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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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
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