Slashdot Mirror
Photoshop in Linux Thanks to Disney
miladus writes "eWeek
reports that Walt Disney's feature animation unit (along with 2 other
unnamed studios) are using Adobe's Photoshop in Linux. They use the Wine emulator
to run the software and the 3 studios 'not known as team players, all
three agreed that a project that would benefit the entire open-source
community while delivering a technology they needed--was worth their cooperation'."
It was really hard to do without crashing with all kinds of errors before, yes. I got Photoshop 5 to run for like 10 minutes once.....
Maybe you should read the text:
"The project has paid off tremendously for Disney this year alone. Development of the porting solution, including site licenses, cost Disney less than $15,000. Had he opted to run Photoshop on Windows machines, it would have cost upward of $50,000 just in annual licensing fees, said Brooks. He estimates support would have been an additional $40,000 a year."
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
No you shouldn't. I'm not trying to start some Photoshop-Gimp flamewar.
If Gimp was working satisfactory for you until now, then you don't need CMYK. Which is the only fine line difference between them, and user interface, yes.
I really need only RGB and pictures are not that big. During my tests Gimp proved to be more usable than Photoshop in my range of usage. But there's a clear line, printing professional usage can't include use of Gimp, except in some small cases where illustrations come in question.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
See Crossover Office, which is based on Wine, to run Photoshop, Internet Explorer, MS Office and a number of other big-name Windows applications in Linux.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Crossover Office 2.0 has official support for Adobe Photoshop.
I installed PS 7 on my P4 2.4Ghz and is ran quite nicely. It's amazing how far Wine has come.
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
Why do people keep assuming that running Wine will cause a lot of overhead? And why don't people READ the article, including the part about performance? And what does clustering technologies like OpenMosix have to do with running an application that is intended for usage on workstations, not render farms? And why, oh, why don't people read the article, especially the part of how the real benefit for Disney was that they a) saved money and b) could standarize on Linux instead of having part of their team stuck with Windows?
I've done it, the latest CSOffice supports Photoshop 7. For me, it seems to run at about 1/2 to 3/4 speed, depending on what you do.
Photos.
I have Photoshop 7 running with CrossOver office on a AthonXP 2800+ and Gentoo, runs like a dream. Its actually never crashed and even the auto online update thingy works. Speed wise, the app feels like your running Redhat. Sometimes things take a second to draw and mouse events are slower than normal. You also cannot resize the toolbar thing, thats ok though.
Admit it, you just did a Google image search for "toy story penguin", didn't you?
I've used PS7 with Crossover Office before (about three months ago)... it ran very smooth, and very fast! I couldn't tell the difference between on Linux and on XP, except that in XP the widgets look a little sleeker for some reason. I can now finally do quality photo maniulation without banging my head against the wall in Linux ;) I highly recommend Crossover, it's a great product.
You may be happy hearing that GIMP is slowly starting to support CMYK
- Added naive RGB CMYK conversion routines [Sven]
- Generalized paint tools [Mitch]
:wq
For one, there's no Windows license cost involved. For two, the animators may already have Linux desktops. It makes a lot of sense to be able to run Photoshop directly rather than having a separate PC, dual booting, or using something like VMWare.
If you'd pay for Photoshop on Linux, then have you paid for Crossover Office, which runs Photoshop on Linux?
It seems to me that, if Codeweavers has done a good enough job of making a complex application like Photoshop run on Linux, why should Adobe throw huge amounts of money at it, only to appease a small fraction of a small market?
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
I think your misunderstanding of the saying is:
It's not the money that makes it hard; it's the human bent to self-aggrandizement and unwillingness to recognize where material blessing comes from that makes it hard.
See the story of the Rich Young Ruler (Mark 10:17-30). The money didn't make him leave sad. It was his love of money that did.
The saying has little to do with money, and everything to do with one's attitude towards it.
CMYK is important yes, but photoshop has numerous features that the gimp doesn't have yet. Image Variations, pantone colors, vectors (yes adobe photoshop has limited vector support) a MUCH better way of handling type (the gimp is truly moronic at handling text) better painting tools (have you seen the entire revamped brush system in photoshop 7, amazing) along with better graphics tablet support. And I have not even come close to covering it all. And even after spending 2 hours trying to get used to gimps interface, it was very counterintuitive. Whoever made all the dialogs is a moron, unless you memorize every keystroke, all actions take 2 to 3 more clicks on average.
Oh yeah, my biggest pet peeve, when you dynamically transform a selected area that stupid grid pops up instead of a more interactive live preview transform. I wish the gimp developers the best, but the gimp is years behind photoshop.
Photos.
Not such a crazy idea, Disney (well go.com) allowed the release of Tea, a Java servlet-based scripting language which is a cracking piece of work, coming as it does with great manuals, an IDE with some really smart auto-completion, and providing a statically type, fully compiled web programming environment. We used it on an eCommerce site to great effect, though I'm not sure how much development it's going through these days.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
I'm no fan of Microsoft or anything, but if and when WINE is faster than native Windows, perhaps it's because libwine has a whole lot of stub functions where Windows has functionality. Not that i have a problem with WINE, but it just doesn't do some things that Windows does, and there's a performance benefit for that.
b.c
What are you talking about? Drawing a line is as easy in Gimp as it is in any program. You select the pencil tool and then draw (same as in Photoshop). The problem that most people have with the Gimp, I think, is that they don't realize that in order to do anything, you have to right-click. This is definitely unlike regular windows programs. But, if you think about it, it really is easier. Rather than moving your mouse all the way to the top of the screen, you have all of your tools right there where ever your mouse is.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Schnapple
IIRC, Disney (at least DreamWorks and Pixar) were using lots of opensource software. Pixar's use of python for its complex rendering software comes to mind. This really isn't anything new for these companies. Hopefully though their increased profile will help more companies realize the emerging relevance of Linux as a platform for their tools.
--Kevin
Last I checked, Photoshop was around $600 per workstation. XP Pro is $200/station, and I think licenses for NT/2K/2K3 server are around $100/seat. So really, Windows ended up being the cheaper part of of the equation, at $300 per station.
Start here:
So we're talking about 200 times whatever you get hit with under their licensing agreement (Licensing 6.0, anybody?)...
So, any way you look at it, they're site-licensing Photoshop, so take it out of the equation. Once you do that, this makes sense. 200*250 = 50,000 in licensing per year (let's hear it for subscription software!) and the 40K is presumably for the highest available level of support straight from MS.
On the other hand, $15k was kicked over to CodeWeavers (along with whatever the other two 'mystery studios' kicked in) so they would focus on Photoshop support in Crossover Office. Presumably, the actual licenses and support deals came out of the same bucket. This is quite likely, as Codeweavers offers terrific support with any purchase, let alone 200 licenses!
I applaud the effort to move off Windows, and I'm glad to see that WINE is of this caliber quality, but don't justify your switch with a bunch of nonsense numbers.
The nonsense numbers are purely your own, I assure you.
"The GIMP is nothing compared to photoshop. It may work for amateurs, but even people who use it as a major hobby could not get the same results with GIMP."
I know many people who use the GIMP for great results. I personally use it for menus for VCDs quite a bit, as well as web graphics. Perhaps you are simply not aware of all of it's features?
In scriptability, when we have a large site to build, we define standard button types, and I make scripts to generate them, and then we just do them in batch, and then as-needed. These are complicated buttons/headings that Photoshop actions don't do well enough for. But with GIMP, it's easy.
There is one place that GIMP falls flat - print. The lack of CMYK really hurts it for print. Other than that, I can't think of anything really missing from it. Well, maybe PS has better dynamic text support, but that's usually not too big of an issue (GIMP's is definitely good enough).
Engineering and the Ultimate
Wine and the Crossover products don't require a windows partition. True some windows apps will function better with a windows partition, but those I've tried(games) have worked fine without a windows partition.
You can fix this by using your window manager's sloppy mouse focus mode. If you're using Sawfish, set your focus mode to "Enter Only" and this problem will go away.
-lars
We calibrate the monitor/graphics card using a system level package, then disable the color management in Photoshop. This gets all the workstations in sync, and set to a reasonably close approximation of the true color. Final color matching is done in post production, usually on an Avid.
Running Photoshop in an emulation layer is not the same as in 'native' Windows, because WINE can possibly alter the colorspace (eg. to fake a 24-bit visual on 16-bit displays). So you can't just calibrate your setup in Windows and hope to get accurate results with the same ICC profile in WINE.
Corel PhotoPaint for Linux can do ICC, and so does Scribus. Not sure on the GIMP side of things, but overall I think at least manual calibration (Adobe Gamma) should give good results.
No, Wine is a Win32 subsystem re-implementation. There is a very important difference. In fact, it was so important to the authors that they put it in the name!
Anything beyond the most trivial CYMK support (i.e. anything adequate for commercial purposes) is tied up in patents.
It's not legal for them to implement.
DNA just wants to be free...
Whether you call it an emulator is not relevant. What is relevant is that Wine does not require that you install a copy of Windows for it to work, which is the (false) claim that was being countered.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
your presumption is incorrect...Wine reverse engineers the Windows API, so there is no need for a MS license since there is no MS product present.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Again, these folks do this for a *living*, have deadlines to meet, etc. Why force them to eat into productive time to learn a new program just to meet someone else's political view of "what's right"?
This is the thrust of the entire article. Disney's (and the two other, unnamed companies') workers use Photoshop. Moving PS from windows to linux obviously saved more money from ditching Windows licenses over time than the investment they put into tweaking WINE. Save $$$ = good. But, as the article stated, GIMP and CinePaint didn't meet their requirements. Thus, there was no saving of $$$ since the time and effort needed to bring GIMP and CinePaint up to the level of PS (not to mention training) would cost more than the savings they would have gotten from tossing the Adobe licenses. One day this *may* happen in the future, but obviously it wasn't a good business decision now.
Just because it doesn't meet some zealot's political muster doesn't mean it was a bad idea.
Or you can do this with any of the sub menus that you use a lot.
That's something I wish photoshop could do.
yadda
Sorry the math does not work for you. It did not come out clear in the article, but we considered dual booting and that was not pratical in our environment (more explaination than I have time to give) so we were looking at XP plus VMWare. Thus you have about $500 per station (for just 100 seats them you get $50K), plus the need to support samba services for our Terabytes of NFS storage that is mounted to every desktop. The cost of photoshop is the same in any scenario, so thus not included. The cost cited are rounded off and actually are for a smaller deployment than is currently planned.
The Wine web site has some links for running AutoCad in Wine