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The Future Of The GIMP
LinuxNews Team writes: "Sven Neumann and Michael Natterer prepared an RFC about GIMP. We learn that
there will be three branches in CVS: 1.2.x branch (stable GIMP), 1.3.x ( devel GIMP but
not many new features) and 1.9.x (VERY devel GIMP with whole new structure, GEGL and
GCim stuff). Looks like GIMP 1.2.0 is on its way to the users.
Check out the RFC."
I had /. open in netscape, and was proceeding to play minesweeper with netscape still in the background, and I thought I was going crazy when it looked like the gimp logo's eyes blinked. Turns out they only moved to the bottom right and back again rather quickly, but it is freaky! Here is the image in question.
Next is ./ going to have background sound that has someone very, very softly repeating "Dave, Dave, what are you doing? I can feel my mind going..."
The GIMP's been CYMK compatible for awhile now, bud. Remember the hype up to the huge scare last New Years? I think most modern programs would have to be CYMK compatible now, to operate normally past the year 2000.
I've got a bunch of RMS photos on my HD...
Despite the best intentions of the developers (and they have done an AMAZING job, I love the gimp), I've been following on the gimp-devel list I can virtually garauntee you, we will never actually see a gimp 2.0 with all the novel features that are proposed.
There are an uncountable number of vapour open source projects that say 'we are going to re-write and revamp everything', lay out a development roadmap and make cool acronyms for the different components required etc...but without someone (or a very small group) that does the 'core' of the package entirely on their own (as Spencer and Peter did), it will never ever get done. Projects like gimp get started form a initial jolt of need, the motivation to re-write something totally new after things have come this far just isn't there.
Open source is not synonomous with research and development; from what it appears they are proposing, gimp 2.0 would indeed be an amazing novel software package...sorry to be such a party pooper.
I think it may be patented (no details though) but even if it is, someone in an enlightened country could/should implement it and put it up on FTP. Then we could all help ourselves. :-) It wouldn't be possible to put it on Linux CDs sold in the USA, but that wouldn't stop people from getting it.
I belive that the "new structure" is referring to mostly backend changes. The front end from what I understand from conversation on the gimp-dev list will not change drastically. The backend however has a lot of leftover code from the beginnings of gimp and gtk, when there was no established object system yet. Now there is, I think the idea is to move the GIMPs backend data structures and layout to a "real" object system.
That's quite possibly the most disturbing image I've had in a long time.....
I saw RMS dancing the funky chicken at LWE in san jose last year too, I've barely recovered from *that*!
but it didn't crash nearly as much as Photoshop did.
I can't remember the last time photoshop crashed on me - my only current problem seems to be a driver bug that both Painter and Photoshop tickle in my GeForce... big blits in certain situations kill the machine completely. On my other system, PS is rocksolid though - has been since v4 or so.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
Pantone Color is a proprietry colour-matching standard - you buy a license to allow you to use it in your app.
The theory goes that when you specify your colour as a Pantone number, your printer, or repro house can match that colour exactly because their ink manufacturer can sell them spot colours in those exact colours, rather than mixing up CMYK to get there. You can get a book of 'perfect' prints of these colours, and then use that to be sure that you're going to get what you want, because your screen is not going to give you WYSIWYG in colour terms.
Many people use particular Pantone colours in their letterhead/logo etc, and having a graphics app with support for it allows you to match their colouring for work you produce. It's more important for print than online work though.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
>Photoshop allows for editable type using both
>Type 1 and TrueType ("scalable") fonts.
Gimp depends on X fonts, so whether or not you use Truetype fonts depends on X. I'm not complaining about your post, just pointing out what a blithering idiot the original poster is both ways.
A quick search at IBM's Patent Site indicates 2 patents - one filed 1975/granted 1977, one filed 1994/granted 1998.
My thought was that this might have something to do with moving and resizing layers. If you put 5 different images together and put them under one branch of the tree, then you could translate these layers and the registration between them would remain the same.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Bring out the GIMP! ;)
I'm sorry. It had to be said. Please subtract the nominal karma fee for such a blatant outburst. :)
---
seumas.com
thanks for the killer link!
look like it's for osX based systems and nothing previous. guess that makes sense in a way - love to have a gimp that ran under os 9.
for those of you who haven't seen it, here's a link:
link
In other news, a link was posted in a slashdot comment today that wasn't to goatse.cx...
actually, GTK+ is "The Gimp Toolkit". www.gtk.org points this out. gtk was created after the original authors of the gimp got tired of Athena Widgets. after it was created, they branched it out, so others could use this toolkit. :)
awfully nice of em, eh?
And forget about another glaring weakness of the GIMP... lack of support for Pantone colors, which will never be remedied, since that'd require paying patent licensing fees. Still, incredibly useful
In any case, lack of Pantone support pretty much shuts the Gimp out of the professional high-end DTP realm, moreso than lack of CMYK, IMO.
:)
No... CMYK is first and Pantone is 2nd or 3rd... Because, you can lie about pantone colors if need be, in that you can make a multichannel image and specify to the printer - now, please print black black plate in black, the cyan channel in Pantone Blue 072, the magenta as Pantone Red 032, and the yellow plate as a varnish.
The file will look absolutely aweful on your screen though, but you can fake your way around with out actually using Pantone colors while creating your files, but that all depends on supplying a file format that will separate correctly at the service bureau (ie, you can examine the plates of a CMYK file in advance by printing separations on your laser printer, but even if you do so with a RGB file, the service bureau will convert your file from RGB to CMYK and destroy anything you thought was going to be a separation...
But again, GIMP won't ever have access to Pantone colors, and since CMYK is more unilaterally useful, it would seem obvious that right now, it's its greatest sore spot... Then device independent color (LAB) for color management purposes... I won't rattle down the entire list of short comings though, because CMYK's enough of a start to making the GIMP a useful program for tasks beyond making simple web graphics.
Who cares if 2 + 2 sometimes equals 3.9999999999 on a chip?
Obviously you've never been involved with a branding campaign... Consistency counts. If every piece of collateral about your company was in a slightly different shade of color, it'd make your company look low-budget at best and amateur at worst. Using Pantone colors from a design perspective costs you nothing. You'll have to pay a couple extra dollars to the printer because they have to pay more for their inks, but in the end you end up using colors that you know will always look the same, regardless as to where they appear, or who you have print each job...
If they would drop support for non-scalable fonts, it would be a lot easier to do what PS does.
Photoshop allows for editable type using both Type 1 and TrueType ("scalable") fonts.
As for your beef about photoshop... The conspiratory theorist in me would say that they remain separate to generate extra revenues... But in the end, i think that they're two separate tools with two separate markets that overlap a lot. Simply integrating type layers into photoshop though kills off a lot of the need to go to illustrator (in my world). I also think that Photoshop would turn into a huge mess if they merged illustrators functionality into it. You'd have a huge selection of tools that only worked in one mode or another , or on one layer or another. Ditto for plug-ins and filters.
good point
> Does anyone know when The GIMP will support CYMK?
When it pries the relevant patents from Photoshop's cold, dead fingers.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Why not use 1.1? It's stable enough. I've been using it for a long time now.
PS. Which book didja get?
When it pries the relevant patents from Photoshop's cold, dead fingers.
I don't think Adobe (or anyone else for that matter) has patents on CMYK -- it certainly predates photoshop, or even computer design by a long shot. Pantone on the other hand....
BTW-- I like your sig.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
It's not the operating system that's holding the printers up. It's chemistry.
Sorry, just because CORBA is used in GNOME doesn't mean CORBA is ONLY used in GNOME. You could still have CORBA without all the GNOME dependencies.
I know CORBA is not used solely in GNOME, but AFAIK KDE uses a different scheme, KParts. So CORBA is a more integral part of GNOME than it is of KDE, in other words, it is more GNOME-specific than it is KDE-specific. That was the point I was trying to make. (And though there surely are many other applications, I have heard of CORBA only in when talking about GNOME, so I'd guess GNOME constitutes a major part of CORBA-using software.)
I doubt, therefore I may be.
Your right. I recently discovered Terraform, which seems to implement much that The GIMP already does.
The one thing that AFAIK has not been modularized in GIMP is the drawing of the images to the screen. The height field could be implemented also this way. I think that a plugin or module for drawing the image might be more consistent with the design of The GIMP. This would allow switching between wireframe/2D map/etc. easily or allow for several simultaneously with several views open.
Of course, more modularization could be done to allow external programs to function as "plugins". Could for example CORBA be used? This, OTOH, could make The GIMP more GNOME-specific, which would make some KDE people somewhat angry (or does KDE implement CORBA?)...
I doubt, therefore I may be.
Just grab Gimp 1.1.30. It has what you ask, and works well.
You have paths (bezier curves), you can stroke them, modify them, and also convert arbitrary selection to bezier paths.
Paths can be easily exported/imported to/from textfiles, and creating a plugin to convert them to/from EPS should be simple (I'm making some experiments as now).
This, OTOH, could make The GIMP more GNOME-specific
Sorry, just because CORBA is used in GNOME doesn't mean CORBA is ONLY used in GNOME. You could still have CORBA without all the GNOME dependencies. Also, if you look at other posts, it appears that CORBA will be used in the 1.9 development branch.
And yet I get BSOD's on this Win2k box just as often as I did on NT4... As all recent MS boxes, it's rock solid if you don't use it much... (ie. a one or two app box.) As with Win16, Win32 and MacOS boxen, if you use it FOR REAL (d/l all sorts of doo-dads and gadgets) it breaks frequently. I'm still on the OS X public beta kick for my G3....it's great. Very stable. Biggest gripe is no drivers for my 3-button scroller mouse. Strangely, OmniWeb and other "Cocoa" applications have full multi-button and scroller support from the get-go, but the "Workspace" and "Finder" don't, nor do the apps within Classic. Should be a patch out soon that allegedly removes volumes of "development code" and gives a serious speed-boost. Can't wait.
Oh, and about the graphics tablet stuff...
We have a Wacom Intuos A5 - a very nice bit of hardware.
Gimp for windows tries. But fails all too often. I will try an update of WinGimp - that might fix the problems.
Anyway, even with proper tablet support, Gimp is not a natural media package like Painter. Painter creates natural, smooth graphics. Gimp generates a series of varying sized circles. It doesn't know what to do with the tablet in the end, which is a shame. A lot more work is required in this area for the Gimp to have decent natural media functionality and decent tablet support.
I hope that the next devel version of The Gimp will allow script-fus to be undone. That's the only reason I don't like using them much --- they are not completely undoable.
whadaya mean, patent fees?
Pantone's gone and patented COLOR?
Or could you expand a bit, please?
Ok, that little GIMP guy freaked me out when his eyes moved - I thought I'd gone nuts. They only move when I'm not looking at them!
--
This
Can you explain to me exactly what Cyan Yellow Magenta blacK has to do with what year it is?
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Actually PS 5.5 and onwards is bundled/integrated with Adobe Imageready, and you can easily (much easier than in the gimp) make animated GIFs. No avi or mpeg stuff like the gimp, but you can do a multiframed animation.
I would use the Gimp's animation capabilities if the interface wasn't such a kludge. Can't they just invent a new palette that's designed for and suitable for animation? Layers?? come on...
Anyway, Adobe would be crazy to start integrating Premiere into PS, they're already bringing in Illustrator features and if it keeps continuing, it'll end up a complete mess.
As long as the Gimp doesnt support Pantone colors ... ..
then it will never commercialy replace photoshop, correldraw
i know pantone color is proprietary but there could be a commercial pluging for it
42
No, color specification. You can say that your logo's shade of red is "Pantone XYZ", and you'll get pretty much exactly the same red on your printed material, your trade-show doodads, the sides of your trucks, etc.
Don't know too much more about it than that, because the whole concept of color gives me a headache--it's enough to make me go out and buy a Mac just for the built-in color correction.
In any case, lack of Pantone support pretty much shuts the Gimp out of the professional high-end DTP realm, moreso than lack of CMYK, IMO.
I just realized that what I asked for is the main new feature in PS 6.0   :)
Okay GIMPish devs, get your butts in gear!
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
It [Photoshop, PaintShop] lacks extensibility for the common user without special tools.
So how is it a rip-off? It's a one-up!
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Indeed, the availability of editable Text and associated effects in the Photoshop are quite useful, and I use it more than GIMP for that reason alone. However, one must understand that the GIMP tries to be friendly to all users of X and supports bitmapped fonts. It's font tool wants to render a layer, either with bitmaps from X, or TTF/Type-1 rendering... and that's it. One shot, one model, one layer. If they would drop support for non-scalable fonts, it would be a lot easier to do what PS does. Or they could have two font tools (like "textbox" and the old one).
Now my beef about Photoshop: if you're going to support realtime vectors in the form of fonts, why not add full Illustrator functionality, with vector layers? God how I miss a simple circle or arc tool in PS. Same to GIMP, let's see some vectors!
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
gimp 1.1 has paths, so 1.2 will have it too.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
If GIMP will be under heavy redesign, thus we mach expect the same thing for GTK+ which is a bad thing for GNOME as it's approaching 2.0 (or 1.2) version.
Or maybe GTK+ is already a distinct rpoduct from GNOME, thus we have no problem...
Ah, the "foxy female" reference. Have you been watching "That Seventies Show" agian?
have you USED the gimp on win32? It's slow, clunky, crash prone, etc etc
Just remember, an application can only be as good as the operating system it is running on...
---
"Fdisk format reinstall, doo dah doo dah,
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
I think some of them are in fact undoable, but some are not. I guess it is the plugin author's responsibility to implement undoability, but you're right: it really should be done outside of the plugin code and in the main app. I hope this'll happen in the future.
Wow...I have seen many messages where people say that the transition from Photoshop to Gimp is a rocky one with less features....But I have a slightly different story...I have used gimp for a while now (at home) and feel pretty comfortable with it -- however I just got a shiny copy of Photoshop on this "nice" NT machine here at work -- and having never used Photoshop before -- I am at a complete loss to get anything done....Good thing I have Exceed....I think if I want to get any work done today I best fire up Gimp from one of the *nix boxen sitting around here collecting dust...(Now if only I could have such a comparable option to replace Excel, Quicken, IE5, Lotus Notes, Homesite --- I would be a happy camper.)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
[A] lack of support for Pantone colors [] will never be remedied, since that'd require paying patent licensing fees.
How long ago was that patent granted? The first I heard of Pantone was working as a temp for a print shop in 1995, and even then it seemed to be an established standard. I realize patents last quite some time, but they inevitably expire.
'Nuff said, but /. wouldn't let me post without a body....
LMAO. That's actually funny before you think about how mac users work at the moment =) I dont think I need to point out the modifier keys (command/shift etc etc etc) =) But very nice wisecrack, all the same.
[CK]
---
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
The only thing it doesn't really do quite the way I'd like is paths.
If you could have strokable paths (especially if you could turn fonts into paths) then it would do just about everything I use Photoshop and Illustrator for.
The Script-Fu is very useful indeed.
There's a huge manual. Really helpful. I thought I could do things quickly in Photoshop until I learned how to use GIMP moderately effectively. Now, rather than wondering how to do something in GIMP, I spend hours cursing Photoshop for not being able to do it.
Please excuse my somewhat off-topic post, but...
Has anyone here heard of a V4L plugin for The GIMP? I tried the one from SANE (which has a v4l backend) but it failed miserably.
Ranessin
Let's have the script-fu work regardless of the sex of the person in the image...
Ranessin
As much as I may like pictures of nude men on occaision, this idea kind of scares me. I'm not sure that most Slashdotters are the kind of men I'd want to look at...
Ranessin
So slow that I even responded to this out of sheer lack of other things to respond to.
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
I would just like to say how much I like using the GIMP. I'm able to do stuff that most people would think is impossible without paying for (or pirating!) photoshop. And it's easy to use, too!
-mdek.net
Must be a slow nerd news day.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
So why don't you use Gimp for Windows, if that's what you've got at work? I've got it at home (my box multiboots slackware and nt, gotta have it for work), and it seems to work pretty well. A few flaky bits, but it's quite amazing to have an almost-up-to-date copy of the Gimp running without X. - Tim
Errr, make that 7.0....
I can't resist -- here's another quote: Or perhaps, Snell speculates, a new category of sexuality might emerge among humans - the technovirgin, people who find it simpler, perhaps even preferable, to have sex exclusively with sexbots. This would avoid all the emotional and physical complications of having sex with people.
IIRC, Rob added the ability to filter by author in response to this article.
Thanks Bob, maybe I'll pull a Signal11 and mod that up from one of my other accounts.
Good point, we have to find someone to sift through the 80% of Slashdot men that are too skinny, too fat or too pale.
Hey, has anyone registered amIaHotGeekorNot.com yet?
No, you misunderstand. I meant animating it to add real bootie action, heat and vibration!
5'8". 150 pounds, running and cybex machines keep me a sleek sex machine!
But some prude at Slashdot keeps rejecting my Ask Slashdot: How to animate a Realdoll.
Any ideas? Disney won't return my emails either.
ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/mandrak e/7.2/i586/Mandrake/RPMS/gimp-1.1.25-13mdk.i586.rp m
and should install on most RPM based Linux distros on pentium and more machines.
"The Future of The GIMP"
Well no more leather I say. It'd just getting tacky. And it's been done. And get the leash off the little fella could ya?
Oh... the software... nevermind. forget i said anything.
Unfortunately the install ii have for 5.5 is corrupt. The ICC files never fuly installed. Result? Some how absolutely no .gif support. :-(
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
If they ran Linux or some form, it would be no problem, now would it?
:-]
P.S. I live where it's a state law that they don't litter the sides of the roads with those eyesores.
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
Try building a multiframed animation in Photo Shop.
"Getting High? Cool." Beavis And Butthead.
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
I really want to get hold of (a stable) 1.2, the book I bought is at the 1.2 level and I get annoyed when the book has stuff I want but can't use in 1.0.4. I use The Gimp a lot, doing wallpapers for my website (http://jsoftco.8m.com - shameless plug!!), and I like it. I am continually finding new and better tools and gadgets (except for one thing I want, I may have to write my own plug-in, and that sounds like work , darn it!).
Teen Angel - a Ghost Story
Pantone has not "patented color", but they do own the IP embodied by their system of numbering colors and specifying the basic colors mixed to produce a given color. Now don't go all crazy complaining they have patented what every kindergartner knows, that yellow and blue make green; they haven't. They have created a standard set of basic colors and recipes for thousands of other colors that can be made by combining those basic colors, so that printers (I mean ink-covered skilled laborers, not beige-colored electronic appliances) everywhere can produce the same color, given its Pantone number. You would be within your rights to devise a different system and then try to get the printing industry to adopt it, but you can't use the Pantone system without paying them for the right.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
script-fu's rule
i just sit there and pretend im l33t by making the tileable textures and sending them to friends saying that i drew this awesome tileable background by hand and impressing them.
-:-:-:-:-:-
visit my page and help me out with my experiment
details in the 12-11-00 update
Photoshop pros:
1) I have spent years learning Photoshop. Whatever I need to do to an image, I can do it in Photoshop really, really quickly.
When I use GIMP, I get frustrated alot "Damn it! In Photoshop I could just do x - y - z and I'd be done by now!"
My time with graphic apps has generally been spread across a wide variety - Corel, Adobe, Paint Shop Pro, and GIMP mainly. When I use any of them I get occasionally frustrated "Damn it, I could do this in no time in (whatever I'm not using at the time)". It simply isn't true that Photoshop has everything GIMP has - I would suggest you just haven't used GIMP enough to understand where it really shines (and where photoshop really sucks). You have, of course, used photoshop enough to know where GIMP really sucks by comparison. get some more experience with GIMP, it will be worth it in the long run.
I still use different graphics apps for different jobs depending on what I want to do, because, in reality, no matter how good any one app is, the others are often better for _something_.
These days my time is split about 50/50 between GIMP and photoshop though.
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Yeah, that was funny! Chris walken had that watch up his ass. :-D
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
I stand corrected. I searched the word via m-w.com and they did not have a definition. I checked dictionary.com and found the definition you referred. Please accept my deepest Pig Testicle apology AC. I have learned 3 things: 1) Do not use m-w 2) The defintion of steganography 3) The only one to blame for all this is that damn monkey! Thank You. Mr. Testicle
You are being trolled you dumbshit! You get an automatic 2 when you post...you should be ashamed!!
Great point. I'm still deciding between +1 Funny and -1 Disgusting...men of slashdot, I love it.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Photoshop pros:
1) I have spent years learning Photoshop. Whatever I need to do to an image, I can do it in Photoshop really, really quickly.
When I use GIMP, I get frustrated alot "Damn it! In Photoshop I could just do x - y - z and I'd be done by now!"
This, I guess, is a problem any new software must overcome when it enters a marketplace already dominated by one program.
In short, you're too lazy to learn a new program. RTFM!!!(assuming there is one of course). 2) Photoshop has really nice text editing features, including being able to edit any text entered at any time. 3) Photoshop's history feature has become indispensible for me.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
In completely stealing things you consider the software you're stealing from to be open-source. That wasn't very hard, was it?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Gimp is a very useful tool.
I don't have a winblows machine,
so I don't have the disposition of
using photoshop. The gimp graphics
are VERY good, as far as I can render
anything with it. All the graphics on my
site are done with gimp. Its the best
thing that has ever happened to the graphics
market !!!
M$ stock dropped in 1/2 since last year. If you are a MCSE, you will be broke.
Suppose you toss said script-fu a screen of frankenfurter from rocky horror picture show? *Shudder*
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
If you tell me he did the limbo, too, I'm going to pass out! :-)
That's all well and good, but...
I didn't realize Jar Jar was a female!!
The problem is not in PSP or the GIMP changing, it's your natural psychological response, like moving away from home after been there for 15 years. nuff said, update as required, well get used to it.
REAL color graphics professionals use a paintbrush and a real palette.
A while ago the KDE people ported the GIMP to Qt, calling it KIMP. Because of the GPL not allowing linking with non-GPLed libraries, they were unable to distribute it. But now that Qt is GPLed, they could do so. I wonder if KDE is still interested in having a KDE-ized version of the GIMP?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
a port to the mac?!!! gimp is killer on win32 - give adobe something to _really_ worry about.....
As for the program itself, it's quite an improvement over the 1.0 series. The user interface is a little more consistent, and there's now a menu button in the top left of image windows, in case you don't like the RISC OS-like context menu. It's a lot quicker and easier to change things like the brush and fill pattern, and the new drawing tools are pretty handy. It seems to have a lot greater support for graphics tablets, something I haven't been able to test since I don't have a graphics tablet...
Anyway, it's well worth a download, and is a great set of improvements to an already great program.
Oh, and here's that Half-Life stuff. :-)
Ford Prefect
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
What used to be a simple layer stack in GIMP 1.x, which is combined using layer modes (Normal, Combine, Difference, ...) will, with the help of GEGL, become a rendering pipeline which can be thought of as a tree of layers which is viewed from its root. The nodes of the tree are operators with an arbitrary number of inputs and outputs. These inputs and outputs access rectangular regions of pixel-data, the edges of the tree. Each edge (comparable to the layers we have now) can hold its data internally as pixels, vectors, text or whatever and only needs to provide a well-defined interface so it can be plugged into the rendering pipeline. A similar approach will be used for the operators: Simple functions like color corrections or blur filters as well as affine transformations and more complex effects are possible.
So, the rendering pipeline becomes much harder to explain in simple terms. This new model, however, yields great flexibility and power. You can have an image that contains both pixel-based portions and vector scalable portions. These objects can then be modified at any time. So, unlike current GIMP, text could be added and then later changed. This is truly useful for speeding up many uses that people have for the GIMP, but it also makes for more new uses.
--neutrino
History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion-i.e. none to speak of. - Lazarus Long
They haven't patented color. They've patented a very specific system of color definitions. You can use any color in the world you'd like without their permission or okay. But if you go to your local printer and leaf through their color swatch book and say "i'd like this plate to be this exact color", then you're generally using Pantone colors.
:-)
You generally only ever see pantone colors on print jobs of 1, 2 or 3 colors, because most of the specturm of colors can be recreated using 4 colors.
They fill a niche. I hope i explained it adequately... Maybe their website will offer a clearer explanation for you...
I don't mean to bag on the GIMP. It's cool, but:
Photoshop pros:
1) I have spent years learning Photoshop. Whatever I need to do to an image, I can do it in Photoshop really, really quickly.
When I use GIMP, I get frustrated alot "Damn it! In Photoshop I could just do x - y - z and I'd be done by now!"
This, I guess, is a problem any new software must overcome when it enters a marketplace already dominated by one program.
2) Photoshop has really nice text editing features, including being able to edit any text entered at any time.
3) Photoshop's history feature has become indispensible for me.
GIMP pros:
1) Free
2) Easy to write your own "plug ins"
3) runs on linux
Photoshop (and Diablo II) are pretty much the only reasons I ever use Windows at all. If there was a port of Photoshop for Linux, I would buy it in a heartbeat (even at $500+)
This begs the question: Can a free software program of this complexity ever hope to overtake the proprietary "Industry Standard" ?
IMHO, we can hope. GIMP is only at 1.2, and has been around a few scant years. Photoshop has been around 'forever' (any timespan over 5-8 years is forever in computer time) and is at 5.5 (going on 6?)
Given the pace of software advances in popular open spource projects, there is definitly hope that GIMP can overtake Photoshop at some point.
My office mate often touts GIMP. He (and myself) can be described as Linux zealots. But, when it really comes down to it, I use the best tool for the job. And often, that is Photoshop. (just as, often, the best tool is Linux)
I wish GIMP good luck, and I DO use it regularly, when it's a quick change and I don't want to re-boot to windows. I look forward to the day when I don't have to re-boot at all.
-geekd
Does anyone know when The GIMP will support CYMK? This is the thing holding me back from replacing Photoshop 6.0 and my whole windows partition.
Fawking Trolls!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
We use Gimp at work for our advertising work in magazines in the UK.
The lack of CMYK is a bit of a pain, but then again, I wouldn't have much of a clue about it anyway!
That means we work with 600dpi A4 images within the Gimp. We load them using the postscript filters provided by Ghostscript, which is the only program in the known universe that can load Postscript generated by Microsoft Publisher. We know for a fact that Quark can't.
We do this on a laptop running Mandrake 7.1. With 64 Megs of RAM, 2 Gig of partition and a 266MHz PII processor. (HP Omnibook 4100). We also use Gimp for Windows for photo work for the adverts (version 1.1.28 I think for the latest ads) which is generally very stable. It has bugs, but not having to pay £500 for Photoshop, plus the time required to learn it is significant for an internet company.
Yep, we don't use the best tools (Publisher is really bad, but we have it and it can be made to do most things). When a really good DTP program for Unix comes out that works, provides all the functionality (or a subset of) Quark and Publisher, then we will be migrating to that.
Anyway, UK readers might have seen the adverts for our company in magazines like Practical Internet, Surfed, MacUser (once, and once only), EWEB, Internet Money, Essential Internet and a few more. Oh, the company - we register domain names at firevision.co.uk. Expanding soon to even more services... [end mini-ad]. We don't think that the lack of CYMK support has affected the outcome that much at all - but we aren't laying out an entire magazine where things like this become a lot more important.
Maybe I should write an article on real business use of the Gimp...
Sadly enough I can see this being possible, given sufficiently powerful edge-detection routines (clothing region detection, sub-clothing body feature determination for nipple and breast shapes etc.). *shakes head* If you want celebrity fake nudes though, why not just look for them on all the bajillions of sites devoted to that? Of course, what with NutScrape being the pig that it is, you'll expend the same amount of cpu cycles either way[1]. Or just become a millionaire and offer the object of your desire a few hundred thousand dollars for a weekend o' carnal fun. "The only difference between an actor and a whore is that the actor sells their mind too." ~ some person whose name I'm forgetting
[1] which naturally is going to lead some troll to propose building a beowulf cluster of 386s to use hot_grits.fu to render a naked N. Portman. Groan. Why do I think of these things?
--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Very much of the Free codebase seems to be coming into a "final rethink" state, after having left a "better attempt" state -- and before that was, of course, the "initial (serious) attempt" state. It is like the good old saying that software is expected to become useful at its 3.0 release.
., and because most of these projects begin with 0 instead of 1 (which is often nothing but a honest thing to do), I happen to believe that, even though the version numbers are still smaller, lots of code reaches a "symbolic 3.0 release". Still with me? OK! :-)
;-) So if there is anything of truth in this story, my comment is that it seems a useless and confusing move, don't do it... :-)
Now, because Free software often uses release versions in the sense of
A few examples:
Linux kernel: the Linux kernel has a history of major rewrites, but still a smaller history of API changes. One might argue that it had its "initial (serious" attempt" around 2.0, a first rethink around 2.2, and now yet another major rethink for 2.4, with Linus saying that they have now learned enough from the past to make the kernel structure workable, so it should be considered a "final rethink".
GNOME: 1.0/ 1.2 "initial (serious) attempt", 1.4 "better attempt" and 2.0 "final rethink" (yes, I _do_ realize that 1.4 as well as 2.0 are future music for now, but there's good thoughts being done about this already.
GTK+ follows about the same course, only it is a little bit further (has already got 2.0 alpha code). There is a good API rethink being done in 2.0.
And now the GIMP. I applaud all this work, because I realize how much courage it takes to make these radical steps, and how _good_ it is that this work is being done. A lot of open source projects have a tendency to become lazy bloatware by a lack of strong leadership (and competition...). Take for example the comments concerning XFree86 that are on the rise again. (Note: this is not to even _suggest_ that the XFree86 team doesn't do a good job. I believe it could have been done better, but that it requires very special leadership skills to take the right decisions in such matters.)
So, I wish you a lot of luck with the re-thinking!
(P.S.: I heard rumours about GIMP 2.0 to have a cross-platform GUI library thingy. After reading this I don't believe much about it at all anymore. Anyway, I think it would be an odd move for the GIMP to move away from the GIMP toolkit!
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Translation: When is Adobe going to come out with Photoshop 6.0? We've run out of features to copy (CMYK support is too hard and it's not like Linux users need it to paste penguins on pictures of lingerie models) and the Open Source Movement certainly isn't coming up with any on its own.
So, when are we getting a story on the SEC investigation of the VA Systems IPO?
if you want pics of nude men, considering that about 230,000 men are users here. We can all take nude pics of ourselves and post them somewhere, maybe even a Men of Slashdot calender to raise money for Athlon's, or the kids or something.
I've been playing around with the design of a terrain engine. For those who don't know the basics of heightmap engines, the obvious thing to do is to have a grid of vertices. The height of the vertices is defined by a bitmap image, where each pixel's grayscale intensity represents the height of the vertex.
The result is that a grayscale image can be created in The Gimp, and the output sent to my (and many other) terrain engines after saving a file. This is an unsatisfactory amount of feedback.
I'd been doing some thinking about making a real terrain editor when it struck me that I would probably be recreating most of the tools and filters in The Gimp, but at a decidedly lower quality. I then realised that what I wanted to do is the opposite of plugins, additional filters, Perl-Fu and Script-Fu: I wanted to throw out the buffer where all the filters and tools are rendered to, and replace THAT with a plugin to the other end of The Gimp.
I am interested in replacing the framebuffer in The Gimp with a AF_UNIX socket which transmits the framebuffer data over to another app, which would be in this case, my terrain. I would be able to paint modifications onto my terrain with all of The Gimp's tools.
I'm pretty busy with my website these days, as we just went live, but I'm definately interested in looking into the code for The Gimp soon enough to see if this is feasible.
Does this tree-based rendering thingy mean that it would be possible to implement a tree of layers, instaed as it is now a stack of layers, that is, that layers could be grouped into "meta-layers", to which the same things (like opacioty, mode, colour balance, etc) could be applied as to real layers? I have missed this feature in gimp.
Perheaps it would allready be possible to implement (just a bit messy?). I don't know. I am a developer, but I have never looked at the gimp sources...
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Where you can take an image of a foxy female, and then have the script-fu trace her clothing, remove them and replace them with the appropriate flesh tones.
You'd have to allow customization though, for nipple and aurolae size and color, as well as pubic hair color, shaping and or lack of.
Once this gets done, though, I then need many screencaps of a certain George Lucas movie.
Can you elucidate on this "whole new structure"? Or is not enough about it known yet? Taking a look at the information at
http://plugins.gimp.org/gimp2/doc_components.html it says:
libgimpwidgets: core-independent widgets used e.g. to build libui widgets (similar to gimp 1.x's libgimpui)
but I really cannot stand it when graphics programs change drastically and add "functionality" (on the level of the user interface) that replaces other things that I'm used to. For instance, I really liked PSP3. I really did. (OLD, old stuff we're talking about here.) But I coulddn't stand PSP4.
I'm reasonably sure the GIMP guys are smart enough not to change things around too drastically, but it's a concern of mine, since I really enjoy working with and playing with The GIMP as it is. I don't want to have to update to a newer form that I really don't like to get the latest neat things.
Just a concern of mine.
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
Ok, let's say you're developing an OS. You have a clear mandate for what an OS does based on decades of examples.
On the other hand, if you're developing a photo-manipulation program, you don't have so clear a map. Once you've "done Photoshop", what else should photo-manipulation be? How does that apply to the extant (and future) UNIX(-like) desktops? How important is performance? How important is non-interactive use? How important is any new feature?
Here's where I think the GIMP should go in the next 2-3 years, but others will disagree....
- The UI and the photo-editing parts should be separated from eachother. The editing engine should be a library with a well-defined API between it and the UI so that others can slap a GNOME UI on it or a KDE UI or another Gtk+-only UI which uses a single window, etc.
- All plugins should be re-catagorized and many re-written to fit smoothly into the new catagories. Perl, C, Scheme... it should not matter to the user.
- Non-interactive use needs an overhaul. One of the most powerful features of the GIMP is being able to script your interaction with it, but most of what people want to do with this will require a single, stateful GIMP that can accept lots of requests at once (call it World Wide GIMP, if you will). This is not really what GIMP was designed for, so most people settle for using a library-based interaction with ImageMagick.
I know that this list of wants is 180 degrees off of what a lot of people want, but that's sort of my point. It's really hard to figure out what community to serve in the Open Source world....I wish the folks at GIMP the best. If I ever have any more spare time, I'll go back to helping them out.