Linux community has no single voice, and includes a great many people who would like to see commercial as well as Open Source software running on Linux.
And the Linux community certainly does not need an AC to speak for it.
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
Information is not Knowledge
All in all, I like it. I love the fact that this is a 365K download and only takes a fraction of a second to load and start running on my system (500 Mzh PIII, 128 Megs, kernel 2.2.14).
Well, it only does JPEG's (intentional, to keep the download size small), but it does them pretty well. I like especially the font select window: it creates a list of major fonts, then has a tree-type menu to see the subtypes (bold, italic, etc). I also like the color selection window, where the area under the mouse flashes across the screen while you go over it.
However, it doesn't seem to do anything that the GIMP doesn't do, but it would have the advantage of being familiar to people from other platforms.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
This software is not for you, Anon, but it is for me and many other people out there who don't want persistently broken open source software that won't work on their systems because they installed Linux over 3 months ago.
And I don't think that Red Hat posted the kind of results that Microsoft will post. Not even 1%. For this $99.99 software, you are paying partly for support (a decent manual, tutorials, support from the author should there be any problems). The only thing that irks you is that you can't see the source code and rip it off, and you are so set in your ways that you are not even willing to try out the software to see if it suits your working methods or to see if it is any good.
Of course, the Open Source method works great - clued up people get money from dumb people not being able to work their systems. But this methodology does not promote the creation of simple, easy to use software because that would affect the chances of you getting money for support.
It is not how Linux works either, you should know that. Many Linux users want good quality software, it is preferable if it is free, and open source, but if you cannot get the quality software that you need, but you want to run Linux (e.g., you are creating graphics for a website, and you are testing it out on your machine running Apache etc) then this is the software for you.
Maybe someone should release some decent music creation software for Linux. Don't see much of that around at all.
And remember Paul Nolan did once comment that he was looking into open-sourcing the underlying GUI system.
This will go great with the Gimp - both great software, but to get the best out of graphics you need as much software as possible, as each bit of software excels at certain things.
I hope that Photogenics can open Layered Gimp, Photoshop and Painshop Pro files.
Commercial Closed Source Software written by corporations is worse than Open Source Software, but Commercial Closed Source Software written by someone by himself, who has to feed himself from the proceeds of his work, and who isn't a large faceless corporate entity - that can quite often be better than Open Source Software.
It depends on the developer - but if you had just spent the last 3 years of your life writing the best software since VisiCalc would you suddenly give up any potential revenues you could get from it and give it to the scavenging hordes of the Open Source Movement? I doubt it.
More than one good choice for paint software under Linux.
A competitor with a nicer UI might spur some improvements to The Gimp's UI.
It's nice to see some Linux software from a different background.
Before starting out I should remind anyone who doesn't know that I'm a Gimp developer... I'm writing this only because I saw a lot of people comparing Gimp and Photogenics elsewhere, many of them without even trying either as far as I could tell.
This is a painting app. Paul doesn't (so far as I know) claim that it's anything else. But many modern packages are more than this, and you shouldn't be surprised that there's a lot of stuff Photogenics just plain can't do.
Anyone who's baffled by layers (say in Gimp or Photoshop) but needs more power than PSP4 or KPaint should check out Photogenics, at worst it will be a gentle introduction to layers and you'll understand other packages better after trying it.
For the "from-scratch" digital artist, it's certainly not so hard to draw stuff in Photogenics as it is in Gimp, or for that matter Photoshop, but then it's even EASIER in MS Paint. Is this a good compromise? Perhaps.
If "paintbrush" and "chalk stick" don't sound like cornerpoints of your days digital image work, then you don't need this app. Just as many drawings done in 5 mins in Photogenics would be an hours work in Gimp, there are many 5 minute techniques for Gimp that PG just can't replicate.
For me, as both a non-artist and a Free Software developer, this app doesn't mean much, for some artists though, there is no doubt this is an important class of app on Linux and they should be trying this out.. now.
Um, don't forget ASM-One, the wonderful assembler/editor/debugger/monitor environment... Hm, on second though, who wants to code x86 assembly, regardless of the environment? I know I don't. ;^)
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
It's not really a question of 'better'. It's a question of 'better for what'. Gimp aspires to be the Script-Fu wielding ninja of graphics. It can do just about everything, and in that immense functionality quite a bit of 'ease of use' is lost.
And what about feature set tuning? You can do that photo touch-up in the Gimp, scrolling through nested menu after nested menu of filters, plugins, and scripts, just to find the three filters you use, and then adjust those filters to do the standard set of stuff on the photo. Or you can use a commercial application that had its feature set tuned for photo touch-up. Only the options that make sense are present, they are all tweaked for the subject material, everything is easy to find. The tuned set is easier, quicker, and makes more sense!!
.sig: Now legally binding!
Doesn't install on systems that have KDE 2.0, because it wants to execute a konsole with -title (invalid option), so you have to make it start something else.
/usr/bin/konsole /usr/bin/konsole.DONTUSE ./PhotogenicsB86.sh /usr/bin/konsole.DONTUSE /usr/bin/konsole
Workaround #1:
# mv
#
# mv
Workaround #2:
Remove the -title stuff or change the order in which terms are searched.
If you do this, you also have to remove the
checksum code, because you just changed the code.
To do that, comment out lines 116 to 121.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
$99.99 is peanuts for most skilled computer people.
You don't seriously mean this do you? Do you realise how many skilled computer people are students and have very little money to spend on commercial software? I'm sure you wouldn't argue that Linus Torvalds was a skilled computer person when he wrote the first version of Linux, but he was a student at the time. Trust me, open source/free software is a lifeline to students on limited incomes. And that's not to mention people who are unemployed, or otherwise short of money through no fault of their own.
I hope you are happy when Linux fails due to lack of corporate investment and commercial software.
Linux has so far succeeded without commercial software, what evidence do you have to suggest that it needs commercial software to continue? Yes, there is commercial software for Linux, but the majority of Linux users don't use it. However, I would not argue that companies such as RedHat and SuSE who understand the community and the open source ethos are a bonus to Linux. Even in the absence of companies such as RedHat, there are still non-commercial distributions such as Debian. But at the end of the day, it does not matter whether Linux makes it into the mainstream, I think most of Linux's current users will continue to love it (and use it) anyway. Linux was never intended to be a method of world domination.
Think of Photogenics this way: you are paying $100 for a box, manual, support and feel good factor, and the software is free.
I am quite sure that Photogenics' manufacturers have never thought of Photogenics in this way.
I know that you don't get the source code, but why do you want it? To steal it and put it in the Gimp?
Are you serious? Open source is about more than "stealing code" as you put it. It's about empowering the user. Open source allows the user to find and fix bugs in the software without being reliant on the software company to do this for them.
The Gimp has the most goddammed awful GUI in the world, very illogical and poorly laid out.
A poor workman always blames his tools. GIMPs user interface is very simple to use, if you take the trouble to get used to it.
Gimp will never evolve to be a truly usable program for the end user.
GIMP already is a truly usable program for the end user. Many people already use it, and love it. It is one of the killer apps of the GNU system.
choice. may have features the gimp hasn't. More good apps on linux can only be good news.
Look at it! The beta download is ~340K! Small app size is a true Amiga legacy. Even if, as Paul Nolan says, the demo version is missing some functionality, it won't balloon to the GIMP's 4-8 megs source download, plus GTK. It runs out of the box, no compile for the most recent version, no strange errors, no ungainly plugin structure. Photogenics is quick and responsive. The menu system makes sense within minutes, not hours. The kitchen sink is not to be found anywhere in here. It's worth $99. This is not to trash The GIMP, which I use regularly. The GIMP would be worth at least $500+ to me, open source or not, if I could buy a pre-packaged working system with a manual, easy RPM install, better color handling, and an organized menu system, and all the plugins working together. The GIMP is beautiful, but there's too much there, and it's not tucked away like EMACS, where you can learn as you go. And Paul Nolan's windowing toolkit is cool.
__ paul ford
Well, isn't Linux about choice? Then why not have tens of graphics programs?
As for open sourcing: well, I wouldn't exactly mind if Corel didn't open-source Draw or Adobe didn't open-source Photoshop or if Newtek didn't open-source LightWave etc. Reason: they are all excellent packages at what they do and lets not start yelling about open-source all over the place. Some companies may think otherwise but if their software does the job, I don't really mind.
For the GIMP: I don't exactly like it (I know I have blasphemied, forgive me!). I just can't wait till Adobe *eventually* decides to keep the Unix version of Photoshop up to date (any Adobe guys listening?????? Where are you????). I've been using it (PS) since version 3.0.4 in Windoze and it's evolved to a great package, thank you. Gimp is good, but it kind-of lacks the usability yet. It's a good program with a very nice lot of features but it isn't quite "there" yet. I'd love to help but I'm not a programmer (at least not of that skill). I'm a graphics designer.
I mean OK, it's open source, it's free and everything, but I've seen better (I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but that's a personal opinion, if I'm entitled to one.). Canvas 7-beta was also quite good, though its design is a bit of a mix of various image-manipulation and layout programs and therefore its usability and intuitivity do leave quite a few things to be desired.
In summary: Linux is about choice and *your* choice is not necessarily *my* choice (as you have seen above).
Trian
I'm no longer fed up with MS Windows: I go rid of them
From the few comments that I've seen so far, I see an alarming trend. There are people out there, perhaps zealots, perhaps misinformed, perhaps something else, who feel that anything other than their OS/GFX Program is bad. People need to chill out and realize that this is a TOOL and everybody who has ever worked with any mechanical object, a 1/4" wrench, no matter how useful, can't fix every problem, you need other tools. The GIMP is great for a lot of people; heck, I use it myself. Photogenics is probably useful for a different type of problem/person. Politics suck, and too many people are trying to make everything political.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses