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What's Ahead For The GIMP?
Ur@eus writes "Hi,
We have just interviewed Sven Neuman, lead developer on the Gimp. The interview covers the upcoming 1.2, 1.3 and 2.0 releases of the Gimp and how [they]will evolve further. You will find the interview here" Improved path support, GIMP/GNOME interaction and an improved rendering system are a few of the points that Sven addresses -- The GIMP has impressed for years and keeps getting better.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
No extra optimizing software should be installed, though. Just changing the configuration of the software that the distribution comes with.
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when the local art collage asked me to teach a photoshop class, i asked if i could teach gimp instead. no.
on irix, glDrawPixels is the fastest way to get an arbritatry frame buffer to the screen (unless you store your arbritrary frame buffers in texture memmory) but this is only true of irix. most other gl implementations are slower. thats probably why erdas is so fast in comparison.
using open gl for the gimp would be easy, its a simple call, but it would slow the gimp down for most platforms. maybe an #ifdef FAST_GL would be a good thing...
AbiWord simply links directly with the Windows API present on all Win32 installations. For each platform AbiWord supports, it uses the native widget set (where Unix's native set is GTK+). This keeps the interface snappy and the overall feel complete. There are advantages to using one single toolkit across platforms (like GIMP does): very little work to support a new platform (as long as it supports the toolkit). Using a cross-platform class framework (like wxWindows) is a great idea when the classes match the functionality you need. AbiWord needs to do so much pixel twiddling (which can be made cross-platform at the device context level) that using cross-platform toolkits doesn't win us as much.
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gotcha. That sounds like a fairly straightforward change to gimp. As far as having lots of windows open, at least for gnome, you can configure the MDI (multiple document interface) behavior: each-in-its-own-window, modal-with-tabs, or modal-without-tabs. Of course, you don't just want to apply it with an iron fist. You really want grouping: all these windows should be modal-with-tabs, but then using each-in-its-own-window for groups. It'd be cool if you could drag a -its-own-window to a tabbed window and have it swallowed up. Dunno if gnome does that.
Indeed.
--Phil (channel!)
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
They support Japanese, as I've used the Japanese version on my own computer.
I recently upgraded from 1.2 to 1.0 because I needed to use the mosaic effect on something, and it wasn't present in the version of 1.2 I had. Will they be putting it back in anytime soon?
(currently testing something about signatures here)
no shift!!
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Just so you know, that is 16 bits per channel. That's more colours than your video card handles, in all likelihood. And yes, it looks like it will be merged in.
Does it have a better UI? I'm not keen on programs that have a lot of little windows floating around. It takes me ages to remember which window I need to click on to get the context menu I need, including finding it in amonst my other programs. I think the GIMP is great. If only it were just had a nicer UI for those of us who only use it occasionally. I was also very happy to discover a Win32 port recently.
This is very likely an X configuration issue, as I'm a lazy ass and haven't bothered tackling it, so the number pad Enter doesn't even work in Netscape or Xterm....
In fact, having no video card at all would give you much better results and, obviously, save you money.
Did you read the article? The GIMP is going to be ripped apart and recoded from scratch after 1.2. 1.2 is "close" to being released. To me that says that the GIMP is going to be recoded from scratch "anytime soon", but I'm not an idiot, so what do I know?
Gimp 1.1 has layers, channels and paths. Are there things you can't do with these in the GIMP that you can in PSP?
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"Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"
no!
----Daniel Pearson of the UMBC LUG
----Daniel Pearson of the UMBC LUG
C.
I sometimes write stuff
Some more informative answers:
1) Yes, X supports multiple inputs, I use the nipple pad on my IR keyboard and a mouse. Here's some relevant XF86Config lines:
Section "Xinput"
SubSection "Mouse"
Port "/dev/ttyS1"
DeviceName "Second Mouse"
Protocol "Microsoft"
AlwaysCore
EndSubSection
End Section
AlwaysCore lets it control the main mouse pointer (as per in the standard Pointer section of the config)
Ditto for stylus, the appropriate SubSections are probably commented out in your XF86Config already, if you use xf86config to generate it. I know Wacom has plenty of support, although I don't have one myself. I know GIMP has pressure sensitivity, I _think_ it has tilt/roll and erasing. I don't own one myself, but I know someone who does, and uses GIMP 1.2 prereleases with it.
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
There are three major efforts in progress... I don't use Adobe Illustrator, and I basically use vector graphics tools for basic layout stuff and maps, so I can't comment on how far they really are, but...
1) Sketch. It's been around a long time, and uses Python/Tk (Python/GTK in the unstable version). It has quite a few features, but the unstable version as a GIMP-like interface, and I know some people don't like that (personally, I love it). It does illustrator, svg, and it's own sk format for import and export.
2) Sodipodi. It appears to be built on a slightly better designed codebase than Sketch. It uses SVG as a native format. Biggest thing it appears to have going for it is full 8 bit alpha channel.
3) KIllustrator. Part of KOffice, it has a crapload of import filters. Sketch outdoes it, IMO, but KDE always suprises me in one way or another.
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
Heh, err. Dealing with the alpha channel is easy--however, you first have to add the alpha channel. Somewhere in the Image menu should be "Add alpha channel", not sure what submenu. Then you use the Eraser tool (probably other tools you can use to apply transparency) to reduce the alpha channel. Plus take a look at the brush dialog; it lets you set the opaqueness for the brush, plus with Layers, you can use transparency (or even image opaqueness) to blend the layers together.
the real at&t mix
one hope I have is that Alien Skin will eventually port to GIMP. that would just be amazing.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
I have run this thing on a bunch of computers,
some of them pretty fast, and the fuzzy select
tool is so amazingly slow it is unusable.
Any work being done to address this?
why dont people get the idea "DO NOT REINVENT THE WHEEL"
Throwing out your old nasty code so you can rewrite it isn't called "reinventing the wheel". It's called "throwing one away". Yes, GIMP 2.0 might take longer to be released. Provided they don't go crazy and decide to make an "application platform" instead of the thing they're supposed to be making, it could actually speed up development, because the architecture should be cleaner and easier to understand. Besides, the GIMP code isn't nearly as nasty as the Netscape code was.
Maybe you're referring to the fact that GIMP is an image manipulation/paint program, and there are lots of those out there. Not many of them are scriptable though. Very few run on Linux. Even less are open source, and let you make your own tweaks/bugfixes/improvements. Plus it's free (as in beer -- I covered the other free in the previous sentence). These attributes together make the GIMP useful and valuable to some people. If it had no unique qualities, then maybe it would be "reinventing the wheel". But that isn't the case here.
First off, filters don't detract from the GIMP, as another person mentioned it is not the same people writing core and plugins.
As far as the list of features that you mention, I think someone else also made a good run-down of where they stand. I just want to point out that Photoshop did not have ANY of these features (except maybe magnetic selection) until version 5.0. That was just a year ago it came out. Now GIMP is in a similar in-between major revisions stage. As is usually the case, open-source trails slightly behind commercial products in some areas. But other features (multi-level undo) have been around for quite some time.
LoppEar
I'm probably out of touch cause I've only used 1.04 and earlier versions. If they haven't added such shape tools to the 1.1 or 1.2 then I hope they keep taking their blue matrix pills each night.
"I can only show you Linux... you're the one who has to read the man pages."
One reason Photoshop is regarded as suitable for use as industrial machinery is that Photoshop has the Pantone colours built in - licenced from Pantone. Is there any way to get these into the Gimp? A licenced plugin or something?
http://rocknerd.co.uk
How hard would it be to add vector support to the Gimp? It would be really cool to be able to mix rasters and vectors between frames in the same image, and I don't think it would be impossible, either. The infrastructure probably exists already, since Dynamic Text is a vector. You'll notice, in the Layers palette, that Dynamic Text is its own type of layer, with the properties of vectors - resizability, etc. Any idea of the difficulty of adding more sophisticated vector support in the future? Even mixed raster-vector layers, perhaps? Raster-tiled vectors? Vector shapes with complicated, super-level defined properties (e.g., "Draw a capital Q, and then perform a [raster-based] chrome filter on the resulting raster)? 'cause that would be awesome, and it would be a feature that no other program would have, to my knowledge. Certainly not Photoshop.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/
What was that web page that was based on gimp, that enabled browser based image manipulation via gimp? There was a /. story on it earlier, but I can't find it.
I think that you are confusing two things: wavelet coding of an image and hierarchical editing. Wavelets should can be useful for the final output (saving the final image as JPEG2000), but they should not be used as the internal representation while you are editing the image. You cannot (in most cases) mix wavelets and lossless editing.
On the other hand, some kind of hierarchical editing can be interesting if you are working on huge images. It could be implemented by extending the current concept of layers in the GIMP, and it would not even require a major re-write of the plug-ins and tools. If I have too much spare time (cough!), I may even consider implementing this for version 1.4 or 2.0.
The only thing that would have to be done is to allow the layers of an image to have different resolutions. So the background layer of the image could be stored at 300dpi while the other layers are stored at 2400dpi. Most of the plug-ins and tools work on one layer at a time and are independent of the resolution of the image, so they would not have to be modified. Some other operations such as "Merge visible layers" or "Bump Map" would have to be re-written, but it should not be that difficult.
But I am not sure if there would be a big advantage in doing that. You would save some memory, but several operations (including displaying the image) would be slowed down because it would be necessary to check the resolution of all layers and to re-scale them at the same resolution before merging them.
-Raphaël
Here are some answers to your suggestions:
Many things are already possible with the upcoming version 1.2 of the GIMP. I suggest that you have a look at the tips and on-line help that are distributed with the current version, or that you have a look at some of the recent books, such as Grokking the GIMP or the GIMP handbook by Sven.
-Raphaël
Hey Sven, it's better if you include a link to your great FreeType plug-in. :-) Here it is: http://freetype.gimp.org/.
-Raphaël
Some parts of the user interface should definitely be improved, and hopefully this will be easier to implement in version 2.0. I don't think that any of the current developers would implement the full range of features of "Save for Web" or ImageReady in version 1.x. However, some of the features that you are looking for are already there. For example:
These features could be integrated a bit better and presented in a way that even new users find them easily, but they exist already. One thing that could be improved in the future versions is the "Export" feature which could include some features of "Save for Web": for example, a preview for GIF and PNG (not only JPEG) allowing you to change the number of GIF colors easily and compare the results with the original.
It is already there: look for a file called ps-menurc in the top-level directory of the source distribution. If you install this file in your ~/.gimp directory, you will get the same keyboard mapping as PS.
-Raphaël
I see... What you want is the QuickMask feature that is available in the latest releases: by clicking on the little square buttons that are in the bottom left corner of the image, you can activate the quick mask which allows you to view your selection as a semi-transparent mask and to edit it with the usual painting tools. When you are satisfied with the result, you can click again to convert the mask back to a selection. I think that it does exactly what you want.
This has been discussed several times on the developers' mailing list. Unfortunately, some limitations of the X Servers make this feature much more difficult to implement than it seems. Basically, it is difficult to create a cursor that is larger than 16x16 pixels, which is obviously a problem for most of the brushes.
-Raphaël
See www.cooltext.com for an example.
The thing is, it's not mostly the same people working on the plug-ins as are working on the core. A plug-in is relatively small and easy to control, so individuals can pick whatever effect they're interested and go do a plug-in for it. These are not usually the same people who have working knowledge of gimp's more complex internals...
Plug-ins: They make GIMP do stuff. http://gimp-plug-ins.sourceforge.net/
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OpenID Enabled
Photoshop plug-ins like AlienSkin can't be used with gimp. However, the "Filter Factory" filters (.afs and .8bf) files can be used with the User Filter plug-in.
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Plug-ins: They make GIMP do stuff. http://gimp-plug-ins.sourceforge.net/
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OpenID Enabled
Someone else started a SourceForge project with the intention of doing this. I haven't seen many signs of life from over there lately, but you could try waking them up...
I also think that rather argue about the video card, it would be more productive to come up with a benchmarking suite, to decide what and how the benchmark will measure instead of where.
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OpenID Enabled
Eek! This is not what GIMP expands to. Rather, it is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. In some times past, people have used the "G" for "Graphical", but the "P" has never been Photoshop.
Opinions on how to capitalize it are varied.
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OpenID Enabled
The "how many people" question is answered by Sven in the interview, I think. As for the original creator, well, that's an interesting story. And "will they hire a larger team"? Umm, AFAIK, no-one (including distributions and start-ups) has any programmers on payroll for GIMP at this time, so I'm not sure who would be doing the hiring...
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OpenID Enabled
Created for just such occasions, the Straight Line Tutorial.
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OpenID Enabled
The Tile Cache Size is in the "Environment" section of the Preferences dialog. It should be set to about as much RAM you system is ready and willing to dedicate to GIMP.
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OpenID Enabled
As has been answered above, the GIMP does not have all of that at all. It doesn't have in-layer text editing, magnetic selection tools, or optimising features (like FireWorks and ImageReady).
If it doesn't have these specific features, then it obviously can't do "a lot of that much better than Photoshop does".
A simple save of a PNG (or some other horrendously unsupported image format perhaps?) does not count as an optimising tool/feature.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
I am a longtime and frequent Photoshop user (ie, any number of hours per day). I use the standard Photoshop filters, and even then - only a few of them. I tried Alien Skin and Kai's Power Tools and Swt-Flux when I first started using Photoshop, and have long since uninstalled them.
When I first saw The GIMP, I laughed at the number of filters - it was ridiculous.
More and more filters won't bring more people to the GIMP - if they won't use it, it's because it's just not Photoshop. The interface isn't the same. When I tried it briefly a few months ago, it felt flaky and I hated it.
That, coupled with the fact that every call for graphic designers in the employment pages asks for Photoshop knowledge, and the GIMP faces an incredibly hard battle to build acceptance amongst designers.
Does the GIMP currently have (or likely to add in the very near future): editable text layers, layer effects, in-layer text editing, magnetic selection tools, multiple-level undo, integration with optimising tools, etc?
Don't waste time with so many plug-ins and filters, and refine implementation of the fundamentals. The plug-ins should be a later priority.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
How on earth is this overrated? Someone is just looking to avoid being meta'd to death, or at worst is targeting me personally. WHY!?!!?
I have a few clients who USE this kind of software, and my point about commercially available training *IS* based in fact! The last person I setup I WANTED to setup with the GIMP, but she knew photoshop and didn't want SEVERAL more books! Not EVERYONE is a geek who can just "RTFM" and off they go! If I could have sent her to a CLASS in using the GIMP, then that would have been different - HOW is this observation over rated?!?!?!?!
Fawking Trolls!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
The process is quite complicated, and results vary quite a bit between various implementations. The reason for this is that with CMYK uses 4 channels: cyan, magenta, and yellow (inverses of RGB), and also the key (usually black). For example, the color black can be made either by setting the key channel to 100%, or by setting C, M, and Y to 100%. While converting RGB to CMY without a key is trivial, deciding how much key to put in various combinations can be quite painstaking to get 'close to perfect' results.
Download a fast DirectX Tetris Clone [276 k]
Yeah. Sure. Lots of people, myself included, use the Gimp to create quality images. To say that the Gimp doesn't "remotely compete" is ridiculous.
I personally do not make use of Photoshop's higher-end capabilities, such as the prepress capabilities. But, for what I do (mostly creating graphics for web pages), the Gimp works just as well, or better than, Photoshop does.
I guess there is one area where the Gimp doesn't even remotely compete with Photoshop - price. The full version Photoshop, last time I checked, sold for well over $500. While the Gimp may not be able to do everything Photoshop can, it's available to anyone since it's free software. There's no "Limited Edition" of the Gimp - the one, full version is an excellent value at a price of absolutely nothing.
I don't know the specifics, but I seem to remember that there is some buffer setting in the config files that you can increase to make working with large images more efficient.
If you can find it, you might want to crank it.
-Mike
#6495ED - cornflower blue
Anyway off to see if I can eat an apple or a pear faster. . .
~ppppppppö
rpm -qi glibc and see what the version is...
~ppppppppö
Ahh Gimp Lite you mean?, unfortunately it is entirely impossible for them to do this, as since the full version is already free they would actually have to pay you to have it included with your scanner/printer etc. . .
~ppppppppö
I think 2.1.3 is probably the latest stable version for Redhat/rpm, I've got that & gimp 1.1.23 and everything runs fine.
~ppppppppö
However, as you say CMYK isn't very useful for web graphics.
I know that Photoshop works for someone as low as me up to atleast a daily newspaper of a town of 75,000. But I would think that anyone that prints every and all pages of a magazine in color would be using some high tech hardware & presses, where the color separations are done right at the printer, bypassing paper, negatives, and even traditional plates now adays.
You don't think the people printing WIRED are reading??
Rader
yer.. freaked the shit out of me too.. I thought I was loosing it and had to do a double take.. if it is going to be animated then it should move the eyes more often, like twice a second or something.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Sorry to agree with an AC, but it's right. I tried honestly to use the GIMP, and found its canvas-less way of laying out toolbars and images to be less than easy to work with.
As for porting GIMP to Windows, why bother? Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro are competiting with each other enough to provide 2 great drawing programs, depending on your taste.
Contrast this with a shrink wrapped app like Photoshop which has real focus. After working with one tool, I have a pretty good understanding of how the next tool is going to work. And how other Adobe apps are going to work. I just don't get that with Gimp, or any other OSS graphics tool for that matter.
How do you structure an OSS project to harness the power of 1000 people coding like mad without the end result looking like it?
You are thinking of something completely different. The default airbrush is still there. What I was talking about was a new airbrush tool Olof came up with that emulates a real airbrush more closely when used with a pressure/tilt sensitive tablet.
I would have kept quiet, but since you mentioned RMS, I spoke. What about Emacs? I'd call that pretty innovative. Forgetting about it's joke version number for a minute, Emacs really does do all kinds of editing. I've not seen it matched by any IDE or other text editor.
And SCO is as big of a copy cat as Linux is. As a matter of fact, they're all copy cats since the original UNIX for all intents and purposes doesn't exist anymore!
Also, I really doubt the GIMP developers said, "We hate Adobe, let's spend years of our time trying to destroy them." More like, "We see no decent general purpose imaging tool both under UNIX and the GPL, let's make one."
I will agree with you on one thing, the nature of the GNU GPL is quite socialist. So what? The cold war's over, not that we could call the Soviet Union Marxist.
I know, "yhbt", don't respond to a troll, but I was bored.
Recommended!
Later...
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
I agree the UI for the GIMP isn't the best but the program is very powerful, and you have to admire it for an open source project. Can I suggest to the GIMP team that they focus on a GIMP library and allow GNOME and KDE to develop a UI on top of this. Hopefully there will be a kde_gimp and gnome_gimp projects developed using this. I think work is already underway with KDE2.
Wow, thanks for the responce :)
:)
:)
Just after I complained about a lack of line drawing tools, I noticed the startup tip. Thanks though
About more dynamic selection tools... a better selection representation would be good, especially with regards to feathered selections and stuff... Maybe a sort of 'convolve' tool to selectively feather particular edges of a selection would be good. Maybe something else to 'nudge' selection areas... as in push the border in and out but retain some level of connectivity - sort of moulding tool for selections. oh and I would like to see brushes displayed something like selections are, so that you can see your brush edges.
But its neat that there is already a bit of vector stuff in gimp... i'd love to see more.
Thanks again
Win32 port of GIMP? where, where? i looked all over gimp.org and i cant find it... id love to use gimp, but i use windows...
Mark Duell
I have used the winblows version of the Gimp as well AbiWord for Winblows and their respective Linux versions. Something I have noticed is that AbiWord appears to be using the GTK+ widgets under Linux and under Windows it uses what look like native Windows widgets for the windows version. However the Gimp on windows appears as though it is rendering the widgets itself.
Does anyone know what AbiWord does differently? I think I prefer what the windows version of Abiword does to what the Gimp does.
Now what I was thinking was that if GTK+ works by using item factories for the widgets, surely GTK+ could use the native windows button widget, or a GTK+ drawn one, or a KDE/Qt drawn one or someother drawing kits widget sets depending on the item factory used. This would allow KDE widget support from GTK. Themeing of course is an issue when you start to mix things up like that, and it's probably the least important issue, however this would give some added flexability and nicer looking ports of GTK programs to windows.
I really think that a major improvement for the Gimp would be a well done port (using native widgets) to Windows (and probably the Mac too for obvious demographic reasons). This would be leverage to promote GTK+.
Kind of like what Apache has achieved for Linux. People recognise it as one of the predominate web servers that gives you the option to run it on either Windows or Linux (and BSD, etc...). So companies make the choice to use Apache first, then when they have taken that step they then may take the step to using it on Linux.
The Gimp could have an even larger market share with a good Windows and Mac port. I still believe it would be a Linux program. With it's success windows developers may even find their way to GTK+ and Glade and see the light. Even if they only develop GTK based programs from Windows, GTK/GDK and GLib are very well written that portability is not difficult.
This post may be met with scorn at the mere suggestion of using windows to run Linux programs, however don't forget the origins of the GNU project on other UNIX platforms before Linux existed. I see the end goal as being free from the dictates of company interests for all the common tasks performed by developers and users of computer systems in their daily lifes. I don't see Windows ports of Linux programs conflicting with this goal.
I've have had several linux installs and I have one on the computer I am working on now...
but anyway most people say CMYK and I am dyslexic so I am allowed to get letters mixed up and in fact most people in the print industry call it 4-colour, there is realy no argument here.
Movie News - "Entertainment news, bitch!"
I bet it wouldn't take long at all to implement, but it makes a lot of tasks faster. I would love it if there was a way to do this in the GIMP already, but AFAIK there isn't.
Now I don't know much about the gimp but what does it use for it's image backend. Imlib? Would the new Imlib2 effect it's speed any? I find that the GIMP kind of chokes on large images (over 70mb). Thanks Will
Have you tried running ldconfig as root? (Not that I'm sure it would be usefull here, but that's what I always do when I'm in trouble with libs.)
If there is hope, it lies in the trolls.
True. I work at a major motion picture visual effects company and we do a lot of work now with floating point colour data in order to get a nice high dynamic range. In fact we used some fairly hairy compression schemes to get our data into 16 bits (per channel) for those off the shelf tools that don't support floating point. For compositing we use Shake which is very happy with floating point data and we'd be pretty excited if Gimp did this too. But I don't see it happening for a long time. For 99% of people it will be unlikely that they could even view stuff that benefits from floating point. But if you have a long and complex imaging pipeline with lots of image processing it makes a big difference. Not just for those darks either - it's fantastic for motion blurring bright lights or realistically simulating lens flares and defocus.
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-- SIGFPE
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
GIMP is good but does not have the features of Photo Paint 9.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Sure the Gimp doesn't have all the features (yet) that commercial apps like Photoshop have. Yet it still is able to do a lot, and I'm sure it'll improve with time. I can't wait to see the devel tree for 2.0.
Cheers
Mike
Also the support for CMYK.
That's CYMK, cheezeball
Cyan, yellow, magenta and I honestly don't know what the k stands for. I'd guess it's some name for black. So, you bet correctly. But would you know what someone was talking about if they came up to you and said 'BGR' instead of 'RGB'? I have people ask me what their DSN numbers are all the time, and I know what they're talking about. But it's still annoying. That and idsn.
I just went over to dictionary.com and it found something for cmyk (the k stands for key or blacK), and it only had a link to an acronym finder for cymk, so I'll take this opportuinty to shut the hell up.
jpeg does have cmyk support
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
one thing that may be impeding the GIMP's mainstream acceptance is its name
.oO0Oo.
I see crap like this here every day.
The whole dominance thing.
Linux & GNU isn't there for domination it's there for liberty
The fact that Gimp isn't a "mainstream application" doesn't make a squat of difference. The point is that it's an application at all and for OS's that support it it's free. Free of a $500 tag, free to do what you like with and free of marketing people saying "the name's not very good, grandma won't like it".
The next person that makes some sort of killer app should call it "The dogshit" or some such.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
i wish suits would learn that it's perl and not pearl
.oO0Oo.
While I understand the need for "geeks" to be different (which I why I don't make mine wear suits)
gosh you are so gernerous to your prisoners mr suit, can I come work for you please. Can we all wear suits on Fridays, please please.
Of course management has no stupid acronyms and people lacking socialisation skills.
If I had a $ for every arrogant manager I'd met I'd have about $278.
If you don't like it either write some software yourself and call it "The Super Efficient Piece of Software for Image Manipulation and Web Scripting" or fuck off.
I think I like the latter better.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
even then most people say cmyk because it's less of a mouthfull than cymk
;-)
.oO0Oo.
try saying it over and over
i do all my images in gbr anyway
i bet the real reason you don't use Gimp is because you havent' got a linux install up yet
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I was referring to the parent post of yours
.oO0Oo.
sorry if you felt insulted
i agree with your sentiments though
free (liberty) software is a great ideal and one i advocate over non-free as much as possible but I've got work to do and even though I know how to manufacture my own tools from the raw metal I'm more than prepared to let someone else do it and pay them for the priveledge.
zealotry can be expensive
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
While I'm knowledgable of some aspects of magazine creation, I do not know much about the actual printing process (I just write, not print. :)
However, I was thinking more along the lines of an ad designer, making an ad for a magazine to print. Or somesuch. I guess the point is mostly the matching from screen -> printer -> published work
Although, I would guess that even big magazine places would use Photoshop or Illustrator or probably both often. If I get the chance, I may one day ask the cover designers what they use (although they work in an office 250 miles away).
-- Mike DeMaria
"So with Adobe running out of steam for interesting ideas... When will GIMP catch up? Can Gimp catch up?"
Color matching.
Important thing in the graphics community. Getting the thing on the screen to look like what's on the proof pages and get that to look like the magazine prints. This requires a great deal of effort to get right. This may (it'd be a good thing at least) require OS support. MacOS has color matching support in the OS and Adobe, which is part of why it's really popular with graphics work (other advantages of MacOS and other platforms aside, it's just an example). So good color matching support would be a nice thing to work on.
-- Mike DeMaria
I definately agree that gimp has a bit of a learning curve(so does almost every other art program out there), but once you do understand howto get around, it is a great (FREE!) tool. One thing that I hope to see being improved is the number of quality plugins and filters.
!ted
AFAIK the answer to both is yes.
Also, I miss the XInput Airbrush, a new tool we had to take out lately since it wasn't finished. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!Sons of bitches.Sharkey
www.badassmofo.com
I think the problem is more than just layers and stuff.
The only reasons keeping me from ripping Windows off my box are two pieces of software:
- Nikon view 600. I just can't make the GPhoto driver for the Nikon Coolpix 600 work.
- Corel Photopaint. If you are used to do your work in software like this (or PSP or PhotoShop) you really see how much Gimp still has to evolve.
I don't use Gimp much, just for q'n'd work when I don't want to reboot, but a few areas really need improvement:
- Valid file formats. This is a bug and is unmistakable. Last time I tried I couldn't get valid TIFF's from Gimp. While I was writing a TIFF reader I even took a look a Gimp's source but couldn't make much sense out of it, for I'm not familiar with the code and it's not small.
- User interface. I can see the point in that dry minimalist interface, considering that when you are doing graphics, screen space is at premium price. But people who do real graphic work in general have access to large monitors, so having a UI that is a bit friendlier, more informative and more intuitive is certainly worth a bit of screen area. Anyway, with Corel PP or PS you can always maximize the window client area. And those small menus (if I use Gimp it's over KDE) really suck, but I bet Gimp zealots can use them even if they are blank.
- Tool control. One just can't compare the flexibility Corel PP gives to that of the Gimp tools.
- Anti-alias. If I have to explain this, it won't make much difference to you. Just take a look at the Gimp icon itself on a dark background. Horribly haloed.
There are more small annoyances, as well as there are annoyances with PP as well (I don't like the concept of objects replacing that of layers), but one gets used to these. I'm not using any bleeding version of Gimp, so a few of these issues may have received some attention lately. My point is there is a long way to go before Gimp can be seriously considered as a replacement for PP or PS. I agree with that college mentioned in a post above (assume you read oldest first) that considered it not prudent to teach Gimp.
Now that Moz supports this, it would be nice to see some tutorials on using alpha transparency layers in the Gimp.
I've heard it mentioned several times now that Gimp is good for web use. I'm using a pre-release 1.2 version of it now, and I'm just not seeing this from it. I honestly wish I did, because I really like the notion that Gimp is built upon.
In comparison to PS 5.5, I'm sorry but Adobe really has their act together when it comes to web work with this thing. I haven't seen anyone mention Photoshop's "Save for Web" function in comparison to how the Gimp saves files for web use. Couple that with the integration with ImageReady, and you get all kinds of wonderful stuff like image splicing for web use, automated rollovers, image maps created from layers, and a really sweet animation utility.
In playing around with Gimp I haven't seen any kinds of utilities that even approach this level of web graphics functionality. This may be due to my ignorance in using Gimp, so I may very well be judging too harshly here.
On a somewhat happier note, I am quite impressed with what all is there now considering what the price is. It was really cool to see pathing support added, and it's really not half bad at all. Like others who have posted here, I too have some UI problems with key mappings and such, but here again I'd be willing to concede that this may be more due to ignorance than anything else.
Last point: When I'm doing some serious editing inside of PS I find myself playing the keyboard like a piano. After a number of years working with it, my mouse and keyboard hands work independently switching between tools and using them. I have a feeling that a lot of serious PS users work in a very similar manner. I don't believe that Gimp should strive to just be a PS clone, but it would be helpful to a lot of PS users such as myself to perhaps provide a loadable keyboard mapping that equates back to PS.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
There is a really sad bug in the latest stable version of GIMP. The enter key on the number pad doesn't work! I think this is a really silly thing to be in a program as evolved as GIMP. Anyone know if they finally got this fixed?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Issue #2 - Why spend $250+ on a GeForce 2 unless you're benchmarking 3d capabilities? A vidcard that costs half as much would be able to achieve the same results for 2d work.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
I want an open-source (Or at least free, or at least not $400) alternative to something like Adobe Illustrator.
Vector graphics are perfect for the web (Particularly if/when SVG gets wide support), and pretty cool in general, but AFAIK, there's no reasonably priced tool for dealing with them. Gimp's path support wasn't that great last time I looked - perhaps this would be a good direction for future development.
Whoops... that's 1.1.23
it's green.
It shouldn't. That's mostly a bugfix release, the interface shouldn't change. If anything, things should work better.
it's green.
Don't know about training classes, I like being self reliant about software products , but I can recommend Alex Hartford's "Gimp Essential Reference". It's got a pretty decent amount of information, and has a reasonable price ($25 US).
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
psp is a wet dream for graphics work. the gimp is just to awkward for me. i can't seem to pick it up. psp has a really nice interface and some really powerful layer tools. the gimp needs these two things desperately.
i like german girls. and nannies.
Hey! How come I never noticed that the Gimp logo thing (forget its name) for Slashdot has animated eyes? It freaked me out when I saw it...
-Antipop
I'm happy that linux is starting to get better image software. I do a lot of graphics and linux's lack of support for that has unfortunatly kept me going back to windows. Does anyone know of any other good world creation software for linux.
I had my first Linux install up in 1993. I got tired of the 'distro of the day' adventures a few years back when packages that used to work stopped working. I got tired of source tarballs for useful programs no longer building on the latest flavor. So I mostly use NetBSD on my free Unix machines these days. (theres one Slackware machine left for various tasks Linux does best)
And yes, when I have stuff like Image editing to accomplish I use one of my other machines (dual boot is a drag, I have 100 MB ethernet connecting a half dozen machines single booting various OSes), with the software best equipped to accomplish the task at hand.
Yep. I used to be a Linux zealot. I know where a lot of fiery eyed advocates are headed, because I've been there. I quit trying to get my schematic capture software and emulator host software to run under Linux, because in the end the real world doesn't care what OS you do your work with. Holy wars are only fun for awhile, and if you've got nothing better to do with your time.
It's four colors, the order to list them has an 'established' pattern, but the important part is to include the right four. I bet you can't list what the four letters each stand for without looking it up somewhere. But you've got the buzzword part right, eh?
Hmmm.. I tried to install (actually upgrade from1.04) the rpm for 1.1.22-1 and I get this error "libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.2) is needed by gimp-1.22-1" which I don't quite get because when I do a locate libc.so.6 it shows up in /lib. I'm not sure what the GLIBC_2.2 indicates.
Do I need to update my c libraries for this to install?
rpm -qi glibc
Name : glibc Relocations: (not relocateable)
Version : 2.1.1
I thought this was current, maybe not... I did run ldconfig by the way.. didn't help.
Thanks...I was just looking at rpmfind and saw 2.1.3 there. Is that going to break anything on my RedHat 6.0 box?
In any case, despite GIMP's coolness, I'm fairly sure Photoshop would beat it hands down at most operations. The majority of CPU-sensitive operations in Photoshop are well-tuned to different processors (AltiVec PPCs, SIMD P3s, MMX, etc). GIMP is not as optimized (though it is, of course, far more portable).
Please tell me they are considering using an internal LAB color model :) that's one of the key points about Photoshop that makes its images better than RGB stuff- LAB is a broader color gamut than RGB. My understanding is that Photoshop uses LAB as an intermediate stage when converting from any color model to any other (bar grayscale, or indexed).
Hi,
m l
You may be interested in a critique of the UI that I did:
http://www.snowdrift.org/computers/gimp-crit.ht
The response was not entirely hostile, but the fact remains that 'code it or go shut up' still rules. Programmers are not willing to see themselves as implementing a good idea they didn't think of, certainly not willing to implement a good idea they don't agree with.
This is why non-free software doesn't have too much to fear yet. Meanwhile I've started to join in with KImageShop in the hope I can talk them round to at least thinking hard about the UI with UI hats on and not programmer hats on.
-----
Erdas Imagine can easily pan, zoom and manipulate an image this size - yet GIMP on the same hardware (SGI O200) becomes virtually unuseable.
Imagine does this by storing several copies of the same image at different screen display resolutions in it's proprietary image format. If the same thing was done with gimp and XCF files, it would make my life a hell of a lot easier.
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
--
Context menus are great -- if they're short. Long lists there (especially with multiple levels of submenus) really slow things down. A better way to do it would be to use the context menu for a few common features, and put the rest on a menubar. An even better way to do it (in my humble non-mac opinion) would be to make the right mouse button do something related to the tool selected (like draw in the background color?).
--
This has been around for yonks, for as long as I remember using the GIMP (pre 0.99). It's called Net-Fu. I don't know if it's being maintained anymore. It is in the directory at the GIMP site:
ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/net-fu/
Some sites using the GIMP/net-fu as a backend are:
http://www.onlinephotolab.com/
http://www.cooltext.com/
--
"Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"
No, it's not. There are some simple algorithms to give you an close approximation, but that's not good enough for prepress work. The conversion needs to take account of the characteristics of the output device, such as the gamut, amount of ink bleed and so on. Yes, you can do it without worrying about these things, but the colours won't look as good in the final printed image.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
An extra bit of resolution could be achieved by shifting away the sign bit before truncation. (negative colors are not needed).
Better dithering algorithims are much more important to getting a good representation than throwing more bits at it. The vast majority of popular image file formats are 8-bit only, so a good converter to 8 bits is more important than handling 16 bits. A 16-bit file is likely to be run through a bad 16->8 converter, resulting in a *worse* result than if Gimp produced 16 bits.
A png-like standard that saves the exponent with reasonable compression would allow "lossless" storage.
Gimp-2.0 will be a total rewrite. This doesn't mean that we will not reuse any code from the current codebase, but we want to change the basic architecture and build the most advanced image processing system out there.
This sounds like a good plan to me. It would be really nice to be able to write scripts that run GIMP and execute efficiently. For example, if you're making images for a website, you probably want your "source" images to be in xcf (gzipped or bzipped probably), but the "published" images need to be in GIF, JPEG, or PNG. Having a script (or Makefile...) that would tell GIMP to produce the published images whenever the "source" images change would be incredibly useful. This is somewhat possible today, but GIMP has a very long startup time (so invoking it once for each image is not a good idea), plus it seems to be really unstable when running in batch mode.
Doing a "complete rewrite" will also make it easier for more developers to get involved. It's always hard to get into the code of something that's been around a while and has accumulated significant bloat. (I'm not saying that GIMP is particularly bloated, but all projects tend to "fatten" with time)
BTW, has anyone else tried to get involved in GIMP development? Whenever I went to the GIMP IRC channel to ask some GIMP development questions, people always seemed really reluctant to talk about development, and instead just wanted to talk about random subjects. Where's the place to talk about GIMP development?
Please check the reference that I gave before speculating. Non-lossy wavelet representations for editing are straightforward, and they are fast and useful. (They are also very different from having multiple layers at different resolutions, the strawman you shoot down.)
Menus that you don't have to look at are a good idea; linear menus are not the best choice--circular menus are. And people can even make selections pretty reliably in multilevel circular menus.
I'm not a graphics person or a programer but I do test and follow the mailling list of a lot of OSS software. (Wine, Kernel Notes, Hurd Etc)
I was wondering if one might be able to use photoshop plugins in the gimp if someone port like a wine wraper for certain files or even did something like what was done with xmps with the Windows DLL.
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
Pie menus! Pie menus! They need to incorporate the GTK pie menu widget into GTK and use it in GIMP! Sorry. Pie menus on the brain.
Personally, I'd like to see a set of trials and benchmarks betwen the GIMP and Photoshop. For best results, it'd be nice to see them compare on both high and low-end systems.
;)
I'd reccomend, for example:
Test suite #1: Linux System:
Redhat 6.2 default installation (no tweaks)
Window System:
Windows 98 Second Edition default installation (no tweaks)
Hardware:
Sawmill window manager (small and fast) PIII dual 650 MHZ w/ 512 MB Ram (to avoid AMD windows issues [if any]) A good Gforce2 vid card.
Test Suite #2:
Same as above but with a PII350 w/ 128 MB RAM.
True, we'd never know if it was Windows vs. Linux or Gimp vs. Photoshop, but it'd certainly be fun. I, of course, would expect the Gimp to come out on top but ya never know
Cheers,
DranoK
That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die.
Shh! Nobody knows I'm gay!
--Ben
Two pages: info and downloads. It's still sketchy on the stability side of things, but if you don't have several hundred dollars to shell out to Adobe, then it's all you've got.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
There is a windows port of GIMP that uses GTK+
;-)
located at: http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/
most of it works, except for some random crashes
- *Normality Is The Root of All Evil*
I would love to see something in gimp that lets you create vector layers. Some layers can be totally pixmap and some can be vector or even mixed? Also, a non linear history like PS would be wonderful... it might allow you to actually apply filters to vector bits but still be able to treat the object as a vector chunk. Make sense? You could then do filters on text and stuff, but still go back and edit the text content. I'm still missing the line tools as seen in photoshop, and some really cool dynamic selector tools would be great - maybe some sort of connect the dots style selector?
First I have to say that I am completely pro free software on the internet and I appreciate everything that the Gimp stands for but: I have tried many graphic programs including PSP and Photoshop as well as Gimp but there is something about gimp that is straight up awkward! I can't seem to get the feel of it. Knowing your software in very important when working with graphics.
A complete rewrite may fix these issues.
The second thing is that if I was to use Gimp there would be no reason for me not to use Linux which then causes a new issue; I don't know what it is maybe it's my settings but I can't work well with my mouse in a linux environment I think it has something to do with the refresh rate. Now why I use ImageMagick instead of gimp for web based is as simple as this.. ImageMagick gets to the point gimp on the other hand (as convenient as it may be for some people) has way to many advanced features which then makes it way more complicated than it needs to be or than I want it. Also the support for CMYK.
Movie News - "Entertainment news, bitch!"
I use Photoshop every day. It's a critical application for me, for pretty much any and all art tasks, both for fun and profit.
I pose the following as questions. Perhaps all of these are possible today in the open-source world.
In Windows and on Macs, if you leave the mouse alone, you can use the pen or puck to click. If you leave the pen or puck idle, you can move the mouse to click and drag around the filesystem quickly. You don't have to select anything to switch. (Some Windows laptops get confused between plugged mouse and touchpad, but pen tablets and mice have mastered this co-existance long ago.) You can't draw freehand with a mouse anywhere near as well as you can with a pen, and conversely, a pen is unwieldy when double-clicking small gui elements.
Pressure sensitivity is only the tip of the iceberg here, but it is a WORLD of difference over a fixed stroke. Press lightly, thin hairline. Press heavily, bold swath. All in one stroke. Modern pen tablets understand many variables and can forward them to any interested software: pressure, tilt, roll, and even a second round tip on the back of the pen for "erasing."
Not a flame. If Linux and GIMP cannot handle these (as well as the CMYK/halftoning/separation features needed by page printers), then the GIMP is sadly relegated to web banners, stock photography edits, and other simplistic work. ART needs an expressive tool set.
[
First, you might want to take him out of that box in the basement and get rid of the leather hood. I imagine the skin conditions attached to prolonged box-storage are pretty deplorable...
Don't get me wrong... Gimp is very cool. But- I't would be good if for future versions they concentrate on making it a little more l-user friendly. You know, maybe hiding away some of the advanced features unless you select a mode that gives you the world. It seems a bit overkill to do some simple tasks that I could do quickly in another application (sometimes). It's overall appearance is not bad, but it isn't great either. They should use gimp to generate some graphics to spruce up it's menu's and interface a little bit... IMNSHO.
Blender And Linux Fan
Someone needs to merge that 16 bit branch into the main source tree. 8 bits really isn't enough for, say, visual effects work - but being stuck out on a limb is a bit annoying when the main development is happening somewhere else. Please merge it back in someone!
--
-- SIGFPE
I don't think JPEG or PNG supports CMYK. I don't think you need CMYK for web graphics or game graphics.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Right click the image then click a menu and click the "dotted line" at the top of a menu you want to "stick" on screen.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's got a very steep learning curve, but that is no different than Photoshop. Most of what you don't know (well, what I didn't know) was what operations I wanted to apply, in other words: what I wanted to achieve in the first place. It is hard to wrap my mind around graphics design.
I would also expect that setting up a course in using the GIMP would be difficult because of this. Then again, I'm no course designer, so...
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
I look forward to the day when schools start offering Gimp classes instead of Photoshop classes.
it's green.
Implement photoshop plug-in compatibility and suddenly GIMP would have ten times as many features availible, from freeware on the net to extremely polished professional printshop stuff.
Don't implement photoshop plug-ins and people who have invested in them (be it money or learning-curve time) will not move to GIMP, and GIMP development will be slowed as people waste their time re-inventing wheels that are freely availible as plug-ins, leaving less time to improve the fundamentals.
It's so rare to get a useful and functioning plug-in standards for graphics. Use it, whatever the difficulty.
--
That's right. After that silliness with "Kimp" The KDE people hacked up an image manipulation tool of their own. It's called kImageShope and it integrates well with KDE and Koffice with that embedding and stuff. Needless to say it looks more like Photoshpe than it dose like the Gimp.
The really cool thing about it is that it will work with Gimp plugins without them being modified in any way. For those new to image manipulation on Linux most of the Gimp's power is in those awesome plugins.
So yes. For all practical purposes the Gimp will soon have KDE integration with all the power that implies ( click image in KWord and edit it in place. yada yada )
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
That is, images are represented at multiple resolutions. When you edit it at low resolution (zoomed out), only the low resolution representation needs to be modified. When you zoom in and edit details, only a small part of the high resolution representation needs to be modified. Global color adjustements and many kinds of other global image processing operations can also be done very fast.
This kind of representation would allow the GIMP to work fast for nearly arbitrarily large images and arbitrarily fine detail, since processing speed is determined by the part of the image that is actually displayed and being modified. It is also a good match to the upcoming JPEG2000 standard.
But this kind of support needs to be built in from the ground up, since filters and tools need to be coded differently.
A good introduction to the subject is the book "Wavelets for Computer Graphics" by Stollnitz, DeRose, and Salesin.
However, this last "upgrade" was only 5.5 from 5.0 and had nothing new to offer (at least for us) In fact, the only really new thing to offer was another product they're "Kind-of" integrating, and won't actually be fully integrated till 6.0
With the recent story Slashdot ran about the Insider Mac web site running "secret" information about the new 6.0 release, there were a LOT of posts saying that 6.0 wouldn't have many new features either. Even saying that the only reason Adobe was so upset about the leak was that people would find out how featureless (and waste of money) the next release would be.
And with Adobe's marketing buzzwords like "Best Release Ever".... wait... I'm sorry. I just can't be as corny as them, so I won't list any more. --But they were good!!!!
So with Adobe running out of steam for interesting ideas... When will GIMP catch up? Can Gimp catch up? How many people are working on this thing. Is it just the original creator??? Will they have to hire a larger team when they hit the "releasable" 2.0?
I hear a lot of people saying the Photoshop will rule because of CMYK. However, I hear more and more people saying that the RGB is all they need. And it's true, if all you need is WEB-output!! And obviously web graphics are important now compared to the 80's when there was no such thing.
One last thing to point out. I'm amazed at what these graphic tools can do. But what is more amazing is that it takes 15,000 apes at Microsoft to release maggot feces (read: buggy shit), but yet it only takes Adobe an extremely small workforce. Adobe is practically at the TOP of the "Net-Income-Per-Number-Of-Employees" list.
So... If Adobe can push this kind of software with their "small" gropu, I'm sure Gimp can too. I can tell you what... that Adobe will never make a Linux version! If they had their way, it'd be MAC only. It still comes out Mac-platform first. (Not as bad as it used to be, though)
Rader
Anyway, I sure would like to see multibyte support in the Gimp someday.
GIMP FreeType, our freetype plug-in is on its best way to support multibyte fonts.
...but geez, that icon is scary. I was ok until I saw the eyes move. I actually jumped. Does it have to be animated?
Yep, that would go a long way towards fixing it. However we are up against something bigger here. As an artist (specialising in computer work) it is becoming painfully obvious that the entire open source movement is still largely "by techies, for techies". And as long as this remains the case, any software that requires expertise outside that narrow range (such as graphics apps, games, 3d animation, possibly even word processing) is crippled by the nature of the open source movement.
A while back, I had the time to contribute to the movement. I couldn't find any projects that were looking for such help. Perhaps this was because you had to be a techie to know where to look to find such a project, or perhaps it was because many techies simply don't realise how crucial the non-programming parts are if you're trying to make a fully functional product that can compare to normal commercial software.
Hell, remember when /. reported that id Software had fired one of their developers, Paul Steed, allegely out of spite? I saw _multiple_ replies stating "Uh - Paul Steed isn't a developer, he does 3d models and art". What?!?
If this thinking is symptomatic of a significant portion of linux developers, linux ain't going anywhere beyond servers and enthusiest machines anytime soon. Windows shall forever reign supreme.
Programming is only one part of good software, and now that everyone is an artist (because they can operate GIMP or PS), everyone is a designer (because they can write html), everyone is a UI developer (because they can write code), we're going to have to deal with the fact that these beliefs are simply false. Flawless html doesn't make flawless design, flawless programming doesn't make a useful UI, flawless pixel manupulation doesn't ensure flawless communication of a concept. These are different skills, and the sooner this is widely understood and accomodated, the sooner open source becomes a genuine alternative.
CMYK support would be a big thing. Asides from it's print advantages (most printing is not done RGB), CMYK allows for some effective touch up. Took the pictures in a photosensitive area of a clean room (you know, the yellow light)? Convert the image to CMYK, chuck the yellow, adjust the cyan and, poof! No more yellow. The image looks normal.
However many features you give and/or take with GIMP, the reason I still will use Photoshop is just how it feels. It's sad, but GIMP may never get to that point due to the platform it's being developed on. I started using Photoshop seven years ago, and I use GIMP to play around on my Linux box, but I just don't see the two converging. Maybe that's a good thing.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
I am disheartened to read that attention is not being paid to the GIMP UI.
The GIMP has 1st class, state of the art capabilities, but it's user interface is terrible.
Believe me; I Love the GIMP, but I just had my first fight ever with my girlfriend of 3-months; it started when she said, "I don't ever use the GIMP; I will only use Corel Photoworks (or whatever it was). The $500 I paid for it was worth every penny." After sitting down with my girlfriend for about an hour with the GIMP, I had to agree that the UI was bad.
Unfortunately, I cannot "just go into the GIMP source code and fix it", the problem is larger than one lone volunteer can solve.
The UI is a traditional Achilles Heel of Free and Open Source Software. Fortunately, there is a traditional solution to the problem as well, namely embedded scripting languages and extensive customizability.
The GIMP will take off when the UI is fully customizable; Making the UI maximally customizable should become the GIMPs next great goal.
This is how to fix the UI for the GIMP.
This is how ALL OpenSource UIs have been fixed- By giving the users an easy way to customize their environment.
Okay, that's enough for now... =^_^= . o O ( Phew! )
I recently started to work at a large International Software development firm. Our client was developing a business-to-business procurement solution that was to be global in every aspect. The program would be web-enabled.
Development was to be Microsoft-centric. Coming from a strong Unix background, I decided to use whatever familiar Unix tools I could to get the job done in record time. Central to my strategy was Perl-Fu for Gimp. I would use it to automate the localization of the images in the product.
It worked fabulously until Korean came along. I abruptly learned that the Gimp is incapable of rendering multibyte fonts. I suppose I should have checked that feature before I started, but the point is that I ended up having the company buy a copy of Macromedia Fireworks and scripting the enxtensions in JavaScript on Microsoft. What a pity.
Anyway, I sure would like to see multibyte support in the Gimp someday.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.