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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'."
I just remembered reading this article in Linux Journal about Dreamworks running Photoshop via VMWare.
Unique signatures are rare.
Haha, yes!
I can feel the slashdotters' brains explode with conflict.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
to run photoshop. Was this not previously possible?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Why does it takes an EVIL company to do the right thing????
....so how long before we start seeing Tux cameos in Disney toons?
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
What about speed issues? Isn't photoshop+wine a lot slower than running it in native win32? I can hardly run mirc with wine on a 1ghz computer (only a test, I don't really use mirc ;)
I think it would benefit the graphics designers if Photoshop for Linux was made Open Source. The Open Source developer community would be able to enhance the offerings of the Adobe Team by adding new Gaussian blur filters, better fill methodologies, and Ogg Vorbis export functionality.
The Linux platforms is an untapped market for Adobe and by making Photoshop Open Source, not only would the community forgive them for the ElcomSoft lawsuit but would also create a new revenue stream by offering support and consulting for Linux adopters.
Only when we free the works of Milne from the clutches of depraved millionaires will we be able to entertain our children.
Which is nice.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
has anyone actually tried to run ps on linux? How does the performance measure up to say a mac or windose box? I would also like to see Adobe golive run nicely on linux too. Maybe adobe will notice the need for its apps on linux and start porting them.
_+_+__+_+_+_+_+_+_+++
when i moo u moo - just like that
Photoshop is probably one of the things that kept Apple going in the dark times. With Photoshop working on Linux there is little reason for a lot of people to stay with windows. This won't make anyone suddenly aware of Linux, but that's because most graphic designers are smart enough to be able to weigh their options. This is why Apple has such a large market share in the design world compared to the consumer world. This probably won't be the killer app for Linux, but it's a VERY big step in the right direction.
Help I'm a rock.
But we still hate 'em right?
Everybody has a purpose in life, maybe mine is to lurk in slashdot.
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
I'm glad to see this sort of thing happening, but I am a little disappointed that Adobe didn't port its code to linux natively.
Using Wine will nodoubtedly help many companies using linux. And it will make the decision easier for many companies that want to use linux, but are worried about compatability issues.
My hope is that Win will carry us through the transition phase until software manufacturers just compile a linux version of their product.
The problem now is that companies won't switch to linux because their aren't enough programs supported on linux. But software companies won't develop linux products because there aren't enough companies using linux. It's a deadlock. But if Wine can make the first crack in the floodgates, the whole thing should crumble. If there are already a bunch of photoshop users running linux-wine, Adobe is much more likely to issue a linux port of their code. Which in turn makes it easier to go linux with your company!
And soon enough, all the software companies will compile their linux distrubutions, and then, if enough people ask for it, alter the code so it can be compiled for Windows.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I don't get where their numbers are coming from.
Apparently Photoshop on Windows costs $50K+$40K support == $90K
Photoshop on linux costs $15K.
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.
Support? How is it that Windows support is $40K/yr but linux support is free? There's just as much free Windows support out there as linux.
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.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
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 find that wine helps me use a lot of Linux applications too. In fact, I have to be flat out drunk before I'll even start Emacs.
[Yikes - who threw that?!]
On a related note, I'm still kind of surprised that Adobe wouldn't port Photoshop over to Linux even for a company with as much clout as Disney. Seriously, I realize it's a LOT of work to port an app that massive, but if basically every animator who runs linux wants it, why not? Catering to your customers is definitely part of a good business model. Since Adobe's management switched over not too far back though, I think some of the crazy innovations might be slower-coming these days. Guess that's what happens when you replace someone with vision (Adobe founder) with a Marketing drone (current CEO, IIRC).
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
Disney Is Not an Open Source Advocate Unless Required.
I'm sorry, but Linux needs photoshop. That is one of those programs that some people actually earn their living using. 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.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
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.
I'm confused... I thought I was supposed to hate Disney. Have the slashgods turned they back on me, again!?
SCO is still bad right?
Can anyone whose done real work with Photoshop-on-WINE comment on how they deal with display calibration and colorspace issues? How do you make sure what you see on your linux box is what you get from your film printer?
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Are you kidding? I'd pay for Photoshop in Linux. It's a quality tool regardless of how we feel towards Adobe. I'm sure many graphics professionals would pay for it too (Disney is proof). Adobe should really consider porting Photoshop to Linux (no need for it to be open source, closed source works fine).
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Yeah, but GIMP sucks to use when you compare it side-by-side with Photoshop. Sure it can do a lot of the same things, and suffices for most Unix users when there is no better alternative. It still clunks like a square-wheeled rickshaw.
It's true; I could typeset my documents with Emacs and LaTeX. That fact doesn't stop me from using Word though.
Getting popular applications like this running on Linux is the single most important thing to get Linux on the desktop.
Note that Adobe could probably release a native version of Photoshop to run on Linux fairly easily. They had a Unix version, and also of course it will run on OSX, so going native to Linux can't be that big an issue.
Everyone who wants to see Linux on the desktop should be pestering the companies of the software they use to release a Linux version. For me, the important one is Macromedia Flash, so I've been emailing Macromedia asking when they are going to port it. If you want to see Linux on the desktop, start pestering!
What would be really great news is that there was a native *nix version again. ( there was one for SGI long ago.. so they cant claim it cant be done ).
While using it in wine may be nice, and shows wine is improving, ( hats off to their team ) it really doesn't mean THAT much in the grand scheme of things.... we don't want to be relegated to just be an 'emulator' ( yes i know its not 100% accurate to say emulation, but you get the point so its close enough )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
I've been using Photoshop since the 2.5 days (pre layers -- when real men [and women] used alpha channels) on Macs. I then switched over to using pshop on the PC because, well, I couldn't afford a mac!
But then, something strange happened. I had been using Linux (Redhat) as my OS-of-choice at home and would switch to my laptop (running 2k) to do Photoshop work. Out of the desire to use my mouse, I went and sunk a few bucks and bought the crossover application (commercial version of wine) and whalla! Photoshop 6 runs on my linux box, and faster!
So, now I can use Photoshop with my mouse (instead of that annoying touch-pad). The only thing that is a little annoying is that the focus of the tool bar and the other pallets take away from the canvas, so if you click on the marquee tool, you have to "double click" on the canvas to get the focus where you need it. Not a big deal, just a "thing."
sad robot making broken music
Give him a fresh juicy apple, and he complains that you should have instead figured out how to make the worm in the last apple tastier.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Added naive RGB CMYK conversion routines [Sven]
This will go nicely with their naive user interface.
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.
No, Adobe decided that they could not compete with Final Cut Pro and said so in a press release that had so much spin that people interpreted it to say that they were getting out of the Macintosh space.
.one in which everyone on the mac side was holding out of Photoshop 7.
Why would Adobe even consider getting out of the market that they earn most of their money in? For the first time ever their sales between Win and Mac were even last year... a year in which NO major version of any Mac software came out..
I have not taken many business courses, but abandoning half your revenue does not seem like a course of action they are likely to take.
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
Hell, I use Emacs for photoediting. It's a little hard modifying binary files by hand but you will eventually get the hang of it. I'm sure there is a preconfigured shortcut key for this but I havent found it yet.
An application doesn't bestow one with talent no matter how well it's written.
But it can be a tool that makes a talented person's life a hell of a lot easier.
A talented carpernter may be able to build a house with a Bowie knife and 20 acres of forest, but its not exactly the quickest and easiest way of doing it, especially if there are commercial demands and deadlines to meet. Sure, you're pure "artist" could render Finding Nemo with a #2 pencil, but how long would it take him.
Personally, for the amount of PSing I do (bad Fark contests) the gimp and PS (or PS Elements) is a wash (mainly because I suck eggs). BUT... from the folks who do some sort of graphic design for a living almost all of them swear by PS, and quite a few of them have dicked around with the GIMP as well. To a (wo)man they all say it just isn't as good of a tool to get the type of work done in a timely manner.
No, that exploding sound you hear is thousands of wine fanatics reading the article and going, "Wine is NOT AN EMULATOR!!
I thought the joke embedded in the acronym was that it stood for BOTH of:
- WINdows Emulator.
- Wine Is Not an Emulator.
Because it DOES provide a Windows API (which is one of the definitions of "emulator") but DOESN'T software emulate the machine itself (which is part of the USUAL definition of "emulator"), instead running the application's executable code "directly on the metal" - avoiding the massive speed penalty - and doing as much as practical of the API emulation by leveraging Linux native services rather than replacing them.
But I don't actually KNOW how much of that is true. If one of the WINE core group can confirm or correct this post I'd appreciate it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Does Gimp support CMYK, like Photoshop? Do you know it is REALLY important if you are doing graphics for a living?
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
That's not the issue here. The issue here is that the Gimp GUI is so braindamaged that it is almost like the authors deliberately designed it to hinder whatever it is you want to do with the program.
Please, please, please tell me this. WHY THE FUCK does Gimp have all of its image processing functions in a goddamn right-mousebutton pop-up menu that hides the image you're trying to process in the first place? Jesus Christ! You couldn't make a worse design even if you tried.
And it has not been fixed just because of the attitude you show here. "Oh yeah? Our system is counterintuitive? Well, boy. There's only one thing I can tell you: just take your time learning our GUI because there is no way in hell that we would stoop as low as using the same GUI the people are familiar in the first place."
BOO! TERRO
If you're interested in contacting Adobe, here's a direct link to their Feature Request form. I suggest as many of us as possible to visit this page and let Adobe know there certainly is a demand for their product. We're talking 3 studios here, including Disney. Lets make some (positive) noise!
http://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
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...
That would make GIMP the fine set of brushes, oil paints and canvas. And people like you, hacks.
What a pompous load of shit. This is like arguing that artists who buy ready-made oil paints are just hacks and real artists gather minerals in the field and grind their own pigments by hand.
Yes, you can do in GIMP most of what you can do in Photoshop, but the simple fact of the matter is that you can do it more quickly and easily in Photoshop. If you're a prima donna fine artist (or fancy yourself one, which sounds like the case here), then you can afford to screw around with whatever tool floats your boat. If you are a commercial artist, you are generally producing "art" to satisfy the specifications and budget constraints imposed by a client who doesn't give a rat's ass what tool you use as long as the end product is on time and under budget.
Which is why commercial artists tend to have mortgages and car payments and fine artists tend to have attitude problems.
The GIMP is on a par with Photoshop 3 or 4. Those who say otherwise need to become more familiar with the current Photoshop featureset. This is all painfully familiar of the whining I used to hear from TeX users about how Word didn't do such-and-such that TeX did, when in actual fact Word did have the feature in question.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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.....
Because it already has a Windows render farm capability
"I already have a CPU in here, why would I need another one?"
I guess you've never edited a 200dpi poster
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.