Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the merry-christmas-to-all dept.
&& writes was the first to tell us that The Gimp has now reached v1.2.0. Congratulations
to all the hackers that made it happen. I couldn't live without my gimp! (God I love saying that)
great program, but it isn't keeping up
by
q000921
·
· Score: 5
The Gimp is a great program, well written, and very useful. But I'm afraid it isn't keeping up with technology.
One area is probably fairly easy to address: photo manipulation programs are used more and more for web design and page layout, and for that, they need features like better vector drawing support, page layout and text support, and output plugins for formats like Flash.
Another area is more fundamental. The Gimp right now uses bitmaps as its fundamental data representation. That makes even simple operations very compute intensive, and even simple operations take up a lot of resources to undo. Combining wavelet-based and multiresolution editing with edit lists provides a way out: it allows the results of operations to be displayed quickly, operations can be undone quickly, and often images (e.g., JPEG2000 compressed images) don't even have to be decompressed fully to be displayed or manipulated. I think addressing this issue will require a fundamental rewrite.
Anyway, for now, I'm really grateful to have the Gimp available: it's a reliable workhorse, and even most commercial programs are still behind the state of the art.
Slashdot Mirror
You can download it here.
One area is probably fairly easy to address: photo manipulation programs are used more and more for web design and page layout, and for that, they need features like better vector drawing support, page layout and text support, and output plugins for formats like Flash.
Another area is more fundamental. The Gimp right now uses bitmaps as its fundamental data representation. That makes even simple operations very compute intensive, and even simple operations take up a lot of resources to undo. Combining wavelet-based and multiresolution editing with edit lists provides a way out: it allows the results of operations to be displayed quickly, operations can be undone quickly, and often images (e.g., JPEG2000 compressed images) don't even have to be decompressed fully to be displayed or manipulated. I think addressing this issue will require a fundamental rewrite.
Anyway, for now, I'm really grateful to have the Gimp available: it's a reliable workhorse, and even most commercial programs are still behind the state of the art.