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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.....
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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"
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!
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.
No, you can write your own CMYK to RGB routines all you want, the problem is that you don't want to. It's a whole lot of really, really messy 3D and 4D vector math that was only figured out through a LOT of research into color perception and reproduction. To rip off the algorithms that these companies came up with is not OK.
This is not the one-click patent. This is a lot of of very smart people spending a lot of time working with spectrophotometers and linear algebra text books.